Mr. Robot Season 2, Episode 3 Recap: That’s A Story For Another Time

Hello, friends. The remaining members of FSociety are being hunted. But first, a flashback. If you wondered how they ended up in Coney Island, Mobley and Romero walk us through the process, revealing the space has a history of owners who die violent deaths. Romero was cell mates with the person who owns it now, and feels it is the "nexus of all evil in the universe." Rather than burning it down, as he promised, Romero is trying to rent it to Mobley. Mobley talks him into joining FSociety instead and that's how you foreshadow in a flashback. Over the credits, as Elliot speaks to us, we hear Dusty Springfield's "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" playing. The music is from an Italian song that Dusty once heard and loved so much that she cried. In a bid to make her own English version of it, two songwriters lifted the music and made up English lyrics, rather than translating the Italian lyrics. It's a story of two songs. We rejoin Elliot on the phone with Tyrell, just like he demanded. Mr. Robot insists he’s delivered the most wanted man in America, but Elliot doesn’t trust it. Control…is an illusion? Elliot intends to keep control, no matter what. He O.D.s on Adderall in an attempt to shut out Mr. Robot. The war for control finds Mr. Robot pushing Elliot's brain buttons to imagine he's been kidnapped by men in black who feed him cement. After he comes to, barfing up the Adderall he took, to Mr. Robot shouting at him, he desperately scrapes the pills out of his own puke to take them again. Staying high on 200mgs of the drug a day keeps him at bay, but by day six of no sleep, Elliot is slipping into what he calls a fatal error. His downward spiral climaxes when he goes full McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in group therapy on a rant against the “metastasizing mind words” we call religion.

Apparently, Angela has been promoted. She meets Evil Corp CEO Price about that Bloomberg interview she was hustling to set up last week, they argue, and he asks her to dinner at a dive bar turned best restaurant in the city. It's a ham-fisted metaphor for her life right now but Price knows what he's doing when he tells her she's right and lets her win the battle over a TV appearance. When we see her again, she's gone full American Psycho, from the white walls of her apartment to the dinner in a fashionable restaurant and the light disco playing in the background which comes to a quick halt when she sees the table of old white men she’ll be joining. The restaurant is empty and they have to pay up front for the meal “because of the situation.” She has a pleasant dinner with Price and two other Evil Corp execs, both family men who use the company's resources to help charities and do non-profit work, Price tells her. They're also men who helped cover up her mother's death. Price gives her enough proof of their side gig doing some "nasty insider trading" and encourages her to destroy them. He’s making her choose her revenge or their lives. Or he’s making her do his dirty work. Either way, she’s living a moral gray area and he’s teaching her to navigate it. The big question in this episode is: who is Ray? He has diabetes and talks to his dead wife. He's some kind of kingpin with digital proficiency. He's making inroads to befriending Elliot because he needs him to pull off a hack. His scenes are clearly the lynchpin to the current theory floating around that Elliot is in a prison or a psych ward, but who is in in the world? A counselor? A guard? A man running the show? Is he a patient? Will Elliot have to cede control to Mr. Robot to find out Ray's true nature? Back to FSociety. Mobley finds Romero's dead body at his mother's house. He meets with Darlene (on a subway where a panhandler is singing a beautiful Italian song, a quiet nod to the Dusty moment earlier), and Trenton, to debate who is after them. He suspects the Dark Army and thinks Elliot is the one leading them to FSociety. Darlene takes off to talk to her brother and Mobley tells Trenton, “I don’t trust her, or her crazy ass brother…They just committed the crime of the century and they’re trying to cover their tracks. Right now, we’re the tracks.” What he's not thinking about are the very real tracks they've been leaving, which brings us to FBI agent Dominique. When we first see her in this episode, she s living every New Yorker’s life: watching Billion Dollar Listing New York while reading the New York Times on her mobile phone and consulting with Alexa. She’s shotgunning coffee while doing her hair and makeup to head into the office, with The Highwaymen’s “Highwaymen” playing in the background, a song written about the four reincarnated souls of a man. Since we hear the song from the start, getting all of the Willie verse and a little of the Kristofferson verse, we’re must know that we are only at the beginning of her journey. She's called to the scene of Romero's death because he has a list of FBI agents that includes her name and something about it keeps bothering her. She goes back to visit his mother and, while getting the old lady a glass of water from a box of packed dishes, discovers that some of the paper used for wrapping are printouts of code. As she (illegally) pokes further, she discovers a flyer for The End of the World party from the end of last season. She visits the address and discovers the F Society sign out front. Now, let's flashback ourselves, to the opening flashback, when Mobley asks Romero, "What happened to the 'u' and the 'n'?" Romero replies, "Oh that, that’s a story for another time." The story is far from over, friends.