Wham Episode / Mr. Robot

Mr. Robot is a show that regularly shakes up its status quo, often in ways that leave viewers questioning the whole thing.

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Due to the nature of a Wham Episode, all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Season 1

• "wh1ter0se" (1x08): It turns out that Elliot is Darlene's brother... and Mr. Robot is their father. For reasons not yet known at that point, Elliot has forgotten huge chunks of his life, and the people around him have either been playing along or genuinely unaware that something was wrong. The episode cements Elliot as an Unreliable Narrator on a whole new level and paves the way for the rest of the series.
• "m1rr0r1ng" (1x09): It's revealed that Mr. Robot is actually dead and Darlene wasn't playing along with him, having had no idea that Elliot was hallucinating their father as a Split Personality. As if that wasn't enough, it ends with Tyrell being brought into Fsociety.
• "zer0-daY" (1x10): Elliot awakens three days later to find Angela is an E-Corp executive, their plan has gone off, Tyrell is missing and implied to have been killed by Mr. Robot, and the world is in complete financial meltdown. The Stinger then reveals that White Rose is on the Big Bad Ensemble and has connections in both the Dark Army and E Corp.

Season 2

• "logic-b0mb" (2x05): Elliot learns that Ray's business is actually an illegal trafficking website selling weapons, drugs, and slaves; when Ray learns that he found out, he sends men to his house who beat him nearly to death. Meanwhile, Dom takes her team to China as part of the 5/9 investigation, and it's revealed that Whiterose is the Chinese Minister of Security shortly before Dark Army gunmen storm the base, killing almost everyone and leaving Dom pinned.
• "h4ndshake" (2x07): Leon turns out to have been a Dark Army operative sent to watch Elliot's back, because Elliot has been in prison for most of the season. Unlike the last few twists, Elliot knew this — he just decided to keep it from us out of bitterness.
• "pyth0n-pt1" (2x11): Dom is told that the FBI will not investigate further into the China lead despite the shootings due to their recent bailout loan, which Price in turn uses to strengthen Ecoin and start to reverse 5/9's effects. Angela is abducted by the Dark Army and given a bizarre psych evaluation by a little girl who resembles her, and then meets White Rose. Elliot uses a lucid dreaming technique to watch Mr. Robot decode a secret message and follows its path to a waiting cab — which is then boarded by none other than Tyrell.
• "pyth0n-pt2" (2x12) is a doozy: Darlene learns from Dom that the FBI has been keeping tabs on Fsociety and has them all figured out, while Joanna finds out that her stalker is a grieving Scott Knowles and decides to frame him for his wife's murder after tricking him into beating her. Meanwhile, Tyrell takes Elliot to the location of Stage 2's planning, where Elliot learns that the plan is to use a firmware hack to blow up the building where E Corp stores its paper backup records so it will be impossible to reverse the hack's damage. When he tries to stop the plan, assuming Tyrell is another one of his hallucinations, Tyrell shoots him. Angela is revealed to be working for the Dark Army officially when Tyrell calls her in a panic. And in The Stinger, a disguised Trenton and Mobley discuss their next move in hiding, only to be approached by Leon.

Season 3

• "runtime-error" (3x05) is shot in just a few takes made to look like one, making for one of the most visually arresting things the show has ever done, and as for the content: Stage 2's schedule is accelerated so it will happen hours from Elliot's awakening, the E Corp building is taken over by rioters aggravated by the Dark Army, and Elliot finds out that both Darlene and Angela betrayed him after the latter fulfills her part of the hack.
• "kill-pr0cess.par2" (3x06): As Elliot rushes to stop Stage 2 despite Mr. Robot fighting to control his body, Darlene relays his information about Tyrell's location to Dom, who conducts a raid on it; Tyrell barely manages to escape while the Dark Army set up the scene to make him look like an unwitting hostage when he's arrested later. Darlene confronts Angela about her involvement with the Dark Army, only for both to be distracted by something on the news. Elliot manages to successfully stop the attack after convincing Mr. Robot that White Rose played them both, but just as he's celebrating his major victories, he sees news reports revealing that Stage 2 actually went off in the 71 other buildings he sent the paper records to, resulting in thousands of deaths and the worst terror attack in American history. Wham.
• "frederick+tanya" (3x07): In his grief and panic, Elliot forces Mr. Robot to confess to Krista, finally making her believe he's involved in the attacks. After storming away, Mr. Robot goes to confront Irving, only to be shown that his entire revolution was All for Nothing because the wealthy will always benefit in the end. Whiterose reveals that Price was a Puppet King to E Corp installed by Whiterose herself after his predecessor failed to do her bidding, and that Stage 2 happened and Price will be cast out in turn due to his failure to stop Angela's lawsuit in the first season. Meanwhile, Leon is revealed as having kept Trenton and Mobley hostage the whole time, and drives them to the desert to make them bury their dead ally before returning them to their Dark Army-filled house. There, they are taken to the garage and forced to shoot themselves, so that Tyrell can finger them as the masterminds behind the attacks and the SWAT team can find them amidst an Orgy of Evidence about their motives and plans.
• Though otherwise a Breather Episode, "dont-delete-me.ko" contains one big shakeup to the status quo: martial law has been instituted across the country in the wake of the cyber-bombings, pushing the series' world into a full-on Dystopia.
• "shutdown-r" (3x10): Mr. Robot reveals that Santiago is The Mole just before Elliot is captured by Irving, while Santiago kidnaps both Darlene and Dom to try and contain his mess. All of them are driven out to a barn, along with Leon and several Dark Army soldiers, where they assume they'll be killed; Irving instead kills Santiago in a Blofeld Ploy and brutally intimidates Dom into replacing him as The Mole. When Grant arrives shortly after, he tries to have Elliot and Darlene executed, but Elliot's pleas to White Rose's camera cause her to have Leon gun down all of the soldiers in the barn, and she gives Grant a tearful farewell monologue that causes him to shoot himself. Elliot helps the Congo plan get back on schedule in return, and then discovers that Romero wasn't the one who planted the seeds to reverse the hack. In an ensuing conversation with Darlene on the subway, he learns that he didn't actually get pushed out of the window by their father, he instead jumped in the middle of a psychotic break. When he then decides to talk to Mr. Robot on the same bench where they had their first meeting, he learns that Robot was the one who encrypted the data because there has always been part of Elliot in him — Elliot returns home and finds the data embedded in one of the images that revealed Elliot's father, and Elliot is finally able to undo Five/Nine. Then, in The Stinger, Darlene walks to Elliot's apartment while telling a prostitute about her hope that the hack is reversed... when a couple of gangsters pull up outside of Elliot's building, led by Vera, who introduces himself as a brave traveler.
  • And all of this is without mentioning Angela learning that Price is her father.

Season 4

• "unauthorized" (4x01): Within the first ten minutes, Angela is killed by the Dark Army after refusing to drop her vendetta; in the two months following her death, pictures of her corpse are sent to Elliot as a warning, who is also planning to be killed by Whiterose. It ends when Elliot follows a lead, but is captured, injected with a lethal drug and revived by none other than Price.
• “Payment Required” (4x02): The final reveal that there is a third personality, one separate from Elliot and Mr Robot, changes the show completely.
• "Not Found" (4x04): After a Dark Army van stalking Elliot disappears, he and Tyrell spend the episode walking through a forest trying to find it. When they eventually stumble upon it, the driver inside fires a few gunshots at the pair and fatally wounds Tyrell, who solemnly accepts his fate, walks off and sees something with a bright blue light as he dies.
• "Proxy Authentication Required" (4x07): During their impromptu therapy session, Krista asks Elliot about the incident from his childhood, which he remembers as a psychotic break where he hid in a closet, swung a bat wildly and ended up jumping out of a window. As it goes on, Elliot begins to remember the day, eventually coming to the realization that Mr. Robot is not the friend Elliot has idolized for his entire life and that he's always been there, manipulating his memories and lying. In reality, his 'psychotic break' was a reaction to his father sexually abusing him. It's enough to completely shatter Elliot, who was already broken enough in this season to have no reaction to Angela's death or Olivia's attempted suicide. To cap the episode off, Krista manages to break free and kill Vera by stabbing him in the back, finally ending the psychotic drug lord once and for all.
• "Conflict" (4x09): Mr. Robot, Darlene and Elliot successfully execute their hack in taking down White Rose and the Deus Group by taking all of their money and revealing their existence to the public. In retaliation, White Rose shoots Price to death before retreating to her estate where the FBI breaks in and presumably engages in a shootout with her Dark Army guards while she's applying makeup.
• "eXit" (4x11): Elliot shuts down Whiterose's machine once and for all and is then taken to meet Whiterose. After a conversation in which the two argue over their world views, Whiterose kills herself and the power plant goes nuclear, presumedly killing Elliot. The rest of the episode is spent in what appears to be an alternate universe, where Elliot is open & upbeat, has a loving relationship with his still-alive father and Whiterose is a beloved charity figure (among other changes). The whole situation somehow gets more confusing when Elliot returns to his apartment only to meet the other Elliot who supposedly died earlier.
• "Hello, Elliot"(4x13): As it turns out, the Elliot we've been following for the past 4 seasons was another alternate personality, created to deal with the anger and rage the real Elliot had towards the world. Mastermind!Elliot then trapped his real self in a utopia and removed Darlene (his only connection to reality) to maintain control. We are also revealed to be another of his personalities who can only watch as the series unfolds. As Mastermind!Elliot awakes in the real world having survived the power plant explosion, he's visited by Darlene, who reveals that she knew that this personality had supplanted her brother's the whole time. After this, Mastermind!Elliot decides to finally let go so his real self can take control again, after which he sits with his other personalities (including us) inside a theater to watch the real Elliot live out the rest of his life.