For the most part Mr. Robot Episode 7: View Source is largely a poignant tale of Good Vs. Evil. It’s more or less tech-less, and might aptly have been given the name The Total Depravity of Man, a biblical doctrine featuring the darker side to human nature.

The show starts in flashback with protagonist Elliot’s former (her throat was cut in Episode 6) roommate and morphine/suboxone contact, Shayla, meeting for the first time. She brings him round his now beloved pet, a black fish trapped in a glass.

As the two sit on the steps outside their apartment building, shortly after Shayla had saved her six year-old niece’s fish, they listen to The Cure’s arguably most haunting song: Pictures of You.

I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you

That I almost believe that they’re real

I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you

That I almost believe that the pictures are

All I can feel

Reportedly Robert Smith wrote the song after a house fire and while going through what was left in the fire Smith found his wife’s wallet – that contained pictures of her. Pictures of You is on The Cure’s album ‘Disintegration’, and that it what Elliot writes on the DVD where he has stored all the information he has on Shayla.

During the flashback Elliot sheepishly tells Shayla that he doesn’t like many people, but her expression tells us he is going to like her. She sees something good in this introvert. She offers her services as a morphine supplier – Elliot asks for Suboxone safety net – and she explains that Elliot may have to get involved with a rather degenerate character, “a fucking psychopath … but you might be worth a psychopath.”

It was this meeting that proved to be the demise of Shayla, something which will haunt Elliot. At the end of this beautifully made scene we are left with Elliot’s loss, the disintegration of a nascent love affair, and with it, it seems, his hope. But in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, sometimes we have to head into the storm, and come out dead or bloodied, so that a greater good can transpire. Mr. Robot might be dark, but one feels it’s also optimistic.

Hell is other people

In the following scene Elliot remembers when he first discovered how to view source code, how he could change it; write his own name in the code. Code is faithful, it is what it is. While at work he imagines if people carried around with them their own truths, if their code could be as transparent as that of a machine. “Would people really wanna see that?” Elliot asks. He imagines one employee has a sign saying, “I’m empty inside”; another sign states, “I’m bulimic”.  Find someone to be honest about yourself with, is the advice given to Elliot by Gideon, his boss at ALLSafe, when he see his employee stricken by the death of a friend. Elliot’s internal dialogue responds with “Bullshit”. People are phony in Elliot’s world, and he has the ability to find evidence to back this up if he so desires. Elliot reminds us of Holden Caulfield in the American classic novel Catcher in the Rye: “I was surrounded by phonies…They were coming in the goddam window.” Elliot’s world, like Caulfield’s, sees us protecting the truth behind heavily guarded pseudo-personalities we’ve created. We are humans with almost impenetrable psychological firewalls, forever acting for the hard-to-please audience of other people.  Bullshit.

Bad Guys

We later meet some of the repellent executives working at Evil Corp painfully discussing some of the things important to them; this consists mostly of stories containing misogynistic platitudes and homophobic insults. Their repartee is overheard by the now unhinged power-seeking Tyrell, who then summarily fires the three men. A good act by a bad man doesn’t make a good man. Tyrell, the archetypal villain of Mr. Robot, then murders Sharon Knowles while a rather incongruous pop soundtrack is playing. It’s a brutal scene, reminiscent, but not as shocking, as one of the murder scenes in the hard to watch film The Killer Inside Me. It’s not easily understood why Tyrell committed such a horrific act, but one thing is certain, Mr. Robot wants us to believe that evil lurks everywhere in the corporate world.

In another scene denoting total depravity Angela attempts to make a deal with former Evil Corp CTO Colby. She arrives at his office, him seeming phlegmatic, composed among the books lining his walls. Until she asks him a simple question’ a morality question, one that concerns all the little people and the fabulously rich owners of industry.

To paraphrase: What was it like in that boardroom when you made the decision to allow toxic waste emissions to drift into areas where people might be poisoned.

His response:

“Did we all have cigars and laugh hilariously as we signed the evil documents? My secretary then was Elaine, who brought us a platter of shrimp cocktail to tide us over to dinner, which pissed us off because we just had a platter at the holiday party. Jim opened the bar. Now, Jim was a real piece of work — half pansy, half mafia. First sign of a tight decision, he’d be chain smoking, downed a river of Scotch. It rained, I remember that.”

So that’s what it was like, she says, when you made the decision that would lead to my mother’s, and Eliot’s father’s death.

Mr. Robot again should be applauded for bringing up socially salient issues. A question Angela might have also asked is: How do you sleep at night? Chris Hedges, a Veteran War Correspondent and political activist, was once asked to give his opinion about this issue of guilt, or lack thereof, when big people make brutal decisions. His answer was that they can go home at night knowing they’ve done the right thing, not just in terms of profits, but for what they might crudely feel is the Greater Good. A decision, be it political, or industrial, might cause suffering and death, but the decision-makers can also be good fathers, mothers, play ball at the weekends and spend Sundays prostrating at the cross. Hedges called this, ‘moral fragmentation’, something the writers of Mr. Robot seem to be well aware of.

Telling the Truth

For a year Elliot’s therapist has been trying to get something out of him, but she hasn’t succeeded. In this brilliant finale she receives more than she desires, or so it seems by the expression on her face. She gets to see some of his source code, and her own.

“I’ve been lying to you,” says Elliot, “I don’t take the pills, but neither do you.”

Illustrating his power he then explains to her in detail her daily routines. He tells her that she likes porn and has a predilection for anal sex. He tells her she’s not good with money. Talking about her clients, he says, “You encourage them to leave their husbands just because you’re bored of being dumped.” Eerily, he explains, “I watch you sometimes through your webcam, you cry, just like I do, because you’re lonely.” I don’t just hack you, he explains, now almost in tears, I hack everyone. “But I’ve helped a lot of people.”

His final words:

“I want a way out of loneliness, just like you.”

“Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Elliot knows he is going to have to crack a few eggs to get his omelet, a kind of Nietzschean adage that in Elliot’s world means the chaos he causes, mostly by illegal means, is for the greater good. A mirror to some of the hacking stories we’ve experienced over the last few years. This is a revolutionary show, make no mistake about it. In spite of Elliot’s psychological self-flagellating and growing misanthropy, he’s heading towards Sainthood. It won’t be easy, just as it hasn’t been for the likes of some Hacktavists in the real world.

Photo Credit: USA Network