So, we don’t know for sure that “we” are Elliot’s friend and we don’t really have an authentic means of communication with Elliot even if we are friends. But, for the sake of argument, let us assume we are the collective object of Elliot’s attention. That we, the gathered millions of audience members, are literally being invited as a collective but unitary character into the show’s universe by the shows “protagonist.”

First, we know Elliot only senses us when some form of media or technology is present (We know this because, in the companion book Red Wheelbarrow, Elliot mentions that for most of his time in prison, he was not talking to us anymore, necessitating the use of the notebook to record the thoughts he would normally share with us).

Anyway, we know that he loses contact with us when Season One ended and we know that he started talking with us again at precisely the moment that the television show overlapped with the book. At that precise moment, Elliot became able to see/sense us again but mentions that he might still be withholding information from us because he no longer fully “trusts” us. So, most likely, given all available evidence, Elliot requires the existence of some technological mediating device to be able to see us (his Friend).

Yes, I am suggesting that the reason Elliot doesn’t trust us is that the USA Network ended the season shutting off the ability for him to sense and communicate with us. We require the camera to SEE HIM and he requires the cameras to SEE US (this also is interesting in that it might suggest that we are possibly both living in parallel real or fantasy worlds or perhaps the point is to suggest that neither we nor Elliot either lives in a ‘real’ world or that a “real” world even exists.

** An aside, I had a conversation on Reddit with a friend named “bwandering” who responded to this notion by explaining that Elliot’s inability to see us without an operating interface might also explain why all of the episodes are named after different kinds of computer file formats (some of which are video) **

What Does It Mean? Part Two

This notion that reality itself is always contestable is one of the elements of Mr. Robot that most reminds me of David Lynch movie “Mulholland Drive,” or more specifically, the connection between the two parts of the film through the “Silencio Box” (kind of a box that connects the two very disparate parts of the movie that both include the “same” characters but the “same” characters acting very differently).