What You Need To Know Before Jumping Into ‘Mr. Robot’ Season Two

Hello friend.

This week marks the much awaited return of last year’s sleeper summer hit, Mr. Robot. Created by Sam Esmail, this USA drama follows the complicated and intricate world of hacking, mental illness, and corporate greed. Last year, Elliot’s confrontation with Evil Corp and his own demons left us transfixed, and this year promises to be just as addicting.

We know that you’re excited for Season Two’s premiere, but we also know it’s been awhile since the last time you checked in with FSociety. Most dramas you can bumble through without a refresher course, but Mr. Robot isn’t most dramas. To help you fully enjoy the bleak greatness that is Season Two, we’ve compiled a cheat sheet just for you. This guide won’t give you every technical detail of this immensely complicated show, but it should serve as a quick reminder about who and what is important. Start studying and get to streaming tonight.

WHO DO I NEED TO KNOW?

Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek): Our corporate-greed-hating protagonist. Elliot is a highly skilled hacker who’s not much of a conversationalist. From the first time we meet him, Elliot is paranoid that “they” have been following him, and the deeper we delve into his psyche, the more than paranoia seems justified. He works for Allsafe Cybersecurity, which has a client he despises — E Corp. His hatred for E Corp, dubbed Evil Corp by Elliot, runs deep, partially because its an evil and corrupt company but mostly because he blames them for his father’s death.

Mr. Robot (Christian Slater): When we first Mr. Robot, he seems to be the highly-driven and all-knowing leader of the hacking collective, FSociety. However, at the end of Season One, we learned something incredibly unsettling about this character — Mr. Robot is actually Elliot’s alter ego or at least a hallucination that takes the form of his deceased father. At the end of Season One, Elliot wanted to desperately break away from Mr. Robot, but Mr. Robot fought back in a big way. Most of the great and terrible hacking attacks Elliot has launched happened because of this hallucination / alter ego.

Darlene Alderson (Carly Chaikin): Elliot’s sister (or so he claims) and another member of the hacking collective FSociety. She’s tough, highly sarcastic, doesn’t put up with Elliot’s nonsense, and is one of FSociety’s best hackers. Throughout most of the first season, Elliot failed to recognize his own sister, so we saw Darlene as a woman a bit too comfortable around Elliot, but all of that changed after one dramatic encounter. Darlene knows that continuing to work for FSociety is causing Elliot to break, but she’s so hellbent on bringing them down, she’s willing to risk it.

Angela Moss (Portia Doubleday): Elliot’s childhood friend and the only relatively normal character in the series. Angela works with Elliot at Allsafe Cybersecurity, though her job is far less tech-focused. She’s one of the few people Elliot trusts, but that hasn’t stopped him from hacking her. At first, their relationship seems mismatched, but when you learn that the same Evil Corp disaster that gave Elliot’s father cancer also cost Angela a parent, it makes sense. At the end of Season One, Angela actually took a job within E Corp, presumably to bring it down from the inside.

Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallstrom): The Senior Vice President of Technology at Evil Corp. He’s ruthless, cold, and overwhelmingly corporate. Think a less murderous Patrick Bateman. Here’s what Tyrell has done in the name of getting an Evil Corp promotion: sleeping around for information, punching homeless men as an anger release, and strangling the wife of his business rival. Tyrell is one of the only people who realizes that Elliot may not be on Evil Corp’s side.

Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer): The CEO of Evil Corp, and boy is he callous enough to wear that title well. Price is almost aggressively cold. When one of his employees shoots himself on life TV, Price confides in Angela that the man’s family and the world are better for it. Ouch. If you needed another reason to root for FSociety, he’s it.

Whiterose (DB Wong): A master hacker and leader of the Dark Army. Every hacker in FSociety is top tier, but judging by the sense of awe that accompanies Whiterose’s name, this transgendered hacker is next level. She has a brief meeting with Elliot that was categorized by her counting down their time left. The most shocking revelation about this character came at the end of Season One, which showed Whiterose dressed as a man casually talking to the CEO of Evil Corp. So many questions.

You: That’s us, the audience. Elliot talks to us directly a lot of the time, and often, we’re the only ones he’ll trust.

WHAT ORGANIZATION DO I NEED TO KNOW?

There are three — Evil Corp, FSociety, and Dark Army. Evil Corp is a ruthless corporation and one of the largest multi-national conglomerates in the world. According to Elliot, they own 70% of the global consumer credit industry, which is why FSociety specifically targets them. There’s also a personal reason for the attack. There was a preventable gas leak that occurred in an Evil Corp facility that killed 26 people, including Elliot’s dad and Angela’s mom. They are not a nice corporate overlord.

Enter FSociety. In Season One, this highly secretive hacking collective set its sights on taking down Evil Corp and exposing it for the horrible company it is. To do this, they switched from cyberterrorism to the regular kind. FSociety went to Evil Corp’s Steel Mountain facility to destroy all of backup copies of the company’s data. So what does that mean? Without the archived data, Evil Corp has no way of knowing of who owes it what, and that’s how a large amount of the world’s debt disappeared overnight. Basically, this small group of talented hackers managed to pull off a global-scale wealth redistribution.

But what is the Dark Army? They’re another group of hackers based in China who will hack-for-pay. Their leader is the mysterious Whiterose. Originally, Dark Army agreed to launch the hacking attack on Evil Corp alongside FSociety, but they backed out at the last minute because of a “vulnerability.” Elliot meets with Whiterose in person, and the partnership continues.

WHAT’S GOING ON WITH ELLIOT?

So many things. Elliot is a sad puppy dog woobie through and through, and most of the time, that’s all his fault. For fun, Elliot likes to hack into other people’s lives and right their wrongs, whether that means turning in a man who’s hosting child pornography to the police or threatening to expose a cheating boyfriend. One of his vigilante hacks spirals out of control and ends with his pseudo girlfriend, Shayla, dead in a car trunk.

Yeah, it messes him up big time, but Elliot was already going through some dark stuff before that. Season One ended with our highly unreliable narrator having a massive breakdown in the middle of a rioting Times Square. That’s the moment it became most apparent that Mr. Robot isn’t a separate person. He’s likely one of Elliot’s alter egos. Keeping with the computer theme, Mr. Robot is probably one of Elliot’s daemons, a background program that allowed to run without direct control from an active user (think the alters from United States of Tara). This is all fan speculation, by the way. We’re not 100% sure who or what Mr. Robot is, but if you want to wildly speculate with us, we have you covered. Season One ended with Elliot confused, Tyrell in hiding as the lead suspect in a murder case, and the rest of the civilized world erupting into riots.

SO WHAT’S GOING ON WITH SEASON TWO?

Season Two is all about the aftermath. Elliot was successful in launching an attack against Evil Corp, but he brought down the global economy while he was at it. Whoops. There’s a dystopian feeling to this second season, and not all of that has to do with the fact most people can’t use their credit cards. Everything and everyone, from Elliot and his relationship to Mr. Robot to Darlene’s recruitment of new members of FSociety, feels lost and confused in Season Two. Be on the lookout for the sudden and painful-to-watch collapse of a large part of society.

Though we root for FSociety because Evil Corp is so very evil, there’s a naive idealism associated with the group. This new season questions whether the idealist philosophy behind the attack — the idea that the world was better without Evil Corp — is actually good for society as a whole. Also, be on the lookout for Elliot’s continued struggles with his own psyche. Elliot more directly confronts who and what Mr. Robot is in this season, and the results are oddly more chilling than Season One’s grand reveal. And we’re just getting started. Welcome back, friend. We’re ready to start obsessively investigating this show once again.

New episodes of Mr. Robot premiere on Wednesdays at 10 P.m. ET on USA or on the USA NOW app.

[Where to watch Mr. Robot]

Photos: USA, Prime Video