Season 4, Episode 2: ‘402 Payment Required’
“There’s a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. I’m talking about the guys no one knows about. The guys that are invisible. The top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. The guys that play God without permission.”
In the very first episode of “Mr. Robot,” the brilliant hacker Elliot Alderson described his quarry in memorable terms. Only now, in the series’s final season, does it appear he’s truly on their trail — and in their cross-hairs.
In the latest installment of Sam Esmail’s techno-thriller, Elliot and his alternate personality Mr. Robot (modeled after his father; that’s important, as we’ll soon see) hold a meeting in their secret base with one of those guys: Phillip Price. The figurehead chief executive of the giant conglomerate E Corp, Price has just saved Elliot’s life after Elliot fell into a trap set by the nefarious hacker-terrorist collective the Dark Army. Now he’s ready to tell Elliot whom he’s really up against.
Over a dazzling montage of real-world news footage and shiny happy stock advertising imagery, Price tells Elliot and Mr. Robot the story of the real guys behind the guys behind the guys: the Deus Group. Founded after the fall of the Berlin Wall by the ambitious Chinese bureaucrat Zhi Zhang — better known by her hacker alias, Whiterose — this elite organization took advantage of the collapse of Communism by putting the whole world up for sale. The first gulf war, the internet, the rise of authoritarianism, the depredations of late capitalism — all of it was the Deus Group’s doing.
What Deus members like Price didn’t realize until it was too late is that it was all a means to an end. Every world-shaking event and paradigm shift brought Whiterose one step closer to the fruition of her secret billion-dollar project beneath the nuclear power plant in Washington Township, where Elliot and his family used to live. Now that project, whatever it may be, is being packed up and shipped off to Chinese-controlled Congo. After that, patsies and flunkies like Price and Elliot are superfluous to Whiterose’s needs. In other words, they’re dead men walking.
It’s a lot to digest, even for a conspiratorially minded audience. Fortunately, it’s also entertaining to digest, thanks to Esmail’s flair for striking imagery. His news footage montage seamlessly splices B.D. Wong’s character, Zhang, into meetings with everyone from Fidel Castro to Vladimir Putin to the Queen of England, “Forrest Gump” style.
And when the scene cuts back to Price, Elliot and Mr. Robot, the contrast between Whiterose’s world of power and influence and their own shabby surroundings — they’re holed up in the shuttered offices of Elliot’s former cybersecurity employer, staring at Post-it notes with names and clues written on them as the sun filters in through dingy windows — is striking. It communicates just how outclassed Elliot is against these godlike opponents.
He’s not the only badly overmatched character in the episode. The F.B.I. agent Dom DiPierro dutifully follows the orders of the Dark Army operatives threatening her family and outs her slain supervisor, Agent Santiago, as a double agent — for a drug cartel, rather than for his true employer, the Dark Army. But because she is unable to say for certain whether the agent investigating the case believed her cover story, the Dark Army takes matters into its own hands and tosses him from a building, making it look like a suicide.
In a show with no shortage of bottomed-out, depressive performances, Grace Gummer is a standout as Agent DiPierro. She looks completely, utterly exhausted by her situation, able to put one foot in front of the other only because the Dark Army will torture her loved ones to death if she stops moving.
By contrast, Elliot has two thin strands of hope to cling to. First, he needs Whiterose to convene a meeting of the Deus Group; Price forces her hand by announcing his plans to resign as E Corp’s chief executive, which necessitates an in-person gathering to choose his successor. Second, he needs to hack Price’s go-between with the group, the E Corp attorney Susan Jacobs; unfortunately, his sister, Darlene, killed her for her role in the Jefferson Township chemical leak that killed her and Elliot’s father.
Darlene reveals that dark secret after she and Elliot get together following the sudden death of their abusive mother. This, too, is a striking contrast: To see our daring hacker heroes attend to painfully ordinary business like arranging a cremation, grieving in a chapel, and going through their mother’s personal effects is to see a whole new side of them both. Neither Elliot nor Darlene really care about the death of their mom, but her passing enables them to process their grief over the murder of their childhood friend Angela, which they had never been properly able to do until now.
It’s then that another group of shadowy figures emerges from hiding, at least to us in the audience. In passing, Darlene mentions the return of Vera, the drug dealer who murdered Elliot’s girlfriend Shayla back in Season 1. Furious, Elliot demands to know why Darlene never told him; she insists that she did. But even Elliot’s Mr. Robot persona denies having been told.
Then the show cuts to the high-rise boardroom where Elliot had his first encounter with E Corp’s inner circle in the pilot — “the guys no one knows about,” as he called them at the time. In this interior limbo lurk Elliot’s mother and his child self, two other alternate personalities. They’re waiting for someone, his mother says. Not for Elliot, not even for Mr. Robot: “For the other one.”
So there’s another personality buried in Elliot somewhere — an echo of the Deus Group, a true power behind it all. Adding additional layers to an already complicated plot is tricky business, of course. But the mysteries are so intriguing, and Esmail’s command of his craft so sure, that the investment seems sound as a pound.
Random Data:
As he did in the season premiere, Mr. Robot narrates the episode rather than Elliot. It’s a sign of how single-minded Elliot has become in his pursuit of vengeance that he no longer has the time or the inclination to talk to his “friend” in the audience.
Surreal sight gag of the night: A man in a full-body snowman costume, offering his condolences to Elliot and Darlene as they argue about their dead mother on a subway platform.
Bets on Elliot’s secret persona? My best guess is the horror-film slasher who first wore the money-man mask that Elliot’s collective fsociety adopted as a symbol, but I’m perfectly happy to have no real idea until the show reveals it.
Darlene can’t quite bring herself to say aloud that she murdered Susan Jacobs; her guilt and self-loathing forces Elliot to complete the puzzle on his own.
As an inveterate adolescent Walkman user, I found its use as an ersatz Proustian madeleine for Elliot’s, Darlene’s and Angela’s childhoods to be astutely observed.
That creepy taxidermist who serves as Darlene’s Dark Army handler returns, issuing threats with a smile in a shop called “La Mort Heureuse.” I’m not sure Camus would approve.
An earlier version of this article misidentified the township where Elliot and his family used to live. It is Washington township, not Jefferson.
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