What I’m Watching: Mr. Robot

Mr. Robot: Season 3, Episode 7 “eps3.6_fredrick+tanya.chk” (B+)

I haven’t been able to get this episode out of my head since I watched it. I remember a similarly disturbing moment in the fifth episode of this show’s first season, when Shayla ended up being dead in a trunk after Elliot spent the entire hour trying desperately to save her. Fortunately, her portrayer Frankie Shaw is alive and well in her own show, “SMILF,” but I can’t say the same for the two casualties of this episode. Things started off much more humorously, as the TV-obsessed Leon returned to grab Trenton and Mobley. When Trenton got out of her binds and started driving, Leon didn’t even flinch, and then she crashed the car anyway. There’s something extremely upsetting about seeing people beg for their lives, and there was nothing that was going to save Trenton or Mobley, especially since they were long dead with the Dark Army gone when the FBI finally broke in to find the staged scene. This was an extraordinary frame job, with Irving and Santiago as the chief executors on the ground playing out Whiterose’s vision, which involved a brutal undercut of Philip. Angela’s mental state is deeply worrisome since she seems to believe that she can rewind death, and it’s hard to figure out exactly where the still-menacing Mr. Robot fits in now that his stage two plan has been corrupted for evil rather than merely revolutionary purposes. I’m really pulling for Dom to go straight to Darlene and request her help in taking down the people she knows are responsible.