Eps1.7 wh1ter0se.m4v/Summary

It's morning in a nice apartment, and on the balcony is Darlene, with little in the way of clothing, looking out on the city. Her hookup, Xander, already well dressed, comes out and holds her a bit. She talks a little about, "what if a revolution happened?" He's not into that sort of thing, he gets paid a lot to deal with problems. It's time for him to go off to work, he kisses her and leaves.

Once he's out the door, Darlene comes back inside and searches the apartment for any hidden cabinets. She finds a safe hidden under the bar. Xander's MBA diploma is nearby on a wall, she puts in the graduation date as a combination ... and the safe opens. Inside, she pays no attention to anything but a handgun, which she takes and puts into her purse.

Darlene walks into a ballet studio, with lots of women stretching and practicing, and one of them is Angela. She's on the phone ("Ollie ... I don't care who you ran into or what he said,"), but hangs up as Darlene joins her, they are clearly old friends. Angela assures Darlene that she's not getting back together with Ollie, he just has some work stuff to deal with. They discuss how Elliot's getting along: "He's had a shitty month." "Or twenty years." The ballet teacher arrives, and Angela and Darlene take their places in the class.

Elliot is thinking about Krista, and how he hurt her. "I don't feel good about that. I hope you're not mad at me." Elliot is burning a CD with his desktop's "Krista Gordon" folder, which he then deletes. He labels all of his hacked-person data CD's with the name of an album; Krista's gets labeled "Talking Heads Speaking in Tongues", and he adds it to his collection of CD's. He spends a while looking through the web page for AirDream Advanced Metering, they provide modern building automation services.

Elliot goes out onto the street and meets Mr. Robot. Elliot asks if Mr. Robot got everybody back, and Mr. Robot nods.

Darlene is on the subway, it's rather crowded, but she notices two Asian men a little way down the car, looking directly at her. One nods to the other, and they get up and walk over to stand right in front of her; she puts her hand in her purse. One says, as if to his partner, "Tell him to follow the proper commands, or the sequence won't initiate." They both walk away down the car, and Darlene looks after them.

At the fsociety hideout, Elliot is telling everyone his plans: he remotely patched the software in the Raspberry Pi he planted in Steel Mountain, he's been monitoring it daily, it's all ready. His malware has been planted at all five of the Steel Mountain locations. They all use AirDream control systems for HVAC, and they are all networked together, so fsociety will arrange to heat all of the locations at the same time, while making sure no alarms go off from the temperature rise. Elliot gets a text from Lloyd Chung: "Allsafe's been hacked."

Elliot needs to get to Allsafe, but then Darlene arrives to say that Dark Army are following her, and probably will follow him as well. She hands him her gun, saying those guys are dangerous, and the meet with Whiterose might not go as he wants. Elliot gives back the gun, he doesn't know how to use them. Darlene grabs his phone and dials herself from it, so they both have each others' number; that's not fsociety protocol, but she says he needs this now. Elliot leaves, and Darlene hides the gun in a popcorn machine in the hideout.

As Elliot leaves fsociety, Mr. Robot catches up with him, to say he should forget Darlene's number. But he's sure that Whiterose wants to talk to Elliot, and he can't afford any distractions.

Tyrell Wellick is walking rather in a haze through the E Corp executive hallways; he gets easily distracted by conversations, and walks into a fellow exec and spills his coffee. His assistant, Elizabeth, catches up with him; he tells her he's busy, cancel all meetings and hold all calls, but she says that Gideon Goddard is already in the office waiting to see Tyrell.

Gideon tells Tyrell that an employee broke the chain of custody with the Colby data file, so it can't be used as evidence against Colby. But Allsafe is putting in place many measures to find the hackers, such as setting up a honeypot for server CS30, the one that fsociety used for its last attack. At the mention of CS30, Tyrell is sweating, but Gideon goes on, Allsafe will ensure that fsociety can't cause any more damage. Just at that moment, Gideon gets a text from Lloyd Chung: "Call the office! 911! Entire network down." Tyrell makes noises of understanding Gideon's concerns, and thanks him for giving the problem his entire attention. They shake hands, and Gideon leaves.

As soon as Gideon is gone, Tyrell turns to his keyboard, and makes an ssh connection to server CS30, or presumably its honeypot. He searches for directories for which he has no access, and looks over the list, staring at one called "fd1info". He looks into that directory, and stares for a while at one file on the list, "fsociety". But then he is interrupted by his assistant: The police are here, there was a body found on the roof last night, and detectives want to speak with Tyrell. Tyrell gets up and says work has to go on, the detectives can make an appointment to talk with him, but for now he needs to talk with the Dulles server farm. He walks out of his office.

At the Allsafe offices, Gideon has gotten back, and is assigning tasks to various employees to get things running again. He tells Ollie to cancel all appointments, no customers can hear about this. He goes into the server room, just as Elliot shows up for work. Gideon and Elliot look at each other for a moment, then Elliot gets to work.

Elliot is looking at logs on his system, and commenting to us: this hack is no big deal, the hackers already have a lot of control of the company systems but aren't doing anything actually valuable, it's like they are making a distraction, something that will keep Allsafe engineers busy while something else goes on.

Then Ollie comes by, and he seems nervous as he gives Elliot an assignment: take these two disk drives to Blank's Disk Recovery to be destroyed, and right now. Elliot objects, he's working on the malware now, but Ollie pulls rank, Elliot has to do this right now, it's noon and the appointment at Blank's is at 2 PM, go get this done.

Elliot is curious about Ollie's nervousness, and hacks into the Allsafe mail system to look at Ollie's mail. His most recent Sent Mail has lots of messages to Angela, with subjects like "I'm on the verge of tears", and "This hack is your fault!" Elliot wonders what Angela has to do with this.

Tyrell is back home with Joanna, and she's surprised, there's a gala tonight. She's sure that, last night, he slept with Sharon Knowles, and took pictures that they can use for blackmail against Scott Knowles. Tyrell says blackmail is too unpredictable, they have to find another way. She says blackmail is perfect, it would raise a scandal, and the company wouldn't allow a scandal during the earnings report, so Scott will resign and Price will name Tyrell as CTO. Tyrell has no answers for her and says nothing. She says, "Don't unravel now."

On the street, Elliot runs into Angela, and complains that she didn't tell him about what was going on with Ollie, Elliot could have helped; Angela says Elliot's not been around to help anyone for a month. Anyway, she says "some guy" gave Ollie a CD that infected his laptop, and the guy forced Ollie to run a disk at Allsafe, so that got done, a while ago. Elliot remarks to us: I was right, the hack was a distraction, this is something set up by the Dark Army and something to do with me and this meeting. Angela is still bothered, Elliot hasn't been himself for several months, even before Shayla.

Elliot gets to the storefront of Blank's Disk Recovery. He thinks: The Dark Army has taken extraordinary steps to make sure this meeting's exactly how they want it. He goes in and gives his name.

Someone leads Elliot to a glass-walled room, and Elliot remarks to us how it is a Faraday cage, a room where no radio signals go in or out. Inside the room is a guy in a hazmat suit, eating a sandwich. The door is open, and Elliot walks in; as he does so, the guy walks out and closes the door behind him. Another door opens, and in walks Whiterose, an Asian trans woman. She demands the disk drives that Elliot has, and starts to disassemble them. She looks at her watch, and says that she manages her time very carefully; she has allotted Elliot three minutes.

He starts to talk about the drives, then about the E Corp hack that fsociety has ready to run, but Whiterose dismisses such topics, they waste precious time telling her things she already knows. He asks if the Dark Army is ready to do their part, and Whiterose says it's fsociety that is not ready: they failed to have a worthwhile focus, first the hack to target Terry Colby, then the vulnerability that raised the suspicion of Gideon Goddard. So Gideon has made a honeypot of the hacked server. Elliot says he'll get rid of the honeypot, but Whiterose says she's not inspired with confidence, until a few seconds ago Elliot didn't even know there was a honeypot. Now Whiterose sets a deadline: Elliot has 50 hours and 23 minutes to disable the honeypot, and then the Dark Army will initiate the hack. She says Elliot will never see her again, and she walks out.

Elliot hurries along the sidewalk back to Allsafe, thinking on what he has to accomplish: He has to get the honeypot down, Gideon has been spying on Elliot, and it's Gideon who has the credentials to get the honeypot turned off. He realizes that he needs a distraction so he can get to Gideon's phone; he calls Darlene and records a message for her.

Back at his office desk, Elliot looks across the room to where Gideon is doing something on his phone. Elliot goes to the coffee pot, just as Gideon looks at the phone, plugs it into its charger, and leaves it on his desk. Elliot remarks to us about how he got a hundred large files transmitted to Gideon's phone, draining the battery. Elliot gets out his own phone, and texts someone a message: "Go."

In the conference room off of the desk area, there is a large TV set, and it starts displaying another of those fsociety videos, with a masked figure making pronouncements: "Corporate greed is a trickle down desire that reaches even the bottom of the food chain. And for what?" It's loud enough that all the employees can hear it, and all of them rush to the conference to see what's going on. Except Elliot. The video is specifically against Allsafe, and Gideon Goddard, and says that Allsafe's nightmare is about to begin, the sweet dreams are over, et cetera, et cetera, you will soon be finished. Some in the room are checking their phones; the video is also on Youtube, and on the Allsafe website.

But while everyone's attention is on the video, Elliot slips unseen into Gideon's office; he taps on it, ending with a display showing a code number. Elliot thinks: the passcode is only good for 90 seconds, he has to log in with it on his computer in that time. Elliot quickly walks to his desk ... just as Gideon, with the others in the conference room, looks around and says, "Where's Elliot?"

Gideon hurries across the room to where Elliot is sitting at his desk; Elliot types the passcode into the login screen for the IT Admin ticket system, logging in as Gideon, and he iconifies the window just in time for Gideon to not see it as he arrives at Elliot's desk. Gideon says he's quite suspicious of Elliot: all these events have been happening around Elliot's appearances and disappearances, and now, there's a disaster going on, every employee was in that room seeing it, and Elliot was off doing something ... else? Elliot has nothing to say. Gideon wants answers, but gets pulled away: E Corp is on the phone, right now. Gideon goes, but says he's "not finished" with Elliot.

Elliot had indeed gotten logged in to the ticket system in time, and he finds the tickets Gideon used to establish the honeypot. He types in a new ticket: "Please remove honeypot and restore normal connectivity on server CS30." He remarks to us: When he hacked Gideon, and his secrets, he saw a good, honest man; Gideon is wrong, because Elliot really is "finished" here, he's not good for Allsafe or its people. He knows Gideon is protecting his people, but Elliot is doing this "to protect everyone."

Tyrell is in his limo, parked outside the fsociety hideout, talking with Mr. Robot. Tyrell knows fsociety has been busy, and wants to know what's planned, they and he are supposed to be allies. Mr. Robot disagrees, there's nothing they could agree on. Tyrell says he has a hold over Mr. Robot, Tyrell knows "your dirty little secret". Mr. Robot says they shouldn't be petty, and once Tyrell thinks about it, he'll realize that telling anyone about "that" does neither of us any good, and the only thing for Tyrell to do in his position is nothing.

Tyrell gets home, and immediately picks up a bottle and drinks deeply. Joanna notices, and says it doesn't inspire her confidence; she had heard that the gala was cancelled, and that maybe Tyrell had accomplished something last night, though he won't tell her what. Tyrell says it doesn't matter anymore, he and she have been blinded by focusing on the "wrong players". He says some months ago he met a tech guy, Tyrell thought he could use him to get something, but now he realizes that the tech could be the step to something grander and more beautiful: God. Joanna is dumbfounded.

At that point, the doorbell rings, and it's two detectives, they are investigating the murder at E Corp, and want to talk to both of them. Tyrell tries to derail this, saying they should make an appointment at the office, but the detectives say this is a time sensitive matter, and they have questions that need answers. First, they ask, did the Wellick's know the deceased, Sharon Knowles? This floors Joanna: "Sharon Knowles? That's terrible. Yes, yes, we did know her." She invites the detectives in.

Inside, she offers the detectives coffee, they accept, and she goes to the kitchen. The detectives sit down with Tyrell, and ask him when he last saw Sharon Knowles. Tyrell just sits and stares, long enough that the detectives ask whether he's all right. Then they all hear a groan from the kitchen. They rush in, and Joanna is leaning against a counter, there's a pool of blood on the floor between her legs. Tyrell says he thinks the baby is coming, they need to go the hospital; a detective starts calling on his phone. Tyrell notices, sitting on the kitchen counter, a 2-tined fork with blood on the end. He looks at her, wordlessly, and she says (in Swedish): "I will not let them take you. You will not leave us."

Night at Coney Island, and Elliot is sitting with Darlene. Darlene says the hack of the climate control system is all set up. They agree, they've done it, in 43 hours, exactly, the honeypot will go away, and her rootkit will take down Evil Corp. Darlene is ecstatic, Elliot really got them to do something worthwhile, and she says "I love you so much." At that, he leans forward and kisses her.

Darlene immediately pulls back in disgust: "what the hell is wrong with you?" Elliot sputters and apologizes, he's confused. "Oh my god, Elliot. Did you forget again? Did you forget who I am? Tell me who you think I am." Elliot is surprised: "You're Darlene. You're Darlene!" But Elliot thinks to us: "I know. I know what she's going to say." She starts to say it: "I'm your..." and he finishes it: "Sister. You're my sister." He steps back, puts up his hood, and walks away.

Elliot makes his way home via subway, in a haze of "I remember Darlene", and "I'm crazy", and "Why did I forget?", and "I'm crazy." "Were you in on this the whole time?"

He gets to his apartment, still terribly confused. "Is this amnesia? What else am I not remembering? I should have stayed on the meds. I'm crazy. I should never have created you. Do I even exist?" The phone rings, he glances at it, then throws it across the room. He sits at the computer, uses a search website to find himself, nothing comes up; he tries other search engines and people finders, no sign of the "Elliot Alderson" of New York who works with computers. "Nothing. No identity. I'm a ghost. Did I erase myself?" He goes to his CD folder and pages through them, reading some of the labels, glancing at a few and tossing them aside. He finds the first CD on the case: it has no label or name written on it, it's blank.

He puts the CD in his machine, and the folders appear. He pages through a directory of pictures, lots of pictures of a man who looks exactly like Mr. Robot, dressed differently, who seems to be an ordinary, smiling, relaxed man. Then there are pictures of this man, and the boy that Elliot remembers as him when he was young; could they be father-and-son pictures? Lots of happy pictures of them doing things together. He remembers something; he gets up and finds on one of his shelves a picture, it's a family foursome picture, Dad (?), the woman Elliot remembers as his mother, his young self, and a young girl. Is it his family? There's a pounding on the door. It's Mr. Robot: "I think we should talk."