Mr. Robot is ready to log off.

The Emmy-winning series, which helped USA rebrand away from blue skies programming and catapulted recent Oscar winner Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody) to stardom, is back for a fourth and final season that promises to be “filled with answers, hacking, and blood.”

Realizing the end was coming, creator Sam Esmail set the stage for Robot‘s swan song with the season 3 finale, making Elliot’s (Malek) mission clearer than ever and reconciling him with his alter ego, Mr. Robot (Christian Slater). Now, taking inspiration from British TV Christmas specials, the final episodes will be set during the 2015 holidays. “It adds a sentimentality to it,” says Esmail. But it won’t be all presents and cheer. “We definitely question the morality of Elliot and what he’s done,” he adds. “That gets put to the test in interesting and dark ways.”

Before the series returns one last time, EW talked with Esmail about the reason he’s ending the show, Elliot and Mr. Robot finally working together, and whether Trump will pop back up again.

Elizabeth Fisher/USA Network More

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What went into the surprise decision to wrap up with season 4?

SAM ESMAIL: I don’t know we ever thought it was going to be longer. In fact, my answer has always been between four and five seasons, and I never quite knew what the exact number was. But basically the way we came to this decision is, after we wrapped season 3, we went back into the writer’s room, and this whole time we’ve had the ending in mind, that’s what we’ve been building up to, and as an exercise I decided to put the last two episodes of what would be the series finale up on the board and I just asked the writers, if we were being honest with ourselves, how much story do we have from where we ended season 3 to these last two episodes? We let that dictate how much story we had left, and it turned out that this would be the final season. It’s a little bit longer than our usual 10-episode season. To us, it was very fascinating to do it this way, because it was really the story letting us know when it was time to end it.

I talked to Rami earlier this year, and he said him and Christian and Carly kind of made a pact to soak everything up as much as possible while filming the final season. Were you able to do the same? Or, with so much left to do before the show is officially over for you, will the reflecting on what this experience has meant to you have to wait a little longer?

You do have those surreal moments when we started wrapping actors and their characters. You start to take in the finality of it. No matter what I’m not going to be writing any more scenes for these characters, I’m not going to direct Martin [Wallström] as Tyrell in a scene again, and those things really resonate. I am in this weird position, because, even though we’ve wrapped shooting, we’re still editing the show, so my mind very much is still in the world and in these characters and still trying to shape how it’s all going to come together. But I think the communal experience on set, it really hit us all and we did try to savor it as much as possible, especially towards the end.

Season 3 ended with Elliott reversing the 5/9 hack, but, if everything was suddenly just fixed and all good then you wouldn’t have a show, so what will the repercussions of that reversal?

Well, I think Elliott says it to us at the end of season 3, that even though he’s reversed the hack, one thing has come out of this, which is that the top one percent of the one percent have shown themselves in White Rose and her associates, and now we’re setting the stage with season 4 for Elliott to go after her and her clandestine group.