As a WMG subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Vera lasts long enough in season 1 to be scary, but not enough to be a seriously developed character. He then reappears in the last season to conveniently wrap up Elliot’s psychology arc.
Of the people we see interact with Vera, all of them significant enough to have names, have pre-existing knowledge of Elliot’s multiple personalities. Of all the people to take him down, it's Elliot’s psychiatrist who finally stabs him, which has a lot of symbolic significance.
He goes down in the same episode Elliot comes to terms with his past trauma. This is also the same episode where Mr. Robot says: “I can't protect you anymore.” and walks out.
Pretty much all of his conflict with Elliot can be explained much in the same way as Mr. Robot.
Implications...
Vera gives a story about “beating a bully to near death with a baseball bat.” Elliot’s fateful event notably had Elliot “swing a bat.”
What likely happened: Elliot was already psychologically breaking from getting molested by his dad. At the time his personalities came into existence, Vera beat his dad to near death with a baseball bat. Realizing he could be criminally liable for the damage, Mr. Robot took over and jumped out the window. This ensured any story told to police couldn't stick.
Elliot could claim he was pushed out the window by his dad. His dad couldnt claim Elliot attack randomly attacked him because that story wouldn't explain Elliot falling out the window.
Darlene’s story suggests she didn't know their dad was molesting Elliot.
While both Elliot and his dad were at the hospital, Vera walked to his dad’s room and said “I see you.”
Fast forward to the “I'm sick” announcement Elliot’s dad made. It wasn't cancer. He was trying to explain his abuse to his son. When we finally see the dad die in the theater, it was the Vera personality who poisoned him. It was also the Vera personality that casually walked away.
Fast forward to when Vera killed Elliot’s girlfriend. Either she or Elliot (Vera) was the dealer the whole time. Vera killed her to protect Elliot for some reason.
Fast forward to Vera’s return and Darlene’s “Who are you?” question. Darlene either already knew about the Vera personality, and she asked that question to Elliot, who had much different behavior. Or... she didn't know about Vera, and noticed Elliot was neither acting like himself, nor Mr. Robot.
When we see Elliot give his “I hate myself” speech to his final season girlfriend, that was the Vera personality talking. The relationship almost ended the same way as the one in season 1: dead girlfriend.
Prediction:
The big reveal will be when both Mr. Robot and Vera appear to Elliot after Vera ‘died.’ Since there are about 6 more episodes to go, Elliot will come to terms with the fact that his personalities are not ‘gone,’ but he’ll be able to use their strengths in the fight against the Dark Army.
A little extra for fun:
Will Elliot live? Probably not. The other two personalities conveniently disappearing after the fight with White Rose would be too cheesy. It's also hard to imagine an epilogue where Elliot is suddenly “just ok” without some sort of goal to pursue.
Jossed. Vera is a separate person.
“WHAAAAT?”
The two fit incredibly well together, especially where “time travel” and “split personalities” are concerned.
Since this is the Mr. Robot, page, here’s a quick (spoilery) synopsis on Homecoming:
A contract company with ambiguous ties with the military, works on a memory manipulation drug. The drug can cause a Middle East vet to forget a PTSD-inducing event and the deaths of multiple associates. In some cases, the characters seem to adopt nearly separate identities.
The first season of Homecoming repeatedly refers to a character named ‘Geist.’ Geist, in the stinger is heavily implied to have dual, opposite gender identities. The character implied to become Geist (or the other way around), makes the transition via a dermally applied version of the memory drug.
If the two series are completely independent of each other, this can be written off as Esmail really blatantly recycling the Whiterose character, but these characters’ comparisons seem too specific to each other to be a simple case of lazy writing:
Same / similar race; Opposite genders to each other; Their respective secondary (primary?) personalities are transgender; Their ‘overt’ personalities are very ‘corporate’ while their alts are very mysterious.
If you count Elliot, then we’re up to three dual-personality characters; but Elliot doesn't fit the Whiterose / Geist comparison as cleanly.
Additional notes:
Things get more interesting when you consider that Homecoming actually provides an explanation for the dual personalities, and by implication, justifies having so many dual-personality characters.
The drug also explains the “time travel” theme in Mr. Robot. The drug causes people to forget major events, and they also forget the status of those involved. In the case of the soldier, since he forgot an IED explosion during his tour of duty, he assumes the people involved are still alive.
This aligns incredibly well with White Rose’s promises to Angela of ‘undoing the damage’ because the drug would essentially do that in people’s minds.
Then there are the implications for Mr. Robot’s arc. All three split personalities could actually be ‘Manchurian Candidate’-style sleeper agents. Elliot targets the cyber infrastructure. Whiterose handles the politics. Geist handles the drug.
If Elliot is being manipulated by the drug, that would mean he has a programmed trigger for Mr. Robot’s personality, and the drug could actually force him to forget the moment of each time he’s triggered.
There’s also a “blink and you’ll miss it” moment in Season 2, Episode 1 of Mr. Robot, where Elliot as a child, falls out of the window, and is taken to the hospital. At around the 05:50 mark, his mom is freaking out about the hospital bills since Elliot’s father doesn’t have insurance. His response: “There won’t be any bills.” Someone has to pay the amount. If not the insurance, and not the family, then it needs to fall on a 3rd party.
It is made pretty clear Elliot’s parents were awful, and Elliot is a very unreliable narrator (explained by the memory manipulation drugs). He could have imagined his dad’s shop, in place of a military lab. He could have even imagined his dad. He didn’t react emotionally to his dad’s death. This could have been the chemicals, or darker still... he fit the ‘dad’ persona to whichever lab member happened to be with him at the time.
- Another online theory is that it's vice versa, where Mr. Robot actually does exist and Elliott doesn't.
- Possibly Jossed as of the seventh episode, in which Mr. Robot directly interacts with Darlene and Romero in separate locations while Elliot is elsewhere.
- Could be a Durden-like "imagining himself through his eyes." Still too early to tell.
- In Episode 8, Mr. Robot is revealed to be Elliot's father, who as far as we know is deceased. Whether or not he actually is real or a hallucination still hasn't been answered.
- Mr. Robot could also look completely different and be suffering the same image replacement quirk as the E(vil) Corp logo
- CONFIRMED
- This was pretty much it.
- They are allied, but for all the wrong reasons. Tyrell sought out Elliot after being fired by Evil Corp, and now seems to want to take part in the attack for purposes of revenge.
- That would be awesome if it were true. And if any show could try to pull that off, it'd be this one.
- If his real first name Samit then his name (Samit Esmail) would be an anagram of "mt alias is me" or phonetically "empty alias is me".
- Is it especially weird that the name is one letter away from an anagram for Rami Malek's twin brother Sami Malek?
- CONFIRMED, though only with his sister, since his dad wasn't real. Darlene outright says as much on the train after The Reveal.
- Based on what we've seen so far, it seems less that Dark Army is being backed by the Chinese government, than that they've infiltrated the Chinese government.
Five episodes after "init_1.asec" we get S 02 E 09 which is called "init_5.fve". This was the last episode we saw in which Elliot gets released from prison to be greeted by his sister outside. They hug and Darlene whispers something into his ear but we don't get to hear what is. It is "init 5", a new script buried deep down inside Elliot's mind, a new sequence of actions in the master plan. Immediately after Darlene triggers "init 5", Elliot breaks down again and loses it but at the same time is determinated to carry on with "Stage 2" without actually knowing what it is. The next episode is called "hidden process", which indicates that stuff happened / is going to happen in the background without us knowing.
She is busy working the social engineering angle of phase 3, and it involves a nuclear accident in one of E Corp's plants.
Clues: Although Elliot does not want her involved, she ends up saving fsociety's bacon not just once.
Her trip to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: While she is left alone in the office, we have conspicuous close-ups on the surveillance camera, while the previous episodes recaps reminded us that with their back door, fsociety can delete security footage. The recaps also remind us about the "rubber ducky" she has, an USB device capable of pulling passwords from a computer. She did something while alone in that office, but fsociety deleted the footage, including ours.
Why is the Dark Army so fanatically driven to sow chaos on a global scale? What exactly is Whiterose's pet project she keeps alluding to? After three seasons, Whiterose and the Dark Army's motivations are still obscure, for the most part. Or are they? Think about it. Whiterose is obsessed with time, and later tearfully confesses to Dom her fascination with the concept of alternate realities. In the season three premiere, a scientist giving a tour at the Washington Township power plant also expresses a fascination with alternate realities right as Whiterose is walking by. Season three is loaded with hints indicating that this is the case: Angela's deranged belief that helping Whiterose will bring her mother, Elliot's father and all the people who died in Stage 2 back to life and that time his literally going in reverse; Whiterose telling Grant, right before he kills himself, that she'll find him once her work is complete; the Superman time-reversal reference as Elliot undoes the Five/Nine hack; all of the Back to the Future references. This would explain the Dark Army's fanatical loyalty to Whiterose, and why she's fixated on the Washington Township plant, which houses a machine resembling a Large Hadron Collider.
Whiterose seems to have a superhuman ability to keep track of all events, and all of her plans go off without a hitch. In the entire series, there has been virtually nothing that has derailed or even delayed her plans. She understands Angela, Price, and Tyrell so well that she was able to effortlessly manipulate them. Additionally, when she speaks with Grant one last time, she promises to "find him" after his death, and speaks as though there will be another timeline where Grant did not have to kill himself. Much like how characters in the Zero Escape series can travel across timelines in order to make different choices. Whiterose was promising Grant that she will find a timeline where Grant would not find himself attempting to kill Mr. Robot in a fit of jealousy.
All of this would make sense if Whiterose were an esper, and had repeatedly attempted to implement the 5/9 hack and Stage 2. Everything worked this time, cause she has because she had made countless attempts in other timelines.
