Mr Robot - 'eps1.1_ones-and-zer0es.mpeg'

"Are you me?"

Elliot's life is in somewhat of a spin. American Psycho-looking executive nerd Tyrell Wellick offers him a job at Evil Corp, hinting that they will be dropping AllSafe and consequently crippling the company by going in-house with their cyber security. Elliot refuses, but is not sold on fociety either after they threaten to dump Evil Corp data if the CTO they framed isn't released and Mr Robot explains his next plan is to blow up a gas pipeline and destroy Evil Corp's off-site tape backups in the process, with potentially huge collateral casualties. He is also somewhat put off by Darlene, one of the fsociety hackers, breaking into his apartment, using his shower and treating him like a confidant.

Darlene is... well, so much in this series is odd.

Elliot rejects the explosive plan, and begins to see Evil Corp goons following him everywhere. He seeks escape in morphine, but he dealer/sort-of-girlfriend Shayla is out of the anti-addiction meds he takes alongside it, which draws them both into the orbit of specialty dealer Fernando Vera, who drugs and rapes Shayla before warning Elliot away from her and explaining that he draws power from his own self-loathing. Although Shayla is willing to accept a certain level of degradation to protect her revenue stream, Elliot can not stand by and uses hacked information about Vera to have him arrested.

Angela is upset that Elliot is avoiding her. Her boyfriend Ollie assures her it's all fine before nipping off to meet up with his other girlfriend and leaving Angela in the presence of a webcam hacker by a peeping tom rapper who harrangued Ollie into buying an infected CD.

Huh.

All unaware of this, Elliot returns to Coney Island to confront Mr Robot. To Robot, everyone and eveything is a one or a zero - act or don't act. He refuses to listen to Elliot's not-psychotic plan to take out the backups until Elliot agrees to talk about his father, who died of Leukemia and at the end refused to talk to his son because Elliot broke a promise not to tell anyone that he was sick. Mr Robot comments that this was a breach of a sacred covenant and pushes Elliot off the pier.

'eps1.1_ones-and-zer0es.mpeg' (I love these episode names, but they're a bugger to type out) deepens the uncertainty surrounding Elliot's sanity. I'm now convinced - largely by the way that Mr Robot stands directly between Elliot and the other members of fsociety when talking to the latter, such that they would be looking at Elliot if, say, Mr Robot were a figment of his imagination - that Mr Robot is a figment of Elliot's imagination. This makes the push off the pier more disturbing yet, especially in light of Vera's philosophy. If Mr Robot is a side of Elliot that gives him strength to act and yet hates himself enough to jump off a pier onto a rocky, debris-strewn beach, then Elliot too draws his strength from self-loathing. The Tyler Durden theory would also explain why Darlene seems to know Elliot better than he knows her, and why everyone else at fsociety either applauds him or ignores him.

The episode is also about false binaries: Mr Robot insists that everything comes down to act or don't act, but this reductionism is critiqued both explicitly and implicitly. Elliot rails against false choices as the driving force of capitalism, but also confronts choices that are no choice at all - leaving Shayla in Vera's grasp was never an option, whatever her stated wishes and regardless of the impact on Elliot's drug supply - and choices that are more than binary - Elliot returns to fsociety when he comes up with a third option, one that does not involve killing anyone. Perhaps we should call that option 'think'?