‘Mr. Robot’ Season 3 Finale Recap: Backspace

The best part was the axe murder.

When Dark Army fixer Irving drives the blade into corrupt FBI Agent Santiago’s chest, and eventually many other parts of his body, a lot of things happen at once. Bobby Cannavale is finally given a chance to cut loose after a season of playing Irving as a model of chatty, casual restraint; now he can go full Gyp Rosetti, and it’s a thing of beauty. Moreover, Mr. Robot has had horror in its DNA, from Tod Campbell’s often eerie cinematography to the roots of fsociety’s iconography in a slasher film; an axe murder seen in that light seems almost overdue. Finally, an explosion of intimate, savage, gory violence after a season full of tension and sadness, in which even a gigantic series of terrorist bombings is witnessed only at a remove, takes all of the show’s unspoken resentments and hatreds and buries them in a warm, wet body, over and over again. “These are for me,” says Irving as he sends his traumatized and cowed new slave at the FBI, Dom DiPierro, away. They’re for everyone on the show, really.

I wish the rest of Mr. Robot’s Season 3 finale (“eps3.9_shutdown-r”) cut half so deep. Instead, it’s a claimant for the most disappointing episode in the history of the show — a profound narrative miscalculation that sees the show retrench rather than create new possibilities, yet also denies the basic sense of completion and catharsis you’d think such a retrenchment would require. Axe murders aside, it just sort of sits there, waiting for something else to happen.

Much as I hate to do this, because this sort of meta dialogue gets grating if the show in question doesn’t have the strength to justify it, I have to quote Irving once again. “A story could have a mediocre beginning, or middle — oftentimes it does,” he says, offering some impromptu literary criticism when he swings by Elliot’s apartment to abduct him away to the Dark Army’s countryside compound. “Always gotta have a wow ending,” he concludes. “Otherwise what’s the point.”  An episode with the stones to include a line like that better deliver the goods.

Instead, the entire season leads to Elliot (allegedly) undoing the 5/9 hack with the touch of a button — an admission of defeat positioned as a triumph. It’s hard to muster the revolutionary fervor Mr. Robot counts on when you’re watching the leader of the revolution hit the delete button on his greatest achievement. I get that 5/9 had unintended negative consequences across the board, but those were due to the manipulations of people like E Corp’s Phillip Price and the Dark Army’s Whiterose. Elliot may swear he’s coming for them and all the rest of their megarich cronies once again, but who cares? We have no idea how he’ll do this, because the season doesn’t take us past the point of him hitting stop on the previous plan. Phillip is by now a neutered figure, thoroughly trounced by Whiterose and remaining at E Corp as a figurehead, if at all. And Whiterose’s minions point out to Elliot that they couldn’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut what he does about 5/9, since it’s served its purpose — engineering the series of events leading to their ability to relocate their mysterious Washington Township operation to the Chinese Congo, which Elliot himself helps them do. (Again, allegedly.) It’s all so…inert as drama.

Even the stinger feels perfunctory. After the credits rolled on the Season 1 finale, we learned that Price was in cahoots with Whiterose (who we discover in the same moment maintains a male-presenting secret identity) all along. At the end of Season 2 we catch up with runaway fsociety co-founders Trenton and Mobley at the exact same moment as Leon, the Dark Army’s most laid-back assassin. This time around, we discover that…Fernando Vera, the drug dealer from Season 1, is back in town? Um, okay, sure. That’s…I don’t know what that is. For a moment I forgot his fate back then and assumed he’d literally come back from the dead, but if you recall he never got killed, he simply skipped town. And he was never that interesting or important a character to begin with, existing only to murder Elliot’s girlfriend Shayla and teach him a lesson about blowback. (Sorry, Shayla.) This is like if the third season of Twin Peaks ended with the shocking return of Dick Tremayne.

And this is just one of several flat “revelations” throughout the episode. We learn that Elliot’s father never pushed him out of that window when he was a kid; Elliot jumped. Thus a key component of his psychological makeup for three seasons is revealed to be bogus for no reason I can discern other than to soften the father-based Mr. Robot persona’s edges, which could surely be accomplished another way. We also discover that Phillip Price’s interest in Angela Moss — a major driver of Season 2 that was only occasionally alluded to this year, almost solely in the previous episode — stems from the fact that he’s secretly her father. I mean for pete’s sake, he straight up quotes Darth Vader at her. It makes the two characters’ simultaneously symbiotic and parasitic relationship much less complex and interesting, much more familiar and cliched, on a show that’s already done the “we’re secretly related” twist a couple times before, and to much more impact and effect. I was surprised, sure, but that’s it.

Sam Esmail is too talented a fillmmaker for the whole episode to be a loss, of course. Grace Gummer is excellent as Dom in this ep, for example. She watches the world around her with increasing fear as she’s kidnapped by her boss and marched out to what she thinks will be her own execution, then gets reduced to a mute shadow of herself when Irving murders Santiago instead as a warning to her about what will happen to her family if she steps out of line; she only breaks her silence to deliver a world-burning indictment of Darlene as a person. Michael Cristofer and Portia Doubleday make the father-daughter revelation better than it has any right to be, particularly when Price has to gently but firmly tell Angela her newfound thirst for revenge against the Dark Army for using her to help murder thousands out of pure pettiness against him is a waste of time. “Accept that you’ve been conned. Find a way to live with what you did.” That’s the voice of a man speaking from experience. Finally, the lethal love affair between Whiterose and her doomed second-in-command Grant comes to an unexpectedly moving end when she essentially but only implicitly orders him to kill himself, which he does as a final act of love; Irving, apparently, had already been romantically entangled and disentangled with the Dark Army’s general long ago, and this knowledge set Grant up for the fall.

Also, you can only complain so much about a show that still looks like this.

All told, it doesn’t surprise me that the finale, and the season itself, is being held up by other critics as a return to form. It was — to a fault. Audacious episodes like the Tyrell Wellick spotlight and the long-take high-rise thriller, the highlights of the season for me, now feel like respites in a long act of creative backpedaling, to get the show back to where it was when it was a zeitgeisty phenomenon during Season 1. “Like 5/9 never happened”? More like if Season 2, a phenomenally bold season of sweepingly despairing and vicious television that risked alienating the audience the show had built, never happened. We’re headed back to the start, and that’s not a ride I’m sure I want to take.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

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