Mr. Robot: 7 Times Elliot Acted as Mr. Robot Without Knowing It and Why They Were Important
Throughout the first season of Mr. Robot, the question of whether or not Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) was real rung through our heads until it was confirmed with a 10-ton hammer in the brutally revealing penultimate episode.
Mr. Robot was one of Elliot's (Rami Malek) delusions, a mental re-creation of his deceased father who represented Elliot's wants and desires to make a change in the world.
Many viewers picked up on this right away having already been introduced to the idea by movies like Fight Club and looking for clues about how Mr. Robot interacted with other characters, how he just happened to show up at convenient times and how he held secrets about his past.
Creator Sam Esmail admitted he never intended the truth about Mr. Robot to be a big secret and thought it was somewhat obvious.
Mr. Robot had to reach out to Elliot to let him into his secret world, and he did so by hiding an encrypted file in Evil Corp's infected servers during the pilot episode's massive DDOS attack.
In the closing moments of the second episode, Elliot and Mr. Robot were just chilling after a long dad talk when Mr. Robot shoved Elliot off the boardwalk railing to the ground below as payback for not trusting him.
The fantastic caper to hack the thermostats at Steel Mountain -- the fortified data-storage facility that held important backups for Evil Corp and other companies fsociety was targeting -- in "Exploits" became a two-man operation when Elliot went in on the inside and Mr. Robot served as his guide from a van in the parking lot.
Except now we know that there was no second man, and Elliot was having a conversation with his worser half like one of those weirdos walking down the street with a Bluetooth headset.
Remember when he tore Bill the tour guide a new one by crushing his self-worth and demanding someone higher up give him access to the lower levels?
Just before the grand reveal that Mr. Robot was a figment of Elliot'