Mr. Robot season 3: Is this what hope feels like?

Mr. Robot gave us its most hopeful episode in ages last week. Does that mean that season 3 will finally turn towards the light?

It’s not a big secret that Mr. Robot’s third season has been remarkably bleak. Whiterose and the Dark Army appear to be winning in every way that matters. Thousands of innocent people died as part of their Stage 2 attack. The group set up Trenton and Mobley to take the fall for their actions. And Elliot’s struggle with Mr. Robot for control of his own psyche became increasingly dangerous and difficult.

(This isn’t even counting Angela’s apparent mental breakdown, Tyrell’s discovery that his wife is dead or Darelene’s legal problems. There’s just a lot of bad stuff going on at the moment.)

The most recent episode, “eps3.7_dont-delete-me.ko,” took the series to its darkest place yet, as Elliot contemplated suicide. However, it’s also the series’ most hopeful episode in ages. Certainly at least since its first season, when Elliot believed in what fsociety was trying to do, and thought their E-Corp hack would actually make the world a better place.

In the end, thanks to the timely intervention of Trenton’s little brother Mohammed — in an appearance that you can probably choose to view as real or not, depending on your mood — Elliot ultimately chooses to live. He even decides to try and forgive his best friend Angela for her involvement with Mr. Robot and Whiterose. Well, maybe he’s not quite there yet, but at least he manages to start talking to her again. But the scene between them is full of cues — from the dialogue to the music — that things will get better, in time.

To cap it all off, he even receives a message from beyond the grave. It turns out that Elliot is who Trenton meant when she told Mobley she scheduled an email full of information to go to “someone I trust” should anything happen to her. Her message, with its plaintive “don’t delete me” subject line, includes her idea about how the original 5/9 hack might be undone and the world restored to what it once was.

This isn’t entirely possible, of course. Trenton’s plan won’t bring back the dead, nor will it necessarily stop the Dark Army.

But, still. This is the most hopeful episode of the series in ages.

Honestly, an episode whose main message is that mistakes can be fixed is probably what we all needed right now. Up until this point, those who were hopeful that this story cold ever end happily have pretty much only had Angela’s borderline crazy ramblings that time can be rewritten to hang on to.

But Trenton’s email offers us a chance to believe anyway. In the light of day — or at least in the aftermath of 71 explosions — Angela’s time travel theory seems, on the face of it, impossible. But a hack as a solution seems eminently plausible. It’s how we got here in the first place. If Elliot and Darlene can battle Whiterose with anything, it’s that. And maybe they won’t be able to rewind time and save all those who lost their lives during Stage 2, perhaps they can still undo the thing that started all this.

What would that look like, I wonder? If a second hack of some type can undo the damage brought about by 5/9 and the introduction of E-Corp’s ecoin currency system, what does that do to the world. Do those that lost their money get it back? Are people’s mortgages restored? Does this somehow cancel out the rolling blackouts through the city? Can it end the looting and riots? Will it somehow take E-Corp out at the same time?

It’s hard to know for sure. Maybe a return to the status quo here is actually not a great idea. Perhaps it will leave people worse off than they were before the hack took place. But at least it’s a plan that has an actual chance of happening. It’s an attempt to fix some of fsociety’s mistakes that’s at least grounded in real life. (Unlike, say, Angela’s insistence that the Dark Army will somehow manage to resurrect the dead.)

At any rate, it feels good to hope again, to think there’s a chance that something good might happen, or that justice will be achieved. We just don’t have a very clear idea of what that might look like, after all this. Elliot seems to though. So maybe we’ll just have to believe in him.

Next: Mr. Robot season 3 review: eps3.7_dont-delete-me.ko

Mr. Robot continues Wednesday, Dec. 6 on USA Network.