Series / Mr. Robot

"Sometimes I dream of saving the world. Saving everyone from the invisible hand; one that brands us with an employee badge. The one that forces us to work for them. The one that controls us every day without us knowing it."

"What I'm about to tell you is top secret, a conspiracy bigger than all of us. There's a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. I'm talking about the guys no one knows about, the guys that are invisible. The top one percent of the top one percent, the guys that play God without permission... and now I think they're following me."

— Elliot Alderson

Hello, friend.

Mr. Robot is a USA Network original drama-thriller series created by Sam Esmail, starring Rami Malek and Christian Slater. Premiering on June 24, 2015, it ran for four seasons and concluded with a two-hour finale on December 22, 2019.

The series follows Elliot Alderson, a computer programmer who leads a double life as a hacker carrying out digital vigilantism. After discovering the existence of a secretive hacker group known as fsociety, Elliot gets recruited by their mysterious leader, Mr. Robot, and joins their digital war against E Corp, a MegaCorp with whom Elliot has a personal grudge. He soon learns, however, that the economic revolution he's trying to spearhead may be larger than he ever imagined, and that other forces could be pulling the strings.

The show is a Pastiche of transgressive, postmodern works such as Fight Club, The Matrix, Twin Peaks, and American Psycho. The presentation of the show is likened to the eccentric styles of David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, and Alfred Hitchcock, for its use of Genre-Busting direction, psychoanalytic motifs, dark visuals, and a distinctive cinematographic method known as "quadrant framing", creating a paranoid and detached perspective of the show's world. Mr. Robot also notably averts Hollywood Hacking by creating accurate, realistic depictions of hacking and technology.

The show has been spun off into a mobile game Mr. Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n.apk developed by Night School Studio and published by Telltale Games as well as a novel, Mr. Robot: Red Wheelbarrow (eps1.91_redwheelbarr0w.txt), written by Sam Esmail and Courtney Looney. A comic book prequel written by Sam Esmail was announced, but has since languished in Development Hell for unknown reasons.

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We at fsociety have only sudo chopped the spoilers for the final season (4.0). If you want to experience the revolution for yourself, it is advised that you alt+f4 immediately!

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Open file "mrrobot_tropes.txt":

Tropes A to G

• 10-Minute Retirement: Elliot's "exile" in season two, which was intended to pacify Mr. Robot.
• Abandoned Area:
  • fsociety use a derelict Video Arcade as their primary base of operations, at least until they are forced to jump ship following the 5/9 hack and subsequent FBI crackdown.
  • Stage two is engineered within a vacant warehouse where Tyrell is also shacking up, away from public scrutiny.
  • The offices of Allsafe Cybersecurity are barren following the 5/9 hack, with very little left of the original firm we remember. Elliot and Mr. Robot set up shop in these offices in season four, transforming it into another base for their campaign against Whiterose.
  • The Washington Township Plant in "eXit", which is also Unexpectedly Abandoned. At least until Whiterose's Dark Army commandos show up, at which point it is made clear that they slaughtered everyone.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Leon's knife is capable of slicing and dicing neo-Nazis like hot butter without much force. However, he could just be that good.
• Abhorrent Admirer: Tyrell is this to Elliot (read: Mr. Robot). Neither Elliot or Mr. Robot are reciprocal.
• Abusive Parents: For Elliot and Darlene, life in the Alderson home was not pleasant. Following Edward's ignominious death from leukemia, Magda became physically, emotionally, and verbally abusive to both of them. However, the most damaging memory for Elliot was when Edward pushed him out of his bedroom window after he told the rest of the family about Edward's leukemia diagnosis. This incident ended up irreparably damaging their relationship. However, in a gut-wrenching twist, it is ultimately revealed that not only did Edward not push Elliot out of the window as he once believed, Edward was also sexually abusive towards him. This abuse in question was the true impetus for Mr. Robot's creation, with that day being the first time that he manifested to protect Elliot and by extension Darlene from Edward.
• Action Survivor: Elliot, over the course of one year, falls off of a pier, falls out of a window, is held hostage by gangsters, is beaten to a pulp, is shot at point-blank range, is held hostage twice more by a terrorist organization, is kidnapped and intentionally overdosed with heroin, is hit by a car and falls down an embankment while being chased by the police, is held hostage thrice more by gangsters, and survives a meltdown at a nuclear power plant! The amount of life-threatening situations he endures throughout the series is beyond remarkable, and that isn't even including what his closest friends and colleagues go through along with him.
• Act of True Love: The Mastermind realizes that Elliot doesn't truly have everything in his "endless loop" once Darlene confesses that she misses him. It is for this reason that the Mastermind finally gives up his control, and Elliot is allowed to wake up.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • "eps2.6_succ3ss0r.p12" focuses on the remnants of fsociety carrying out a leak of the FBI's top-secret surveillance program Operation Berenstain, being discovered by Susan Jacobs, and scrambling to cover their tracks as the feds begin to close in.
  • "eps3.2_legacy.so" revolves almost entirely around what Tyrell was doing behind the scenes in season two.
• Affably Evil:
  • E-Corp CEO Phillip Price is generally so confident in his power that he's usually charming and polite to everyone in spite of being a ludicrously greedy and egocentric man with little to no regard for other people. In fact, it's something of a reveal just how cunning he really is later on, since he's so innocuous in his first few fleeting appearances that it's easy to assume he's a bit ignorant of E Corp's wickedness.
  • Ray is the only person besides Leon who makes a conscious attempt to befriend Elliot in prison. Just when Elliot begins to see him as a mentor of sorts with the knowledge needed to find a place in a chaotic world, Ray is revealed to be the curator of a digital black market that specializes in guns, drugs, and human trafficking. Even Elliot is disappointed by this.
  • Leon, for all of his trite, philosophical ruminations on television shows and insistence on helping Elliot in his mental recovery, is still a ruthlessly efficient killer working with the Dark Army as one of their sleeper agents. Even after holding Darlene hostage with the intent of killing her, Leon still approaches Elliot like an old friend and wishes him well.
  • Irving is very gregarious and upbeat, yet also a brutal enforcer who describes murder as "fun."
  • Janice seems to be an ordinary, friendly person until she reveals that she's a merciless hatchetwoman for the Dark Army. Even then, she's chipper and communicates instructions for murder in upbeat, emoji-filled texts.
• After-Action Healing Drama: Elliot is put through one after getting shot in the stomach by Tyrell and faints due to the blood loss. Irving immediately calls in backdoor surgeons in order to heal his stomach trauma.
• Agonizing Stomach Wound: Elliot and Tyrell both end up on the receiving end of this. While Elliot survives, Tyrell does not.
• Airport Novel: In his final scene, Irving is revealed to have written a trashy thriller novel called Beach Blanket, and he's doing a signing at an airport, so it's both literally an airport novel and beach novel.
• Alas, Poor Villain:
  • Santiago, of all people, reveals that he is working with the Dark Army to ensure the safety of his aging mother. He later tries to avert Dominique's execution by Irving, pleading that she can still walk away. As it turns out, Santiago was the real target of this execution, in which he is butchered with an axe. Damn.
  • Grant's death is surprisingly tragic. Having let his obsession with Whiterose and jealousy towards Elliot interfere with his better judgment, Whiterose orders him to commit suicide for the cause, saying that he is not worthy to see her project through to the end. Grant then shakily tells Elliot to look after Whiterose before blowing his brains out.
  • Tyrell Wellick dies in the middle of season 4 after some Dark Army soldiers try to kill Elliot and he takes a bullet for him. He accepts his death and takes a final walk before falling down and dying.
• All Love Is Unrequited:
  • Tyrell's love (read: obsession) with Elliot (read: Mr. Robot). Mr. Robot does not share the sentiment, and once Tyrell understands that Mr. Robot is the one he actually idolizes, it throws a wrench into their "relationship."
  • Elliot has been secretly pining after Angela since childhood, but the two are doomed to never be together: on top of already being taken by Ollie, Angela goes on to manipulate Elliot's mental condition for the Dark Army's gain (which nearly destroys their friendship), and ends up being executed for trying to seek retribution against Whiterose.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Elliot believes this to be the case in regards to Darlene, Angela, and his therapist, Krista. The show proves him to be at least two-thirds right.
• Alternate History: The show exclusively takes place in 2015, in which the Five/Nine hack destroys the world's economic stability and sends it careening into an unprecedented global depression. During this time, the world seems five minutes away from becoming the typical Cyberpunk dystopia with disorder in the streets, political tensions between the United States, Iran, and China, and corporations capitalizing on the chaos. This all changes dramatically when Elliot's reversal of the Five/Nine hack ends up "resetting" the show more or less with everyone seemingly forgetting that the hack even happened and things proceeding as normal. Once fsociety expose the Deus Group, redistribute their money back to the people, and destroy Whiterose's project, the historical impact is not lost on the world by the year's end.
• Alpha Bitch: Joanna and later, Angela. Joanna pretty much fills in this role, based on the callousness towards people lower than her and how she manipulates her husband and others to stay on top. Angela herself becomes this after joining E Corp and later the Dark Army, where she proceeds to gaslight and bully Elliot just because he doesn't have the same ideology as she and believes he is trying to usurp her mantle.
• Alternate Identity Amnesia: Because Elliot suffers from dissociative identity disorder, he is totally unaware of the times in which Mr. Robot becomes the dominant alter.
  • The series finale deconstructs this with the reveal that the Elliot we have been following is just another alter that took over and never let go, forgetting that he was just another alter in the process.
• Alternate Universe:
  • Whiterose waxes rhapsodic about a universe where 5/9 never happened.
  • The FBI investigation into 5/9 is called "Operation Berenstain," possibly a nod to the most popular of the Mandela effect's examples.
  • A worker at the Washington Township plant discusses the possibility of parallel universes during a tour of the plant's facility.
  • Angela's mother alludes to this, speaking of "another world out there" where she and Angela can still be together.
  • "eXit", "whoami", and "Hello Elliot" mostly take place in what appears to be the parallel universe that Whiterose sought after, with everything in Elliot's life being perfect. It's an illusion.
• Always Someone Better:
  • The reason Tyrell was passed up for the CTO position. As we learn much later, E Corp seems to engage in this on a regular basis when it comes to its employees.
  • The Dark Army also utilizes this via incredibly cold calculus — i.e. murder, to guarantee precision, loyalty, and endurance. If all else fails, compromised members promptly commit suicide to preserve the organization's "sanctity."
• Alone with the Psycho:
  • In season one, between Elliot and Tyrell at the Fun Society arcade. The same occurs in season two, but in the Confictura Industries warehouse.
  • Dominique and Irving after he murders Santiago.
  • Darlene and Vera in the season three finale, although he is flanked by several of his cronies.
• Ambiguously Bi:
  • Despite being in heterosexual relationships, Angela and Shayla share a rather searing kiss.
  • In a "blink and you'll miss it" moment, you can see that Elliot has written "Obama is really hot" in his journal as he flips through the pages. Strangely, this line is not found in the Red Wheelbarrow book.
  • Tyrell has sex with another man with the sole intention of hacking his phone, and later professes his love to Elliot.
  • Dom's physical sexual relationships are exclusively with women. However, in episode "404 Not Found," she engages in cybersex chatrooms with men.
  • Darlene seems to be predominantly heterosexual, as demonstrated by her relationship with her boyfriend, Cisco. Sometime after Cisco's death, Darlene seduces Dom in an attempt to obtain her FBI access card, and at one point says "I said I wasn’t a lesbian, end quote. I never said I wasn’t into girls." It's unclear if Darlene is at all sexually attracted to Dom or if she did it just for the access, although in "406 Not Acceptable," Darlene admits her feelings toward Dom were genuine.
• Ambiguous Situation: The last we see of Tyrell is him wandering around in the woods after being shot and finds something that is not shown to the audience but that is emitting strange noises and blue light. He reacts with astonishment and joy at whatever it is, but what happens to him and what he found is never made clear.
• An Aesop: Several.
  • The idealization of revolution does more harm than good. fsociety set out to erase the world's debt to E Corp under the mistaken belief that the people will be spurred on by their newfound economic liberty to take down the so-called "top one percent of the top one percent." What really happens is that the people are pressed even further into the dirt by a catastrophic global depression while E Corp is allowed to capitalize on the situation. Pretty much everything that occurs following season one is a long and painful reality check, with season three focusing almost exclusively on just how misguided the endeavor was.
  • It is infeasible to weaponize a system against the people that designed it in the first place. The Five/Nine hack results in E Corp being bailed out by China thanks to several backroom deals between Phillip Price and Zhi Zhang, both of whom belong to the Deus Group: the ones who have been carefully guiding the situation in their favor thanks to the Dark Army's involvement.
  • Changing the world starts with you. When you learn to not accept its oppressive trends and actually be an individual in spite of it, the world will be forced to mold around your existence regardless, and it is up to you to decide whether that change is good or not.
  • While people make mistakes that often cause great suffering, those mistakes do not have to define us nor dictate our potential to be loving and caring.
• Another Story for Another Time: When Elliot inquires about just who Mr. Robot is, he responds, "that'll come later." Oh, does it ever.
• Anyone Can Die: Once season two begins, all bets are off, and bodies start dropping at an alarming rate compared to season one. Season four is particularly ruthless in that by the end, Elliot, Darlene, and Dominique are the only ones left from the original main cast.
• Apocalypse How: 5/9 almost instantly cripples the world thanks to the economic depression it unleashes across the world, and we see in grisly detail just how much the common people are suffering because of it. By season three, New York City is more or less a Wretched Hive straight out of a cyberpunk story, with rampant homelessness, vandalism, and street vendors trying to make ends meet.
• Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: While in a bathroom, Tyrell intimidates Scott's wife until she non-verbally consents to be violated (by spreading her legs), at which point he politely declines her offer and leaves the bathroom. She appears disappointed at this. When he forces himself on her on the roof of an office building, she does not resist and appears satisfied until he starts strangling her.
• Arranged Marriage: In Whiterose's Start of Darkness flashbacks, her partner Chen was Driven to Suicide after being forced, by his father, to marry someone else.
• Artistic License – Geography: In the pilot, Mr. Robot gets off the subway with Elliot at the Church Avenue station, saying that they need to wait for the Q train to go to Brooklyn. There are three different Church Avenue stations in New York City, and all of them are already in Brooklyn. The one that Mr. Robot and Elliot visit is underground and only serves the F and G lines.
• Ass Shove: Leon shoves a knife up the ass of a neo-Nazi after interrupting his Attempted Rape of Elliot.
• Attempted Rape: Elliot becomes a target of this by the neo-Nazis while in prison. Leon arrives to rescue him just in time.
• Ate His Gun:
  • Following the 5/9 hack, E Corp executive James Plouffe does this while being interviewed on national television.
  • Agents of the Dark Army notably use this as a morbid form of liability insurance to ensure that their field operations and plans can proceed without outside scrutiny.
  • Freddy, the lawyer Elliot blackmails at the start of Season 4, shoots himself in the head when he learns the Dark Army is after him.
• Axe-Crazy:
  • Given that he is the malicious alternate personality of Elliot, Mr. Robot is remarkably violent and chaotic, often reveling in the disorder that he causes whether it is out of personal spite, a so-called act of retribution against society, or simplybecause he is just bored. He grows out of this by season three once the consequences of his anarchist behavior and self-serving guile begin to manifest beyond his control, and he realizes the importance of having Elliot as his counterbalance.
  • Tyrell also counts, from paying a homeless man to let him use him as a punching bag, to murdering the wife of his business rival during spontaneous sex. While he is no doubt prone to violence, season three suggests that he has been manipulated by literally everyone around him, and has been made a tool of whomever is pulling his strings based on his violent, obsessive personality.
• Babies Make Everything Better: Subverted. Following the birth of his and Joanna's child, Tyrell has to go on the run from the authorities for his involvement in 5/9 and the murder of Sharon Knowles. Joanna is murdered by a scorned lover right in front of the child. In season 4, Tyrell is acquitted for the aforementioned crimes, but still doesn't get his child back. The Dark Army murders him soon after.
• Back for the Finale: Angela and Tyrell return in Elliot's Lotus-Eater Machine loop after both being killed early in Season 4. Price and Dom also return, though they've only been absent for a couple of episodes at that point.
• Bad Boss: Fernando Vera tends to kill his own henchmen, for serious reasons like conspiring against him, or Evil Is Petty reasons like not coming to the same conclusions as him while psychoanalyzing a photo.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: At the start of Season 2, Gideon plans to report Elliot's suspicious activity while working at Allsafe to the FBI. Gideon is gunned down by an unhinged conspiracy theorist before he can do so.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: The entire show revolves around Elliot's struggle against Mr. Robot, who desires to be the one in control so he can cause chaos however he pleases without Elliot's moral code interfering with his insurrectionist agenda. Season two in particular primarily focuses on their dynamic as two personalities fighting endlessly and accomplishing nothing in the process. While they do put their differences aside to stay ahead of the authorities, this cease-fire doesn't last, and season three brings them back to square one as bitter enemies who fight over the execution of stage two. "shutdown-r" ultimately seals this conflict for good once Elliot and Mr. Robot finally understand the futility and pettiness of their war after getting a front row seat to the real danger of the Dark Army's power and subsequent wrath.
• Batman Gambit: It's a show about hacking, after all. Expect plenty of social engineering, profiling, and a little bit of dumb luck along the way. Elliot himself even admits to this being how he operates so efficiently as a vigilante, as he looks for the singular qualities (read: weaknesses) in people.
• Batter Up!:
  • Darlene smacks Cisco with a baseball bat after learning he's been in contact with the Dark Army about her actions.
  • Vera recounts a time he brutalized one of his childhood bullies with an aluminum baseball bat.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: Attempted and failed by Elliot when he tries to hide from Evil Corp security on their way to escort him out of the building by taking a seat in a conference room and acting like he's supposed to be in the meeting. He's not as inconspicuous as he'd hoped and is asked to leave immediately.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Tragically Inverted, when Elliot was one of the few people who was so nice and kind to Angela when others looked down on her. Her joining E Corp, the company he hated, did not stop him from being kind to her. Unfortunately, Angela repaid him by going behind his back and using his mental disorder to facilitate Stage 2 and abandon him altogether. It was clear that his kindness to her meant nothing to her anymore.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Practically the gold standard of Tyrell's intimidation tactics, which he uses to get in close with Sharon Knowles and other women over the years, mostly on Joanna's command. Not even men are excluded from this.
• Beard of Sorrow: Tyrell grew one while in hiding, as seen in "eps3.2legacy.so".
• Been There, Shaped History: Whiterose is revealed to have orchestrated The Gulf War via the Deus Group, and Price claims they even invented the internet and social media as a means of manipulating the world. A few brief shots show Whiterose meeting with Vladimir Putin and Queen Elizabeth II, executed à la Forrest Gump.
• Benevolent Boss: Gideon Goddard is a mentor to his employees, and Elliot even describes him as a good, honest man.
• Berserk Button: Contemporary society seems to be the big one for both Elliot and Mr. Robot, who see it as revolting.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: The Dark Army believe in this trope wholeheartedly, and promote self-sacrifice as the ultimate gift to their cause.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Phillip Price, Whiterose, and Mr. Robot share the stage as primary antagonists. However, Season 3 reveals that Whiterose is the true Big Bad of the series, as she is shown to have control over Price, and Mr. Robot ultimately sees the error of his ways. In season 4, Whiterose returns as the main antagonist once again. Phillip Price and Mr. Robot are barely antagonistic anymore and are helping Elliot with bringing down Whiterose.
• The Big Board: The FBI have a whiteboard detailing suspects and persons of interest related to Five/Nine.
• Big Good: Elliot fully blossoms into this by the end of season three. Subverted in season four, in which he veers hard into Villain Protagonist territory, and is ultimately revealed to be just another alter that locked the real Elliot away in a dream world.
• Bilingual Dialogue: The Wellicks, when they're alone. He speaks Swedish and she speaks Danish. The two languages have some degree of mutual intelligibility. Oddly, the captions state that she's also speaking Swedish, though a newspaper headline confirms that she's Danish.
• Bilingual Bonus: In "runtime-error.r00" the first line of dialogue is a man speaking in German to Elliot, saying "Aller Anfang ist schwer" which translates to "All beginnings are hard/heavy." Could also be a Shout-Out to Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," but is originally a quote by Friedrich Heinrich William Korte. The complete text is "All beginnings are hard. To begin is to begin. To begin is easy, to persist, art."
• Bisexual Love Triangle: Tyrell found himself in one when he was in love with both his sociopathic, deadly, and manipulative Femme Fatale wife Joanna and the sweet, selfless, and kind Humble Hero Elliot. He ends up with neither when Joanna is killed by her fake lover and he himself ended up sacrificing his life for Elliot, but not before the latter showed kindness towards him in his last moments.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Mastermind is ultimately successful in making the world a better place for Elliot at least in some small way, but Elliot is nonetheless forced to reckon with the consequences of the Mastermind's destructive campaign and all of the tragedy that it has caused for both himself and others. This is softened by Darlene's presence however, and it is implied that she and Elliot will finally be able to reconnect and heal together. However, given Sam Esmail's assertion that most of, if not all of his shows and movies take place in a shared universe, along with its many direct callbacks and references to various events taken place in the show, Leave the World Behind implies that any peace and healing that Elliot gains probably isn't long for this world, considering that the movie ends with America in the midst of being taken over by a foreign power and in the midst of a horrific civil war, leaving an already heart-wrenching ending a lot more bitter than sweet.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: fsociety is at best a grey hat organization that will use anything at their disposal to achieve their goals, but are ultimately pitted against the greater, corporate evil that is E Corp and the black-hatted Dark Army, who are little more than mercenaries for hire and are responsible for most of the direct carnage that occurs throughout the show.
• Black Comedy: The sitcom-inspired nightmare in "m4ster-sl4ve".
• Bland-Name Product:
  • E Corp is an obvious riff on that other corrupt MegaCorp, Enron. The E Corp logo, a box-shaped capital E at a 45 degree angle, is based on Enron's logo.
  • Steel Mountain is an obvious stand-in for Iron Mountain, an actual data vault company.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Minister Zhang (aka Whiterose) shows off his "sister's" dresses and fawns over them. He's in his own bedroom and doesn't have a sister.
  • Irving's reassurances that the Stage 2 target building will be evacuated before they blow it up.
• Blood-Splattered Innocents:
  • Several members of the production crew including Angela are splattered with blood when the E Corp executive James Plouffe eats his gun on live television.
  • Dominique speeding out of Lupe's following Cisco's assassination by the Dark Army.
  • Joanna's infant son in "undo".
  • Dominique once again, when Irving murders Santiago.
• Blofeld Ploy: Irving appears to be preparing to dispose of Dom with an axe when Santiago kidnaps her from FBI headquarters, only to instead swing it into Santiago, who has outlived his usefulness.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Angela (Blonde), Darlene (Brunette), and Dom (Redhead).
• Blood from the Mouth: Vera spits up blood after being stabbed In the Back by Krista.
• Blunt "Yes": Elliot to Olivia when he confesses he had heroin a couple days ago, but didn't really want to.

  Olivia: What, did someone hold you down and force you to do it?

  Elliot: (beat) Yeah.

• Bolivian Army Cliffhanger:
  • Season 2: Tyrell shoots Elliot in the stomach to stop him from ruining Stage 2. Elliot's fate was left unknown until the Season 3 premiere.
  • Season 3: Just as Darlene is about to enter Elliot's apartment, Vera and his minions enter as well. The gleeful smile on his face suggests that he will make the ongoing chaos worse.
• Bondage Is Bad: The Wellicks, a villainous couple, indulge in bondage despite her late-term pregnancy and Tyrell's hesitance due to possible risks to the baby.
• Bonding over Missing Parents: Angela and Elliot first met after Angela's mother and Elliot's father died in a toxic leak at the company they both worked at.
• Book Ends: The show opens with Elliot's famous greeting, "Hello, friend," in a skyscraper overlooking New York City. The show ends with a similar view in the same skyscraper, as the Mastermind personality relinquishes control to the real Elliot. As he wakes up, Elliot is greeted by Darlene: "Hello, Elliot."
  • The titles of the pilot episode and final episode ("esp1.0_hellofriend.mov" and "Hello, Elliot") also mirror this to drive the point home.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Elliot and Darlene lift a security guard's fingerprint off a phone case, then 3D-print a scannable finger as part of a heist.
• Bottle Episode: "407 Proxy Authentication Required" takes place entirely in Krista's apartment.
• Bound and Gagged: People who get captured by Vera, like Krista and Elliot.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • Elliot's narration isn't just an explanation of what's going on in the show. It's actually a one-sided conversation with the audience that has Elliot regularly asking the viewers for support and confirmation.
  • At the end of the pilot, Elliot turns to look straight at the camera as his inner monologue directly asks the audience if they're seeing what he's seeing.
  • Near the end of "wh1ter0se" after learning that Darlene is his sister and he has forgotten much of his life, Elliot turns to the camera and asks, "Were you in on this? Were you?"
  • In the final episode, Elliot has a conversation with a mental construct of Krista, and she addresses the audience as well.
• Breather Episode: Each season has one, usually following intense, consecutive episodes.
  • Season 1's "v1ew-s0urce", in which we see Fsociety having drifted apart following the Dark Army's abandonment, and a largely absent Elliot, still dealing with Shayla's death.
  • Season 2's "succ3ss0r", despite being viscerally intense, is more of a breather episode for your mind, considering the jaw-dropping plot twist in the previous episode.
  • Season 3's "dont-delete-me", which follows three back-to-back episodes of non-stop panic and turmoil, is entirely focused on Elliot as he tries to find the will to live in the wake of the Dark Army's terrorist attacks.
  • Season 4's "410 Gone" is a Day in the Limelight episode for Dom following the successful hack of the Deus Group, which gradually reveals that the Dark Army is no longer after her. It comes after three extremely tense back-to-back episodes, which included The Reveal of Mr. Robot's origins, The Caper to hack the Deus Group that has been the focus of the season, and the deaths of Vera, Janice and Price.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer:
  • Elliot is quite...odd, even when he isn't dealing with a malicious alternate personality. However, what he is capable of at a terminal can only be described as legendary. He even maintained a successful employment at AllSafe until the hack.
  • Vera is abnormally spiritual for a ruthless drug dealer and murderer. Even after escaping from a prison, he finds enough time to talk to Elliot about etymology and the cosmos.
  • Dominique obviously suffers from some form of social anxiety disorder. Her behavior is also rather dry and direct, making some of her interactions awkward by nature. As an FBI agent, she is insanely driven and perceptive, being the first person to campaign that the Dark Army is connected to 5/9.
  • Whiterose engages in cross-dressing to maintain her identity as Minister Zhang, is obsessed with time, and speaks in a droll, unaffected tone but with a healthy lexicon. She also happens to be unfathomably powerful, being the leader of an organized criminal syndicate.
• Bunker Woman: Gender Flipped. In "m4ster-s1ave", after brutally beating Elliot up, Ray's thugs later lock him up in the basement.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday:
  • Terry Colby admits under pressure that he does remember the meeting that caused the death of Angela's mother, but his recollections focus mostly on the weather and the food. The meeting was dull and businesslike. It was just another normal day.
  • Leon doesn't recall participating in holding Dom hostage and killing four people in the Season 3 finale until Dom jogs his memory.
• Bury Your Gays: Gideon is shot in the throat at the end of "unm4sk". Tyrell dies at the end of "404 Not Found", and Whiterose kills herself during "eXit". To rub salt in the wound, two of those three killed are villains.
• Cain and Abel: More like Cain and Cain. We discover in "br4ve-trave1er" that Vera's brother Isaac wants Vera dead so he can take over their criminal empire. Elliot tries to help Isaac do this, only for Vera to have Isaac killed as soon as they were reunited, suspecting the betrayal.
• Call-Back:
  • In Elliot's Fantasy Sequence where he imagines a future worth fighting for in Season 2, he apologizes to Bill Harper, the innocent Steel Mountain employee to whom he gave a scathing "The Reason You Suck" Speech in Season 1.
  • Elliot has a Take That! directed at Josh Groban in the series premiere, feeling justified in disliking Ollie because it's one of his Facebook likes. In the Season 3 premiere, Elliot asks if Angela has an outfit he can borrow after recovering from a gunshot wound and is seen leaving her apartment in a sweater that reads "Property Of Josh Groban".
  • Dmitri Shostakovich's Waltz No. 2 plays on the radio after Mr. Robot forces Elliot into a cab to prevent him from interfering with Stage 2, which was also part of the soundtrack as Elliot witnessed the fallout of 5/9 in the Season 1 finale.
  • In the Season 3 finale, Elliot makes an Ironic Echo of his "top one percent of the top one percent" speech from the pilot during his reconciliation with Mr. Robot, and Vera refers to himself as a "brave traveler" (the title of the episode he last appeared in) when he shows back up in The Stinger.
  • In season 4, there's a soundtrack callback to Elliot's drug overdose hallucination in season 1, during which Perfume Genius's "Queen" plays. The song plays this time when Elliot confronts Angela, and she reveals that the "alternate universe" is another construction of Elliot's mind.
• Camera Abuse:
  • In "br4ve-trave1er", blood splattering the lens when DJ shoots Isaac.
  • In "wh1ter0se", Elliot becomes enraged at his "imaginary friend" (the viewer) and shoves the camera away from him.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: For most of Season 4 Whiterose is waiting around to kill Elliot, but can't, because if Elliot dies, the hack he set up to ship Whiterose's machine to the Congo dies with him.
• Camera Tricks: Any of the simulated long takes and the show's quadrant framing.
• Capitalism Is Bad: Elliot believes that the wealthiest top 1% of the top 1% have enslaved the world, and fsociety's goal is to bring them down. While Elliot and his allies repeatedly question whether the means they use to pursue this end are justified or effective, the essential point that companies like E Corp are completely amoral and willing to do anything in the name of profit is never seriously challenged.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Subverted. The evil Megacorp of the series is called Evil Corp, but only because we see everything through Elliot's perspective. The company's real name is E Corp, but he's explicitly conditioned himself to see and hear his nickname for them instead.
• Cassandra Truth: Justified. Dominique correctly believes that the Dark Army are the real string-pullers of 5/9, but has no evidence. After surviving two attempted hits by them, Dominique still cannot make a case to her supervisor, Santiago. This is because Santiago is a Dark Army mole, and is deliberately blocking her attempts to finger the Dark Army as anything more than boogeymen.
• Celebrity Paradox: Joey Bada$$ plays Leon, Elliott's friend of sorts introduced in Season 2. When Darlene tries to scan Dom's FBI badge at a bar in Season 3, a Joey Bada$$ song is playing.
• Central Theme: So far, there is one that can be deduced for each season:
  • Season one: Exposing truth, and ousting those who are pulling the strings. The general plot revolves around hacking the economy and revealing it for the "sham" that it is, while also detailing that Elliot himself is a personal victim of manipulation by Mr. Robot. This ends up becoming the plot arc for the last four episodes.
  • Season two: Control is an illusion. For the entirety of the season, Elliot tries to take back control from Mr. Robot but ultimately fails, Darlene is unable to keep fsociety together as a group when the chips are officially down, and Angela learns that all of her hard work in attacking E Corp from within was for nothing.
  • Season three: Accepting the truth, and ridding oneself of denial. Elliot's plot stems from his realization that 5/9 was a mistake, Darlene has to come to terms with her brother's mental illness, Mr. Robot has to literally be lectured about how his "revolution" was already decided for him, and Angela has to be explicitly told how much of a pawn she has become to Whiterose as well as how ridiculous her agenda is in the long-run.
• Chandler's Law: A by-the-book example occurs in "logic-b0mb." As Dominique stops to get something to eat in the hotel lobby, armed Dark Army thugs suddenly storm the place, killing everyone except her.
• Chiaroscuro: As a result of the rolling blackouts, the night scenes in season three are presented in this manner.
• The Chosen Wannabe: While it is clear that Elliot is The Chosen One, most of the characters like Darlene, Angela and Dom desired to be this. But they fail in various ways as they are constantly overpowered by the Dark Army. Darlene steps down as the leader and is subsequently picked on and tortured by them, Angela got killed because of her desire to be chosen one and Dom gets weakened and broken into becoming their mole.
• Cleanup Crew: One of Irving's many responsibilities in the Dark Army.
• Cliffhanger:
  • Season 1: Elliot, following Mr. Robot's initiation of the E Corp hack and Tyrell disppearing without a trace, goes to answer his apartment door after someone knocks. Elliot opens the doo—roll credits.
  • Season 2: Tyrell shoots Elliot, Darlene is in FBI custody, Angela has seemingly joined the Dark Army, and Leon confronts Trenton and Mobley, who are revealed to be alive and with new identities.
  • Season 3: Dominique is forced to replace Santiago as the Dark Army's mole in the FBI, and Fernando Vera returns to visit Elliot at his apartment, running into Darlene on the way.
• Clue, Evidence, and a Smoking Gun: A rare non-verbal example in Season 2. Dominique begins to suspect that Romero was involved with the fsociety hack: He was killed shortly after the hack took place, he had information concerning local FBI agents, his computer was suspiciously well-protected...and his papers lead her to a building with a very conspicuous sign reading "F Society". Her response when she sees the building is to say "You've got to be fucking kidding me."
• Comical Coffee Cup: Irving has a collection of cheesy portable mugs to make himself more relatable, including a mug that says "#1 Dad" which he uses to relate to Tyrell as a father, despite not actually having kids himself.
• Conspiracy Theorist: 5/9 spawns a number of them, with a particularly unhinged one murdering Gideon because he believes he's a "crisis actor".
• Consummate Liar: Elliot has a habit of saying what people want to hear when he feels uncomfortable with the questions.
• Continuity Lockout: Miss one episode (or even half of one) and you will be totally lost.
• Convenient Misfire: As revealed in a Flashback early in Season 3, Mr. Robot attempted to shoot Tyrell in the arcade before 5/9, but the gun misfired. Tyrell took this as further evidence for his A God Am I delusions.
• Cooperation Gambit: This is apparently E Corp's response to Angela filing a lawsuit against them. It turns out that Price ordered this to dissuade her from pursuing more evidence on the Washington Township toxic waste scandal. Why? Not only because Whiterose told him to, but because Angela is Price's daughter, and he was secretly priming her to uproot Whiterose's plant. This ultimately fails in the end as Whiterose takes matters into her own hands.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Par for the course with E Corp. Many of its senior board members are quite formidable.
  • Tyrell Wellick is an amoral ladder-climber who figures out Elliot and strangles a woman with his bare hands.
  • Terry Colby covered up the incident that killed Elliot's father and Angela's mother. He plays some mind games with Angela and eventually recruits her to start working for E Corp.
  • The new CTO sees Tyrell coming from a mile away, gives him a dressing down, and threatens to whip out his penis in a gesture of dominance.
  • The CEO of E Corp, Phillip Price, is as canny, ruthless and intelligent as you'd expect the CEO of an evil MegaCorp to be.
• The Corrupter: E Corp CEO Phillip Price is portrayed as this toward Angela, slowly drawing her into seeing the life of a Corrupt Corporate Executive is true power and all but relishing it.
• Cosmic Plaything: Elliot, as no matter what the situation is, he really can't catch a break.
• The Cracker: The Dark Army is a mercenary hacker organization who will take any job for the right price.
• Creator Cameo: Sam Esmail appears in the pilot during the first subway scene and in "init_5" behind a set of bars while Elliot is being processed in prison. He also appears as one of Phillip Price's goons in season 4, where he gives Elliot a lethal injection of heroin.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Whiterose speaks effeminately but dramatically lowers her tone when she is in her Zhang persona.
• Darker and Edgier: The show proved to be the nail in USA's "Blue Skies" programming coffin. As it progresses, we are treated to murder, drug addiction, rape, terrorism, child abuse, and mental illness.
• Damned by Faint Praise: When Joanna's new boyfriend is talking about how he'll take her to Madrid, Joanna comments that there's no way he can or will ever be able to afford to take her there, but it's okay because that kind of material stuff doesn't make her happy.
• A Death in the Limelight: "404 Not Found" is this for Tyrell.
• Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit: After having Trenton and Mobley executed, not only does the Dark Army frame them for the various attacks by them but also associate fsociety with Iran.
• Deconstruction: Of the romanticism that underscores revolution and anarchy. Elliot enters the show with a grandiose and immature vision of toppling the plutocratic elite and redistributing their wealth to the common people with fsociety. However, when he actually manages to cripple E Corp, the effect is to drive the world into an economic depression, which deeply hurts the common people, makes the city into a near-dystopia, and the elites not only survive, but use the crisis to gain greater power. Irving makes this explicit in season 4, stating that nothing is going to stop the powerful from staying in power, and that Elliot's revolution only happened in the first place because someone with power allowed it to happen.
• Decoy Antagonist: At first, Mr. Robot, Phillip Price, and Tyrell Wellick were shown to be the antagonists, but as of Season 4, Tyrell is killed as he was about to help Elliot take down the Dark Army, Price is broken after losing Angela, and Mr. Robot finally supports Elliot and tries to nurse him back from his trauma. It is clear that Whiterose, The Dark Army and Vera are the Big Bad Ensemble of Season 4.
• Defective Detective: What we see of Dominique's private life is pretty sad. She turned her back on her fiancée to focus on work, seems to have no friends, reads about overcoming social awkwardness and masturbates to cybersex.
• Denser and Wackier: Season two proved to be a major exercise in esotericism, to the point where not even the numerous Mind Screwdrivers in season three have provided legitimate context to all of its mind-screwiness. Naturally, rows of Epileptic Trees are still being planted. That isn't even getting into just how complicated the underworld of the setting is implied to be, and the obfuscation of certain characters' motives and alignments.
• Depraved Bisexual: Tyrell seduces people of both genders to further his nefarious goals.
• Destination Defenestration: Elliot's dad Edward threw him out a window when he was a kid, because he told his mom about Edward's leukemia. In a flashback to the event, Edward seems genuinely distraught about it and claims it was an accident. After Elliot finds out that Mr. Robot is actually his long lost father, the two pay a visit their old house. While there, Elliot decides to get payback for the aforementioned incident by throwing his father out of the same window he himself was pushed out of. However, it turns out he actually threw himself out by doing so.
  • It ultimately turns out that Edward never actually threw him out of the window to begin with: Elliot jumped out by himself during a hallucination. The trauma of the event caused him to misremember the incident as his father having thrown him out.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: While sitting in on his church group, Elliot goes on a massive tirade against God and organised religion. It's only after he finishes speaking and sees everyone's horrified faces that he realises he said it aloud.
  Elliot: Please tell me I didn't say all that out loud... Shit, I did.
  • He does it again in "runtime-err0r". When his coworker has been yet again bragging about his weekend's sexual conquests, Elliot rants about how puerile, repetitive, and boring he finds it, before realising he didn't tell it to the viewer as he thought he was doing.
• Did They or Didn't They?: In his last appearance in Season 3, Irving intimidates Grant (who has shared romantic moments with Whiterose) by reminding Grant that he used to have his position as Whiterose's assistant and implying that Whiterose expected sexual favors as part of the job. It's unclear if Irving ever had relations with Whiterose or if this is simply an intimidation tactic.
• Disappeared Dad:
  • Elliot's father died of leukemia during his childhood. Darlene knew him much less intimately than Elliot.
  • Angela's real father, Price, walked out on her mother.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Tyrell Wellick is presented as the Big Bad of the series in the first season as a cunning, ambitious and thoroughly unhinged Corrupt Corporate Executive who seems like the worst member of E Corp's nest of vipers. However, he's eventually smacked down by Elliot's efforts as well as infighting among E Corp's own executives. He eventually makes a Heel–Face Turn and helps fsociety against E Corp and the Dark Army.
• Disposing of a Body:
  • As they consider wood chippers, acid barrels, and the Dark Army's expertise, Darlene and Cisco end up deciding to have Susan Jacobs' body cremated. They do this by stuffing her body in a suitcase and taking it with them to the dog shelter, and that includes riding the subway!
  • After Elliot and Mr. Robot find Tyrell's corpse in the woods, they incinerate it along with the Dark Army reconnaissance van they were pursuing.
  • Mastermind!Elliot boxes up Host!Elliot's body in order to steal his identity. This proves to be unsuccessful.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Elliot already doesn't like Terry Colby for being the CTO of E Corp, the company he blames for causing his father's death. However, when Colby is rude to Angela during a meeting, it's the final straw that makes Elliot frame Colby for a conspiracy, which he knows will destroy Colby's life.
  • Mr. Robot pushes Elliot off a pier because Elliot did not want to get innocent people killed in Mr. Robot's latest plan and tried to offer an alternative. After The Reveal, it's Elliot's guilt for ratting his father out making him do so.
  • Elliot learns that Shayla is abused by her dealer, Fernando Vera, so he tips off the police and Vera ends up in prison. Vera retaliates by having Shayla kidnapped, threatening to kill her if Elliot doesn't break him out of prison and not letting Elliot know until later that Shayla was already dead.
  • Tyrell angrily fires three of his E Corp subordinates when they unwittingly insult him (while discussing workers who sleep with members of the same sex for promotions) in a casual conversation they were having. When they ask him what they did wrong, he blithely responds: "Nothing."
  • In perhaps the most egregious example, the episode "dont-delete-me" reveals Whiterose blew up 71 buildings and killed over 4000 people because he pushed back on helping her annex the Congo before acquiesing.
    Price: You had to destroy so much. Why?
    Whiterose: Because, Phillip, I had to ask you twice.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Joanna writhing and moaning after her beating by Scott Knowles is a little... suggestive.
  • Elliot's first time at a terminal since the 5/9 hack plays like an addict getting a fix after a period of abstinence.
  • Tyrell gussying up to go meet Elliot is eerily similar to a teenage girl getting ready for prom.
  • Angela's betrayal and treatment of Elliot throughout Season 3 is almost like Domestic Abuse.
  • The entire storyline of Vera's obsession towards Elliot feels more like a classic Stalker with a Crush and Yandere. He becomes obsessed with making Elliot his partner, is absolutely certain that the universe intends for them to be together, and ultimately kidnaps, threatens, and psychologically tortures him with the explicit intent of traumatizing Elliot so badly that he'll bond to Vera out of desperation. It shares some similarity with You (2018), Berlin Syndrome and Enough 2002.
• The Dog Bites Back: Whiterose and Dark Army prefer to keep people in line by constantly beating them with a heavy stick and providing no carrots. After taking everything from Price, Tyrell, and Dominique and keeping them alive as muppets, all of these characters are willing to look past their differences with Alderson siblings and provide the latter with crucial assistance in their quest to bring Zheng down.
• Doom Troops: Among the usual hatchetmen that the Dark Army employ, Whiterose appears to have her own team of armor-clad soldiers toting assault weaponry. We get to see their handiwork in "eXit" when they massacre an entire SWAT team.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Angela exploits Elliot's mental illness by working with Mr. Robot and keeping Elliot in the dark. Worse still, she never seems to face any direct consequence of this, let alone seem to regret it. At least until she's murdered by the Dark Army.
• Driven to Madness:
  • Mr. Robot attempts to do this with Elliot while in prison by actively tormenting him and mocking his confused exasperation at his blackouts. His efforts prove unsuccessful in the end once Elliot accepts that he is still very much himself regardless of Mr. Robot's influence.
  • Scott Knowles gaslights Joanna by sending her miscellaneous gifts and calling her, trying to sell the impression that Tyrell is still alive and maintaining contact with her. Joanna ultimately realizes the truth and confronts him later on.
  • Angela is made into what can only be described as a Manchurian candidate by Whiterose, who instills within her the (false) belief that her mother can be resurrected by the Washington Township project. Price has to snap Angela out of this fantasy by admitting his parentage of her and revealing that the project is a giant lie.
  • Angela herself tried to do this with Elliot after being brainwashed by Whiterose. She exploited his mental illness and was working with Mr. Robot behind his back for Stage 2. And when he doesn't remember anything about it, she gaslights him so that he doesn't remember any part of it. When he finds out, she tries to weasel herself out of it and taunts Elliot for his DID.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • E Corp executive James Plouffe shoots himself on live television following the Five/Nine hack.
  • The Dark Army believes in this as a twisted form of martyrdom that serves a higher power. It also helps that it is a pretty effective tactic to avoid loose ends.
  • Subverted by Elliot in "dont-delete-me", who seems intent on overdosing on morphine to stop Mr. Robot but is interrupted by Trenton's brother, Mohammed. The two bond and become friends, which gives Elliot hope again.
  • Whiterose's partner, Chen, committed suicide to avoid going through with an Arranged Marriage.
• Driving a Desk: Done during the sitcom sequence in "m4ster-sl4ve," and attention is even drawn to it when Tyrell Wellick crashes into the green screen at the back of the set while trying to escape.
• Driving Question: The show is a cavalcade of driving questions, but the one question that is the most persistent and looms over them all is what Whiterose's machine actually is. Apropos, it is also the question that has planted the most Epileptic Trees. In spite of this, the machine's true function remains unknown even after the series finale.
• Drowning My Sorrows:
  • Gideon shares a morning cocktail with Elliot following the Allsafe hack, lamenting that E Corp will drop them as a client because of it.
    • He later spends his last moments drinking at a dive bar after the Five/Nine hack tears his life and what remains of his career asunder.
  • Tobias, the drunk Santa that Darlene encounters on Christmas Eve, has apparently turned to the bottle to cope with the heartbreak he experiences volunteering at a children's hospital.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Elliot & Darlene leave the Deus Group doxxed and penniless; with Elliot personally destroying Whiterose's machine and ending her reign of power. In the aftermath of all the pain, trauma, and loss he endured since fsociety began a year ago, Mastermind!Elliot learns his true identity: another of Elliot's personalities. Accepting his fight is finished, he gives control back to the real Elliot to awaken in a newly liberated world.
• The Ending Changes Everything:
  • Once it is revealed that Mr. Robot is a split personality of Elliot, quite literally everything that happens in Season 1 is given new light.
  • The reveal in the series finale that the Elliot we've been watching isn't the real Elliot - he's just another alter, like Mr. Robot, created to protect Elliot's psyche - and the real Elliot has been trapped in a fantasy world since the start of the series serves to recontextualize the entire show.
• Enemy Mine: By Season 3, Whiterose eventually inspires this from characters normally enemies to each other, including Dom, Darlene, Elliot, Mr. Robot, Tyrell, and Price.
• Entitled to Have You: Vera has this attitude towards both Shayla and Elliot for different reasons.
• Dysfunction Junction: It is no exaggeration that literally every major player in the show has serious issues. Rounding up established characters that haven't been through life-altering trauma and/or carry unstable personalities is an easier task.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • The series opens with Elliot confronting a child pornographer with evidence he obtained by hacking him, and refuses an attempted bribe by the man, saying that he doesn't care about money. Elliot then leaves as cops storm in, acting on the anonymous tip he made just shortly beforehand.
  • Tyrell shows his true colors when he pays a bum to let him beat him up.
  • E Corp CEO Phillip Price first shows the audience that he's not some ignorant goober when he fires Tyrell. He takes great relish in it and talks about how he'd been looking forward to seeing how he'd react.
  • When we first meet Leon, he fearlessly squares off with another man at the basketball court, establishing that, Seinfeld obsession not withstanding, he's not someone to be messed with. This foreshadows him carving through Elliot's attackers and revealing that he's been protecting Elliot for the Dark Army this whole time.
  • Irving is introduced complaining about the loyalty card policy at a restaurant, before casually taking a life-or-death call mid-conversation with little concern, establishing him as a Bunny-Ears Lawyer-type Fixer with a flippant attitude toward his violent line of work.
  • Janice appears Affably Evil just like her predecesor Irving while talking to Dom outside her mother's house, before threatening to kill Dom's mother and throwing in a Country Matters as she does it, demonstrating that she is going to be a More Despicable Minion than the other Dark Army agents we've seen.
• Exact Words: Promotional material for later episodes of Season 3 do this.
  • The description for "fredrick+tanya" says that "Angela hits the rewind button." She sits in front of a television and obsessively watches the aftermath of stage two, rewinding the broadcast.
  • As for "dont-delete-me", it is stated that "Elliot tries to get ghosted; it is the day of all days." Elliot tries to get ghosted in that he engages in suicidal ideation, while "the day of all days" is that the same day, he watches his favorite film, Back to the Future Part II, in a theater.
• Expy: Fsociety is based on Anonymous. They are both "hacktivist" organizations with a smiling mask as their logo, prone to making video threats and masked appearances.
• Everything Is Online: Apparently. Elliot can use his unusual hacking skills even to open prison gates.
  • Notably averted on other occasions, such as early in the series when it's a major plot point that E Corp's backup data is safely tucked away in Steel Mountain, forcing F Society to rely on good old fashioned social engineering to deal with it.
• Evil Corp: It's the actual name of the company (in Elliot's head at least).
• Evil Is Petty: Irving, a high-ranking member of the Dark Army, is shown to be petty and penny-pinching. In an early scene, he argues exhaustively in an attempt to get a free milkshake from his fast food loyalty card. In his final scene, he signs a copy of his book and gives it to Dom, only to insist that the cashier charge her for it.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The events of all four season take place within one year. This is taken to extremes in the fourth season, which takes place over the span of one week (specifically over the Christmas season).
  • Taken even further during the Christmas Day 2015 itself, covering events from "404 Not Found" to "410 Gone", meaning seven episodes took place in a single day.
• Face/Heel Double-Turn: Season 3 is one for both Darlene and Angela. While Darlene realizes her mistakes and decides to be more around Elliot and take care of him, Angela grows more selfish and starts to emotionally neglect Elliot, even go as far as to making him miserable.
• Fade to White: "404 Not Found" concludes with a fade to white as Tyrell succumbs to his Agonizing Stomach Wound alone in the woods.
• Fake Guest Star:
  • B.D. Wong as Whiterose before Promotion to Opening Titles.
  • Gloria Reuben as Krista is in more Season 4 episodes than some credited regulars.
• Fake-Out Fade-Out: The Season 4 premiere ends with Elliot seemingly being killed and the end credits begin, before cutting back to the same scene a moment later where Price and his goons resuscitate Elliot.
• False Flag Operation:
  • The Dark Army organizes the E Corp riot as a smoke screen for Angela to access the code-signing machine on the twenty-third floor.
  • They later implicate fsociety as Iranian terrorists who carried out the cyber-bombings through extensive stage-setting and the use of a funded patsy.
• Fantasy Sequence: Elliot fantasizes about a future worth fighting for in Season 2, which culminates in many of the disparate supporting characters all having dinner together in the street while watching Evil Corp's headquarters collapse.
• The Farmer and the Viper: What Elliot and Angela's relationship turns into at the end. Angela suffers from insecurity due to the fact she doesn't feel respected in any of her workplaces, even in All Safe despite the fact Gideon is nice to both her and Elliot and feels stepped on after Terry banishes her from an E Corp meeting and Ollie cheats on her. The only person who respects and values her and loves her for who she is is Elliot himself. He has shown his kindness and caring to her and she was always amazing in everything she did in his eyes and appreciated her talents. When Darlene asked her to help her and fsociety in their femtocell hack against the FBI, Elliot advised her to not join them because he doesn't want to risk her safety and has been nothing but kind to her her whole life. Sadly, due to E Corp's influence and Whiterose's corruption, Angela lets her power and greed get the better off her and repays Elliot's kindness by using and bullying him for Stage 2, mainly due to the fact she was jealous of him being the Chosen One and decided to bring him down to her level and eventually gave up on him for good.
• Fatal Flaw: Each of the main characters have this:
  • Elliot's low self esteem and drug addiction.
  • Mr Robot's need of destroying E Corp and causing chaos.
  • Darlene's hedonism and anger.
  • Angela's need for power and her obsession of getting vengeance on E Corp.
  • Tyrell's god complex.
  • Dominique's determination in getting the bad guys to justice.
• Fauxshadow: Elliot's actions in "406 Not Acceptable" serve as a Red Herring of him going down a dark path with Mr.Robot even wondering if he cracked under pressure or did it reveal our true selves. "407 Proxy Authentication Required" makes it clear that nothing like this happens with Elliot.
• Feud Episode: Most of season 3 is this for Elliot and Angela thanks to Stage 2.
• Fingore:
  • Cisco gets a needle jammed in and broken off under his fingernail after questioning the Dark Army's true intentions with the femtocell.
  • Tyrell breaks his thumb to escape his handcuffs while in police custody, only to get rescued a minute later anyways so it was All for Nothing.
• Final Season Casting: Season 4 introduces Janice as Dom's new Dark Army handler/taxidermist.
• The First Cut Is the Deepest: Due to Angela betraying him and breaking his heart and later being killed by the Dark Army, Elliot is unable to even develop relationship with anyone, even ruining his relationship with Olivia due to his blinded rage towards the Dark Army.
• Five-Philosophy Ensemble
  • The Realist: Elliot
  • The Cynic: Darlene and Mr. Robot
  • The Optimist: Angela
  • The Apathetic: Tyrell
  • The Conflicted: Dominique
• Flaw Exploitation: A tactic utilized by many of the show's characters on an extremely frequent basis.

Elliot: Nothing is actually impenetrable. A place like this says it is, and it's close, but people still built this place. And if you can hack the right person, all of the sudden you have a piece of powerful malware. People always make the best exploits. I've never found it hard to hack most people. If you listen to them, watch them, their vulnerabilities are like a neon sign screwed into their heads.

• Foil: Elliot and Angela. Both have lost their parents as kids due to the toxic leak at Washington Township plant and desired to get justice for their deaths. But as the series progresses, there is so much difference between them. Elliot remains noble in his goals, cares about his loved ones and doesn't lose his kindness and humanity despite the hell he was put through and steps up to improve himself and make amends. Angela, on the other hand, becomes more and more corrupted with power and greed and willingly loses her humanity to advance her goals.
• For Want Of A Nail:
  • Whiterose got her Start of Darkness because she failed to land a job promotion, which had disastrous effects on her personal life. All of this led to the creation of the Dark Army and its global conspiracy.
  • If Elliot hadn't needed the suboxone to avoid getting addicted to the morphine (which he got addicted to anyway), then Shayla would never have had to go to Fernando Vera, who she describes as a "fucking psychopath", as a supplier and therefore never would have ended up caught in the mess that ended with her being Killed Off for Real and Elliot possibly becoming Vera's Replacement Goldfish.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Elliot (phlegmatic-melancholic), Darlene (sanguine-choleric), Mr. Robot and Tyrell (melancholic), Angela (melancholic-choleric) and Dom (choleric).
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • A few can be found when Elliot is hacking, such as Krista's brutally honest dating profile and Gideon's emails about cookies. Some of these are implied to be created by Elliot's subconscious and reflect on his feelings about them.
  • When the camera is following Susan Jacobs around on her jog back home, you can briefly see Darlene watching her.
  • Pausing when the camera skims over Elliot's journal reveals some funny entries, such as him trying out potato latkes for the first time, and an entry stating that "Obama is pretty hot."
  • When Elliot is receiving a beatdown in "h4ndshake", you can briefly see that Mr. Robot is taking the hits for Elliot.
  • Viewers can get a glimpse into Irving's eclectic personal life from a few blink-and-you'll-miss-it moments in "eps3.2_legacy.so", like the various jokes on his collection of cheesy portable mugs or a page from the novel he's working on in which the protagonist is beaten over a misunderstanding.
  • In the episode "401 Unauthorized", Elliot and Mr Robot are discussing Angela's death. One frame briefly flashes a picture the Dark Army sent Elliot, which depicts Angela's corpse with a gunshot wound to the head.
  • Irving finally finishes his novel Beach Towel, and the back cover can been read in "410 Gone". The plot summary involves the protagonist being manipulated by a criminal mastermind but eventually turning the tables on them when they discover their true plan, and involves themes of "political corruption and income inequality" with "a twist ending you won't forget". Does This Remind You of Anything?
• Foreshadowing:
  • Mr. Robot only interacts with other people when Elliot is in the same scene, and he is always front and center when doing so. Elliot on the other hand is hanging out in the background.
  • Darlene somehow knowing where Elliot lives despite him being a ghost in the digital world. Darlene also knows Angela and the two seem to act like BFFs.
  • Elliot's routine at his "mother's house". A bit odd that Elliot would voluntarily sit down to watch basketball games, go out to eat three times a day with the same guy, always chat with visitors at the same table and not somewhere else more convenient, and attend a church group despite being a fervent atheist. Even further, that Elliot would even consider staying with his mother!
  • The dream that Elliot experiences while being pummeled by Ray's cohorts features the line, "I hear prison jumpsuits are in these days" by Mr. Robot himself.
  • Elliot's ideal future ends with E Corp crashing to the ground. By the end of Seaon 2, we are shown that Mr. Robot and the Dark Army are planning to do just that by blowing it to smithereens.
  • While being seduced by Darlene, Dom mentions needing melatonin supplements to get to sleep. The morning after, Darlene tries hacking Dom; she doesn't get very far.
  • Later, Dom wishes that Darlene suffers pain and agony for the rest of her life. Guess who returns to make sure he gives the main characters exactly that in season 4...
  • During Mr. Robot's monologue about the lost in "404 Not Found", he mentions a set of keys left somewhere and forgotten. Come "408 Request Timeout", it's revealed young Elliot hid the key to his room in the museum's storage in 1995 as a measure to fight back against his father's sexual abuse. Around twenty years later, Elliot is led there by his second split personality, his younger self after learning the truth.
  • In the fourth episode, "eps1.3_da3m0ns.mp4", Elliot has a Dream Sequence where he and Angela are both wearing wedding attire. Angela tells him he isn't the real Elliot and he was "only born a month ago". In the Grand Finale, it's revealed that the Elliot we've been following throughout the series is another alternate personality (The Mastermind). The real Elliot has been trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine within his own mind where it is perpetually his and Angela's wedding day. The Mastermind accidentally traveled to this fantasy world in "eps1.3_da3m0ns.mp4" while enduring morphine withdrawals.
• The Friends Who Never Hang: The only character pairings we haven't seen interact with each other so far are Elliot/Dom and Darlene/Tyrell.
• From Bad to Worse: Season 1 is a moody tech-noir drama, but hardly reaches the level of dread in Season 2, with Anyone Can Die in full effect, an even darker aesthetic, and some seriously twisted plot developments that catapult the show into a Lynchian nightmare. Season 3 ups the ante with more action and tragedy, as well as characters having to come to terms with themselves and their actions so far.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: In Season 1, Vera is a small-time drug dealer and contract killer with an operation so transparent Elliot thinks it's a wonder he hasn't been locked up already. When he returns in Season 4, he claims to have completely conquered the drug trade in the Dominican Republic, with politicians on his payroll and his own private island, making plans to take over New York City.
• Fourth Wall Psych: At the end of Mr. Robot's rant in "da3m0ns", he says: "But first, a word from our corporate overlords." The show then cuts to a commercial break. When it returns, the scenes begins with an Evil Corp. commercial.
• Freudian Trio: Darlene is the Id, Elliot is the Ego and Angela is Superego.
• Gainax Ending: The final few episodes become so bizarre, it's almost impossible to figure out what's going on. It starts off with Elliot entering an alternate world where there's another version of him whose better off in life, engaged to Angela, and has a successful career at Allsafe. Eventually, it's revealed that our protagonist is not the real Elliot Alderson, but an alternate personality who took control and never let go, and the Elliot who lives inside this delusional world is the real Elliot. Somehow, things only get more convoluted from there.
• Geek: Played with. While Elliot and his father are both portrayed as being traditional nerds in the sense that they are enthused by computers and technology, they also are shown to have respectively cosplayed as Marty and Doc Brown from the Back to the Future series. However, Elliot makes it clear on several occasions that he is not swept up in popular geek culture like comic books, video games, and so on.
• Gilligan Cut: In "d3bug", Elliot promises his psychiatrist he isn't going to do morphine again. Cut to him railing morphine in the back aisle of a bodega.
• Gender-Inverted: There are most of the tropes in the series that are gender-inverted between the characters.
• Go Back to the Source: Season three's premise is that Elliot must reverse 5/9. While he doesn't necessarily change history, he has to literally return to what set him on his journey with Mr. Robot in the first place: the CD containing records of his entire childhood (and the encryption keys for E Corp's formatted data).
• Going Cold Turkey: The premise of "da3m0ns". Elliot loses his supply of morphine and suboxone, forcing him to detox while on a road trip to hack into Steel Mountain's climate contol system. The results are not pleasant whatsoever.
• Going in Circles: Elliot and Tyrell find themselves lost in the woods in "404 Not Found", and accidentally wind up back at the gas station they left earlier in the night after searching for a shortcut.
• Gone Horribly Right: By the start of Season 3, this is how Elliot feels about Season 1's big hack.
  (Flashback to Season 1): "Fuck society."
  Present Elliot: "Yeah, I fucked society alright."
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: Elliot, Darlene and everyone else tries to rehabilitate Angela out of Whiterose's brainwashing, holding out hope for her redemption. But unfortunately, she is completely beyond repair as she decides to go back to her old tricks and take down Whiterose and her machine alone, which leads to her death.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: The Wellicks are Scandanavian. When they're alone, he speaks Swedish and she speaks Danish. Tyrell also occasionally peppers his speech with random bits of French.
• Greater-Scope Villain: E Corp (called Evil Corp) and its corrupt executives are initially presented as the Big Bad of the series, but fsociety eventually learns that E Corp is a puppet of a much more powerful and malicious organization, the Dark Army, led by Whiterose.

Tropes H to M

• Hacker Cave: The Fun Society arcade, which served as the original base of operations for fsociety. Combined with the arcade being stuck in a legal limbo of sorts after the odd number of tragedies that befell its previous owners and Romero siphoning electricity from the city's power grid, it made for an ideal safehouse. After Five/Nine, fsociety abandoned the arcade and went on to take over Susan Jacob's house as their new HQ.
• Hacker Collective: fsociety is a hacker group with which the protagonist is affiliated. They are highly secretive, ideologically anti-corporate and members only communicate in person to minimize traceability. The Dark Army, by contrast, is an apparently bigger/more professional operation of hackers for hire.
• He-Man Woman Hater: Terry Colby.
• He Knows Too Much: After a BOLO is issued for Cisco, the Dark Army quickly dispatches an assassin to gun him down for this reason.
• Head-Turning Beauty: In "407 Proxy Authentication Required", after he successfully breaks Elliot, Vera gets too distracted by his beauty and fragility to the point he forgets he left Krista untied and with his knife. This gives her the opportunity to kill him.
• Heel–Face Turn: Tyrell Wellick starts out as the Disc-One Final Boss but ends up joining Elliot's resistance of E Corp, though his motivations of hatred and vengeance prevent him from going beyond an Anti-Hero.
• Helpful Hallucination: Elliot's alters, sometimes. Mr. Robot and the child Elliot have both guided Elliot to hidden items crucial to his plans. However, Mr. Robot spends a good portion of the series as an Imaginary Enemy instead.
• Hero of Another Story: Hot Carla, whom Elliot describes as his "personal totem," is never given any focus in season two aside from a couple appearances. However, in the Red Wheelbarrow tie-in book, it turns out that she was the most important figure in Elliot's life while he was in prison, and ultimately steers him in a more rehabilitative direction.
• Hidden Wire: Price wears a wire while trying to talk Angela out of her plans to get revenge on Whiterose. When he is unable to do so, the Dark Army treats her to a Boom, Headshot!
• Hitler Cam:
  • Of sorts. After James Plouffe's suicide, Phillip Price gives a public eulogy while the camera lifts up to show him looking down upon an onlookng crowd from a balcony. The whole scene gives off an eerie Bohemian Grove vibe as Price's voice echoes through the hall.
  • When fsociety takes over Susan Jacobs' house, there is a shot like this of Darlene as she enters.
• Hollywood Hacking: The writers go through great lengths in order to ensure that techies will not roll their eyes at what transpires. Details are glossed over in the hacking scenes, and hacks are shown to occur much faster than they would in real life however. The trope is referenced several times, however:
  • In one scene, two members of Fsociety laugh at the inaccuracies of Hackers.
  • In "br4ve-trave1er" (1x06), it's deconstructed when two gangsters force Elliot to hack a prison in less than a day. While not explicitly referenced, it's made implicitly clear that the characters got their idea of hacking from pop-culture.
• Hollywood Healing: Elliot is shot in the stomach by Tyrell in "Python" and later wakes up in "Power-Saver-Mode" in Angela's apartment after one week with only a bandage on his stomach. He at first had a slight discomfort while walking due to the stomach pain but while going to the defcon with Darlene, he is perfectly fine and also has no scarring from the wound.
  • Same happens with Dom in Season 4, she gets stabbed in the chest by Janice, puncturing her lung. Then the next day, she moves around fine without feeling any breathlessness and chest pains, especially when running to the plane to travel to Budapest.
• Homage: Dominique is frequently seen holding a lollipop in her mouth, an almost certain homage to Kojak.
• Honey Trap:
  • Tyrell's preferred method of manipulation, showing himself being both willing to seduce a man so he can hack his cellphone and his rival's wife with the intention of sabotaging his rival's career.
  • Darlene attempts to hack Dom by getting her badge number via a hidden NFC device; when it doesn't work she seduces her, which still doesn't work as Dom locks her badge in a safe and hears Darlene attempting to break into it.
• Hope Spot: The episode "eps3.5_kill-process.inc" ends with Elliot and Mr. Robot working together again to foil the Dark Army's plans to blow up the Stage 2 target building. However, Elliot learns moments later that the Dark Army destroyed 71 other buildings at the same time, resulting in thousands of casualties.
• Hospital Epilogue: The series ends with Elliot waking up in the hospital after surviving the destruction of Whiterose's machine, where he is reunited with Darlene and the Mastermind personality decides to give control back to the real Elliot.
• Hourglass Plot: One of the main parts about this show is how Elliot's path to self discovery and healing parallels with Angela's path to darkness, loss of humanity and self destruction. Especially since their goals were similar, but their motivation was different: Angela wanted power and revenge for her mother's death while Elliot at first wanted revenge for his father's death, but also wanted what's best for the people he serves. Elliot started off as a lonely broken person who was a morphine addict while Angela was a confident woman who had an amazing social life and a boyfriend (who turned out to be a cheater). But notice how their Character Development become polar opposites of each other, especially in Season 3. Elliot remained humble and kind throughout the series as he realised his mistakes and wanted to make things right and redeem himself. He even tried to protect his loved ones from any danger and wanted to improve his relationship with them. While Angela joined E Corp which caused her to slowly let greed and power get the better of her, which is later made worse when Whiterose brainwashes her and turns her into a cold power hungry sociopath who will hurt anyone who gets in her way of her goals, especially Elliot. The end result of all this is that Elliot retained his humanity, gained profit (which he and Darlene later gave back to the people) and victory from the Deus Group hack and even gained emotional support from Darlene, Mr. Robot, Krista, Leon as well and possibly Dom, despite dealing with the trauma of finding out about his dad's sexual abuse, while Angela lost her sanity, status, friends and eventually her life due to being to committed towards Whiterose's project and her declaration to take it down by herself.
• How We Got Here: "eps3.2_legacy.so" finally reveals what became of Tyrell during all of season two, leading up to the present.
• I Am Your Father:
  • Mr Robot is revealed to be Elliot's father before he's revealed to be a figment of Elliot's imagination who looks like Elliot's father.
  • Phillip Price is Angela's biological father.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: The episode "1.2_d3bug.mkv" focuses on this almost entirely. Elliot takes his relationship with Shayla more seriously and even attends his boss' dinner party. When he's reminded of the Washington Township scandal, his lust for revenge is reignited and he rejoins fsociety by the end of the episode.
• I Let Gwen Stacy Die: Elliot has this reaction to the murders of Shayla and Gideon, both indirectly caused by his well-intentioned hacking efforts.
• I Let You Win: Irving and later Price both let Mr. Robot know that his 5/9 stunt was only allowed to succeed because they wanted it to happen as part of a greater Corporate Conspiracy.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Tyrell and Joanna Wellick both have some eerie, piercing blue eyes. Fitting, given the cold, calculating, almost alien nature shared by the two.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming:
  • Season 1's episodes end with a different video file extension, and the file name portions of the titles make liberal use of Leet Lingo. For example, the pilot is titled "eps1.0_hellofriend.mov".
  • The second season uses encryption file extensions, such as ".tc" for the now defunct Truecrypt, ".p12" for a PKCS12 file usually containing an RSA public key and an X.509 certificate, ".hc" for Truecrypt's successor Veracrypt, and so on, and the file name portions of the titles themselves continue the use of Leet Lingo.
  • Season 3's episode titles drop the Leet Lingo and end in various semi-obscure file extensions ranging from ".h"^note a header file necessary in programs written in C/C++ or ".ko"^note a sort of file serving as an extension for the core functionality of a Linux-family operating system, to ".torrent" or ".gz"^note a type of compressed file common in Unix-family operating systems. The final episode, "shutdown -r", bucks the trend by being a command.
  • The first ten episodes of the fourth season are titled after 4xx error codes used on internet pages.
• If I Can't Have You…: A combination of this and My God, What Have I Done? leads Derek to murder Joanna after she convinces him to give a false testimony and then leaves him to rekindle her marriage with Tyrell early in Season 3.
• The Illuminati: While not the actual Illuminati, the Dark Army are much alike in sheer power and scope. They can manipulate governments at will by directly influencing the political structures and decisions of their respective countries, and even fabricate events to facilitate their dubious goals of societal reform.
• Imaginary Enemy / Imaginary Friend: Mr. Robot.
• Impersonating an Officer: Elliot spoofs a fax saying that he is a police officer to exploit the exigent circumstance procedure and have Tyrell's phone traced.
• In the Back: Vera meets his end when Krista stabs him in the back with his brother's knife.
• In the Hood: Elliot, to the point where you have to wonder if he was born in that thing.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Much of Tyrell's instability stems from this.
• Informed Loner: Possibly due to being an Unreliable Narrator, Elliot is constantly talking about how lonely and alienated he is, yet has maintained a close friendship with Angela since childhood and has casual sex with Shayla in the pilot. It's eventually revealed that his Mr. Robot personality is more personable and interacts with more people than Elliot normally does.
• Insanity Establishment Scene: Elliot has two in the first season: when he has a Surprise Incest moment with Darlene after forgetting who she was, and when he learns that Mr. Robot is a hallucination.
• Insistent Terminology: Elliot refers to E Corp as "Evil Corp", because that is what he visualizes them as. As our ever-so-unreliable narrator, that also means that other people in Elliot's life do the same. By season three, Elliot grows past his petty hatred for them, and begins seeing E Corp as normal.
• Instant Sedation: When Elliot briefly lapses into his normal self while in the Red Wheelbarrow basement, Angela uses a syringe to inject him with a sedative. It does not take more than ten seconds before he collapses.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: In the Season 2 finale Elliot challenges Mr. Robot and Tyrell to stop him from interfering with Stage Two, believing them both to be hallucinations. Then Tyrell shoots him in the gut.
• Insecure Protagonist, Arrogant Antagonist: Elliot deals with his childhood trauma, self loathing and a horde of mental illnesses, namely DID. While Tyrell is more confident and thinks highly about himself.
• Insufferable Genius: Elliot's technical expertise often gets brought up in comparison to how others navigate the digital world, which is almost always inferior.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: After Tyrell successfully seduces Sharon Knowles, they meet on the roof of the E Corp building and begin making out. Halfway through, however, Tyrell loses it and begins to strangle her, resulting in her death. The same sultry love song is playing throughout the whole scene.
• Interrupted Suicide:
  • Elliot plans to overdose on morphine after he fails to stop Stage 2 and Trenton and Mobley are killed, but Trenton's kid brother stumbles across him and Elliot winds up babysitting him for the day, eventually changing his mind.
  • Olivia slits her wrists shortly after Elliot drugs and blackmails her, but Elliot manages to stop the bleeding.
• Intimate Telecommunications: As part of Dom's Defective Detective lifestyle, she is frequently seen masturbating to cybersex with anonymous strangers.
• Irony: Elliot, who was constantly shipped by fans with either Angela or Tyrell, ends the series happily single.
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet: Mr. Robot suspects a trap when investigating John Garcin's apartment.
  Mr. Robot: Is it just me or is this the quietest building in all of Manhattan?
• It Will Never Catch On:
  • In 1994, Mr. Robot says that he's never heard of this movie Pulp Fiction, but he'll reluctantly give it a shot.
  • The villains Price and White Rose watch Trump's media appearances in 2015 and take cracks at his intelligence while pondering how useful he'd be as a political puppet.
• It Works Better with Bullets: Elliot manages to retrieve his gun while being held hostage by Vera, but learns Vera's men took all the bullets out of it the moment they abducted him when he tries to shoot them all.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Elliot comes across as difficult to engage with because of his scathing views regarding modern civilization and his laundry list of personal impediments, but he is a legitimately decent guy trying to keep people happy through his vigilantism.
• Jerkass: Quite a few on this show, and on different sides of the spectrum, whether it be the people that Elliot hacks or the corporate drones in E Corp.
  • Former E Corp CTO Terry Colby is your average, loathsome business executive and a misogynist who thinks of himself as intelligent when it comes to technology, but as Elliot points out, he is an arrogant moron. The worst kind.
  • Lenny Shannon cheats on Krista and abuses his dog Flipper.
  • Scott Knowles is portrayed as more smug and confident than Tyrell is, and that is actually saying something.
• Just Like Robin Hood: Darlene disperses all the money she and Elliot stole from the Deus Group evenly to the general public's E-Coin wallets.
  Darlene: We just Robin Hood-ed those motherfuckers!
• Kansas City Shuffle: The paper records facility in New York turns out to be a red herring designed to keep Elliot distracted while the other facilities are leveled by the Dark Army.
• Karma Houdini: Irving is the only major Dark Army character who doesn't either betray the organization or die.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Vera commits numerous atrocities throughout Season 1, only to escape prison with Elliot's (unwilling) assistance. The Bus Came Back in the final season, and he gets his comeuppance when he is stabbed In the Back by Krista when he returns to New York City.
• Kavorka Man: Leon gripes that Frasier of Frasier isn't handsome enough to be "getting more butt than an ash tray."
• Kent Brockman News: Let's Be Frank with Frank Cody which appears to be an obvious Infowars parody, complete with a frenzied host, unhinged conspiracy theories, and doomsday prophesying.
• Kick the Dog:
  • Krista's boyfriend yanks his dog into the air by the collar while yelling at her to poop.
  • Colby rather callously has Angela dismissed from a meeting, causing Elliot to decide to frame him for the hack after all.
  • Tyrell pays a bum to let him beat him up, establishing that he's not just a corrupt executive but a real scumbag.
  • Angela's treatment towards Elliot in the first half of season 3. It shows that how much Whiterose's brainwashing has turned her into a sociopathic jerk.
  • Whiterose and her lieutenants engage in petty cruelty while carrying out the business with the worst example being organizing a terror attack with massive casualties purely out of personal spite. Ultimately, this behavior drives very much antagonistic characters like Elliot, Mr Robot, Tyrell, Price, Darlene, and Dominique to set aside their differences just to see Zheng being taken down. So much so that even selfish executives like Tyrell and Price are willing to die for this cause.
• Kicked Upstairs: At the end of season 3, Wellick has been offered a promotion to CTO, in which capacity he'll have no power and do exactly as Price says.
• Kill and Replace: Believing that Whiterose's machine has worked, Elliot kills his Alternate Universe double so he can take his idyllic life.
• Kill the Lights: Used to avoid a security guard during The Caper in "405 Method Not Allowed".
• Kingpin in His Gym: Tyrell has an Establishing Character Moment where he pays a bum to allow Tyrell to pummel him. Tyrell is played as a physical threat in a few later scenes.
• Klingon Promotion: While people don't usually get murdered, the board of E Corp is extremely Darwinian. The execs are constantly sizing each other up, looking for weakness.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Elliot has a very pessimistic view of modern culture and humanity in general. That doesn't stop him from being a dedicated hacker vigilante who takes down people who cross his moral code, or make him okay with innocent people getting hurt.
• Kudzu Plot: The overall narrative of the show is about as dense as the Metal Gear series; there are conspiracies on top of conspiracies, hidden motivations beneath hidden motivations, and secrets wrapped in secrets, all of which progress at their own individual pace with some lasting the entire length of the show, and most being crucial to the arcs of certain characters. It doesn't help that Continuity Lockout is also in full effect, meaning that by missing just parts of one episode, certain details later on will be lost on you, and those details by themselves usually end up being important to the plot in some capacity. All in all, good luck watching without taking notes or looking up at least one recap video to stay on top of everything.
• Lack of Empathy: A startling quality of E Corp executives is their complete absence of anything resembling understanding of personal tragedy. One example is when the CEO of the company gives Angela a thousand dollars in cash to buy some new shoes after hers get blood on them following a suicide she witnesses.
• Lady Macbeth:
  • Mrs. Wellick seems to wear the pants in the family and is constantly urging Tyrell to push harder for advancement. On the day of their child's birth, she threatens to leave him if he doesn't fix the professional mess he's made. She even gets a very subtle Scrubbing Off the Trauma allusion in a scene where she's scrubbing a stain off her dress while scheming with her husband. In spite of everything that happens to Tyrell and some infidelities on her part, she stays loyal to Tyrell and continues trying to advance his interests.
  • Angela herself took over this position in season 3 when she started manipulating Elliot by working with Mr Robot. She helps him complete Stage 2 and motivates him to fight off Elliot, even if it means he will no longer exist.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The official Twitter account makes no attempt at hiding Elliot and Mr. Robot being the same person, despite it being a major plot reveal later in the season.
• Laugh Track: The beginning of "m4ster-sl4ve.aes" parodies 90s sitcoms, complete with one.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • During a scene of "da3m0ns" (1x04), when two Fsociety hackers are laughing at the Hollywood Hacking in Hackers, Romero says, "I bet you right now some writer's working hard on a TV show that'll mess up this generation's idea of hacker culture."
  • In "power-saver-mode" (3x01), when Elliot rants about how It's All My Fault, he looks quickly at a few posters on the wall. They are about "a new TV series, based on fsociety. Coming to NBC this fall." It's named SHIFT+CONTROL. During the same rant, as often, he also turns to face the camera and talks directly to it.
  Elliot: Televising our revolution with commercial breaks.
  • "Payment required" (4x02) opens with montage full of jabs at very particular existing political and corporate leaders. Later in the same episode, when Price tells Zheng that the latter's Christmas tree is unbalanced, the reply is nonchalant admittance that it is unbalanced "to the left," One of the main criticisms of the show since very beginning was its one-sided political affiliation.
• Leet Lingo
  • Most of the episode titles in seasons 1 and 2 use numbers in place of certain letters. The convention was dropped for seasons 3 and 4 in favor of more "normal" file names for the former, and 4XX HTTP status codes for the latter.
  • Elliot will occasionally drop common chat lingo into his speech, like "Why meet IRL?" or "I'm doing this AFK." This is almost entirely limited to the first episode.
  • The episode summaries on Amazon Prime are also styled this way.
• Let Me Tell You a Story: Vera's story about getting revenge on a bully with an aluminum baseball bat when he was a child.
• Lipstick-and-Load Montage: "Legacy" has a rare male version, with a sequence showing Tyrell shaving and putting on a suit to look his best for Elliot.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: It's revealed at the end of the series that Elliot has trapped his "real" personality in an infinite loop where he lives a happy, mundane life.
• Loyal Animal Companion: Elliot's pet fish Qwerty and later on, his adopted dog Flipper.
• MacGyvering: Elliot makes a WiFi antenna out of a Pringles can.
• The Man Is Sticking It to the Man: The show makes fun of itself for doing this during the Season 3 premiere, by having an In-Universe NBC show about the 5/9 hacks called Shift+Control:
  Elliot: They packaged our fight into product. Turned our dissent into intellectual property. Televising our revolution with commercial breaks. They backdoored into our minds and robbed our truth, refurbished the facts, then marked up the price. This is what they do. It's what they're good at.
• Malevolent Masked Man:
  • Fsociety has created a market with their iconic "The Gentleman" masks. In-universe, they are based off the mask the serial killer wears in a very obscure horror film, The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie. Out-of-universe, they resemble Uncle Pennybags of Monopoly and the Guy Fawkes masks of Anonymous.
  • The Dark Army also utilizes their own masks, with the muscles' masks modeled after the Japanese folkloric oni and assassins simply wearing ski masks.
• Manipulative Bastard:
  • The Wellicks are a Machiavellian power couple. Tyrell sleeps with a male secretary in order find information on the favored candidate for CTO of E Corp and later sets a dinner party with the man purely to gain leverage. Meanwhile, Joanna is shown to have put Tyrell up to some of these actions. Following Tyrell's disappearance, she begins dating a bartender so she can use him as a means to absolve Tyrell of a murder charge against him. It works, but it ends up leading to her own murder by the bartender when Joanna reveals her true love for Tyrell.
  • Elliot and pretty much everyone else in Fsociety kind of have to be this to carry out social engineering for their hacks.
  • Whiterose is the ultimate manipulator, having been responsible for Price's implementation as CEO of E Corp as well as supposedly having U.S. President Donald Trump elected.
• Manipulative Editing: The entirety of "runtime-err0r" was filmed and edited to make it look like it was done in one take a la Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Appropriately enough, USA aired it without any commercial breaks.
• Masculine–Feminine Gay Couple: Dom and Darlene.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Zigzagged between Elliot and Darlene as Elliot mostly employs the Always Female tropes and Darlene employs the Always Male trope. E.g. In Season 4 Elliot deals with his murderous Yandere abuser Vera, which a woman usually deals with and while Darlene deals with torture from The Brute Janice, which a male character usually deals with. Though Elliot proves himself to be more deadly and brusquer later in the series, much like a Gender-Inverted Femme Fatale.
• Masculine, Feminine, Androgyne Trio: Darlene is the masculine, Angela is the feminine, and Elliot is the Androgyne.
• Medium Awareness:
  • During his sitcom delusion in 'eps2.4_m4ster-s1ave.aes', Elliot can hear the laugh tracks and censor bleeps, and is understandably freaked out.
  • At points, Elliot addresses the audience in a more intimate manner, sometimes appearing to interact with us.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Alderson loop is a term for an infinite loop that would normally have an exit condition, but because of the current code implementation, such an exit is impossible. Elliot's current "code" prevents him from exiting the infinite loop that is Mr. Robot. It gains an additional meaning in season 4, when it's revealed that Elliot put his "real" personality in an infinite loop within his own mind.
  • A ridiculously wealthy CEO named Phillip Price.
  • The white-dressed Angela Moss, who ends up manipulating Elliot. Moss is also a flowerless green plant without any true roots.
  • Vera believes in these. When he escapes prison, he tells Elliot he plans to live up to his name, which means "brave traveler."
  • Gideon is the name of a minor but heroic biblical figure. Gideon Goddard is a minor character, but is one of the most moral and honest characters in the series.
  • Tyrell is the name of the primary megacorp in Blade Runner, which produces replicants (androids) that are "more human than human."
• MegaCorp: E Corp, obviously. Their role in the economy makes them "too big to fail," as they are behind many, many, many commercial ventures.
• The Men in Black: A product of Elliot's delusions.
• Mental Health Recovery Arc: Basically the whole series, with the real Elliot reclaiming his mind in the Grand Finale.
• Mental World: Elliot dissociates himself from the harsh surroundings in prison and projects his own perspective onto everything. The cell is his bedroom in his mother's house. His mother and Lone Star are prison guards, Ray is the warden, and everyone else besides are inmates. His routine is random work around the prison, three meals a day, and writing constantly in his journal.
• Messianic Archetype: Elliot has strong elements of this. He represents a once-in-a-generation leader who truly wants what's best for the people he serves, which makes him a threat to the people with selfish motives who are willing to hurt or kill him. He even sacrificed himself several times to protect the people he loves and almost died several times throughout the series but survived. He even maintains a kind-heart despite the hell he is put through.
• Mind Screw: Delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia make the plot of this show. It'd honestly be easier to count the number of times when the show isn't trying to confuse or throw you for a loop.
• Missed Him by That Much: Dom changes her mind about not running away with Darlene and decides to board the plane after all... but Darlene had a panic attack after Dom left that caused her to miss the flight.
• Mistaken for Suicidal: Darlene believes that Tobias, the drunk Santa she gives a ride to on Christmas Eve, plans to kill himself because he is drinking heavily and has a bottle of Percocet, but the pills are actually for his wife's injured back.
• "Mister Sandman" Sequence: The first season has a flashback to 1994, which takes place in a single store, but that brief scene shows a Super Nintendo with game cartridges, a Sega Genesis, a pile of floppy disks, a reference to the latest Pentium 90 with an 800-megabyte hard drive, a discussion over whether to see Time Cop, Star Gate or Pulp Fiction, a man on the radio talking about the pending 1994 Major League Baseball strike, and no less than two giant posters that say 'Rated 1994's best buy of the year!'.
• Money to Burn: fsociety forces Scott Knowles to burn 5.9 million dollars in a public park as part of a ransom demand.
• Mushroom Samba:
  • An interesting inversion; in "eps1.3_da3m0ns.mp4", Elliot experiences this during drug withdrawal. The delirium combines with a fever dream to create a twisted, chaotic step into Elliot's mind.
  • This is later played straight when he overdoses on Adderall, although it is fairly brief.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Ray, the prison warden who operates a trafficking site, allows Elliot to report him when he learns what is "for sale" on his site, and expresses to Elliot his regrets over what he has done before the police take him in.

Tropes N to T

• Nebulous Evil Organization: The "top one percent of the top one percent" that Elliot warns us about in the pilot episode turns out to be more than just a deranged conspiracy theory. Episode "402 Payment Required" elaborates on this, and Price reveals to Elliot that Whiterose founded the group, named the Deus Group, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its members were under the impression that it was a cooperative effort to shape the world for profit. This is a ruse, and the group was created to facilitate Whiterose's "project" and the annexation of the Congo. The members of the group are subservient to Whiterose, or are replaced by someone who will be.
• Neon Sign Hideout: In season one, Fsociety operates out of a derelict arcade on Coney Island. Once known as "Fun Society," the continued decay of the arcade's marquee led to the U and N letters falling off, leaving behind "F SOCIETY". Dom later quips that the FBI were probably the weakest link in the situation purely because of its hilariously belated discovery.
• Never My Fault: Ollie comes off as this, rarely ever attempting to level with Angela about anything and trying to excuse his infidelity as part of a larger problem.
• Newscaster Cameo: Nancy Grace makes an appearance as part of her current affairs program, commenting on the investigation into Tyrell Wellick as well as the fallout from Operation Berenstain. Laurie Segall also cameos in a few episodes.
• Nightmare Sequence: Dom has a nightmare of hooking up with a woman who turns out to be a Dark Army operative, which ends in the operative drowning her.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: At the Deus Group reception in season four, one of the attendees is a man with his back turned to the camera wearing Donald Trump's distinctive hairstyle. The show pulled no punches in season three, when Trump is specifically called out by Price as a useful puppet.
• Nice Mean And In Between: Zigzagged in each seasons and sometimes Downplayed:
  • Season 1: Elliot and Angela are Nice, Tyrell and Mr. Robot are Mean, and Darlene is In-Between.
  • Season 2: Elliot and Dom are Nice, Tyrell and Mr. Robot are Mean, and Darlene and Angela are In-Between.
  • Season 3: Elliot and Dom are Nice, Tyrell, Mr. Robot and Angela are Mean, and Darlene is In-Between.
  • Season 4: Dom is Nice, Elliot is Mean (until Not Acceptable), and Darlene and Mr. Robot are In-Between.
• No-Dialogue Episode: "405 Method Not Allowed" is presented entirely without dialogue, except for the first and last lines which are (appropriately) "It's cool, dude - we don't have to talk" and "It's time we talk".
• No Escape but Down: At the end of the episode "405 Method Not Allowed," Elliot finds himself cornered by police on all sides with no way out except a lengthy fall down a steep hill. He takes the plunge and makes it.
• No Fourth Wall: The show is barely contained within its own reality; Elliot and Mr. Robot both acknowledge us, the audience, and often involve us in the action when the two are experiencing a power struggle. Elliot himself states right off the bat that we're just another construct in his head, and that we're only able to watch the show because he created us. Logically, the series ends once Elliot (revealed to be the Mastermind) relinquishes control, and Host!Elliot wakes up, thereby rebuilding the fourth wall and locking us out of his thoughts forever like the rest of his alters.
• No Name Given: Despite telling Elliot that it will come in due time, Mr. Robot never reveals his name to him. This is because Mr. Robot is his name, given that he does not actually exist.
• No Medication for Me: Elliot neglects to take his psychiatric medication, instead opting to rail morphine and smoke marijuana. He later hacks his therapist Krista, and learns that she also forgoes taking her medication.
  • Averted in season three, when Elliot begins to take Prozac, although it is presented as being not as good as what everyone assumes.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Elliot helps Angela throughout the series and is one of the only people who is caring towards her. And what he gets from her? Angela starts to psychologically abuse him and work with Mr. Robot behind his back, despite knowing that Elliot loves her and how much is it going to hurt him.
• No Romantic Resolution:
  • With all of his love interests and those who had a crush on him dead, Elliot ends the series single, though he is completely okay with it.
  • Dom and Darlene clearly still have feelings for each other, but they miss the chance to run away together due to a Missed Him by That Much moment at the airport. It's the last we see of (the real) Dom in the series.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown:
  • In "eps2.3_logic-b0mb.hc", Elliot gets the ever-loving crap kicked out of him courtesy of Ray's goons.
  • Scott Knowles dishes one out to Joanna in "eps2.9_pyth0n-pt2.p7z" after she slanders Scott's wife. It later turns out that she intentionally provoked him into attacking her.
  • Tyrell nearly gives one to Mr. Robot in "eps3.8_stage3.torrent"
• No Sense of Personal Space: Tyrell blatantly uses this as a method of intimidation with Elliot as well as Sharon Knowles.
• No, You:
  • When Mr. Robot accuses Tyrell of being a puppet to the Dark Army:
  Tyrell: "No puppet! No puppet! You're the puppet!"
  • Elliot trades these back and forth with Trenton's kid brother, which takes a dark turn considering he just had an Interrupted Suicide.
  Elliot: "You're annoying."
  Mohammad: "You are."
  Elliot: "This is a nightmare!"
  Mohammad: "You are!"
  Elliot: "So are you!"
  Mohammad: "I wish you were dead!"
  Elliot: "So do I!"
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Angela becomes this in Season 3.
• N-Word Privileges: Vera doesn't care.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Ernesto Santiago is one, and seems to actively stonewall Dom from pursuing credible leads or stepping back to look at the bigger picture. It turns out that Santiago is actually working for the Dark Army, and that he really is stonewalling Dom.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Deegan the Irish mobster wiping out the Dark Army agents holding Dom's family hostage.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: A tell-tale sign that Elliot is experiencing a hallucination or Mr. Robot is about to take over. fsociety also uses this as a gimmick in their propaganda videos.
• Once a Season:
  • So far each season has ended with a post-credits scene that begins on a lingering shot of a Cadillac, with the passenger always being a big reveal.
  • Medication plays a significant role in Elliot's life each season. Season one followed his addiction to morphine, season two featured a brief experiment of overdosing on Adderall to stop Mr. Robot, and season three shows that Elliot is finally taking sertraline: a proper medication and anti-depressant that is prescribed by Krista. This last example is depicted as the most negative of the three; Elliot is at his worst, even after suffering agonizing withdrawals and intense hallucinations.
  • Each season builds upon the relationship between Krista and Elliot, and dedicates a decent chunk of the plot to their continued development. Season one established Krista and Elliot's relationship while showing their revealing interactions as the two learn truths about themselves. Season two examined their relationship after much of Elliot's life and his consequences on Krista's life are laid bare. Season three revealed a major twist in their relationship, with Krista finally meeting Mr. Robot, who confesses his and Elliot's involvement in 5/9. Krista attempts to report Elliot but is denied based on hearsay and coincidence.
• Once is Not Enough: Tyrell bludgeons a member of the Dark Army with a hammer, then tells Elliot he's dead without bothering to confirm the kill. When the Dark Army operative wakes up later in the episode, it causes a massive headache for Elliot and Tyrell and ultimately results in Tyrell's death.
• The Oner: The show is very fond of this cinematographic technique.
  • In "eps1.3_da3m0ns.mp4", there is an uncut shot that begins with Mr. Robot dragging a delirious Elliot from a cab and sending him into a drug house.
  • The shootout at the hotel in China is also done in one take, starting with Dom descending a flight of stairs.
  • "eps3.0_power-saver-mode.h" has a sequence that follows Elliot and Darlene through the CTF tournament. However, this is given the illusion of a single take, with cleverly hidden cuts.
  • The entirety of "eps3.4_runtime-error.r00" takes place in real time, but, much like the above, is just post-production sleight-of-hand.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Both Elliot and Tyrell had gotten shot in the stomach on separate occasions. But the only difference is that Elliot was able to survive his injury despite the fact he got hit roughly in the middle of his stomach, close to his navel while Tyrell's was more on the side, which possibly killed him.
• Order vs. Chaos: Invoked by Price in a conversation with Minister Zhang.
  Price: Order will not protect you anymore, my friend. I will rain chaos, even if it hurts me. Because I would rather see you lose than win myself.
• The Ophelia: Angela in "Stage 3", Darlene in "401 Unauthorized" and Elliot in "408 Request Timeout".
• Out of Focus: Tyrell, a major character in Seasons 1, 3 and 4, spends the entirety of Season 2 in hiding, only appearing in a brief Voice-Only Cameo, two Fantasy Sequences, in a Flashback, and in the season finale. This is because one of the major mysteries of Season 2 is what exactly happened to Tyrell at the end of Season 1, with Elliot doubting he's even alive.
• Outlaw Couple: Both Tyrell and Vera were hoping to be this with Elliot. While Tyrell accepts that Elliot won't accept and forgive him for his misdeeds for a while, Vera takes really drastic measures to make sure his fantasies about being partners in crime with Elliot comes true.
• Painless Death for a Price: Whiterose offers to give Price a painless death if he reveals the details of his Enemy Mine scheme with Elliot.
• Parody Episode: "eps.2.4_m4ster-s1ave.aes" opens with a twisted sitcom parody of the show, complete with a different theme song, laugh tracks, shoddy effects, and censor bleeps. Justified in-universe as the sequence is playing out in Elliot's head.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Done much more realistically than is typical. Elliot benefits a lot from the slovenly approach to password safety of the people around him, but to the non-tech savvy the passwords they choose might actually seem reasonably safe, such as his therapist using the name of her favorite artist combined with her birth year backwards (Dylan_2791). The most straightforwardly moronic password (Angela's boyfriend, with a password of 123456Seven) is used to emphasize that he is, indeed, kind of a moron.
• Pastiche: While the plot of the show borrows some obvious elements from Fight Club, the color filters, framing of characters, and shot choices in general are very much in the style of David Fincher.
  • Elliot's personality and arc of vengeance against the predators who prey on innocent lives, specifically men and later on the Dark Army has some elements of a feminist revenge genre (but Inverted and less violent) like Lady Snowblood, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Ms. 45, I Spit on Your Grave, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and Film/MFA.
• Pet the Dog: When Elliot confronts the man who is two-timing his therapist, his only demands are that the man tell her the truth—and give Elliot his dog, whom we saw him mistreating earlier in the episode. Considering he frequently expresses his hatred for 90% of human society, he seems very fond of Flipper.
• Playful Hacker: While Elliot is certainly not "playful," his interest in hacking is benevolent. He wants to help people and punish wrongdoers. He does violate peoples' privacy repeatedly, but his only motivation is a desperate attempt to connect with people in the only way he understands.
• Product Placement:
  • A more low-key example, but most of the browsers we see used in the series are Firefox.
  • Most of the phones are Android-based, Blackberry is mentioned in pilot.
  • Elliot regularly uses Kali Linux, a penetration testing (Ethical Hacking) Linux distribution, and Protonmail, an email service designed to maximize privacy through end-to-end encryption. Both received a corresponding recognition boost from general audiences, with developers of the former having to gently warn people that Kali isn't really meant to be used as a day-to-day OS for anyone who doesn't work in information security.
• Pop-Cultured Badass: Leon, a deadly enforcer for the Dark Army who prattles on about sitcoms of The '80s and The '90s to anyone who will listen.
• Post-Cyberpunk: Begins in a tech-dominated world easily comparable to our own, but as 5/9 tears the world to pieces, this trope slowly becomes more and more subverted. By season three, martial law has begun to sweep over the United States, with other countries experiencing civil unrest and utter chaos due to the global economic depression. It almost serves as an origin story for a classic cyberpunk setting, a tale of how our modern world can end up like that.
• Power Corrupts: One of the reasons why Elliot does not want to be a leader and what disgusts him about the Corrupt Corporate Executives. And Angela herself ends up getting Drunk with Power as the series progresses.
• Properly Paranoid: Elliot frequently "wipes down" his computer rigs and destroys any traceable components following his hacks. Elliot becomes still more paranoid once he learns the truth about Mr. Robot, allowing himself to be arrested by the police and incarcerated to prevent the alternate personality from causing any further damage.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: Angela's main storyline serves as this.
• Psychopathic Man Child: Tyrell Wellick. He actually pouts before smashing a vase on the countertop during his talk with his wife in the aftermath of his disastrous encounter with Scott. And then, later, he strangles Scott's wife and it's clear he didn't intend to do it, but was provoked into it by her insinuation that he doesn't have what it takes to impress her.
• Punchclock Villains: A common occurrence at E Corp.
  • Angela has a pleasant dinner with several nice executives of Evil Corp. Afterwards, Philip Price comments that they were "ordinary people" who even participate in charities. However, they also signed off on the action that killed Angela's mother and engage in other white collar crime.
  • When Angela sits in on a meeting with the Risk department, who handle lawsuits and liability against the company, the executives are remarkably banal and much more interested in the snacks being late than talking about business.
  • Leon is a laid-back, media-obsessed contract killer and enforcer for the Dark Army. He doesn't seem to have any ill-will toward anyone and just does as he's told.
• Punk in the Trunk: When Elliot is Trapped in TV Land as part of a delusion, he imagines that Mr. Robot has kidnapped Tyrell and is keeping him in the trunk of the family car.
• Rape and Revenge: After being sexually abused by his father, Elliot grew up to be a vigilante hacker who takes down pedophiles, rapists, abusers etc.
• Rape Leads to Insanity: Mr. Robot, Elliot's hallucination and alternate personality, was created as a result of Elliot being sexually abused by his father.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Elliot gives a brutal one to Bill to get him out of the way:
  Elliot: Think about it, Bill. If you died, would anyone care? Would they really care? Yeah, maybe they'd cry for a day, but let's be honest. No one would give a shit. They wouldn't. The few people that would feel obligated to go to your funeral would probably be annoyed and leave as early as possible. That's who you are. That's what you are. You're nothing to anyone, to everyone. Think about it, Bill. 'Cause if you do, if you let yourself... You'll know I'm telling you the truth. So instead of wasting any more of my time, I need you to go call someone that matters, because, Bill... You don't.
  • Elliot, coming down off of Adderall after having not slept for six days',' unleashes one against God'', and the people of his church group, after listening to a man's story about God "forgiving" him for beating up an Indian store owner, and then thinking about Gideon Goddard's senseless death.
  Elliot: Is that what God does? He helps? Tell me, why didn't God help my innocent friend who died for no reason while the guilty run free? OK. Fine. Forget the one-offs. How about the countless wars declared in his name? OK. Fine. Let's skip the random, meaningless murder for a second, shall we? How about the racist, sexist, phobia soup we've all been drowning in because of him? And I'm not just talking about Jesus. I'm talking about all organized religion. Exclusive groups created to manage control. A dealer getting people hooked on the drug of hope. His followers, nothing but addicts who want their hit of bullshit to keep their dopamine of ignorance. Addicts. Afraid to believe the truth. That there's no order. There's no power. That all religions are just metastasizing mind worms meant to divide us so it's easier to rule us by the charlatans that wanna run us. All we are to them are paying fanboys of their poorly written sci-fi franchise. If I don't listen to my imaginary friend, why the fuck should I listen to yours? People think their worship is some key to happiness. That's just how he owns you. Even I'm not crazy enough to believe that distortion of reality. So fuck God. He's not a good enough scapegoat for me.
  • Angela gives one to an old family friend who insults her for working for E Corp.
  Angela: You're a plumber, right, Steve? You've had, what, 60 years at life? And that's the best you can come up with. Literally cleaning shit for a living. I'm 27, and I've got a six figure salary at the biggest conglomerate in history. And I'm just getting started.
• Red Baron: Susan Jacobs, a lawyer for Evil Corp, is known as "Madame Executioner" because she's proficient in killing lawsuits, usually involving deaths, against the corporation.
• Recycled Script: As it goes on, season three begins to reflect the events of season one, but in reverse. This is intentional, as the entire season is built upon Elliot undoing everything that he set out to accomplish in season one with the 5/9 hack. Other characters that underwent high octane deconstruction in season two (namely Angela, Darlene, and Tyrell) are sent back through their respective arcs from season one in the same manner, amounting to the season's Meta Twist: everyone had the answers that they were looking for the entire time.
• Reset Button: Elliot hits the reset button at the end of season 3. He decrypts E Corp's financial records, undoing the 5/9 hack and saving the world economy from the brink of collapse.
• Remember the New Guy?: Irving, somewhat. He has been active since season one (and the linchpin of season two's more tantalizing mysteries), but we are only made aware of his presence in season three.
• Retraux: "eps2.4_m4ster-s1ave.aes" featured an intro designed to parody 80s-90s sitcoms, especially Full House and Family Matters; in fact, the guys who wrote and sang that series' theme did this one. Also in the mix was Paul Fusco- the guy who created and puppeteered ALF! And to complete the night, USA Network itself got in on the act - using recreations of their 80s-90s idents and promos from the "America's Favorite Cable Network" era, including voiceovers from Alan Kalter, a different logo bug, and a promo for USA Up All Night!
• The Reveal:
  • Darlene is Elliot's sister.
  • Mr. Robot is Elliot's father, Edward Alderson.
  • Mr. Robot is Elliot's hallucination of his father, which acts as his split personality.
  • White Rose is China's Minister of State Security.
  • Leon is a member of the Dark Army.
  • Elliot has been in prison for all of Season 2.
  • Angela is working with Mr. Robot.
  • Mr Robot isn't the only alternate personality inside Elliot's mind, with two based on his childhood self and his mother Magda along with an mysterious third male, who is revealed in the finale to be the Elliot we've been following throughout the series.
  • Elliot was sexually abused by his father as a child. Mr. Robot is an idealized version of his father that Elliot created in order to protect himself from the abuse and pretend his father was a good person.
  • As the series finale shows, the Elliot that the audience has been following since the start is another personality, created by the real Elliot to deal with the rage and anger that he had towards the world.
• Revealing Cover-Up: The episode "eps3.4_runtime-error.r00" consists entirely of one of these. The Dark Army stages a riot that spreads throughout the E Corp headquarters, as a cover for Angela to get to the code signing machine and sign their malware.
  • Another one of these is used in "eps3.6_fredrick+tanya.chk", when the Dark Army stages a house to make it look like 5/9 was an Iranian terror plot and has the FBI raid it.
• The Rich Have White Stuff: The Wellicks.
• Riddle for the Ages: What is the blue glow that Tyrell stares at as he dies from a bullet wound.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • Elliot's experiences in prison are turned into an illusory world where Elliot can revel in his own self-created comfort while getting through his sentence and attempting to annihilate Mr. Robot. He snaps out of it upon going free, despite Elliot himself disagreeing, going as far as to doubt that Tyrell is even real.
  • Angela spends all of season three slowly entering what can only be described as a permanent fugue state. She hides in her apartment, slowly obsessing over resurrecting her mother, Elliot's father, and the innocents who have paid the price for the revolution. Her paranoia reaches a breaking point, and eventually she voluntarily abandons her apartment to live on the streets, disguised as a vagrant.
• Sanity Strengthening: The entirety of season three is built upon Elliot realizing his agency apart from Mr. Robot, and ends with the two identities merging finally to wage war on the Dark Army.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: A defining character trait of Elliot, established in the very first scene, is that he cannot be bought or bribed.
• Seven Deadly Sins: In Season 4, each of the characters represent probably half of them:
  • Elliot represents Wrath, due to his vengeance against Whiterose.
  • Darlene represents Gluttony in the first episode of Season 4 when she uses booze and drugs to cope with Angela's death.
  • Dom represents Sloth, when she begins to wallow in self-pity and is scared to fight back against the Dark Army.
  • Janice represents Pride, showing how much she is arrogant and confident in torturing anyone who gets in her way and believes that she is better than anyone and thinks highly of herself.
  • Vera represents Lust, because of the fact that he is obsessed with Elliot and will stop at nothing to have him for himself.
• Significant Birth Date: Elliot's father was born on 5/9, also the date fsociety plans to hack of Evil Corp.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog:
  • The entire story arc of "eps1.5_br4ve-trave1er.asf". After going through with a complicated and risky hack to break Fernando Vera out of prison so he will let Shayla go free, Elliot finds Shayla in the car trunk with her throat slit, revealing she had already been dead throughout the whole ordeal. Mr. Robot invoked this trope midway through the episode when he advised Elliot to abandon the hack and let Shayla die.
  • Eps3.5kill-process.inc ends not only with Elliot failing to stop the Dark Army's terrorist attack, but with SEVENTY-ONE buildings being obliterated by the UPS exploit instead of the one he has spent the entirety of season three trying to rescue.
• Shout-Out:
  • In Season 1:
    • Angela shows up with a DVD of Back to the Future Part II, which she says is Elliot's favorite movie. Whether this is true or not is unconfirmed. Elliot seems to have no interest in art or culture. In the eighth episode, we see a picture of Elliot and his father cosplaying as Marty McFly and Doc Brown, respectively.
    • Shayla shouts "Keep the fish ya filthy animal" to Elliot minutes after she gives him Qwerty.
    • One of the games found in the arcade is called Intergalactic Planetary.
    • The ninth episode, in which Elliot learns that Mr. Robot was a hallucination of his dead father and he was responsible for all of his actions, ends with an instrumental version of "Where Is My Mind" by The Pixies.
    • Mr. Robot asks Elliot if he wants to see Time Cop or Stargate, but Elliot chooses Pulp Fiction.
    • When asked if he is okay, Eliot responds "I am pretty fucking far from okay," a memorable line from Pulp Fiction.
    • The masks worn by Fsociety and its supporters are an obvious allusion to the Guy Fawkes masks worn by Anonymous, who themselves were inspired to wear them by V from V for Vendetta.
    • The use of a talking fish in the withdrawal hallucination sequence, and the use of Time Zone's "World Destruction" during the season finale, both shout out to The Sopranos.
    • In the final scene in the 1% gentlemen's club, while Price and White Rose discuss the hack, a harpist plays "Nearer My God to Thee," purportedly the last song played on the Titanic before it sunk. Appropriate.
    • Angela loves the book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. She later uses the pseudonym Claudia Kincaid, a character from the book. The book inspired her and Elliot to sneak into a museum together as kids, and season 4 contains scenes of them doing so. Elliot also gifts Angela a signed copy of the book in season 4.
  • In Season 2:
    • Elliot's Seinfeld-obsessed friend is named Leon.
    • Dominique says that she's one of the few people who love Romy and Michele's High School Reunion.
    • An FBI agent gives a shoutout to its own network's slogan, their "blue sky" ad campaign, and one of their biggest shows when he tells Darlene things aren't going to go like they do on TV: "There are no blue skies for you. This isn't Burn Notice. Characters like you aren't welcome here."
    • An E-Corp employee in "init_5" has the password "holidayarmadillo".
    • At the end of "pyth0n-part1", Tyrell makes a Humphrey Bogart impersonation : "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
    • There are a number of references to the William Carlos Williams poem "The Red Wheelbarrow." These continue into Season 3, most noticeably with the Red Wheelbarrow BBQ shop that is a Dark Army front.
  • In Season 3:
    • When they were kids, Elliot and Darlene once made a snowman that they named Kevin McCallister.
    • Leon has moved his 1990s sitcom commentary to Frasier, which he doesn't like because he finds Frasier Crane to be unbelievable as a Kavorka Man.
  • In Season 4:
    • The expository montage that opens "Payment Required" is ironically set to part of the soundtrack of the montage-of-modernity film Koyaanisqatsi.
    • In a nod to Christian Slater's role in Pump Up the Volume, Dominique chats with happyhardonhenry806 in a cyber sex chat room in "Not Found,"
    • Leon says that he needs to find a rest stop and "steal some mirrors." This is a reference to Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, in which the narrator ponders the slang phrase "take a leak" and invents the phrase "steal mirrors" to mean the same thing.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Earlier in the season, Angela mostly dresses in pale colors but once she takes the job at Evil Corp she is shown going to work in a black business suit but wearing white heels. After her shoes are ruined by the blood spatter from the Evil Corp executive's suicide she witnesses and Phillip Price talks to her, she says she doesn't think she'll be able to return for the press conference later that day. However, after he gives her money to buy new shoes and following her Out-of-Character Moment in the shoe store, she does return to Evil Corp in time for the press conference wearing black heels. Upon seeing her present in her new shoes, Price comments: "Very nice, glad you reconsidered."
  • A promotional poster for season two has Elliot wearing Mr. Robot's jacket over his hoodie.
  • Elliot experiences one of Mr. Robot's takeovers as Mr. Robot's shirt and jacket replacing Elliot's hoodie.
  • Mr. Robot's appearance reflects his legitimacy and how much control he has over Elliot. His strongest is when he sports his hat, scarf, and glasses, but when the two become disintegrated in season three, he loses hit hat, glasses, scarf, and slowly becomes more grungy.
  • Elliot passes by a sign advertising Omni Consumer Industries. The name and logo are both references to Omni Consumer Products from RoboCop.
• Shown Their Work: All over the place. The series is famous for this.
  • The hacking piece of the story is incredibly well researched compared to virtually any other series.
    • One of the first plot threads emphasizes that hacking is time and research intensive.
    • The series prefers basic Unix terminals to flashy graphics.
    • It features Kali Linux, and while obviously an in-story advertisement, it is a real operating system designed for IT security tests (hacking).
  • In Season 2, Episode 7, it shows FBI agents walking around in a large room with a massive monitor suspended from the ceiling, inside Ecorp. To the casual observer, it might seem oddly artistic and clashes with the grittier feeling of the show, but its actually really accurate to what a high-end emergency management office would look like. Considering that season 2 is essentially a season long emergency response, it makes perfect sense the FBI would spend a lot of its time there.
• Sliding Scale of Beauty: Each of the characters represent different levels, which also fits their characteristics:
  • Elliot is a mix between Level III and VII.
  • Darlene, Angela and Dom are Level IV.
  • Tyrell and Joanna are Level VI.
  • Vera and Janice are Level X.
• Slipping a Mickey: Elliot drugs his new girlfriend / mark, Olivia, by drugging her coffee and then threatening to report her drug use so she will lose her Custody Battle.
• Slowly Slipping Into Evil: Angela's arc throughout the series is this.
• Smokescreen Crime: In "Kill Process," a riot breaks out at the E-Corps recovery building in New York, and Elliot works desperately to divert the files stored on-site to seventy-one other facilities. At the end of the episode, Elliot learns that the riot was just a diversion to keep everyone busy while the Dark Army attacked those buildings.
• Simultaneous Arcs: Season 4 does this a few times. 406 ends with Elliot being Kidnapped by Vera and Darlene and Done being held by Janice. The next episode 407 involves Elliot and Krista being held by Vera while 408 focusses on Dom and Damlene being held. Both the arcs have different formats, as 407 feels more like a stalker/stockholm syndrome thriller a la Berlin Syndrome and You (2018) while 408 is more similar to 310. Though we do see the aftermath of Elliot being held by Vera in 408 so they don't quite match up. However eXit plays this much straighter as it and the previous episode start in the same place, with Elliot and Darlene saying goodbye. 410 shows this scene from Dom’s point of view while eXit shows it from Eliot and Darlene’s. From there the two episodes go in different directions with Darlene and Dom heading to Budapest in 410 and Elliot heading to Washington Township in eXit.
• Sinister Surveillance: Operation Berenstain, a (highly illegal) mass surveillance program orchestrated by the FBI and designed to tap into thousands of innocent Americans' phones, all in a bid to stop Fsociety.
• Smart People Play Chess: Ray and Elliot play chess together, and Ray convinces Elliot to play chess against himself to sort out his problems.
• Smoking Hot Sex: Elliot smokes a joint in bed after sleeping with Shayla.
• Smoky Gentlemen's Club: The Stinger at the end of the Season 1 finale reveals that this is where The Illuminati meet.
• The Snack Is More Interesting: A scene in Season One has Tyrell throwing a tantrum while Joanna calmly eats dinner in front of him, not even looking back when he smashes a vase behind her.
• Split-Personality Takeover: In Season 3 Elliot and Mr. Robot stop communicating, with Mr. Robot simply taking over Elliot's body from time to time to continue working on Stage 2 against Elliot's wishes. When Elliot is on the cusp of thwarting Stage 2 Just in Time, Mr. Robot starts to seize control of his body for minutes or even seconds at a time just to force Elliot to leave the building, smash his computer or trip while he's going down the stairs.
• Spot the Impostor: In "power-saver-mode," when Mr. Robot asks Angela how she can tell him from Elliot:
  Angela: Your eyes. You're never trying to look away.
• So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Elliot suffers from this on some occasions. He gets nearly raped in prison by the neo nazis, he is forced to strip and is verbally harassed by a drug dealer to get morphine, and both Tyrell and Vera get obsessed with him.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • A doorman listens to Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy" as he watches Elliot get abducted by hired goons.
  • Dom's family is kidnapped by the Dark Army while "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" plays.
• Stalker with a Crush: Tyrell is revealed to be in love with Elliot in the season two finale. Vera himself ends up being obsessed with Elliot in Season 4 when he desires to break him and build him back up again to be his partner.
• Starter Villain: Terry Colby, despite representing the obnoxiously conceited jerkasses that run the E Corp gamut, is shown to be totally oblivious to information technology and a pitiful, digital victim of Elliot.
• Start of Darkness: Season 4 gives us a flashback episode in which we see the origin of Whiterose.
• Static Stun Gun: Darlene uses one on Susan Jacobs, killing her. It is later revealed that Susan had a heart condition which required a pacemaker to treat, and the stun gun shorted it.
• The Stinger: Each season thus far has concluded with one that teases an oncoming facet of the plot.
  Season one: Whiterose (as Zhang) meets with Price at a lavish club to discuss a response to Five/Nine among other political conquests. Price then reveals that they know of the person responsible behind the hack.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Elliot is shown to be cynical and aloof most of the times but deep down, he is actually a kind-hearted person and deeply cares for other people.
• Suicide Attack: The Dark Army's protocol for dealing with being potentially burned is immediate suicide. Every one of their direct attacks have ended in the assassins turning the guns on themselves.
• Surprise Incest: Elliot has forgotten that Darlene is his sister when he plants a kiss on her. Her reaction begins a sequence of events that ultimately makes Elliot confront his dissociative identity disorder. To the audience, however, it is a major reveal.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Fernando Vera has Shayla and Isaac murdered, musing that either way, he is a wanted man with nothing left to lose.
  • Elliot is arrested for hacking Lenny Shannon when he takes Flipper to be examined by a veterinarian and unwittingly has the dog's microchip scanned in the process.
  • It turns out, when you wipe out all records of debts owed to an enormous corporation in the aim of bringing down the top one percent of the top one percent and fomenting a revolution, what actually happens is the economy collapses and the elite you were fighting can still work the system to their benefit. Who would have thought? This one point ultimately becomes the driving arc for the latter two seasons.
  • Being followed by the Dark Army, Elliot is unable to sabotage stage two at the hacker tournament.
  • Stage two targets the other seventy-one recovery buildings instead of the one Elliot labors to save because of his decision to divert the paper records.
  • Trenton and Mobley are made sacrificial lambs for the Dark Army once their identities are ousted in the national media.
  • Elliot, Darlene and Price keep on trying to pull Angela away from Whiterose's brainwashing. But their attempts end up futile as Angela is completely beyond repair and continues to be stubborn, which eventually ends up to be her undoing as it causes her death.
• Surreal Horror: Displays some elements of this, between Elliot’s hallucinations and Unreliable Narrator status, and the masked aggression from Leon, Irving, Mr. Robot, Whiterose, and even Angela.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute:
  • The mask worn by Mr. Robot in his public addresses as well as the logo of fsociety resembles a certain other anarchist anti-hero whose image has been taken by certain other anonymous computer hackers.
  • Midland City is pretty much an amalgamation of darknet markets such as the Silk Road and Black Market Reloaded.
• Take That!:
  • Elliot feels justified in disliking Ollie off his Facebook likes alone: George W. Bush's Talking Points, Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Josh Groban.
  • Elliot can tell that Colby knows nothing about technology because he uses a Blackberry phone.
  • Two Fsociety hackers watch Hackers and talk about how stupid its Hollywood Hacking is.
  • Season three is littered with potshots at Donald Trump. Price and White Rose watch him on television and decide that he'd make a useful puppet while also mocking him for a buffoon. They later spend several scenes at Mar-a-Lago mocking its tasteless décor. White Rose later contracts an Alex Jones expy to endorse his presidential campaign. There's also a scene where Tyrell snaps, "No puppet! No puppet! You're a puppet!" which was a comment made by Trump during a 2016 presidential debate against Hillary Clinton. In season 4, a member of the evil Deus Group with his back to the camera is implied to be Trump himself.
• Talking to Themself: Whenever Elliot talks to Mr. Robot, he is really doing this, much to the concern of the people around him.
• Tap on the Head: One of Irving's henchmen knocks out Mr. Robot with a blow to the back of the head, and Irving and Mr. Robot converse like normal as soon as he regains consciousness.
• Taxidermy Is Creepy: Janice, one of the Dark Army's handlers, is a taxidermist by trade, and she is quickly revealed to be a sadistic, creepy individual.
• Technician vs. Performer: Possibly the main source of conflict between Angela and Elliot later in the series. Angela as the perfectionist Technician who ends up being too focused on winning against E Corp and bring justice for her mom's death and Elliot as the humble Performer who just wants to use his power for good and help others. This causes Angela to be jealous and envious of him over the fact that despite he not having the same status or goals as she, he is still The Chosen One to take down E Corp and decides to overthrow him in Season 3.
• Tempting Fate: In the final moments of "pyth0n-pt2," Elliot begins ranting about how he's finally going to "take back control" from Mr. Robot. Anyone who's seen the posters◊ for Season 2 can anticipate this won't end well.
• That Man Is Dead: Said by Whiterose in "eXit".
  Whiterose: You were looking for Minister Zhang? He isn't here. He's dead. There's only Whiterose.
• "They're Not Real" Reveal: Elliot learns Mr. Robot (who looks like his father) is actually a hallucination when he visits his father's grave.
• This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: Darlene while telling off Elliot in the second episode.
  Darlene: Even your stupid hoodie can't protect you, bitch!
• This Is Reality: An FBI agent invokes this with Darlene during an interrogation.
  Agent Santiago: There's this thing called the Patriot Act that a bunch of people signed into law. Do you know what that means? It means that you are not on some TV show. This isn't Burn Notice. There are no blue skies for you out there. Characters like you are not welcome here.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: We experience the entire show through Elliot's perspective. Knowing how unstable he is, it is safe to say that some of what we see in the show should be taken with a grain of salt.
• Thwarted Escape: Trenton escapes her bonds after being taken captive and attempts to drive away in her captor's car, but since she grew up in the city and never learned how to drive, she doesn't get to safety before crashing the car into a rock.
• Tomato in the Mirror: In the Grand Finale, Elliot learns that he's not actually Elliot Alderson, he's another of Elliot's alternate personalities (The Mastermind) who became dominant shortly before the events of the series began.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Angela in season 3.
• Town Girls: The Defective Detective FBI Agent Dominique is the butch, The Casanova but sometimes Damsel in Distress Darlene is the neither and the Fallen Hero Angela is the femme.
• Trapped in TV Land: Elliot spends the first half of 'eps2.4_m4ster-s1ave.aes' stuck on a 90's sitcom roadtrip with his family, complete with laugh track, swear bleeping, and ALF. It's a delusion created by Mr. Robot to distract him from his near-fatal beating at the hands of Ray's thugs.
• Trauma Conga Line: Most of the characters went through that, but these two take it the worst:
  • Elliot from the beginning of his life. He was abused physically, emotionally and mentally by multiple people, survived multiple near death experiences (getting brutally beaten up, getting shot in the stomach, being forced a heroin overdose, getting trapped in a nuclear meltdown), he loses his loved ones including Shayla and Angela, gets kidnapped multiple times, nearly gets raped in prison. And this is all the while he is dealing with multiple mental illnesses, most notably his DID and Depression.
  • It isn't easy for Dom either. She survives two shootouts, her interrogation is stonewalled by her boss who is a Dark Army mole, she gets kidnapped and is forced into replacing him with the threat of hurting her family, and then gets captured with Darlene and during interrogation Janice punctures her lung.
• Trauma-Induced Amnesia: Elliot repressed the memories of being sexually abused by his father through Mr. Robot.
• 20 Minutes into the Past: While the show ran from 2015 to 2019, the events of the series only took place throughout 2015, which allows the show to indulge in some It Will Never Catch On trope examples.
• Twisted Christmas: The events of season four are set to occur during the holiday season of 2015, and is by all accounts the bloodiest and most explosive of the series. And it more than delivers: Tyrell, Vera, Janice, and Price are all killed, Elliot learns the truth about Mr. Robot and his father, the Deus Group hack is successful leading to Price's aforementioned murder, all in Christmas Day itself.

Tropes U to Z

• The Unfettered: Tyrell Wellick, but his pregnant wife Joanna fits the bill even better than he does. When the police come to their door asking about the murder of Sharon Knowles, she immediately realizes Tyrell killed her and, while preparing drinks in the kitchen, forcefully induces labor with a fork to prevent the unstable Tyrell from answering their questions. Yeah.
• The Unfair Sex: In Season 3 when Angela drugs and abuses Elliot just to complete Stage 2, Mr. Robot does nothing and lets her do it believing her reason to do this is justified. But in Season 4 when Elliot blackmails and possibly drugs Olivia in order to get the materials to take down the Dark Army, Mr. Robot calls this behavior unforgivable and something that "crosses the line".
• The Unreveal: We never find out what Whiterose's machine actually is. There are multiple hints and suggestions about time travel and alternate realities, but the machine is ultimately destroyed without any real reveal, and the alternate reality Elliot found himself in turned out to be another delusion.
• Unholy Matrimony: The Wellicks. They indulge in bondage sex despite his misgivings over risks to the baby.
• Unreliable Narrator: While this is a no-brainer and could fill a Doorstopper with examples alone, it is still very much justified considering that Elliot legitimately suffers from a laundry list of mental disorders, one of which has psychogenic amnesia as a symptom.
  • Elliot seems to think that random men in black are following him at all times, but Krista asserts that they are born out of delusion. It is never known whether the men in black are actually there or just Elliot's paranoia.
  • According to Elliot, he has underwent "intensive self-reprogramming" to see visualize any mention of E Corp as "Evil Corp," as it is all he sees and hears.
  • Elliot's withdrawal nightmare definitely indicates that there is a much deeper method to his madness as his hallucinations become more cryptic.
  • Despite seeing a picture of only him and his mother early in season one, Elliot later finds that the same picture now features his father and sister.
  • Elliot discovers that Mr. Robot is an alternate personality of his, and that every single one of their experiences was really Elliot taking charge.
  • Played straight in season two, where Elliot purposely lies to the audience about being in seclusion at his mother's house and the circumstances surrounding it when he was actually arrested and locked in prison for hacking Lenny Shannon.
  • Early in season one, Elliot mentions that he strictly controls his drug usage to avoid "turning into a junkie." However, Vera later mocks him for not admitting to himself that is a junkie already.
• Unknown Rival: Elliot became one for Angela, as she was hell-bent upon foiling his plans to stop Stage 2.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • Fsociety is an anti-capitalist hacktivist organization that wants to bring down Evil Corp and other Mega Corps who cross their moral code. They are indifferent to the upheaval this would cause if they should actually succeed, which is something that Eliot is not comfortable with.
  • Whiterose. She truly believes her machine will make the world a better place for everyone, and there's no line she or her henchmen won't cross to get it operational.
• Women Are Wiser: Inverted between Elliot and Darlene. Played straight with Tyrell and Joanna.
• Wham Line:
  • "wh1ter0se" (1x08): "Did you forget me again?"
  • "m1rr0r1ng" (1x09): "Who are you talking to?"
  • "h4ndshake" (2x07) has two: "When you see Whiterose, make sure you say I did good," and "Where do you think you are right now?"
  • The Season 2 finale has two pretty big ones at once after Tyrell is told by Mr. Robot to shoot Elliot and picks up the phone to call someone afterwards:
  Angela: Tyrell, you did what you needed to do.
  Tyrell: [crying] I love him.
  • "402 Payment Required" (4x02): "Elliot, I'm telling you, I didn't talk to Darlene."
  • "Series Finale: Part 2" (4x13): During his mind collapse, Elliot talks to a manifestation of Krista, and she reveals the third personality hinted at for the entire season.
  Krista: Krista never quite figured it out, did she? She never realized she wasn't talking to the real Elliot. She was talking to the dominant personality."
• Wham Shot: In "kill-pr0cess.par2" (3x06), all looks well as it seems that Elliot succeeded in preventing the destruction of E Corp's data storage building. But then he glances around and sees nothing but shocked faces and people crying. He runs to the nearest TV and, sporting the same horrified expression as everyone else, the camera cuts to news footage revealing that Stage 2 went off in the 71 buildings Elliot had sent the paper records to, resulting in thousands of deaths and the worst terrorist attack in American history.
• We Used to Be Friends: Angela and Elliot go from childhood best friends to bitter enemies.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Usually when characters are in life-threatening situations, their fates are left ambiguous until much later. This has happened with Tyrell, Angela, Dominique, Elliot, Trenton and Mobley, Cisco and Darlene, Mr. Sutherland, and Krista.
• We Wait: The common exchange is had between Elliot and Price after forming their Enemy Mine alliance, after Price announces his resignation to Whiterose.
• What You Are in the Dark:
  • When hacking, Elliot often ruminates about how everyone is different when no one is looking. This ends up being more telling than he thinks.
• Write What You Know: In a Freeze-Frame Bonus, the back page of Irving's novel Beach Towel can be read. The plot synopsis involves the protagonist being manipulated by a criminal mastermind, before eventually turning the tables on them, and promises themes of "political corruption and income inequality" with "a twist ending you won't forget". It is said to be based on the author's personal experiences... which makes sense, since the plot synopsis basically summarizes the Mr. Robot seasons Irving appeared in. invoked
• You Are Too Late: In "eps3.6_fredrick+tanya.chk" it appears that the FBI are raiding the house where Trenton and Mobley are about to be murdered and framed by the Dark Army. When they breach the room, it's revealed Trenton and Mobley are already dead and the Dark Army cleared out hours ago.
• You Killed My Father: The Washington Township leak that Evil Corp covered up caused Elliot's father and Angela's mother to develop cancer, fueling their desire to take down Evil Corp. Elliot later uncovers that Whiterose's machine was the source of the leak, though by that point he already has plenty of motive to take down Whiterose.

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"...so, this is what a revolution looks like."