I don’t think I’ve posted much, if at all, about my love of Mr. Robot. It’s back for a third season, and this week there’s apparently an amazing episode coming from all the murmurs. I got so into things this year that I added another subreddit to my diet. And now… I want to theorize a bit.
I’ve seen a couple of other people mention this idea, one I posted a few days ago, but the more I think about it, the more I think it’s the most obvious thing that not everyone is seeing: Mr. Robot is the real person and Eliot– at least as we know him as the quasi-narrator– is the construction.
Now what I don’t mean is that the protagonist is old and imagining a younger self, that Christian Slater is the real person we are supposed to be seeing, or anything weird like that. What I’m saying is that Mr. Robot– who doesn’t look any different to anyone but Eliot (and us) is who Eliot Alderson is. And he’s done things that excite but frighten Eliot, that go further than Eliot ever would. So to protect himself, the psychotic break that we see resulted in Eliot developing a naive, “good” version of himself, a thinker, a romantic, to “hide” in.
The reason why this seems obvious to me– and I feel silly for not seeing it sooner– is that we’ve seen some really clear indications of it. First of all, Mr. Robot knows everything Eliot knows, but Eliot doesn’t know everything Mr. Robot knows. Second, Mr. Robot has built fictions to protect Eliot (the whole jail-as-mom’s-house thing). And Mr. Robot, when we got the big reveal in season one, Mr. Robot knew they were the same person, that Darlene was Eliot’s sister, etc.
Mr. Robot is the one in control because Mr. Robot is Eliot Alderson, the master hacker, the angry son of a father ravaged by cancer.
It explains so many things, too.
It explains why Eliot– our Eliot– can’t really bring himself to turn Mr. Robot and the others in. He knows he’s not talking about his dad; he knows he can’t turn himself in. So he tries to thwart himself. And he figured out, through his medications and therapy, how to sometimes block Mr. Robot out. A little. But we have to ask… has he? Are we at all certain that Mr.Robot didn’t want Eliot to “mess up” stage 2?
It also explains that Eliot jumped out the window but he remembers being pushed, just as he saw Mr. Robot push him off the ledge at the pier.
Mr. Robot isn’t Eliot’s dad. He looks like Eliot’s dad in Eliot’s mind, but Mr. Alderson was a kind man, and he didn’t know all the things that Eliot knows.
Eliot isn’t real.
Mr. Robot is.