Mr. Robot’s new season has more of the same—epic hacks, creativity amid chaos

Warning: This post contains minor spoilers for episode one of Mr. Robot's third season, which started last night.

The trailer for Mr. Robot S3.

Mr. Robotseems to know we all need CliffsNotes at this point. Wait, what's Stage Two again? How does this character know that character?Its Season 3 premiere largely throws audiences a bone with some table-setting, reintroducing us to the main players as they pick up the pieces in the aftermath of various Season 2 twists. Remember, the FBI snagged Darlene, Elliot got shot, Angela agreed to help the Dark Army, power outages ran rampant in NYC, et al. So resist the urge to pause and head to Wikipedia, and Sam Esmail and co. will reward you with ample in-episode reminders.

Based on last night's first hour ("eps3.0_power-saver-mode.h"), everything still seems to be revolving around the ominous Stage Two on a macro-plot level. As we learned late last season, Elliot (well, technically Mr. Robot) devised an attack with Tyrell and the Dark Army where E-Corp's paper records will disappear via massive explosion, thus completing his anarchistic goals to destroy the digital shackles maintaining wealth inequality. It turns out the femtocell Elliot programmed for Darlene (that Angela sneaked into an FBI temporary camp) didn't aspire to capture evidence of the bureau's snooping, instead it was meant for hacking E-Corp. And now Mr. Robot/Elliot/Tyrell/the Dark Army believe they can fill a skyscraper with hydrogen and cause the transformers inside to light the fuse-Elliot's Batman-like no-kill ethos be damned. (As an aside: that was tech advisor Ryan Kazanciyan's favorite S2 hack, and it took a week-plus to sort out, as he told us on our on-hiatus Decrypted podcast. Kazanciyan has already outlined his work from S3 premiere if interested.)

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