WARNING: Spoilers ahead for "Mr. Robot" season two.
We're on episode two of Mr. Robot's second season, and much like last time, it's never quite clear when things are real, or some crazy delusion in Elliot's head.
Though this episode didn't resolve many of the questions we had for the debut, it's moving ahead a bit and showing us more about the new characters on the show, most notably in FBI Agent Dominque DiPierro.
There were some things that stuck out for us in this week's episode.
1. A flashback scene tells the origin of fsociety's Coney Island digs, and they were surprisingly hidden in plain sight.
At the start of the episode, Mobley is being taken through an alleyway by Romero and being told a story of the place he's about to take him — which ends up ultimately being the arcade where fsociety later pulls off its hacks.
But the flashback scene has a couple interesting anecdotes within: The revelation that Romero was busted and imprisoned for six years, and his main contribution to the hacker world is being a phreak.
Phone phreaking was popular in the pre-smartphone, payphone days, as those who knew the tricks could scam free phone calls and hack into places like AT&T with a payphone and pre-recorded tones.
Though we knew the arcade was called Fun Society since the first episode of the series, it's interesting to hear Romero tell the story of how they came to be there. Started as a business called Fun Society Amusement, LLC, it had been in legal limbo and boarded up.
And the group seized on the space. But they didn't do much to the name. They've been hidden in plain sight the entire time, as the hackers known as fsociety were literally working at a place called F Society.
That may be a costly mistake, since FBI Agent Dominique DiPierro finds the place at the end of the episode.
"You've got to be f--king kidding me," she says.
2. Elliot is still battling his hallucinations, fighting not to be "owned."
There's a key (and particularly gross) scene where Elliot decides to take a bunch of adderall to rid himself of Mr. Robot. That doesn't work out so well, and he ends up throwing them up.
It's at this point that Mr. Robot appears and says that Elliot is owned by him.
Which, in the hacker world, holds another meaning. Sure, Elliot is a bit of a slave to Mr. Robot, but "owning" something as a hacker means you have taken full control over that thing. Basically, if Elliot hacks a mobile phone, he has "owned," or "pwned it," as he would write it.
"I will not be owned," he fires back.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider