Oh boy, what a weird pair of episodes. Masters & Slaves and Handshake (I'm just going to write the simple versions of the titles for the sake of it not being a pain to write) play some real interesting games with our understanding of what is happening in the world of the show.
Obviously, spoilers, so let's do a cut.
Masters and Slaves starts off in a very, very strange way. Elliot is living in what appears to be a sitcom from the 80s or early 90s (his childhood, in other words,) in which his parents, his sister, and he are on some kind of road trip. But the humor of the show is really off - not only with jokes about his dad's cancer or his mother's abusive behavior, but also the fact that Tyrell Wellick is in the trunk of their car.
Elliot's not an idiot - he knows this isn't really happening. But the truth is that what is happening is so traumatic that Mr. Robot is shielding him from it. Elliot is getting the absolute shit beaten out of him by Ray's thugs (more on that in a little bit.)
The illusion ends with Elliot waking up in the hospital with some really nasty injuries - but he's still under Ray's control. Ultimately, Ray coerces him once again to get the site up and running again, but Ray seems to know already that Elliot has burned him - making it just an ordinary website that any idiot (and certainly the FBI) could find. Elliot leaves Ray's office as the FBI swarms the building, apparently free. (More on that in a second.)
Meanwhile, Angela is working for FSociety, playing a crucial role in hooking up a Wi-Fi router that will intercept FBI cell phones in the ECorp building.
We get a rather surprising return of Dom, who survived the shootout after the second shooter apparently also turned his gun on himself, leaving four FBI agents dead. Dom understands that while the official story is Uighur separatists, this is clearly the Dark Army trying (and succeeding) at putting a halt to the investigation.
Dom seems to be on to Angela, and shortly after the hack succeeds, she demonstrates it when trying to pull up security footage of Angela on the restricted floor.
One other notable moment here is that Cisco gets injected with something by a Dark Army representative (in his finger, which must have hurt like crazy.) We don't know exactly what this is, but I'd guess it's some sort of tracker.
Johanna Wellick, well, her story is still pretty tangential. Her boyfriend is turning 30, but she's still keeping him at a distance, however we find out that she has begun divorce proceedings.
Meanwhile, Angela is working on moving through ECorp so that she can position herself to get the data on the events that led to her mom and Elliot's dad's deaths. She's not terribly subtle about it, and even though she gets Price to put her in Risk Management, it's not as if they don't know what she's trying to do. The question, then, is whether ECorp understands that she's willing to go to crazy lengths, like hacking the FBI, to take her revenge.
But then there's Elliot.
I honestly watched the two episodes right after the other, and they've kind of bled into each other, so getting Ray caught might actually happen in Handshake.
But what we realize is that Elliot has been hiding something from us. Just as Mr. Robot takes the blows of a group of attempted rapists, Elliot has been lying about where he is.
He's not at his mom's house. He's in prison.
So was he caught for the 5/9 hack? If so, how did the other FSociety people not get caught? Elliot is nearing the end of his prison stay, so it's clearly not a major offense like the murder of Tyrell Wellick (unless he successfully used the Insanity defense, which is very rare, though totally applicable if he really did it while under the control of Mr. Robot.)
But one interesting detail we discover is that Leon, the guy I thought was a childhood friend and is only now getting into Seinfeld, is actually a fellow prisoner and a member of the Dark Army, who asks Elliot to put in a good word for him with Whiterose when he gets out of prison.
So Elliot has been in prison all this time, and it's not that he didn't know - he was shielding us from the knowledge. There's a lot to unpack as we move forward. And a real question of just who or what Ray was.
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