Elliot himself appears to have been hacked, with some combination of mental illness, drugs, and desire having bifurcated his conscience: There’s the hoodie-wearing junkie, and there’s the fearless political radical played by an avatar of his dead father. In the show’s ninth episode, that radical, Mr. Robot, indicated that Elliot’s confusion came about by deliberate overmedication from his therapist. But that might be a lie, a self-deception that allows Elliot to undertake dark, difficult tasks under moral cover of amnesia. In the finale, Mr. Robot tried to hack Elliot further, forcing him to face the fact that he’s got a revolutionary living in his head.

What does that revolutionary want? To reveal that all of modern society is a manipulation. With a preacher’s fervor, amid possibly hallucinated throngs of people in Uncle Moneybag masks, he ranted out a grab bag of anti-capitalist talking points—which are also, theoretically, the facts theoretically enabling E-Corp’s power:

Look at it: a world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills. Psychological warfare in the form of advertisements. Mind-altering chemicals in the form of food. Brain-washing seminars in the form of media. Controlled, isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You want to talk about reality? We haven't lived in anything close to it since the turn of the century. Took out the batteries, snacked on a bag of GMOs while we tossed the remnants in the ever-expanding dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses, trademarked by corporations, built on bipolar numbers jumping up and down on digital displays into the greatest slumber mankind has ever seen. You have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bullshit, a kingdom you've lived in for far too long. So don't tell me about not being real. I'm no less real than the fucking patty in your Big Mac.

Perhaps Mr. Robot’s most potent hacker of all is the showrunner, Sam Esmail. As a piece of TV, the finale was mostly brilliant, packed with images likely now seared into viewers’ longterm memory banks: the cold, unblinking eye of the TV camera facing the suicidal E-Corp exec; the strange, faux-casual mannerisms of Elliot and Joanna Wellick as they sized each other up; Elliot, choking himself in a cyber cafe during a delusional fit; Elliot, choked by Mr. Robot up against the NYPD’s American flag lights in Times Square. Even more powerful was the use of music, whether it was Alabama Shakes’s airy “Sound and Color” accompanying Elliot’s new worldview or Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Got Your Money” playing on the hackers’ dance floor.

The vivid filmmaking style of Esmail and his team is not merely impressive; it’s of a piece with the rest of the show’s themes about misdirection and mood-massaging. A favorite trick of Esmail’s is to let small, possibly vital info drips be overpowered in the audience’s mind by a jolt of wide-screen awesomeness. Take the opening of the finale, when Lenny says that Elliot has proxy servers in Estonia, and “short of that country falling apart, we’re never going to get any real evidence” of his crimes. In the very next scene, a news broadcast indicates Estonia is indeed on the verge of collapse because of the fsociety hack. I missed that fact the first time I watched, because I was too caught up in the goosebump-inducing joy of hearing Time Zone’s bouncily anarchic single “World Destruction” fading in over footage of global protests. But the truth is, we may have been given a vital clue about next season: The big hack could incriminate Elliot in a much smaller one, which could in turn incriminate him in the big one.