All Of Your 'Mr. Robot' Season 2 Finale Questions Answered

Mr. Robot Season 2 has come to a close, leaving us with a couple of cliffhangers and many questions. Thankfully Mr. Robot showrunner Sam Esmail and some of the cast have answered some of your burning questions, or at very least, providing insight into the choices that were made in this finale. What is going to happen to Phase 2 of F Society's plans? How does Tyrell play into the future of this story? What is going on with Angela? Is the FBI too close to stopping it all? What's with that post-credits scene? And what might we expect from Mr. Robot season 3? Hit the jump as we attempt to sift through the

Hit the jump as we examine the interviews and try to answer all of your Mr. Robot Season 2 finale questions.

Season one of Mr. Robot was a huge cliffhanger. Elliot wakes up alone in Tyrell's SUV three days after the f society hack succeeded with no memory of what happened. The episode ended with Elliot opening his apartment door and us not seeing the mysterious visitor (that question took much of season 2 to answer finally). And of course, the post-credits scene that revealed a meeting between Whiterose and E-Corp CEO Phillip Price.

Season two of Mr. Robot provides us with a bunch of questions. Angela picks up a phone call from Tyrell Wellick, apparently dispatched through the Dark Army. Has she been flipped? Is she working with or against Elliot? Does she have her own secret motivations?

"You can't quite read what side she's on, and it always keeps me on my toes in an interesting way," Esmail explains. "This just doubles it down for us. Now she's part of this group we never would have expected. She's shifted once again. But is this an alliance with Elliot, or is it against Elliot, one of her oldest childhood friends? That's something we're going to play with in an interesting way next season."

Actress Portia Doubleday admits that she's not really sure of the plan for Season Three yet, but says "there is definitely something that transpired in the last episode—whatever Whiterose said to her."

"There's a switch that has flipped in her. Something has drastically changed."

But why does Angela tell Tyrell he did the right thing in shooting Elliot? Doubleday says it's a tricky question, but she thinks Angela "feels she has to control" Elliot but "at the same time, she loves him very much." But does she want to be the first person he sees when he wakes up because of her love for him or her need to control him? Doubleday teases "I think you're gonna have to tune into Season Three to know that."

Esmail provides some clues as to where they will be taking this in Mr. Robot season three by namedropping not of his favorite Quentin Tarantino films, Jackie Brown:

Jackie Brown does it so well, where I'm watching the back half of that movie, and I don't know which side Jackie Brown is playing. I think it's really ingenious for Tarantino to keep us in the dark on that. It gives us suspense and activates us and engages us, because it makes us want to figure it out, as opposed to giving us the information ahead of time. With Angela, we're going to continue to do that, walk that line: What are her true alliances, and what are her true motivations?

As for the bigger arc of the series, Esmail says that it concerns White Rose's connection to the Washington Township plant:

"It is a thread that needs to be explored, but the big question is: What is going on in that plant? Why does she care so much about it? Also, what did she tell Angela to convince her of that? Obviously — and I'll say this right now, on the record — those questions will be answered in due time. Not every episode can answer every question, but those are the big, overarching mysteries of the show. The White Rose and plant of it all is something that harkens back to the beginning of the series. I think it will always be looming throughout the series and as we go into the next season. "

Esmail says that the concept of what Stage Two was actually brought up in the writer's room during the first season.

"If the endgame of the first season was hacking Evil Corp, the endgame of the second season would be to take down their paper records," Esmail told EW. "Once you take down their digital property, you would know that they would then try to rebuild the database and go to analog. That would be the executional plan for the season 2 arc."

While Elliot wanted to change the world, he didn't want to kill people in the process. If this is just the beginning of stage 2, who knows what season 3 might bring.

As for the decision to keep Tyrell Wellick out of the season, Esmail says that had a lot to do with Elliot. It was important to have Elliot reconcile his relationship with Mr. Robot, and it wasn't something he could do in just a couple episodes, or it would feel "completely disingenuous." And to accomplish this, Esmail says it "was all was predicated on Tyrell's absence, because once he comes back in, it blows up the whole thing."

"Whether Mr. Robot lied to Elliot or what he withheld from him, all of the sudden, the show becomes about that and the plot machinations of that and not about what Elliot's emotionally going through in terms of this serious disorder that he's discovered about himself," Esmail told EW. "Tyrell's absence was a byproduct of what we felt Elliot's journey needed to be for the entire season. Once we Tyrell came in, it went back to those plot machinations, folding Elliot back into the overarching journey of the revolution."

Expect Tyrell to be a larger part of the story in Mr. Robot Season 3, as Esmail has confirmed: "We'll definitely see more of him in season three."

The first scene of the Mr. Robot Season 2 finale shows a flashback to Elliot and Tyrell's first real meeting in Coney Island outside the F Society headquarters. Tyrell tells Elliot a story about his father and not wanting to be like him, but what does that mean?

[The Story] resonates with Elliot," says Esmail. "Elliot at the time was Mr. Robot. The way we've presented Elliot's real dad in the past, he was nothing like the Mr. Robot we see in Elliot's split personality. And it's a rebellion against everything Elliot's dad was — a guy who was too weak to fight back against everything Evil Corp was. And Mr. Robot, the side of Elliot's personality, connected with Tyrell's rebellion against his father, the fathers they felt were too weak for them. There's a real bond that formed there.

Esmail didn't want to have this "sort of conventional antagonistic relationship" which is why Tyrell tells Angela on the phone call that he loves Elliot. The friction is out of love, not hate.

Usually the hero and the villain of any story are deeply flawed characters. Well, what if these two have the same flaws and are two sides of the same coin, and they both see that and feel that and connect on that? I think there's something a lot more complicated there. We can go into a lot of deeper levels into what that relationship and that conflict will look like going forward.

This is why when Tyrell shot him, he didn't want to kill him. Remember, Tyrell was in tears and didn't want to pull the trigger.

Will Elliot survive being shot by Tyrell? Considering he's the main character in this series and while there may not be any "blue skies" in this show, this isn't Game of Thrones. The cliffhanger phone call between Tyrell and Angela suggests he is still alive, and Tyrell isn't going to just let him die.

The firing of the gun serves as a realization to Elliot. Not only is Tyrell real, but Mr. Robot seems willing to allow himself to be shot for the greater cause of F Society. Mr. Robot has always seemed concerned with self-preservation but in the climax of this finale, he tells Elliot that he's willing to go "all the way.  Esmail tells THR that this change completely "redefines the stakes" for the show:

"Now? All bets are off. In fact, everything to him is about the plan, and he's willing to die for this cause. That's how extreme his passion is for this whole project, for this whole revolution. It kind of realigns the stakes for us. Now Elliot cannot even trust his life with Mr. Robot, which happens to also be Mr. Robot's life. It also raises the stakes in terms of the extremes Mr. Robot is willing to go through in order to pull off this plan. It's two different levels that have been kick-started and raised a lot higher for next season."

Sam has always said that the show is really about Elliot's journey. The first season being the realization and awareness of who Mr. Robot is and how he pertains to Elliot. The second season was the battle and his discovery that it is not possible to destroy Mr. Robot.

"The third season is really that next stage," Esmail says. "The word I would use is disintegration. What does it look like now that these two are completely not on the same page, that they are completely split and truly split apart? What does that look like? That's the next chapter of Elliot's journey."

Dom walks Darlene into an FBI boardroom with whiteboards laying out the entire structure of F Society. Is this Darlene's breaking point? Will she turn against F Society and assist the FBI for a plea deal? Esmail would only say this about that loose thread:

"Dom says to her boss: her intention is to flip Darlene, to get the man in the middle, in this case, Tyrell. Season three, we're going to explore if and how that would be possible."

In the finale it is revealed that E Corp CTO Scott Knowles was the one leading Tyrell's wide Joanna on all this time, calling her and sending her gifts. But now she has plans to frame him, and Esmail lays it all out:

"The line in the last episode about of all the gifts, this is the greatest gift he's ever given us, that was an allusion to this is the plan she's enacting. It's essentially a frame up job to get Tyrell off the hook for the murder. Scott fell right into her trap."

Also remember that Elliot tells Tyrell that his wife Joanna is looking for him. Will we see the couple reunite in season 3?Esmail teases "Potentially."

This season's post-credits scene focuses on the F Society foot soldiers: Mobley and Trenton, who have relocated to the West Hollywood coast and are now working at a Fry's Electronics. We see them get approached by Leon, who we know works as an agent of the dark army. Why did they decide to end the season with this scene? Esmail says they wanted to answer the mystery about where Mobley and Trenton went off to and also they are "setting up another dynamic in this whole web we've created, which is, there may be a solution all of this."

"There may be a solution to reverting the hack. Whether or not that's even relevant to anyone anymore, and whether or not anyone even wants that at this point, is up for debate. But to add that into the mix — what if you can fix the thing that we started — is something we felt would be an interesting dynamic for season three. The other side of this is that this whole show has been about these guys who really wanted to change society, to revolution society, and of course they didn't think everything through. They acted more on impulse and were a little bit naive in that decision-making. We saw in the second season that this isn't exactly what they were expecting, that we were in the hangover of this. Now we have those same two revolutionaries saying, "Let's put this all back together." It brings up this very interesting question: Once you break something, is there a way to go back? Or have you done something too drastic that it's irrevocably changed? That there is no turning back? That's a question we were interested in exploring moving forward.

As for Leon's plan, Esmail tells Variety that his "intentions remain to be seen" but promises that "we'll definitely get into it in the third season."

What other clues do we have for what we can expect in the third season? Esmail says that while the second season was darker and more isolated like Empire Strikes Back, we should expect season three to emulate Return of the Jedi and we'll see a "new Elliot come into fruition in the next season."

Sam has also srevealed that he is now shooting for a five-season arc for Mr. Robot, up from his previous plan of four. So we haven't yet hit the midpoint twist yet.

Along the way, Sam Esmail provided some clarifications which might debunk your crazy conspiracy theories:

This should put some crazy conspiracy theories to rest before they pop up for next season.