Season 4, Episode 8: ‘408 Request Timeout’

Last week, “Mr. Robot” dropped a bomb on its protagonist. This week, the fallout began.

Elliot Alderson, our hacker hero, has just learned that his beloved father molested him. There’s no such thing as a good time for a revelation of that nature. But only hours remain before Elliot is scheduled to hack the Deus Group and bring their empire to an end. Meanwhile, his sister, Darlene, is being held at knife point by Dark Army goons alongside the F.B.I. agent Dom DiPierro, and their lives are in danger unless Elliot can be tracked down. The timing could not have been worse.

Elliot beings the episode in a state of blank-faced shock. As his therapist, Krista, hurries him out of her apartment and takes a taxi to the closest police precinct to report the death of Fernando Vera at her own hands, Elliot seems barely to hear or understand what is happening. He snaps out of it as he and Krista say their goodbyes, but only to a point: Now that he knows what his father did to him as a child, he has no idea how to move forward.

For Darlene and Dom, the threat is more immediate: They’re being held prisoner by Janice, the Dark Army’s infuriatingly chipper emissary. Janice toys with her F.B.I. captive, first outing Dom’s romantic feelings for Darlene, then stabbing her in the lung, leaving her to slowly asphyxiate. Janice says she’ll save Dom and spare her family, who’ve been held hostage in the middle of their Christmas festivities by a squad of Dark Army operatives, if and only if Darlene can locate Elliot.

Unfortunately, Elliot’s retreat from the real world has taken him off the grid. After he snaps out of his near-catatonic state, he follows a vision of his child self to the Queens Museum, where he used to hide from his father as a kid. He screams an apology at his young alter ego for having failed to protect him(self) from his dad’s depredations all those years ago. For a fighter like Elliot, who has spent months tilting at the biggest windmills in the entire world, a perceived failure to have fought back hard enough would naturally weigh heavy on his conscience.