Let’s do the least important part first.

What if the Washington Township Facility (WTF), a nuclear power plant, is being used by password ‘whiterose’ (from now on just ‘whiterose’) to generate enough power to literally travel “Back In TIme” just like in Elliot’s favorite movie “Back To The Future?”

Sincere apologies for all the haterade I sent towards all of the “Back to the Future” and “SciFi” Mr. Robot theorists over the last two seasons, it is quite possible they were onto something.

When Angela said:

“What if I told you we could make it like none of this ever happened. I mean everything. Including what happened to our parents. If we could take it all back?”

I knew I had misread the Back to the Future references, but I am still sticking to Occam’s Razor.

Here is an article from Wired in 2013 explaining the kind of power that would be necessary to go back in time, and how one might attain it:

“Now, how do you get 5 x 108 – 5 x 109 Joules? Doc Brown’s first choice was to use plutonium. Although he didn’t give too much of the details, I guess he was using Plutonium-239. Pu-239 is radioactive, but I don’t think that’s how it gave energy in this case. Instead, I guess that there was some type of fission process that broke the nucleus into smaller pieces. Since the pieces have less mass than the original, you also get energy (E = mc2). The Wikipedia page on plutonium as the details, but let’s just say that one Plutonium atom produces 200 MeV (mega electron volts) in the fission process (3.2 x 10-11 Joules). In a typical nuclear reactor (which probably wouldn’t use Plutonium-239), this energy is used to increase the temperature of water to make steam. The steam then turns an electric turbine to produce electricity. Clearly, that’s not happening here. I’m not sure what’s going on – but surely it’s not a 100% efficient process. I am going to say it’s 50% efficient. In order to get 5 x 108 Joules, I would need: Since 1 Plutonium-239 atom has a mass of 3.29 x 10-25 kg, this would require a fuel mass of just 1.2 x 10-5 kg. That seems possible.”

Obviously, while time-travel to the future has been proven possible, time-travel backward is thought to be impossible (you have to do some crazy stuff to hold two wormholes open).

However, plenty of folks have suggested possible fixes to both the Grandmother and the backward time travel problems and Michio Kaku often talks about things being possible even if we don’t entirely understand how they are possible “yet,” so let’s not discount the idea out of hand.

I suspect Sam Esmail will just harness one of the theories for how backward time-travel is possible and apply the fusion solution to it.

One possible solution is parallel universes, and (oddly enough) guess what was mentioned in the first few minutes of Eps 3.0 by a group walking through the WTF?

Yup, you guessed it, parallel universes.

Anyway, the WTF modified to become a fusion reactor could allow us to visit parallel universes and to time travel backward (in other words, to visit any moment in time, in a parallel and interacting universe). Also, a particle accelerator is also one of the methods that could create fusion power.

Or, perhaps, this quantum physics theory presents us with the answer:

“It might sound odd to have high-level physicists congratulating each other for figuring out that time travel isn’t real, but in reality it’s physicists’ slavish adherence to mathematical logic has made this conversation necessary. Looking at the most current mathematical models for time and space, there’s simply no reason that the arrow of time can’t be turned backwards, that you can’t enter a so-called “closed time-like curve” (CTC) and loop back around to the past. No reason, of course, except that that’s obviously impossible. The insight published this week is that quantum superposition may offer an out, which both allows time travel and eliminates the paradox. Consider our general situational setup, with a photon going back in time to switch off the machine which first emitted it. This photon will at all times be in a superposition of states, meaning that it can have multiple, sometimes directly conflicting, states at the same time. That certainly sounds useful if we’re interesting in wiping out impossible contradictions, doesn’t it? It is slightly more complex than all that, but the math essentially boils down to that. The actual experiment claims to have confirmed a principle called self-consistency, which basically states that if a particle went back in time it would have a certain probability of emerging and self-interfering across time, and that that probability is fixed to that probability that it will enter the CTC and go back in time. The upshot is that any object traveling backward in time actually has a sort of multi-dimensional probability distribution — much like an electron is in all places within its positional probability distribution. In the past, physicists have traditionally used the probabilistic model to say that while backward time travel is technically possible it is also functionally impossible — that the probability of being able to travel back in a CTC and self-interfere is vanishingly close to zero but, importantly, not actually zero overall. This new experiment could show a way to a more robust, and sci-fi friendly, alternative.”

Or as one one of the ARG folks figured out by running a QR code hidden in 3.0, it could use a particle collider to create the time travel itself.

Regardless, it is hard to forget that ‘whiterose’ explicitly told Angela last season that her Mother had been involved in a project to bring humanity to the next level at the WTF and then makes a reference to it coming full circle by telling his aide that he is using Elliot to get what he needs and then suggests that when they are done with Elliot that he can “die for us just like his Father did.”