‘Mr. Robot’ Series Finale: Who Is Elliot Alderson? (2024)

When Sam Esmail first launched USA’sMr. Robot, he was clear about one thing: the story came from a screenplay, and Season 1 was just the first act. As of tonight, we’ve finally seen the end of that screenplay, where Esmail has been leading us all along. And despite some side trips, the atypically named “Series Finale, Part 1,” and “Series Finale, Part 2,” showed that this entire series has been one long question, though we’ve been asking the wrong one. While fans, viewers, advertisem*nts, even the characters in the series have been asking, “Who is Mr. Robot?” the real question we should have been asking is, “Who is Elliot Alderson?”

Spoilers forMr. Robot‘s series finale past this point.

Mr. Robot, for all its complex plots and visuals, started off with a relatively simple premise. Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) was a hacker and part of a group called fsociety bent on taking down a global corporation called E Corp. Along the way, Elliot was helped, and occasionally impeded, by a mysterious figure named Mr. Robot (Christian Slater). Towards the end of Season 1, we discovered that Mr. Robot wasn’t real; he was a personality Elliot constructed based on his own father, Edward Alderson. Elliot had (and has) Dissociative Identity Disorder, meaning that like Elliot, it was tough for us to trust what we were seeing in the show at any point.

As it turns out, Elliot wasn’t just an unreliable narrator… We’ve actually never met Elliot, at all. We’ll get to the “whys” and “how” and “holy sh*t” in a second, but the big reveal saved for the very last episode was that the character we’ve been watching the whole series was another construction of Elliot’s psyche, called “The Mastermind.”

In lesser hands, this sort of seemingly series redefining twist could have wrecked the entire show. And on the surface, this seems to be a classic “we were inside his mind the whole time,” type thing, a la the end of St. Elsewhere. But what Esmail and company have created is both far more complex, and simpler — and that’s all because they keep it focused on that question we posited in the first paragraph: who is Elliot Alderson?

Here’s the short version of what happened. Back when Elliot was a child, he was sexually abused by his father. Terrified, trying to escape, he threw himself out of a window, and in order to protect himself from the pain, created a new personality. That was Mr. Robot, the idealized version of his father, the one who did not, and would never hurt him. Mr. Robot stayed with him ever since, taking over whenever things got too horrifying, or were too dark for Elliot to deal with. Mr. Robot took the pain, so he didn’t have to.

The second personality was Elliot’s mother, but not his real mother… As Mr. Robot hid his pain, this other personality — The Persecutor — filled in the gaps, blaming Elliot for the pain, making him feel like the abuse was all his fault. Was this to motivate him? Punish him? Unclear, but that led directly to the third personality, Young Elliot, built to take the abuse that he couldn’t handle.

Essentially, Elliot recreated his family; not an ideal version, but one that could exist in memories to keep him safe, and cold. If they existed as separate beings, he wouldn’t need to feel the absolute crushing pain of the monstrosity his father inflicted on him.

That all brings us to The Mastermind, the character we’ve been watching this entire show. He’s the hacker superhero Elliot never thought he could become; harder, angrier, able to take down corporations and save the world. While The Mastermind has been in control, he constructed a perfect world for the real Elliot, one where he was stuck in a permanent mental loop the day before his wedding to his childhood friend, Angela Moss (Portia Doubleday). There he could be happy and free of worry, with a perfect father, a perfect mother, a perfect childhood. Totally normal.

Oh, and there’s one more — well, many more — personalities, but we’ll get to that in a second.

The important thing to understand here is that everything we’ve been seeing on the show has really happened, except for what occurred at the end of the last episode. In it, Whiterose (BD Wong), leader of the hacker organization the Dark Army, seemingly set off a device that shunted Elliot into a parallel universe. What actually happened was that Elliot was knocked unconscious, and The Mastermind personality ended up in the mental structure it had created for the real Elliot, a maze dug in so deep even The Mastermind didn’t know it was there.

So no,Mr. Robot is not a sci-fi show, exactly, and there are no parallel universes. When Angela died, she died for real. When Whiterose shot herself in the head, she also died. And yes, The Mastermind did really shut down E Corp and, along with Elliot’s sister Darlene (Carly Chaikin), redistribute the world’s wealth from the 1% to the masses, evening everything out.

It also turns out that Darlene was essentially the failsafe of this whole scenario. In the maze The Mastermind created to keep Elliot docile, there was no Darlene, the one person in the real world who loved — and loves — him unequivocally. As she reveals when The Mastermind emerges from his coma, she’s always known he wasn’t the real Elliot, just like she knew when Mr. Robot would pop out of hiding. And it’s thanks to her love, her willingness to be there for him no matter what that The Mastermind ultimately lets go. In one lastFight Club riff, the Alderson “family” stands in front of a window and looks out at the world they’ve created, exactly like the last shot of Fincher’s movie. But they’re watching a world that’s bright, and light, and being built up, not destroyed. Now that thereal world is finally safe enough for Elliot to live in, he can come back and become the dominant personality, one more time.

I mentioned that there’s another personality, and this is the one that gets to the crux of what Esmail has been saying all along. That’s us. The viewers. Elliot’s friend, who he’s been talking to, on and off throughout the entire series. As a version of Elliot’s therapist Krista (Gloria Reuben) says during the final episode’s big reveal segment, we’re part of this, too. We’re complicit. Later, as he tries to leave the world he’s created, The Mastermind tells us that this doesn’t work unless we let go, too. The series ends with the light of camera widening out, the entire show unspooling on the side, 2001 style, until it pulls out to reveal Elliot’s eye. And the last shot of the series is Darlene looking directly at Elliot, directly at us, and saying, “Hello, Elliot.”

Because, you see, we’re all Elliot, and we’ve been Elliot all along. We all have the ability to change the world; but we’re all also a jumble of personalities that are meshed together. We’re memories hidden to conceal our pain, moments of glory and anguish and everything in between. And we’re more than just software waiting to be hacked; there’s no way to quantify the sum total of an entire life the way you can store files in a computer. We are our emotions, and experiences, and other people’s emotions and experiences, as well.

We’re Elliot Alderson, every single last one of us, and the choice of what to do next is up to us. Will we put on a mask and say “f society?” Will we try to live a normal life, whatever that means? Or will we grow and change and learn as we go, understanding that we aren’t singular beings, we contain multitudes. We’re the connections we make with others, and the ones we break. We’re not robots, we’re humans. Hello, friends.

Where to watchMr. Robot