I rated last week's hour of USA Network's Mr. Robot as the best since its premiere, but last night's sixth episode, titled "eps1.5_br4ve-trave1er.asf" blew its predecessor out of the park.
Written by Kyle Bradstreet and directed by Deborah Chow, the episode played out the climaxes of a handful of storylines in sublime fashion.
The entire hour was beautifully paced and executed. Proceedings began in a diner where Elliot and Shayla were meeting under the careful watch of two of Fernando Vera's henchmen, one of whom was his brother, Isaac. In order to rescue Shayla from Vera's capture, Elliot was tasked with breaking him out of the prison he was incarcerated in, with Shayla's life at stake if he failed. While Elliot himself said the assignment was achievable, what had him more worried was that he had just one day to do it.
fsociety's Darlene was only too happy to help, but was quickly wrapped up by the duo guarding Elliot. Fortunately a cunning plan to infiltrate the police department's network had been enacted by Darlene a short time earlier when she casually dropped a few dozen flash drives laced with malware. The cop who picked up one of the sticks narrowly avoided letting Elliot into the system, with Avast! getting a nice bit of product placement as being the antivirus which stopped the breach.
Before Elliot and Darlene enact plan B, let's move to Angela, who had a really fascinating hour. Fresh from her breakup and from learning her father is drowning in debt arising from medical expenses last week, Angela set out to dig up more information on the death of her mother, Emily Moss, at the hands of E Corp years earlier. We learned that the resulting case brought against the corporation was eventually dismissed, leaving no one accountable for Emily's death, and no compensation changing hands. This didn't deter Angela, though, who brought with her all the evidence she could find to the only lawyer who would listen. House of Cards' Sakina Jaffrey had a great outing guest starring here. The seed was, however, planted in Angela's mind to keep pursuing her investigation as she noticeably perked up when she was told hypothetically that a credible witness was all that would be needed to bolster the chances at winning the case.
Angela, trust yourself. You'll do what's right.
Spurred on by her time with the lawyer, Angela rushed to tell Elliot, narrowly avoiding the semi-hostage situation he was dealing with in his own apartment. With Angela gleefully explaining her plan to Elliot, Angela's voice faded and he narrated the above line to us as the only way to make Angela stop, telling her what she wants to hear so the information overload he was experiencing could be reduced.
After last week's bizarrely fascinating scenes featuring Tyrell Wellick and his wife, I was surprised we also saw a degree of closure along with escalation surrounding this storyline too.
Did you enjoy the view?
That was Scott's line to Tyrell last night as the pair faced off regarding the games Tyrell was playing in order to better position himself for promotion to CTO of E Corp. This was one of the finest scenes of the night, with the stunning directing and shot selection being the particular highlight for me. It's fair to say Tyrell is dodgy to say the least, so it was extremely satisfying seeing the little weasel put squarely in his place. His pregnant wife continues to give me the jitters too, as she sat calmly ate a piece of meat on a skewer while Tyrell tore the kitchen apart in the background. Where these two are headed still isn't clear, but despite their utterly bizarre relationship and general demeanor, I'm eagerly looking forward to witnessing their next move, because if there's one thing Tyrell appears to despise, it's being pushed over and trodden on.
Like a few weeks earlier, around half the episode passed before we saw the title character, Mr. Robot, present himself in last night's installment. Again, his role was minimal at best as he tried to rationalize with Elliot and persuade him to give up on trying to save Shayla as it was distracting him from the real mission partially executed last week, which was to destroy E Corp's tape drive backups before they were cloned and relocated to several other facilities. I was surprised with the ease in which the events of last week escaped me as this episode hardly mentioned them, nor focused on them.
Did I make a mistake? No. I don't make mistakes.
The final 15 minutes or so of the episode was used to play out the daring escape plan Elliot was trying to pull off. It kicked off with Elliot meeting Vera himself in prison, outlining the details of the escape, while also serving as a way for Elliot to determine which electronics he could attempt to infiltrate to force all the prison's cell doors to open simultaneously. When that wasn't successful, Darlene came to the rescue once again, flaunting her assets to a cop in a police cruiser long enough to distract him from Elliot taking control of the Bluetooth keyboard to force his way into the prison system via the cruiser's network connection.
Before the plan was executed that night, however, Elliot found himself in yet another sticky situation when Isaac took Elliot for a ride, and, while at gunpoint, revealed his intention to kill his brother. But precisely at 9:49pm, after a momentary power surge, the doors opened and the inmates flooded the yard, with Vera promptly making his way to Elliot and Isaac. After a brief cheer, Vera told his fellow accomplice, DJ, to shoot Isaac, having known his brother's intentions all along. How he knew is a mystery, but that was to be the last thing Elliot was concerned about.
Unbeknown to Elliot, all along, Shayla, his on-off girlfriend who he had been through hell and high water during the last few hours to save, had been dead in the car beside him all along. Elliot opened the trunk, and for over a minute, Elliot paced randomly in utter disbelief. It wasn't until just after he bolted from the scene on foot that the camera finally revealed a bloodied Shayla sprawled in the trunk, her throat slit.
It marks the first major character death in the series after just 6 episodes. Actress Frankie Shaw has done a superb job from day one playing the character so I was gutted to learn that her role was now over. It's not something Elliot will take lightly, especially given his tendency to contain his emotions inside his head, and I'm sure fsociety won't be overly pleased to have their main man distracted by a close friend's passing instead of focusing on the job of taking down E Corp. It will be interesting to see whether Elliot and Angela grow closer as a result, or will Darlene try to close in on Elliot? Regardless, someone will have to walk the dog when he's gone.
As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to hear if you thought this episode was as good as I did in the comments below. There's just four episodes of Mr. Robot remaining this season. Check out next week's episode promo here, and promotional photos here.
