Attention! This is an after-the-fact review of Mr. Robot and has allusions to later developments in the series.
Where’s my mind, man? Where is my conscience, that inner compass that is supposed to guide me, support me and make me feel good? I don’t have it, man. I think I’ve never had it. There is a void inside me. Where is my mind? Indeed, what is my mind? Is it me or is it just a part of me? Elliot is triune, he has inside infinite selves but no one fully responds to the sense of conscience, to the morality that seeks desperately, forcibly in everything Mr. Robot.
“Where is my mind“, is the question of Elliot who questions himself in this 1×09, the question of an Elliot who is desperately trying to weave the pieces back together of a life he doesn’t remember. Because, as we will understand later, that life was not fully his. He there, in that dim and distant past was silent and yet alive, repressed but agitated by one anger which explodes in this first season of Mr. Robot. Elliot wanders like a ghost, confused and without a conscience to guide him, relying on anger, al mastermind who owns it in every season. That is his mind, what directs him towards the revolutionary choice of destroy the world.
His conscience is a dark void filled with blind fury.
It’s an obsessive thought that keeps wondering, stubbornly, who he is and where he is, but above all where should I go. Where is my mind when I try to remember the past? Where is my mind when I relive that past in the image of a father who isn’t real? The whole perception of the world is compromised and becomes impossible distinguish what is real from what is not. Mr. Robot tries to be that guide, tries to bring Elliot’s anger back into the right track, directing it towards a noble and lofty purpose, towards a sense. But that sense something is always missing when you don’t know where your mind is.
Angela He knows. He has in mind what he wants. But she too, unknowingly, is moved and controlled by a mastermind, from an instance as angry and desperate as Elliot’s. Anger at the loss of one’s parent. Anger directed towards a scapegoat that must be immolated, torn apart, torn to pieces: the E Corp. Yet even in her, next to her, how Mr. Robot for Elliot, there is someone trying to drive it, support it, channel its destructive force into something constructive. In this 1×09 we still don’t know who he is or why he does it. We wonder, confused, why that same E Corp would want the woman who tried to destroy her after her. And that she failed to do it.
Someone in the shadows is working for her, moved by the same purpose that moves Mr. Robot: a feeling of protection and defense. Mr. Robot chooses to support Elliot, to support him in his journey of personal rediscovery. He can’t tell her where his mind is, he can’t do that. Only Elliot can. Only when this anger that feeds within himself will be extinguished, the world revolutionized and the memory recovered, only then will he be able to understand where his mind really is. And who is it.
But for the moment he’s just an angry and confused boy, an aimless wanderer unable to make sense of the antics he experiences every day.
He thinks he’s going crazy, in fact, he’s sure he is. And yet, in so much confusion, in so much frustrating anguish, without realizing it he is making gods progress. “Mr. Robot is me“, he admits in a moment of rare lucidity. Everything becomes clear for a moment and his mind falls back into place. But there is still a chaotic universe around and especially within him. There are many black holes, dark memories and ready to swallow him. It will be a long but necessary journey.
Where was my mind?he wonders, when he realizes that “It wasn’t me, all along“. Where is my mind? What is my mind? But above all who am I? The latter will be the decisive question, the necessary step for Elliot to reconstruct his story, weaving together the infinite, colliding souls of his mind and his past. Elliot and Angela share in this 1×09 an identical, angry, stubborn path of self-reconquest. Both naively have a common purpose which, however, is silly and inconclusive in the face of the games of the powerful.
“I wanted to save the world“, Elliot confides melancholy to Tyrell. It’s all here. Both want, hope and fight to save the world. They do it with the candor of a child which, however, is not enough to change things. They realize it very soon: a revolution it doesn’t come from just one person. Angela will accept that unexpected assignment, she will choose to try to change things from within E Corp, however, risking gradually losing herself. She coming to the point of asking herself again: “Where is my mind?” in that wonderful episode that is 2×11, when Whiterose’s brainwashing will lead her to lose itselfscrewed into false, reassuring illusions.
Elliot in this episode of Mr. Robot accepts that Tyrell joins him, that that revolution also passes from those in power who know it thoroughly.
“I wanted to save the world“, he whispers, embarrassed, and in pronouncing those words he almost seems to realize their recklessness. Elliot wanted to save the world and didn’t realize he had to save himself. It has always been this Mr. Robota close-knit path of personal rediscovery, of a desperate search for one’s own mind, for that conscience that seems irretrievably lost, erased like a useless file and overwritten by anger and fear.
It will take stubbornness, time, pain to figure it out. Elliot will have to fight for his mind, for the salvation of his inner world going through a undone, an undo that is always possible if you have an emergency backup. Elliot has Mr. Robot, the defense and protection of him, but above all Angela e Darlene, his dearest affections, the people who bring him back to reason, who return him to reality, however hard and painful it may be. “There is a part of you hidden deep inside that knows this is the right thing to do“Darlene says. She who desperately throughout the series will try to get her Elliot back, to recover for herself that hidden part who has decided to give up fighting, to take refuge in a world of fiction where everything is only apparently going well.
Now there is anger, confusion and despair. But there is also a faint hope, a belief that we can make a difference, that we can do the right thing. This is where the search for Elliot’s mind will begin. From this fighting hope that everything will be fine. That things will settle down if only we have the strength to continue to fight for the change to happen. Where is my mind?Elliot wonders in this 1×09 of Mr. Robot and the answer will be slow in coming, it will only be the final moment of a journey of identity reconquest that requires delicacy, gradualness, disillusionment and honesty. But who also needs thatamore who ultimately saves and restores all men to themselves. There, in those affections, in that love, it is Elliot’s mindthe mind, the conscience, in short, the soul of every man.