"Krista never quite figured it out, did she? She never realized she wasn't talking to the real Elliot. She didn't realize she always was talking to you."
Not!Krista, speaking to the Mastermind
Elliot hides the alternate Elliot's body in a storage container, intent on taking the alternate Elliot's place and marrying Angela. A police officer, Dominique, attempts to arrest Elliot after she discovers the alternate Elliot's body. Elliot escapes to Coney Island, where he discovers that there was no wedding. Mr. Robot explains to Elliot that the world they are in is not the parallel world Whiterose spoke of, but rather an illusion created by Elliot during a morphine withdrawal, with the intention of keeping "the real Elliot" trapped. Bewildered and confused, Elliot wakes up in Krista's office. Krista (who is a manifestation of Elliot's mind at the moment) explains that the Elliot since the beginning of the series is not the real Elliot, but a persona called "The Mastermind" that the real Elliot (who suffers from dissociative identity disorder) created to deal with his rage and anger at the world. However, this persona decided to take over and trapped the real Elliot in the Utopian world, getting rid of Darlene, who is the real Elliot's strongest connection to reality, and Krista explains that the Mastermind must give control back to the real Elliot, but he refuses as the world collapses. The Mastermind wakes up in the hospital, where Darlene reveals that Whiterose is dead and her machine is destroyed, and that she knew that the Mastermind had taken over. Accepting his identity, the Mastermind returns to Elliot's mind with the rest of his other personas. The real Elliot wakes up in the hospital, and is greeted by Darlene, reciting the episode's title.
Tropes
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: When addressing Mastermind!Elliot as themselves does not work, the family (Mr. Robot, his wife, and Child!Elliot) take the form of Krista Gordon, his therapist, to break the truth to him.
- Back for the Finale: Grace Gummer, Portia Doubleday, and Martin Wallström cameo briefly as Dom, Angela and Tyrell (respectively) in Elliot's time loop mind prison. Gloria Reuben reprises her role as Krista Gordon in the mind prison, while Carly Chaikin appears at the very end of the episode as Darlene in the real world.
- Battle in the Center of the Mind: An episode-long one, as Mr. Robot and Not!Krista ultimately reveal — the entirety of this episode and the previous take place entirely within the mind prison that the Mastermind had put Elliot in prior to the series' beginning.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Not!Krista looks directly into the camera and mentions that she can see the audience just like Mastermind!Elliot and Mr. Robot have. She also lampshades the fact that the audience really wants to know the truth as well.
- Mastermind!Elliot tells the audience directly that letting Real!Elliot take control of his own mind again requires us to let go control of Elliot as well.
- Call-Back: Plenty of moments throughout the series pop up in flashes during The Reveal, hinting at the Foreshadowing that had been laid out ever since the fourth episode.
- Converse with the Unconscious: We hear Darlene's disembodied voice asking Elliot to Please Wake Up at one point. Turns out she's doing this while maintaining an Unbroken Vigil in the real world, where Elliot is unconscious in the hospital.
- Eye Recall: Inverted for the second-to-last shot in which the real Elliot regains control of his mind and the memories of what Mastermind!Elliot did over the (at least) 9 months that he was dormant flood back into him.
- Fair Cop: Alternate Dom is an NYPD officer and appears in a rather form-fitting uniform.
- Ironic Echo: Elliot calls back to his Season 1 monologue, calling himself "a guy trying to play God without permission" in reference to him supplanting the real Elliot Alderson.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: Mastermind!Elliot trapped Real!Elliot in a perfect time loop in which he is the CEO of AllSafe, he wins the F Corp contract bid, his father Edward is still alive and running the Mr. Robot store, and he is set to marry Angela the next day. Mastermind!Elliot did this to keep Real!Elliot pacified while he used his prolific coding skills to dismantle the cruel, capitalist nature of society that surrounds him.
- P.O.V. Cam: Used for the final shot, in which Darlene welcomes Real!Elliot back to the real world. As the audience of the show itself is one of Elliot's alters, we're meant to interpret this POV shot as us watching Elliot's life alongside Mastermind!Elliot and Mr. Robot in the theatre room in his mind.
- The Reveal:
- Everything that occurred in the series, from the formation of fsociety through the 5/9 hack & reversal to the Dark Army wealth redistribution, really did happen. It's just that the perspective we've been perceiving everything through was skewed the whole time: the Elliot we've been following for the length of the show is actually its own split personality called The Mastermind, with the real Elliot buried in a "Groundhog Day" Loop of a Lotus-Eater Machine, as mentioned above. Whiterose's machine did not in fact activate; the machine was successfully deactivated by Elliot through the eXit program, but it ended up exploding as part of its shutdown; this explosion knocked Mastermind!Elliot loose from his control of Elliot's mind and dropped him into Real!Elliot's Lotus-Eater Machine.
- It's confirmed that Mr. Robot aka Edward was the first personality created when Elliot was a child, to replace the real Edward that abused him and tried to shoehorn himself into Elliot's life as a good dad right before he died of cancer. Elliot then conjured his mother and himself as a child, punisher and concealer of abuse, respectively. Elliot most likely created his mother's personality the way he did just to shift the hate he felt for his dad's abuse to her, as he still wanted to idolize his father. A month before the series proper, The Mastermind personality, created by Elliot to deal with his anger at the world, took over his mind and pushed Real!Elliot into the mind prison and removed the concept of Darlene from it so that Real!Elliot couldn't see the exit. One can assume that the drawings of fsociety found on Real!Elliot's computer and his belief that they were fictional characters he made up were his mind's way of coping with the discrepancies in his memories left behind when Mastermind!Elliot took over.
- The reveal of The Mastermind also adds additional context to Mr. Robot: while he's continuously said that he will always protect Elliot, we weren't fully aware that he was referring to Real!Elliot.
- It's finally revealed why Elliot can see the show's audience and talk to them: the audience itself is one of Elliot's alters, described by Not!Krysta as "the voyeurs who think they aren’t a part of this despite being here for all of it" (which also explains why we can't respond to him.) When Mastermind!Elliot relinquishes control of Elliot's mind, he tells the audience that they have to relinquish control as well.
- Darlene reveals that she knew Real!Elliot had been replaced by Mastermind!Elliot for the length of the series, but went along with it anyway because it meant she got to spend time with the brother that she loved so much.
- Shout-Out: The streaming images that come out of the projector light, followed by the extreme close-up on Real!Elliot's eye, is a direct homage to the "stargate" sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- The surreal sequence on Coney Island with a bunch of bystanders in a crowd all wearing Mr. Robot's face seems to be a pretty clear homage to a similar scene in Being John Malkovich.
- The Unreveal:
- We never find out whether Whiterose's machine would have worked or what it was even supposed to do. A news report mentions Whiterose's death but does not mention the machine. It also conveniently exploded during the deactivation process, probably because it was never designed to be shut down properly.note
- Though it's safe to assume that Tyrell died earlier in the season, no one brings him up.
- Tomato in the Mirror: This is what happens to The mastermind when he realized he is not the real Elliot.
- Wham Line: "*sigh* I know."
