Except to us. Elliot unleashes his alienation on the audience in a fourth-wall-breaking voiceover that turns the viewer into his imaginary friend and closest confidant. And while the iron grip he’s had on the story has started to loosen, he’s been an all-consuming but unreliable narrator, the full extent of which we're only starting to understand as Mr. Robot’s first season comes to a close. Things are largely funneled through his point of view, i.e., every time someone mentions the conglomerate Elliot blames for his father’s death, we hear his nickname for it instead — Evil Corp.

The instability of Mr. Robot’s subjective universe has only increased (spoilers ahead, for anyone not caught up) as the season has gone on, until, in the penultimate episode, it was revealed what many of us suspected all along: That mysterious, erratic head of fsociety, played by Slater? He doesn’t exist. He’s never existed, not in the form in which we’ve known him. He’s a delusion who looks like Elliot’s dad and who dwells only in Elliot’s head.

Elliot has been Mr. Robot all along.

Malek isn’t in on every detail of the show’s plan — USA renewed Mr. Robot for a second season before the series premiered — but this is an unveiling he’s known would be coming from the start. He’s aware that it’s the sort of development that requires a leap of faith, even in a series that, from the beginning, established Elliot as paranoid, unstable, and uncertain about the truth. He’s maybe even been a little nervous about it.

“I have to remind myself always that it's a tightrope with him. One episode, you probably want to kill him. And the next episode, I'm sure you feel for this guy,” Malek says later, sitting in the gratifyingly air-conditioned Silk Road Cafe on Mott Street. Elliot may sometimes traipse into the morally questionable territory of a Walter White or Don Draper, but he’s considerably less sure of himself and of his world, to the point of being someone who seems in need of help rather than some grand act of white-hat corporate terrorism.

“My hope is that the audience comes together with Elliot to try to get him back to reality in some way,” Malek says. “I understand that it is hard to watch someone's perspective that is, at certain moments, not real. Or a figment of his imagination. But that's the ride you're on with him — so I guess you gotta take it or leave it.”

He pauses, then leans forward and asks, “You wanna take it with him?”

Well, yeah.