Mr. Robot season 3: What if Whiterose gets away with everything?

What’s next for Mr. Robot season 3, now that it seems as though Whiterose is more firmly in charge of…well, everything, than ever?

Season 3 of Mr. Robot has certainly been a shocking one. We’ve seen betrayals, reversals, fake-outs, and surprises. Things we thought we understood about the show and its universe turned out to be wrong. People died. Yet, there are many things we still don’t understand.

The season’s most recent episode had an air of tidying up loose ends. The Dark Army’s Stage 2 attack wiped out the paper records left over from the original 5/9 hack. The subsequent murder of Mobley and Trenton provided a pair of convenient scapegoats to frame for the E-Corp attacks and blame for f-society’s continued activity. The FBI investigation, for all intents and purposes seems to be wrapping up in the wake of Tyrell Wellick’s arrest and the deaths of Mobley and Trenton.

Even Dom, the most ardent believer that Whiterose and fsociety are linked, seems defeated in the face of the neat bow wrapping itself around this whole story. “They’re actually going to get away with this,” she whispers to herself at the end of “eps3.6_Fredrick+Tanya.chk.” And at the moment, it seems like she’s right.

At the moment, it sure seems as though Whiterose has everything she could possibly want. China got its annexation of the Congo. The paper records that backed up E-Corp are destroyed. fsociety’s revolution is in chaos. Tyrell Wellick is in jail. Phillip Price falls, finding himself ruined professionally in the most devastating manner by the end of the episode. Even Angela, the truest of true believers in Whiterose’s vision, seems ruined. If the scene of her brokenly rewinding the DVR footage of the explosions, insisting that the dead will be fine, isn’t the saddest thing we’ve seen this season, I don’t know what is.

There’s a lot of bleakness in Mr. Robot season 3 at the moment. In fact, it’s hard to know where we go from here. If — as it certainly looks at the moment — Whiterose is victorious, what happens to everyone else? fsociety, in every capacity that matters, is dead. Their revolution has been coopted by the very people the group claimed to be fighting. Whiterose was never a savior, just another puppetmaster who stayed two steps ahead of everyone else. Whatever she promised Angela doesn’t seem likely to happen now. (Did we ever really think time travel would save us? Did she?) Elliot’s psyche appears badly fractured. Meanwhile, the 1% just keep right on partying on rooftops as the world collapses around them.

So, we have to ask: Is it truly possible that Whiterose does get away with everything? Is Mr. Robot really willing to go that dark? (The answer, I think, is obviously yes, as much as I don’t want it to be.)

There are still three more episodes in season 3. That’s an eternity in the world of this show, which has reset its own internal, well, everything, at least twice already this year. Given everything that’s happened, we have to assume that Sam Esmail has more twists up his sleeve, but it’s difficult to imagine at this point what those might look like. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Next: Mr Robot season 3 review: eps3.6_Fredrick Tanya.chk

Mr. Robot continues Wednesday, Nov. 29 on USA Network.