Standing on the beach, with a gun in my hand, staring at the sea, staring at the sand Staring down the barrel at the Arab on the ground, I can see his open mouth. But I hear no sound. I'm alive, I'm dead, I'm the stranger. Killing an Arab - The Cure

The inspiration for that song by The Cure, a favorite of Sam Esmail, is the Albert Camus book “The Stranger” in which a man, almost as if in a trance, kills a random Arab man on the beach. For most of the rest of the book, he is trying to come to grips with his crime from a prison cell until he finally comes to grips with his crime and its illogic, as he explains:

“It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.”

Sometimes things happen, or we do bad things, and we are not precisely sure why they happen.

I have talked to, for instance, fellow recovering addicts who tell me that they spent an entire day feeling great because they 100% knew that they were resolved not to act out (use their substance or engage in their addictive behavior of choice) only to wake up several hours later to the reality that they had broken their sobriety (FYI I am a recovering addict with 7.5 years sobriety, wrote a book about addiction and recovery, and am very active in my recovery community).

Just like Angela was struggling to come to grips with her own complicity last week, trapped in a loop of watching one of the 71 buildings as it collapses and come back to life, Elliot had to come to grips with his complicity this week.

And, for him, that complicity started with the fall of his father Edward, from cancer, in a movie theater while he literally walked away and didn't even try to help his Dad.

Sometimes, we have to come to grips with some hard realities about the ways in which we are broken and the ways in which being broken seems way beyond our ability to establish control.

The difference between knowing in your heart that you want to be good but facing the reality of having done something bad can be maddening.

I remember an interview that I once heard with the Director, actor, and artist Terry Gilliam where he talked about how he got the idea for his masterpiece, the movie Brazil. He mentioned something about sitting on a somewhat polluted beach alone (maybe in New Jersey) and the only other person on the beach had a small radio and he remembers that it was playing the song Brazil.

Somehow, he was haunted by this reality until a very surreal and dystopian movie grew up around that one idea.

In the movie Barton Fink, the main character (umm, Barton Fink duh), often imagines that he is sitting on a beach and that somehow that makes sense, or at least helps him escape in his mind, from the insanity that often surrounds him (or maybe he was sitting on the beach, like Terry Gilliam inspired by some idea or memory to create an insane and troubling narrative about himself in his head).

If there was ever an episode of Mr. Robot that gives some credence to the idea that Elliot is creating his own simulation, this could have been it.

But, my gut still tells me that this is more surreal than it is a signal.

A few years ago, after many years of silence, one of Sam Esmail’s main influences, David Lynch finally revealed his inspiration for the Movie Blue Velvet, when he was a kid, he started to turn down a dark alley and a strange woman came out of the alley and ran past him totally naked and frantic.

He recreated this scene that had been haunting him like a ghost an entire life but instead of placing it in a world of logic and linearity, he presented it in a world much more akin to the way he had been experiencing the memory his entire life.

He showed us his nightmare. He exposed the ghosts.

Elliot is letting us see his guilt and his ghosts.

In a later Lynch movie, "Lost Highway," he had two different characters that were, in a sense, actually different elements of the same character (sound familiar?). The second version of the character wakes up as a totally different person, only aware of having the same name and some of the same memories, but instead of being the married jazz musician he went to sleep as, he wakes up living in a prison cell and wearing a different face and owning a different history.

I suspect this is how Elliot feels when he wakes up almost every day (especially after Mr. Robot has been in charge).

As he shares with Darlene before he starts on his surreal journey:

“I tried everything, medication, therapy, fuck I even put myself in jail, he won't leave, he won't leave because I wanted this...I liked it”

Tonight's episode is about Elliot letting us see the reasons he decided he needed to kill himself (all the reasons, even the ones that are more ghosts than real) and he is also letting us see the reasons he ultimately decides he changes his mind (he can still make the world a better place - thanks to Trenton).

Elliot created Mr. Robot. He is to blame (I have been saying this since Season 1).

Now that he has accepted his complicity, he starts thinking out the only good thing he can do for the world is end himself and the part of him that enjoys the idea of burning down the world.

Dissociatives are a fragmented whole and the different parts do whatever they are best suited to do but they are all part of the same system (I have called this system E Prime since Season One).

So now that he has come to grips with what he has done, how does he tell the story?

He tells it like David Lynch, like Albert Camus, and like Terry Gilliam did.

Sometimes we see, have done, or do things that are so terrible that it is impossible for us to represent them in the cold light of real-time and linear time or logic.

Portia Doubleday has often said that Angela and Elliot are both chasing the same goal but through different means.

Now they are both living different versions of the same nightmare.

Spirit Guide