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CHARACTER INFO
Character Name: Darlene Alderson
Canon: Mr. Robot
Canon Point: season 2, between episodes 6 and 7. so, after attacking Cisco with a baseball bat, but before greeting Elliot outside of prison.

Appearance:

Age: 26

Setting:
Mr. Robot is set in modern-day USA, Earth, and takes place primarily in New York City in about 2015-2016. The biggest divergence from our timeline is the presence of Ecorp, which is a multi-tentacled giant of a conglomerate corporation. Ecorp has an involvement in just about everything and everywhere--technology, banking, instant messaging, cell service provider, loan services, et cetera et cetera.

History:
BRIEF BACKSTORY: Elliot and Darlene grew up in New Jersey, the children of Edward and Magda Alderson, probably. Some dates don't line up. The Aldersons were very unhappy. After Edward lost his job at Ecorp, he started a computer tech store, Mr. Robot, which also failed. Edward was sick with leukemia, but only told Elliot; when Elliot brought it up, Edward pushed him out a window. On the face of things, they had an otherwise happy relationship. Things were more tense with Magda Alderson but Darlene bore the worst of it, e.g., her mother once tried to get her to drown her secret pet cat. Life was dark and unhappy both before and after Edward Alderson's death. Darlene ran away from home a lot.

In the first episode, we meet twentysomething Darlene plugged into her laptop at the fsociety HQ on Coney Island. She is duly unimpressed with Elliot when he makes his entrance, and similarly unimpressed when he shows up to work with fsociety the next day. When Elliot acts confused at Darlane's questions, she prompts him with a reminder of Mr. Robot's task for him: he needs to hand over access to the root directory from the DDos attack against E Corp. At Elliot's continued confusion, Darlene dismisses him as a dick and takes off.

Darlene, having demonstrated that she is a real friendly girl, puts in regular and abrupt appearances in Elliot's life. She stays over, uses his shower, bitches about her relationships, and eats ice cream on the subway with him. Elliot, meanwhile, elects to continue his work with fsociety despite Mr. Robot having pushed him off a railing and onto some rocks. In a stroke of crazy genius, Elliot cracks the plan for wrecking E Corp's hard copy records. Steel Mountain, the impenetrable fortress of data, does not need to be blown up. fsociety will hack the facility's climate control system. This part of the mission will require a physical presence, so Elliot volunteers to go with Ramon, Mobley, and Mr. Robot, while Trenton and Darlene stay behind to get in contact with the Dark Army, the powerful Chinese hacker group, in order to coordinate a simultaneous hack on E Corp's Chinese servers.

Darlene's contact with the Dark Army is a personal one. Their agent, Cisco, is her ex-boyfriend, the one who wanted to marry her. Darlene storms around New York with Trenton in tow until she finds him. Cisco is not so sure about Darlene getting in touch with the Dark Army and the famous whiterose, but Darlene is insistent. They will talk, Cisco will arrange a meeting, and it will go well. When the crucial moment comes, however, the Dark Army cuts off contact with Darlene. She hacks Cisco and uses his credentials and username, but the Dark Army is unresponsive, and do not coordinate the attack.

Elliot, Ramon, Mobley, and Mr. Robot return, only to learn Darlene's news. Without coordination from China, the plan cannot progress. It will be meaningless to trigger the meltdown of the climate control system, since China will still have the backup records stored. Their time is up. The records are duplicated; the duplicates are shipped out to similarly impenetrable structures. Darlene takes the failure very personally. She is angry with herself, and with her failure. On the way back to Elliot's place, she miserably puts her head on his shoulder and cries.

That seems to be it for fsociety. Or it would be. But it isn't. After helping Elliot release a man from prison so Elliot's girlfriend will be freed (which fails), Darlene rebounds. She secures a meeting with whiterose, which Elliot is to attend. Meanwhile, Darlene and Mr. Robot work on getting the band back together. While Mr. Robot pulls some crazy intimidation tactics, Darlene visits Trenton at university and lodges a more personal appeal. One by one, fsociety reforms. In his meeting with whiterose, Elliot learns that his Elliot's boss, Gideon, has turned E Corp's hacked server into a monitored honeypot, which would have been a trap. This is why the Dark Army refused to cooperate. Darlene and Elliot work together to take down the honeypot. They succeed, which will provide them a clear path for cooperation with the Dark Army. Darlene, ecstatic, tells Elliot that he is the best person and that she loves him. He kisses her. She reacts badly because, guess what: she's his sister, and he's forgotten all about her.

Elliot takes off, leaving Darlene to look for him. She enlists the help of Angela, a childhood friend of the Aldersons, but neither of them have any success. Angela, on a whim, tries the Alderson's old house. Darlene had the same thought and they meet there, but Elliot has already gone, to stand beside the grave of their father. Darlene and Angela find him talking to no one and having a bit of a breakdown, but they calm him and Darlene gets him home again.

Then Elliot takes off again. fsociety's hack takes place, without fsociety. The world goes effectively crazy. As CEOs shoot themselves on live TV and banks close their doors, fsociety eradicates the evidence of their hack, frees a whole lot of dogs, and hosts an end of the world party to eradicate any fingerprints or DNA evidence in their headquarters. "We are finally free," says Darlene. And they are, every one of them. And Elliot is still missing.

And that's because Elliot's vigilante hacking has gotten him landed in prison. Darlene sends encrypted cards asking for guidance, and pays Elliot some visits while he's in the big house. She is aware of Mr. Robot as a separate entity at this time, going so far as to indicate she would rather speak to "him", since Elliot is desperately trying to get through prison without Mr. Robot.

Darlene is the de facto head of fsociety at this time, and under her guidance, things start to go awry. Darlene and fsociety harass Susan Jacobs, the general counsel for Ecorp, out of her smart home, and take over the premises as their HQ. fsociety undergoes an expansion, and the house is full of expendable foot soldiers that Darlene whips into a frenzy on a handful of occasions with Mr. Robot-y speeches. Behind the facade, she's a mess, and weathers frequent panic attacks. Romero is killed during this time, and Darlene and Elliot co-hack the FBI to try to figure out who killed him. While they're in there, they uncover a massive surveillance project known as, Project Berenstain, and they leak information on the project to the American public.

Also Susan Jacobs comes home unexpectedly to find her house inhabited by hackers. fsociety ties her up in her pool room and, later that same night, Darlene uses a stun gun to kill Jacobs. Jacobs has a pacemaker, which Darlene may or may not have known about--but it's likely that she knew full well, as Jacobs' death was really an act of revenge on Darlene's part. She remembers watching the televised trial that followed the Washington Township Scandal, and remembers in particular seeing Jacobs laugh at the verdict that absolved Ecorp of any wrongdoing in the scandal--which was part and parcel of what killed Edward Alderson.

After killing Jacobs, Darlene goes back to Cisco's house. She wakes up and finds he is in the shower, and has left his laptop open. On it are displayed his recent communications with the Dark Army, and a photo of Darlene, asleep in Cisco's bed. Concerned that he is betraying her to the Dark Army, Darlene waits until he's out of the shower, then hits him in the head with a baseball bat.

Personality:
Darlene does not take shit from anyone. Confident, headstrong, bitchy, impatient, she can mostly be found posted up in a corner with a cigarette, staring judgmentally at the world around her.

Darlene is also sharply intelligent. Effectively Mr. Robot's second in command, she helped to start fsociety, and her work on the hacks and the programming used to achieve their goals is instrumental in their success. "I am really smart and good at things," she tells Elliot at one point, and this line, though deeply sarcastic, is also very true. Darlene knows how good she is. She doesn't need anyone to tell her so.

Her smarts are streetsmarts, and it's unclear where she learned her hacking skills. Elliot's interest in computers and electronics seems connected to Edward Alderson's tech store, Mr. Robot, but Darlene is never mentioned in correlation to the shop, and did little in the way of traditional school (too busy running away!). It seems likely that she is self-taught, out of necessity and out of a competitive streak that makes her want to keep up with Elliot and keep current.

Darlene is described once as the "consummate survivor", and right after that hook-up calls her that, he goes to work, and Darlene breaks into his safe to steal his gun so she can give it to Elliot. So, apt description. Darlene is determined to survive, and has fought her way through a lot of shit. She does not give up easily.

As a leader, Darlene's downfall is her anxiety and her inability to be the truly inspired voice that Mr. Robot is. When left to run fsociety alone, Darlene expands the operation to include a whole network of foot soldiers. This allows fsociety to work in more demonstrable ways, like stealing the balls off of the Wall Street bull statute--but also allows for a lot of loose ends, and allows fsociety to grow into an ultimately unmanageable beast. Darlene is not comfortable with the weight of the work asked of her. She is better as a point person, as the hands, and not the brain. Not that she would admit any of this.

She rejects the more standard and normal aspects of life. Elliot recalls that when she was younger, Darlene ran away from home a lot. When we meet her, it's easy to see this capability in her. She's strong and self-reliant, and openly mocks her boyfriend for having the nerve to propose to her. "Can you actually believe it," she asks Elliot as she stabs at her Froyo, but she is equally confident that her boyfriend will take her back. When Cisco does ultimately reject her, Darlene doesn't seem quite able to comprehend it. Then she gets pissed. Later, when Cisco tries to comfort her, Darlene rejects him. "You want to help? Be a man and let me be upset."

Darlene has a sharp temper, and her impatience makes her easily roused. She dismisses most everyone with a few sharp words, and she always has an insult ready. She is a poor teacher because she has no time for mistakes, including her own. When she fails fsociety, she is pissed at herself.

There is a softer and more loyal side to her as well. Season 1 of Mr. Robot does not delve much into Darlene's motivations for the foundation of fsociety. She spews the rhetoric about corporate greed and freedom, and indeed she seems to believe it. Later, she confesses to Elliot that the real reason she came back to the city and agreed to start hacking with him for good was because she wanted to be with him. fsociety was Darlene's version of a family reunion.

And that's because a part of Darlene is deeply (if narrowly) loyal. When Elliot gets into trouble with Vera, the drug dealer, Darlene helps her brother--and then, when Elliot is to be driven off to God-knows-where, refuses to leave him. She is visibly upset when Elliot drives off with the guys without her. Whatever has passed between them, Darlene loves Elliot--so she is, understandably, upset when he reveals that he has forgotten who she is. Again.

Dealing with Elliot is not something that Darlene seems to have been good at. From the way Angela talks, Darlene has been largely absent until recently, and indeed hints that Darlene might be in a way responsible for some of Elliot's backsliding--although that really isn't fair to say, as Elliot's actions are his own. And there is recent evidence to suggest that Darlene is a trigger for Mr. Robot, as it was Darlene who was present at his birth. Whatever else can be said, Darlene feels both a loyalty to and a responsibility for her brother--and, to an extent, shares in his sense of responsibility for freeing the world. When her collusion with the FBI forces her to betray Elliot's secrets, she does what she can to keep him safe, and only agrees to comply on the condition that she will be safe--and that Elliot, too, will be safe. He is the only thing that she has in the world.

Darlene also hates what the world is, and hates the hand that was dealt to her family. It is her revenge that drives her to kill Susan Jacobs with the taser. She plays it off like an accident, but she had read through Jacobs' emails and knew that she had a pacemaker, and her speech to Jacobs just before she kills her indicates how premeditated Darlene's actions really were. Whether or not she intended to kill Jacobs herself, she certainly believed herself capable, and wished for her death.

There is more to Darlene than just a bitch in heart-eye sunglasses. She might be badly mannered, irritable, and short tempered, but Darlene is a hacker with a heart of mostly gold. Perhaps not as gold as Elliot's. Perhaps more tarnished. But she is cofounder of fsociety. She is a believer in their work. She is smart and good at things, and she is a menace to society.

Inventory:
- clothes: blue military-style jacket, grey tank top with floral skull pattern, dark denim shorts, dark kneesocks, below the knee boots with big heels, sunglasses, underwear.
- pocket contents: 1 half-finished pack of cigarettes, 1 gold rhinestoned zippo, a transit card.
- 1 backpack, containing: Ecorp laptop and charger, a notebook with a lot of torn-out pages, a red marker, a pack of gum with 4 pieces remaining, a bag of weed and requisite generic bong, makeup bag, spare underwear, spare socks, glasses case, grey hoodie, miscellaneous keys on a souvenir keychain from Coney Island.
- Ecorp phone
- burner phone