'Mr. Robot,' the Audio Easter Egg, and the Van Gogh Painting

By Dustin Rowles | Mr. Robot | August 4, 2016 |

By Dustin Rowles | Mr. Robot | August 4, 2016 |

After wheel-spinning through the first third of the season, Mr. Robot finally found some forward momentum in this week’s episode, “eps2.3_logic-b0mb.hc.” For over an hour this week, the characters circled the wagons until they eventually jumped into them, only to discover that they were loaded with explosives.

There was amazing Audio Easter Egg uncovered by a Redditor, in fact, in this episode. There’s speculation that the Redditor was a plant from Mr. Robot because who would ever uncover such a thing? At any rate, when the audio is translated into an image, we see this:

“Hang in there, pussy” may have been a coded message by Sam Esmail to his viewers: Hold tight, things are about to get real.

Boy, did they.

We still don’t know where Elliot is, but it’s hard to shake all the prison-like imagery in Elliot’s scenes. This week, another clue arrived in the form of a Van Gogh painting, Wheatfield with Crows, thought to be his last before he killed himself. It was painted only two months after he left a mental asylum. which very well could be where Elliot currently resides.

The painting could have also foreshadowed the oncoming tragedy. After a creepy meeting with China’s Minister of State Security — who just so happens to be the head of the Dark Army, Whiterose — Dom walked right into a shootout at one of E Corp’s storage facilities in Beijing. Never trust a man with that many clocks who speaks in heavy-handed ways about mortality.

Meanwhile, Elliot himself got into trouble of his own after he made the mistake of looking into the website he was trying to hack for Ray. “I told you not to look,” Ray told Elliot, after Elliot discovered the website was used to sell rocket launchers, sex slaves, assassins, etc. on the black market. Nothing was more heartbreaking in this episode than finding out that Ray was a seriously bad guy, willing to rip off a hacker’s rat tail. His thugs delivered a beat-down on Elliot that may keep him from hacking into the FBI for a few days, but don’t underestimate Elliot’s ability and capacity for vigilante justice.

Ray is fucked.

So, too, may be Angela, who got a visit from her old boyfriend Ollie. He charmed her with cheap beer and Josh Groban Night before revealing that he’d talked to the Feds. That scare led Angela back to Elliot and fsociety, and now Angela is back into the fold, poised to help Elliot hack into the FBI.

We still don’t know where Tyrell Wellick is, but we do know that his wife, Joanna, is demented. She had a parking garage attendant murdered and ensured that he had enough time to process his own death. Twisted.

It’s hard to get a beat on where Mr. Robot is headed this season, but “Logic Bomb” did a lot to bring the disparate characters back into the same orbit. In a season already filled with death, the episode’s final tracking shot was also punctuated with the most terrifyingly violent sequence, so far.

Consider my wavering interest fully reignited.