Mr. Robot season 3: Is the series about to drop time travel on us?

Could Mr. Robot season 3 be about to delve into its wildest territory yet? Is it really possible the show might tackle alternate realities? Maybe.

Theoretically, USA Network’s Mr. Robot is a hacker story, focused on a troubled programmer who sought to save the world. Over its first two seasons it grew into something else, folding in everything from an underground revolution, to cyberterrorism, to a corporate global web wide enough to turn life in a post-5/9 hack hellscape into a profit opportunity.

Now, as season 3 gets under way, the show seems poised to introduce something else. Something that could turn out to be … a lot weirder than we ever expected when this whole thing started.

During the season premiere, Mr. Robot finally revealed the Washington Township power plant, whose existence kicked off so much of the show’s original story. (Both Elliot’s father and Angela’s mother died from medical complications related to working there.) It’s also the home of some secret project whose details we aren’t yet privy to, but which is key to the plans of Whiterose, the mysterious Dark Army leader.

So what’s inside this place, exactly? Well, unsurprisingly, we’re not sure. There’s some kind of massive device within the space, and I don’t think it’s an accident that it looks to be something very similar to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. And, if you’ve ever read any science fiction at all, particle accelerators are usually connected to ideas like time travel and alternate or parallel realities. (The show itself underlined this point by featuring a E-Corp scientist asking about whether reality is as we perceive it and if copies of ourselves exist.)

Later in the episode, Angela hints at a similar possibility to Elliot. She implies that they can somehow undo what’s happened to them because of E-Corp. Even the deaths of their parents, apparently. But could that ever be possible without the insertion of something that changes or alters time?

If “Eps3.0power-saver-mode.h” is anything to go by, much of season 3’s primary storyline will focus on Elliot’s attempt to fix what he did via the 5/9 Hack. For the most part, that likely means trying to thwart Mr. Robot’s “Stage 2” plan to blow up a building of innocents, and infiltrating E-Corp thanks to a new corporate job. But perhaps Angela’s storyline will explore some of these more … out there ideas.

After all, she is Whiterose’s newest true believer. And she sure signed on to the Dark Army agenda in record time. But to what end? She says it’s because she wants to destroy E-Corp for what they did to her family. (It’s a reasonable motivation. Just look at what her desire for revenge has lead her to do and give up thus far.) But Angela’s now willing to lie to her BFF and exploit his mental illness to get her way. Is this a sign that she’s become a real true believer in Whiterose’s cause? Does Angela also think that she can somehow recreate reality with the Dark Army’s help?

Back in season 2, Whiterose told Elliot (and us) that she hacks time. Wouldn’t building a literal time machine be the next great evolution in that statement? Sure, it sounds crazy. Mostly because Mr. Robot never sold itself as a deep sci-fi property in this way, though maybe it should have. After all, haven’t the false narrations used in the series’ first two seasons created alternate realities of sorts already?

We believed that Mr. Robot was a real person, and that Elliot was staying with his mother for a considerable length of time. Until we didn’t. Maybe the constant story shifting isn’t to teach us so much about unreliable narrators, but to remind us that time — and reality — is a fluid and flexible thing.

Next: Mr. Robot season 3 premiere review: “Eps3.0power-saver-mode.h”

Mr. Robot continues Wednesday, Oct. 18 on USA Network.