Mr. Robot season 3 episode 8 preview: eps3.7_dont-delete-me.ko

Mr. Robot season 3 continues, as Elliot struggles to come to terms with the world that he and Mr. Robot hath wrought.

Things got increasingly bleak in last week’s Mr. Robot, which showed us the fallout from the Dark Army’s Stage 2 attack. Thousands died as the hacker group cleaned house, destroying all of E-Corp’s paper records and setting up original fsociety members Trenton and Mobley to take the fall for it all. Whiterose, at the moment, certainly looks set to get everything she could possibly want.

Elliot was largely absent from last week’s episode, glitching into Mr. Robot almost immediately and remaining as his alternate self for the bulk of the hour. From everything we can tell, this week’s episode picks up three weeks later, and sees Elliot back to his normal self, but still struggling to deal with his role in all the terrible things that transpired.

Beyond that, we have no idea what’s next. Angela seems irreversibly broken. Darlene is still (maybe?) an FBI informant. Tyrell Wellick is in jail. Where do we go from here?

Of course, the official synopsis is even vaguer than usual when it comes to what to expect this week:

"elliot tries to get ghosted. FWIW it’s the day of all days."

What in the world does “day of all days” mean? That, it would seem, is a complete mystery, particularly now that Stage 2 has taken place.

What is exciting, however, is that it appears as though Mr. Robot will more directly tackle the mess that is Elliot’s psyche at the moment. Or at least that’s what it looks like in the episode trailer:

“Even if it was him, it was me,” Elliot intones ominously in the trailer, while discussing the Stage 2 attacks and Mr. Robot’s involvement. This at least appears as though Mr. Robot seems to be tackling the split between Elliot and his alter ego head on. For much of this season, the show has treated the two personalities as pretty much separate people, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde style. But the thing is, they aren’t. As much as we — and Elliot himself — might not want to face this, Mr. Robot doesn’t exist in a vacuum. He’s still Elliot, at the end of the day.

Whether that means the two personalities could ever be reintegrated is another question. “eps3.5_kill-process.inc” hinted that, at the very least, some degree of cooperation between the two was still possible. (After all, the two did work together to some extent towards the beginning of the series.) And now that the Dark Army has betrayed Mr. Robot, perhaps Elliot’s alternate personality will be more open to the idea of teaming up. That’s at least a more intriguing — and likely — prospect that Elliot getting the therapy and help he needs to reintegrate himself into a whole person at any point before Mr. Robot’s final season.

Next: Mr. Robot season 3: What if Whiterose gets away with it all?

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