One of the most overlooked elements of Season 2 is the slow-motion car wreck it was for Darlene (Carly Chaikin), who puts on a brave face and soldiers forward out of love and admiration for her brother but is really the girl crying in her room alone at the beginning of the season.

During Season 2 we find a lot more about the trauma Darlene experienced as a child, while we know that she is trying desperately to maintain Elliot's "organization" through sheer strength of will (at the same time she feels uniquely unqualified to carry out its mission). During the season, she becomes a terrorist, puts her oldest friend in harm's way, becomes a murderer, loses a man that she loves, and ends up in FBI custody.

In her own way, she is as bifurcated as Elliot (which is why, I suspect, Esmail included the Body Double reference mid-season when Darlene goes to the hotel in disguise). Outwardly, she is the iron tough leader of fsociety while inside she is the girl who wanted so badly to be saved from her family as a kid that she didn't mind being kidnapped by a crazy woman).

She loves Elliot so much she puts her brave face on and risks the whirlwind to run things while he is in jail (she is in real and serious jeopardy in FBI custody at the end of the season, Gitmo level jeopardy, as one of the leaders of a criminal conspiracy to destroy the US economy).

When she visits Elliot in prison on the 24th and asks him to be more like Mr. Robot, this might seem like a betrayal, but it was Elliot who put her in this position. She needs Mr. Robot because fsociety is falling apart at the seems, Romero is dead, Gideon is dead, most of the core members are on the run, and she is having to rely on the B-Team (a bunch of fringe followers). As we find out later, she has no particular talent for strategy.

Darlene has been left holding the fraying explosive bag that Elliot handed her, and all Elliot wants to talk about has nothing to do with how she can keep things together. You hear a lot of talk about privilege in society today but Darlene is right to suggest that Elliot is in the privileged position here (despite being in jail). She needs help and direction, not to have a nice long talk about old times.

In a sense, the game of Chess that Mr. Robot and Elliot play for so-called "control" of Elliot prime ignores the value of the chess pieces entirely. If anything, Mr. Robot is being more thoughtful than Elliot here because Elliot's sister, friends, and co-conspirators are all at the most extreme risk while Elliot sits in jail and tries to resolve his Daddy issues.

Mr. Robot is clearly the more admirable personality fragment when he objects to Elliot sharing everything with Warden Ray Hayworth (Craig Robinson) after Ray finds Elliot's Red Wheelbarrow notebook after Elliot throws it away (for a genius, Elliot is pretty cavalier with his "confessional" notebook). Elliot seems never to remember how many bodies are at stake in his personal mental health games.

Anyway, Elliot agrees to play chess with Mr. Robot for control of Elliot Prime.

And, as we know, what he learns is that Mr. Robot is Elliot and Elliot is Mr. Robot.

No annihilation, only stalemate.

He can't escape who he is. He can't escape his Father. He can't look in the mirror and not be haunted any more than the rest of us. We carry our parents with us.

He can stay bifurcated or integrate.

I am certainly not saying that he can't become a better person. But, you really have to think about the narcissism of Elliot's dream sequence here (his dream is represented both during S2 and in Red Wheelbarrow).

Leon (Joey Bada$$) suggests that Elliot should, "Take a look into the future" he'd be "fighting for and see if it is worth it."

Elliot's saw the "future fairy tale" (remember everyone Elliot cares about was sitting together at a big table having a grand time) and decides that it is a future worth fighting for. But what the hell does that mean in this context, almost every single person at his dinner table in the fantasy is at risk in the real world because of Elliot.

Mr. Robot isn't really being the bad guy here. He is right, lots of the people Elliot purports to care about need Elliot to get back on the job.

Luckily, after the stalemate (aka the Handshake), Elliot decides to re-engage with technology and accepts Ray's offer to work on the TOR site.

Unfortunately, because Elliot wants to get to "the bottom" of what is going on with Ray's site he insists on getting in contact with Rat Tail (Luke Robertson) and we know what the result of that was (another body on Elliot's foreseeable consequences list). Seriously, RT had actually gotten free of Ray and the Nazi Gangsters he was using for security in the jail because he did not want to be a part of the terrible things happening on the TOR site and Elliot forces him back in (and as we know this results in the death of RT).

Massive Narcissism.

I should probably do a bit about the ethics of consequentialism here but Elliot is totally full of shit here anyway. He doesn't need to use RT to get to the bottom of what is going on with Ray's site. Elliot uses RT here because it will make his Robin Hood job easier. Elliot is the best hacker in the world, this was just an expediency measure.

In other words, Elliot did not use RT to save others. Elliot saved others from the site for sure by turning Ray in, but he sacrificed RT simply for expediency IMHO.

This is why he sees his Father's face in his personality mirror. Just like his Father "looked the other way" when sacrificing Darlene to his wife, Elliot frequently sacrifices real people that he knows and real people that he doesn't (RT, everyone made destitute by five/nine).