“As he watched Rome burn” – Whiterose.

And Mr. Philip Price (CEO of E-Corp) had no clue what Whiterose tried to convey in the season’s finale.

The premise of Mr. Robot is captivating and at the same time delusional. The ones you keep close to your heart never leaves you. The psychological effect is so strong that it keeps you connected. The story of Elliot Alderson is not an ideal story to tell people but there are ways through which you can still say a lot. In his private life, he prefers a regular dosage of morphine suboxone (8 mg) to stay aloof of the feelings that remind him of his closed ones. To keep himself busy, he hacks people online and then deletes them from the system. He prefers to keep records of the hacked data encrypted in audio compact discs.

Mr. Robot is a slow poison that sprawls over you steadily and then engulfs you entirely. Sam Esmail is clever enough to feed you with everything and would still leave a door open which he can shut off whenever he wants to. The plot grows on you and then immediately shuts itself down just when you start to feel it. The background score reminds me of Tron Legacy or rather something not belonging to the world as I know it. And the neatly spun all ten episodes serves you the purpose without any CGI.

The story of Elliot revolves around a corporate firm that if disrupted would make the world economy fall apart. The E-Corp does its business with the people’s debt and Elliot thinks that to make the world a better place again people should take back control. There’s a subtle analogy with Google’s motto: Don’t be evil and the way it does business with people’s data. There are other characters in the story that are just meant to propel Elliot’s personal agenda. Angela Moss, Elliot’s childhood friend, wants to testify E Corp’s Chief Technology Officer, Terry Colby, for his actions over toxic release in 1980s. The incident killed several people including Angela’s mother and Elliot’s father.

The plan for Elliot to make the world a better place kicks off over a discussion with Mr. Tyrell Wellick (Senior Vice President, Technology at E-Corp). That small discussion at AllSafe (Elliot’s workplace) was over some desktop environment preference. Mr. Wellick points out that he prefers KDE over Gnome (I would have gone with XFCE but then it’s really a matter of choice). E-Corp happens to be the biggest client of AllSafe. What really sets the tone for the plot was when Mr. Wellick says to Elliot that it will be fun working together.

Elliot believes that with Mr. Robot and Black Army (headed by Whiterose) could wipe out the debt. The plan was to encrypt the files in all the data centers of E-Corp and then lock it forever with a self-destructive encryption key. The Black Army would simultaneously initiate attacks on the backup servers. They did succeed in the end. But Elliot and Angela ended up succumbed to what they had never visualized.