4 things to know about the Mr. Robot season 4 trailer

If the trailer for the series’ final season is anything to go by, Mr. Robot season 4 is going to be eerie, tense and super dark. Here’s what you need to know.

The end of an era is near: The final season of Mr. Robot will air on USA Network this October.

We’ve all known this was coming for a while, but to see it put down in black and white like that is kind of upsetting. (Even if Mr. Robot is definitely the sort of show that needs to be able to go out on its own terms.)

So, this fall, we’ll finally see the conclusion to years of hacking and manipulation and murder and theft and oppression, and if you’ve ever seen this show at all, then you’re probably well aware that we’ve likely got no idea what’s coming.

The first trailer for the final season is basically Mr. Robot in a nutshell: Tense, atmospheric, maybe a little full of itself and absolutely impossible to look away from.

The trailer doesn’t reveal much about what we might really see in the final season, at least beyond some brief flashes of returning characters like Angela, Darlene, Krista, Dom, and Phillip Price. But, that’s not unusual for Mr. Robot, which shrouds much of its intensions in complicated riddles and mysteries.

After a few (dozen) views, here’s are some of the important takeaways.

It’s set at Christmastime.

Over the years, Mr. Robot has been very deliberate about setting specific moments of the series at specific times. The show definitively takes place during the Obama administration in 2015 and has referenced everything from Occupy Wall Street to the bank bailouts. It implies that one of its main villains is responsible for the rise of Donald Trump. And it specifically sets an episode on October 21, 2015, the day Marty McFly travels to in the film Back to the Future, Part II.

Mr. Robot is a show that’s aware of time, and chooses its settings with great purpose. So what does it mean that it appears the final season will be set at Christmas? Many things are possible. Given that the show has always been a meditation on the problematic nature of capitalism, setting the story during the most gleefully consumer-focused time of year is probably not an accident. It’s also a time for family and friends, all of which appear to be in danger now, thanks to Elliot and fsociety’s work.

It’s dark as heck.

This probably shouldn’t surprise anyone, given that Mr. Robot has always been a tense, complicated sort of show. But the trailer for the series’ final season is super dark. As the eerie strains of “Silent Night” in the background, there are tears, violence, an ominous voiceover, lots of blood and what appears to be a body being loaded into a coroner’s van.

This definitely does not feel like a wonderful Christmastime, is what I’m saying. Is there any way we get out of this with everyone we care about still alive?

There’s a blink and you’ll miss it shot of Fernando Vera.

One of the most shocking twists at the end of season 3 was the revelation in a post-credits scene that Fernando Vera – drug-dealer, murderer and the only man on this show who’s ever really bested Elliot – is back. Vera, who kidnapped Elliot’s girlfriend Shayla to force him to hack him out of prison and then killed her anyway, is a complete monster. He’s also the most personal, human representation of the real-life costs of the things Elliot does.

Vera was searching for Elliot in the stinger at the end of last season, and though we don’t exactly know why, it seems safe to assume that whatever the reason, it’s bad. The quick, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of him in the season 4 trailer features him with a gun (of course), looking like he’s about to shoot someone.

Elliot and Mr. Robot appear to be on the same side, at last. 

“We need to get back to work,” Elliot declares to his alter ego during the season 4 clip.

Mr. Robot‘s third season often featured Elliot and his alternate personality at odds with one another, with one sometimes going so far as to drug or otherwise suppress the other half of his psyche. It was rare to see the two “sides” of Elliot in the same scene, and they were usually working at cross purposes, right up until the very end of the season.

But as season 4 begins,  Elliot seems to have finally accepted that Mr. Robot isn’t an enemy or a friend or a rival. He himself is Mr. Robot, whether he likes it or not. The two are on the same page, so to speak, and working toward the same goal. (And neither of them thinks the other is real when they aren’t.) It’s going to be interesting to see the two of them actual work together for once, which may or may not indicate something broader about Elliot’s own ability to heal.

Mr. Robot returns for its fourth and final season on USA Network beginning Sunday, October 6.