I have never been wrong this much in my three years of writing about Mr. Robot.

First things first, I have had an argument running for over two years with many Redditors about the question of if Edward pushed Elliot out of a window or if Elliot pushed himself.

Apparently, I was really wrong,

Apologies.

I was wrong and my Redditor friends were right.

Mea Culpa.

I still have some real reservations about Elliot pushing himself out the window.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) happens when someone (usually at a young age) experiences serious trauma.

DID is a protective device where instead of a person facing down all of life's stressors as a unified being the parts of that person best able to handle each new problem take over to face down and handle whatever are the most pressing and troubling new events.

A dissociative person is a fragmented whole (not a set of independent personalities fighting for control of a single body).

Mr.Robot is a show based on puzzles and reveals (or it has been until now).

It has always been presented like it were a puzzle (all of the pieces are in the box but you have to figure out how to assemble them correctly). Sure, in the Mr. Robot puzzle the pieces themselves might try to convince you that they belong somewhere else and you might need to use the box itself to complete the puzzle...But you could be sure that all of the pieces were there if you just concentrated hard enough.

Our job has been to figure the clues out correctly and to put everything in the right order while Sam’s job is to make the pieces seem ill-fitting, shake the box up over and over again, and constantly try to make us forget that our job is putting together the puzzle.

My worst nightmare has been a Mr. Robot that “makes things up as it goes along” (in the style of Benioff and Weiss, the showrunner’s behind Game of Thrones).

But here we find ourselves. To date, the only trauma we have ever been presented with that could fully explain Elliot's dissociative break was Edward pushing him out of a window and now that foundational piece has been erased from the puzzle entirely.

I would be fine with this if they had pointed to a piece of information, another puzzle piece, that had been sitting there in plain sight since the beginning which explained Elliot’s dissociative break, but they did not.

They just erased the piece and started fresh...That really worries me in the worst possible way.

Don’t get me wrong, the clues that Edward did not push Elliot out the window were there and were lovingly and almost forensically assembled by adherents to this theory (there was a series of screenshots that I remember broken down to Elliot’s trajectory and landing position etc.).

What I am talking about Sam and the writer’s not giving us any information that explains an alternative narrative for what trauma Elliot experienced that created the Dissociative break and inflamed Elliot’s rage (there is also the question of why Edward felt the need to apologize to Elliot at the movie theater, but that could have been

I am not even saying that they won’t provide an alternative explanation. I am saying that either that information was hiding in plain sight or it will represent the worst kind of writer’s cheat and a sign that Mr. Robot is heading in a new direction unbound by all of the rules that it has previously followed.

Frankly, I don’t care about if Edward was good or bad (in fact, I prefer the “good Edward” narrative). All I care about is that the pieces are all put in front of us and they aren’t changed just to allow the writer’s the flexibility to write themselves out of corners that they painted themselves into.

All I am saying is that when the rules of the universe have been established and then those rules are violated, everything starts unraveling and what was an enjoyable puzzle turns from a legitimate and well-constructed mystery into Mr. Robot’s “magic hour.”

One other thing, this could seem like whining, but this is the central foundational motivation for the protagonist of the entire freaking show. Now we have no idea why Elliot is so angry, no idea why he was so angry at E-Corp, and no idea why he has dissociative identity disorder.

When Sam said it wouldn't be cool to inject time-travel into S3 of a show, it is also uncool to unmoor the motivation for your main character out of the blue in S3 (meant with respect).

Now, It could easily turn out that the answer was hiding in plain sight and If that turns out to be the case I will go back to being happy as a clam.