that bitch was playing chess. dark army is everywhere. tubbs and muslim chcik think they're safe out west. what the fuck did whiterose show anglea to convince her to get on the team? and darlene better keep her fucking mouth shut.
MR. ROBOT Official Discussion Thread (New Season starts Oct.6)
- Thread starter playahaitian
- Start date
Man there is no way that Dom would have been able to peace all this shit together.....
Idk, they did have the illegal servalance going on, and enough people talked to where they could have gotten that information.
It's also not 100% accurate.
Man what in all of the shit...
I'm fucking pissed off at this ending.
I'm fucking pissed off at this ending.
Ok never mind... I still have 10 minutes left.
Ok just finished... still don't like this ending.
Way to many open threads without answers.
Way to many open threads without answers.
There are way to many dots connected from this. I also don't see how they can get the link to Elliot especially since Elliot was in jail almost immediately after the hack and since none of the major players gave up any real information.
They can probably connect him to Tyrell. They were probably watching his house when he was wanted for murder.
Also, I think his former boss from all safe may have said something. Didn't he say something about the Feds asking about him when he visited him in jail?
My guess is their connections aren't really that strong and just good guesses so far. No real dark army on the board and they still have Tyrell at the center.
No
It doesn't add up at all that Elliot would even be on the radar of the FBI.
And putting Elliot in the center with Tyrell is more than a good guess.
I need the receipts on how they pieced all of it together. Especially when they didn't even know where the F society was until the miracle agent showed up.
Thanks bills... I'm glad I'm not the only one. There is no way that they could have pieced this together like this. Hell Dom's never mentioned Darlene at all. Most the season she was guessing about Angela. So how in the hell would she linked Angela's ex to the all safe hack.
And again... there is no way that Elliot would even be on the radar. If this wall was real... then why don't they just arrest everyone. They have all the main players.
Elliot clearly isn't hiding... hell wouldn't they put a tail on him or bug his place. Clearly that's not the case. This finale is the first time that I'll say that the show had a misstep. there is no reason to just rush into making Dom a fucking invincible Sherlock homes.
Naw Elliot has been kind of sloppy, and everyone that the Feds interviewed either visited him in jail or is connected to someone that visited him. If they were all under servalance it wouldn't be that hard to come up him being involved.
Also, since he was in jail his calls and visits were probably monitored. The whole delusion thing caused a lot of misdirection, but if you think about those phone calls and discussions during the visits it wouldn't be hard to put it together.
Then some people snitched too.
Correct.
The only way it works is if they detail the process of how they got here, and if they do that it's still a miscalculation on their part because it's not an OOOOH ah ha moment it's an you should have showed me this to begin with thing. It's one of those trying to be cute with deception in times when you need to be straight forward if this is the case.
Elliot was not on anyone's radar. Nobody. He went to jail for the dog shit, it was successfully pinned on Tyrell.
He has no attachments or ties to Tyrell for real.
Darlene is suspect a maybe not a real deal of course.
The other two, that are working at Frye's don't do anything. The boyfriend that died is the only one who was exposed.
If Elliot was on the side somewhere then I'd believe the wall because you look at everybody and then see what sticks.
There are no concrete blocks to connect Elliot as the center piece in this entire thing. None.
It would be really hard because he went to jail for something unrelated to that hacking. He was already cleared even if he was monitored after the fact.
The next thing that wouldn't add up is that Elliot didn't deal with a lot of people. Just the original hackers in the room. Everyone else thought Darlene was the leader so there's no way they could have said no it's really her brother. She was the spokeswoman and did all of the front running so Elliot didn't have to. They wouldn't even know him.
Even with his delusion, he spent this entire season, the part in jail, suppressing it. They never talked about it. They talked about other things. His routine, helping the warden run the illegal tor site. Those things were talked about. And the warden approached him on that because he got arrested for the dog shit and hacking the email stuff.
Badass was in there as a whiterose representative. Watching him every single day. If Elliot would have slipped up or snitched through his delusion he would have been killed.
I need some concrete on how he became the centerpiece like immediately other than a "hunch"
Because going by everything they discovered Darlene should be in the center not Elliot. And they should have done that before they revealed the board.
I will have to review the time line, but the Feds interview Angela then she goes to visit Elliot. Gideon is interviewed by the Feds, then he goes to visit Elliot. Didn't he speak on the phone with Tyrell while in jail also?
The surveillance they were under wasn't just them being followed around, it was some sort of mass surveillance software, spying on the entire country. If the connection wasn't made I think it would be more unrealistic. How he got close to the center may be a questionable, but if he got on the radar and the call from Tyrell while in jail was real that would likely be it.
Angela visited Elliot on the train and the dark army snatched her.
Gideon visited the Feds because Allsafe was involved but he didn't mention anything about Elliot and Elliot didn't say anything to Gideon when he saw him.
The only possible way that the FBI would be on them like this is if the Dark Army leaked the info and this was part of Elliot's plan. Almost every one involved was connected through the dark army except for the Asian dude from all safe. This might come into play with Tyrell speech about Elliot saying that they would be Gods. A god wouldn't care about getting found out.
peace
She's close but has nothing solid and no real ideal of Elliot's and Ange's plan.
She keeps flashing that magic shell but ain't no bullet nor a crime other then that of her snatching it from ole boy.
This is basically all Dom has hoping to shake or let the answers fall out of Darlene fucking with her ego, by putting some respecK on her 'name' & so called accomplishments.....
My girl PimpWifey wants ALL her paper now that she's on her own.
Trenton & Mobley are abt to be acquainted with the trunk of that Caddy one way or the other even thinking that Let'sFixItBack dumb shit.
Hahaha at that being the best they could do with what 6332 agents plus Dom & super taps on the job foh
Only centered by proximity with having the connection from the Centerpiece Weller & the snitches so called boss as their usernames are under their names.
She's close but has nothing solid and no real ideal of Elliot's and Ange's plan.
She keeps flashing that magic shell but ain't no bullet nor a crime other then that of her snatching it from ole boy.
This is basically all Dom has hoping to shake or let the answers fall out of Darlene fucking with her ego, by putting some respecK on her 'name' & so called accomplishments.....
My girl PimpWifey wants ALL her paper now that she's on her own.
Trenton & Mobley are abt to be acquainted with the trunk of that Caddy one way or the other even thinking that Let'sFixItBack dumb shit.
Hahaha at that being the best they could do with what 6332 agents plus Dom & super taps on the job foh
Naw Elliot might be sloppy but Mr Robot is on point.
There is nothing to connect him. This entire time Elliot has barely known what has happened and we, the viewer, can't trust anything that we see from him... hell how do we know that he even got that phone call. Tyrell clearly doesn't seem the type to randomly call and just breathe on the phone. He wants this plan to succeed and that would be to easy.
peace
& where'd the tape go after Cisco found footman @ the eHouse if we assume that he didn't destroy it properly while taking ole boy to the hospital? He better have ate it since it wasn't in the crib they swept.
Doesn't matter because it's in the wind.
Nice because if he didn't go get it when Darlene went to check Ellioit, he would have got ran up on by the Feds.
& where'd the tape go after Cisco found footman @ the eHouse if we assume that he didn't destroy it properly while taking ole boy to the hospital? He better have ate it since it wasn't in the crib they swept.
Doesn't matter because it's in the wind.
Nice because if he didn't go get it when Darlene went to check Ellioit, he would have got ran up on by the Feds.
Right. The key distinction, in a show that is all about the fine print, is that he is the centerpiece of the investigation.
Elliot has not been hiding. If. They thought he was the centerpiece, how did he get snatched by Tyrell's wife...whom they've been following, and then eventually go back home only to leave again and get in a cab and get out with Tyrell...the most wanted man in america walk right the fuck across the street from the ecorp offline data center into a building and NOT be in cuffs right now?
The way the show is going they are dragging out the feds investigation and only showing it thru one field agents eyes.. the reality is there would MANY agents working many different angles that would nab fsociety...the way the show goes its as if theyre saying only one agent would working on 911.
HOW FSOCIETY WOULD BE NABBED IN REAL LIFE
1. Gideon would have dropped elliots name all over the place to the feds.. there was no reason for him NOT to.. He lost his career, his marriage everything so it was ridiculous for him to try to get elliot to go to feds when he would have been giving them his info from the beginning. Gideon said himself that whenever something went down..the all safe hack, e corp tech officer getting implicated, elliot being somewhere else when he should be at the office.. He was at the center of all the problems and issues they had. Gideon would have told the feds all that stuff and elliot alderson's name would be known to the FBI and he would be a person of interest at least at this point.
The fact that he's in jail now would have made it easier for them to track him and see who visits.
2. The two people at Steel Mountain who interacted with elliot when he hacked the thermostat. I'm sure they erased the security vid of him in the building but the feds would just question everyone in that section of the building for any strange or unusual people there and that list would get narrowed down quickly because
remember Bill the schlubby guy who elliot made feel bad to get to access to where he wanted? Bill would certainly remember elliot and describe him to the feds and PING number two...now elliot's a suspect.
3. observing who visits him in jail would be easy and who would they see...
she's involved in the all safe hack and now works at e corp....hmmm she's now at least a person of interest if not a suspect and who else visited elliot in jail?
who is she...his sister?? put a tail on her and see where she goes...
whose house is this? an e corp high ranking attorney? why would she be going there?
In the story as it goes..elliot isn't on anyone's radar..yet..but in real life he would have been suspect number 1 almost from the beginning and certainly by a year after the 5/9 hack like it is now..
it wouldn't be that hard or laborious to find them all either.
remember the All Safe hack preceeded the Ecorp hack and the feds were pressuring gideon but on top of that they had the personnel records for the company and no matter how careful ellliot was otherwise his fingerprints are all over All Safe
I'm hearing the theories but still.... there is no way they would have connected Elliot to this. Again.... if he was then you would have surveillance on him... with the hope that he would slip up and connect them to Tyrell but obviously they don't. The fact that Tyrell is still in the city, walking around like it isn't shit... should tell you all you need to know about either the power of dark army or is this world actually real.
I'm leaning even more towards my belief that this entire world is made up in Elliot's head. The flickering lights and the fact that they seem to flicker under every dramatic scene..... is becoming the give away to me.
I'm leaning even more towards my belief that this entire world is made up in Elliot's head. The flickering lights and the fact that they seem to flicker under every dramatic scene..... is becoming the give away to me.
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i will be exponentially pissed if this turns out to be the case.
I was going to say the same thing...that kind of dramatic turn NEVER works out for a TV show...NEVER..
People were PISSED when it turned out a WHOLE SEASON of Dallas was a dream for Pam Ewing...
Season nine followed the aftermath of the death of Bobby Ewing. When Patrick Duffy decided to come back as Bobby in the spring of 1986 the producers decided to make the whole of Season Nine a DREAM. So Pam woke up and Bobby was alive, it had all been her nightmare.
People were PISSED when it turned out a WHOLE SERIES of St. Elsewhere was in the imagination of an autistic boy..
Tommy shakes the snow globe, he is told by his father to come and wash his hands for dinner. Donald places the snow globe on the family's television set and walks into the kitchen with Tommy and Auschlander; as they leave the room, the camera closes in on the snow globe—which holds a replica of St. Eligius.
The most common interpretation of this scene is that the entire series of events in the series St. Elsewhere had been a product of Tommy Westphall's imagination, with elements of the above scene used as its own evidence.
People were PISSED when it turned out the whole series of Roseanne was some fictional story she wrote after her husband died...
In the show’s final moments, we learn that the entire show has been in Roseanne Connor’s imagination. She’s been writing her memoirs and has changed the details of her life that she didn’t like. We learn that, in reality, Dan had died of the heart attack, daughter Becky married David (instead of Mark), daughter Darlene married Mark (instead of David), and sister Jackie is gay (instead of mother Beverly). Barr then reads a very long T.E. Lawrence poem that seems to go on forever. The whole dream twist comes out of left field and feels completely out of character for what began as a simple blue-collar sitcom. So many could identify with it for so long that to end it this way feels very cheap.
so there is very little positive history for a tv show to do something like that and it end up working out in a GOOD way..
in fact there was ONE show did that and it worked and the ONLY reason it worked was because it was Bob Newhart and anyone familiar with his style of comedy would get the nod back to his popular old show
So an ending like what your talking about for Mr Robot does NOT bode well at all.
I was going to say bob Newhartbefore I saw you put it in there. It works so well because his previous show was loved. That was
I remember that Dallas finale.. the end credits had this
"And Patrick Duffy as ???"
like everyone didnt know that Bobby was coming back
*thoughts?
In Season Two, Mr. Robot’s Biggest Weakness Is Trying to Be Too Clever
“All we have is a garbled reality, a fuzzy picture we will never make out.”
Our fourth-wall-breaking antihero Elliot Alderson says that in the season-two finale of Mr. Robot, and it sounds equally like a self-diagnosis and an instruction to viewers on how to watch the show. But if it’s the latter, where does that leave us, Elliot’s invisible friends, as we head into season three?
With questions. Lots and lots of questions. Some seem urgent and necessary, others arbitrary and baffling and suggestive of a series that has a tremendous amount of confidence but no discernible plan going forward.
Is Elliot in control of his own destiny? Did he really mastermind the 5/9 hack, or was he just a pawn manipulated by the Dark Army in cahoots with Tyrell? What’s Tyrell’s role in the show’s drama? And is it actually Tyrell that we’re seeing in conversation with Elliot, and later, Elliot and Mr. Robot, or another bug in Elliot’s program, another of the voices he hears in his head? Tyrell shoots Elliot to stop him from interfering with his attempt to destroy E-Corp’s paper records (I guess they’ve been blasted back to 20th-century record keeping by the hack?), but is it actually Tyrell shooting him, and was that an actual bullet that entered Elliot’s body, or are both Tyrell and his bullet symbolic of psychic forces rattling around inside the hero’s subconscious, like Mr. Robot repeatedly shooting Elliot near the start of the season? “You’re both the same,” Elliot tells Tyrell and Mr. Robot in the warehouse, then adds in voice-over, “This is another of Mr. Robot’s mind tricks,” but does that mean what we assume it means — that Mr. Robot, never shy about its Fight Club allegiance, is on the verge of being able to change its title to All My Tyler Durdens?
Probably Tyrell is real — otherwise why would series creator and writer-director Sam Esmail have ended the warehouse scene with that low-angled point-of-view shot from Elliot’s perspective showing Tyrell remaining solid while Mr. Robot flickers like a streaming video losing its connection to the internet? But if he is: whoooo, boy. Setting aside the mundane but valid questions of where presumably real Tyrell lives whenever he’s not plotting in that warehouse with tented fingers, and why he’s still wearing a sharp business suit everywhere instead of wearing something less attention-grabbing like, say, a hoodie (his suit probably smells terrible by this point, yes? Or does he still have access to a closet-full?), Esmail is looking at some pretty severe narrative-management issues in season three. If that was a real bullet that Tyrell shot into the hero’s body, I hope the story will skip ahead in time to Elliot’s recovery; otherwise we’re in for an even longer-haul version of the first half of season two, which sidelined Elliot from the show’s main action while shifting focus to supporting characters that ultimately weren’t anywhere near as fascinating as him.
And then there are subsidiary plot-character questions — maybe I should say “issues”— that will need to be resolved, and that won’t be easy to resolve without making Mr. Robot feel less like the new Breaking Bad, an audience-tormenting potboiler that nearly always played fair and maintained psychological plausibility in its characters from start to finish, than the new Lost, which kept dropping new and increasingly contrived revelations about its people to help the show’s writers dig their way out of deep holes, and that routinely tried to solve large storytelling problems by pulling a rabbit out of a hat, then producing new hats with new rabbits the following week. I adore Lost, and being another Lost is not the worst fate for a TV show, but you know what I’m getting at.
Still: Is Darlene going to become a (reluctant) tool of the FBI? The show went in that direction during those scenes between Darlene and Dom, but I don’t believe she’d deceive Elliot in that particular way (she’s been portrayed as even more of a fanatic for the cause than her brother). I guess Angela is in cahoots with Whiterose and in league with the Dark Army, but the conversion required to get her there seems to have occurred mostly offscreen (a pity, because their conversation in that room with the fish tank was such a highlight of the penultimate episode that I wouldn’t have minded a whole hour set there; between the fish tank, the minute-by-minute beeping of Whiterose’s timer, the allusions to Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampff test, and the cutaway shot of Lolita, and B.D. Wong’s delightfully haughty interaction with Portia Doubleday, the scene represented the show at its most gleefully David Lynchian).
Speaking of Lolita: The show’s references to Vladimir Nabokov’s novel have been just frequent enough to make me wonder if the show won’t ultimately reveal Elliot’s father as a child molester. If so, it’ll be a rare instance of Mr. Robot referencing a Stanley Kubrick film (he adapted the novel in 1962) not merely to tip its hat to Kubrick but to pay allegiance to one of his sources, a novel about a secret sexual predator who doubles as the book’s charming but thoroughly unreliable narrator. The seeds of aLolita reveal certainly have been planted: Tyrell’s anguished monologue in the season-two finale is about his own miserable failure of a father, and the series opens (literally, in its very first scene) with Elliot vigilante terrorizing a pedophile. And there are a number of throwaway lines scattered throughout the story to date that would seem to point in this direction, including Tyrell’s allusion to Elliot’s “dirty little secret … there are people close to you who wouldn’t be happy that I know what you know.”
Am I up or down on Mr. Robot? Neither. It annoys and frustrates me, not always for good reasons, but I can’t stop watching it because even at its least coherent, it’s more assured, more mysterious, and more viscerally intense than any other drama on commercial television. That, and Rami Malek’s now Emmy-winning performance in the lead role. He’s the most original lead actor on television, and he’s playing a character who,culturally and generationally, means something. I’m still fascinated by his adventures, even though the second season of Mr. Robot felt much more scattered than season one, and I had plenty of reservations about the first season. The show feels increasingly scattered even as it insists to us that it knows exactly what it’s doing at all times. At key moments it seems to forget where and even what it is — as its heavily medicated hero sometimes does — and once it wakes up, it appears to improvise a hasty solution to whatever problem it created before.
One example, I suspect, is all that business with Brian Stokes Mitchell’s chief technology officer, Scott Knowles. He was revealed to have been the mastermind behind the torment of Tyrell’s wife, Joanna (Stephanie Corneliussen), but he hasn’t been around much this season, so his sudden, very important appearance here (climaxing in Scott’s savage, if strategically provoked, beating of Joanna) had a rabbit-from-the-hat quality. Who cares about either of them, really? Who ultimately cares about any other recurring character except Elliot, and maybe Darlene and Angela, who are established as having deep roots in Elliot’s past? One of my previous observations, that somewhere inside Mr. Robot is the greatest half-hour drama of all time, is admittedly snarky, but I don’t think it’s wrong.
My chief complaint about Mr. Robot is that it continues to botch the basics while doing seemingly impossible things with great assurance — such as building an alternate universe of apocalyptic decay that is just like ours but more desperate and creating a great lead character with one of the richest, most allusive voice-overs this side of a Don DeLillo novel, and carving out a safe harbor on commercial TV where anti-capitalist satire and warnings can flower. I can’t think of another American series that’s not merely concerned with the flow of large sums of money, but with how individuals in the private sector and the U.S. government (and international governments, too) angle for their piece.
Too often, though, the show expends great energy on narrative strategies that have a played-out cliché quality. What was the point of waiting until more than midway through season one to reveal that Mr. Robot is Elliot’s Tyler Durden? What was the point of waiting until halfway through season two to reveal that Elliot was in Riker’s Island the whole time, even though he told us he was living with his mother and decompressing from the internet? If we’d known from the jump that Mr. Robot was a figment of Elliot’s subconscious, that Darlene was actually his sister, and that he was incarcerated throughout the first half of season two, the show wouldn’t have been any less compelling, and it could have been just as visually clever (see NBC’s late, lamented Hannibal).
There’s imaginative and there’s clever, and it strikes me as strange thatMr. Robot so often choose to be clever, when being imaginative is so much more impressive, and also neutralizes that section of the audience that’s obsessed with guessing what’s coming next, the better to prove that they’re smarter than the show. No individual who watches Mr. Robot is actually smarter than Mr. Robot, a heartfelt, occasionally insightful, always visually and aurally brilliant show; but thousands or millions of people all making individual guesses about what’s “really” happening are guaranteed to be smarter, because they’re operating in a hive mind where at least one of them is bound to be correct in their guesses.
I am vastly less impressed by shallow plot twists that tell us, basically, “That thing you thought was X was actually Y the whole time!” than by scenes like the one between Whiterose and Angela, which teetered on the edge of metaphor or dream logic without tipping over. That sort of balancing act is much harder to pull off than “X was really Y,” and it has the added virtue of being impossible to “solve” by viewers because it’s not a puzzle; it’s more of a vibe. Mr. Robot might travel this route more often in season three; at least I hope it will. There’s been talk of lucid dreaming (“Mind awake, body asleep”), which seems to tie into that old psychologist’s adage “Everyone in a dream is you,” or a reflection in a “Hall of Mirrors,” to invoke the Kraftwerk song that played at the start of the season-two finale. The most exciting scene in the entire season, for me anyway, was the bit where Elliot seemed to stand over the shoulder of Mr. Robot at his computer and eavesdrop on his thoughts. You don’t get much more dreamlike and lucid than that: One invisible friend eavesdropping on another eavesdropping on another. I’d rather the show delve even further into this kind of storytelling strategy, embracing a deeper kind of misdirection, and championing complexity and ambiguity — all in the name of doing what the show keeps purporting to be doing, even when it isn’t: giving us a highly subjective portrait of a reality that is impossible to fully perceive.
In Season Two, Mr. Robot’s Biggest Weakness Is Trying to Be Too Clever
“All we have is a garbled reality, a fuzzy picture we will never make out.”
Our fourth-wall-breaking antihero Elliot Alderson says that in the season-two finale of Mr. Robot, and it sounds equally like a self-diagnosis and an instruction to viewers on how to watch the show. But if it’s the latter, where does that leave us, Elliot’s invisible friends, as we head into season three?
With questions. Lots and lots of questions. Some seem urgent and necessary, others arbitrary and baffling and suggestive of a series that has a tremendous amount of confidence but no discernible plan going forward.
Is Elliot in control of his own destiny? Did he really mastermind the 5/9 hack, or was he just a pawn manipulated by the Dark Army in cahoots with Tyrell? What’s Tyrell’s role in the show’s drama? And is it actually Tyrell that we’re seeing in conversation with Elliot, and later, Elliot and Mr. Robot, or another bug in Elliot’s program, another of the voices he hears in his head? Tyrell shoots Elliot to stop him from interfering with his attempt to destroy E-Corp’s paper records (I guess they’ve been blasted back to 20th-century record keeping by the hack?), but is it actually Tyrell shooting him, and was that an actual bullet that entered Elliot’s body, or are both Tyrell and his bullet symbolic of psychic forces rattling around inside the hero’s subconscious, like Mr. Robot repeatedly shooting Elliot near the start of the season? “You’re both the same,” Elliot tells Tyrell and Mr. Robot in the warehouse, then adds in voice-over, “This is another of Mr. Robot’s mind tricks,” but does that mean what we assume it means — that Mr. Robot, never shy about its Fight Club allegiance, is on the verge of being able to change its title to All My Tyler Durdens?
Probably Tyrell is real — otherwise why would series creator and writer-director Sam Esmail have ended the warehouse scene with that low-angled point-of-view shot from Elliot’s perspective showing Tyrell remaining solid while Mr. Robot flickers like a streaming video losing its connection to the internet? But if he is: whoooo, boy. Setting aside the mundane but valid questions of where presumably real Tyrell lives whenever he’s not plotting in that warehouse with tented fingers, and why he’s still wearing a sharp business suit everywhere instead of wearing something less attention-grabbing like, say, a hoodie (his suit probably smells terrible by this point, yes? Or does he still have access to a closet-full?), Esmail is looking at some pretty severe narrative-management issues in season three. If that was a real bullet that Tyrell shot into the hero’s body, I hope the story will skip ahead in time to Elliot’s recovery; otherwise we’re in for an even longer-haul version of the first half of season two, which sidelined Elliot from the show’s main action while shifting focus to supporting characters that ultimately weren’t anywhere near as fascinating as him.
And then there are subsidiary plot-character questions — maybe I should say “issues”— that will need to be resolved, and that won’t be easy to resolve without making Mr. Robot feel less like the new Breaking Bad, an audience-tormenting potboiler that nearly always played fair and maintained psychological plausibility in its characters from start to finish, than the new Lost, which kept dropping new and increasingly contrived revelations about its people to help the show’s writers dig their way out of deep holes, and that routinely tried to solve large storytelling problems by pulling a rabbit out of a hat, then producing new hats with new rabbits the following week. I adore Lost, and being another Lost is not the worst fate for a TV show, but you know what I’m getting at.
Still: Is Darlene going to become a (reluctant) tool of the FBI? The show went in that direction during those scenes between Darlene and Dom, but I don’t believe she’d deceive Elliot in that particular way (she’s been portrayed as even more of a fanatic for the cause than her brother). I guess Angela is in cahoots with Whiterose and in league with the Dark Army, but the conversion required to get her there seems to have occurred mostly offscreen (a pity, because their conversation in that room with the fish tank was such a highlight of the penultimate episode that I wouldn’t have minded a whole hour set there; between the fish tank, the minute-by-minute beeping of Whiterose’s timer, the allusions to Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampff test, and the cutaway shot of Lolita, and B.D. Wong’s delightfully haughty interaction with Portia Doubleday, the scene represented the show at its most gleefully David Lynchian).
Speaking of Lolita: The show’s references to Vladimir Nabokov’s novel have been just frequent enough to make me wonder if the show won’t ultimately reveal Elliot’s father as a child molester. If so, it’ll be a rare instance of Mr. Robot referencing a Stanley Kubrick film (he adapted the novel in 1962) not merely to tip its hat to Kubrick but to pay allegiance to one of his sources, a novel about a secret sexual predator who doubles as the book’s charming but thoroughly unreliable narrator. The seeds of aLolita reveal certainly have been planted: Tyrell’s anguished monologue in the season-two finale is about his own miserable failure of a father, and the series opens (literally, in its very first scene) with Elliot vigilante terrorizing a pedophile. And there are a number of throwaway lines scattered throughout the story to date that would seem to point in this direction, including Tyrell’s allusion to Elliot’s “dirty little secret … there are people close to you who wouldn’t be happy that I know what you know.”
Am I up or down on Mr. Robot? Neither. It annoys and frustrates me, not always for good reasons, but I can’t stop watching it because even at its least coherent, it’s more assured, more mysterious, and more viscerally intense than any other drama on commercial television. That, and Rami Malek’s now Emmy-winning performance in the lead role. He’s the most original lead actor on television, and he’s playing a character who,culturally and generationally, means something. I’m still fascinated by his adventures, even though the second season of Mr. Robot felt much more scattered than season one, and I had plenty of reservations about the first season. The show feels increasingly scattered even as it insists to us that it knows exactly what it’s doing at all times. At key moments it seems to forget where and even what it is — as its heavily medicated hero sometimes does — and once it wakes up, it appears to improvise a hasty solution to whatever problem it created before.
One example, I suspect, is all that business with Brian Stokes Mitchell’s chief technology officer, Scott Knowles. He was revealed to have been the mastermind behind the torment of Tyrell’s wife, Joanna (Stephanie Corneliussen), but he hasn’t been around much this season, so his sudden, very important appearance here (climaxing in Scott’s savage, if strategically provoked, beating of Joanna) had a rabbit-from-the-hat quality. Who cares about either of them, really? Who ultimately cares about any other recurring character except Elliot, and maybe Darlene and Angela, who are established as having deep roots in Elliot’s past? One of my previous observations, that somewhere inside Mr. Robot is the greatest half-hour drama of all time, is admittedly snarky, but I don’t think it’s wrong.
My chief complaint about Mr. Robot is that it continues to botch the basics while doing seemingly impossible things with great assurance — such as building an alternate universe of apocalyptic decay that is just like ours but more desperate and creating a great lead character with one of the richest, most allusive voice-overs this side of a Don DeLillo novel, and carving out a safe harbor on commercial TV where anti-capitalist satire and warnings can flower. I can’t think of another American series that’s not merely concerned with the flow of large sums of money, but with how individuals in the private sector and the U.S. government (and international governments, too) angle for their piece.
Too often, though, the show expends great energy on narrative strategies that have a played-out cliché quality. What was the point of waiting until more than midway through season one to reveal that Mr. Robot is Elliot’s Tyler Durden? What was the point of waiting until halfway through season two to reveal that Elliot was in Riker’s Island the whole time, even though he told us he was living with his mother and decompressing from the internet? If we’d known from the jump that Mr. Robot was a figment of Elliot’s subconscious, that Darlene was actually his sister, and that he was incarcerated throughout the first half of season two, the show wouldn’t have been any less compelling, and it could have been just as visually clever (see NBC’s late, lamented Hannibal).
There’s imaginative and there’s clever, and it strikes me as strange thatMr. Robot so often choose to be clever, when being imaginative is so much more impressive, and also neutralizes that section of the audience that’s obsessed with guessing what’s coming next, the better to prove that they’re smarter than the show. No individual who watches Mr. Robot is actually smarter than Mr. Robot, a heartfelt, occasionally insightful, always visually and aurally brilliant show; but thousands or millions of people all making individual guesses about what’s “really” happening are guaranteed to be smarter, because they’re operating in a hive mind where at least one of them is bound to be correct in their guesses.
I am vastly less impressed by shallow plot twists that tell us, basically, “That thing you thought was X was actually Y the whole time!” than by scenes like the one between Whiterose and Angela, which teetered on the edge of metaphor or dream logic without tipping over. That sort of balancing act is much harder to pull off than “X was really Y,” and it has the added virtue of being impossible to “solve” by viewers because it’s not a puzzle; it’s more of a vibe. Mr. Robot might travel this route more often in season three; at least I hope it will. There’s been talk of lucid dreaming (“Mind awake, body asleep”), which seems to tie into that old psychologist’s adage “Everyone in a dream is you,” or a reflection in a “Hall of Mirrors,” to invoke the Kraftwerk song that played at the start of the season-two finale. The most exciting scene in the entire season, for me anyway, was the bit where Elliot seemed to stand over the shoulder of Mr. Robot at his computer and eavesdrop on his thoughts. You don’t get much more dreamlike and lucid than that: One invisible friend eavesdropping on another eavesdropping on another. I’d rather the show delve even further into this kind of storytelling strategy, embracing a deeper kind of misdirection, and championing complexity and ambiguity — all in the name of doing what the show keeps purporting to be doing, even when it isn’t: giving us a highly subjective portrait of a reality that is impossible to fully perceive.
OK I had to watch it twice.
I liked it and hated it.
complete mindf*ck
salute to all those who hated Super Dom from the jump
it just DOESN'T"T make sense.
The FBI isn't gonna sit back and let MILLIONS be lost people dying left and right when they KNOW who causing it.
This is my theory..
Dom don't know sh*t.
That was all just a SHOW to make her THINK the FBI got this.
I don't believe a RANDOM bullet killed Romero...
and notice one thing
the E-Corp exec that owned the smart house?
Whose body they incinerated at the animal shelter?
How they know EVERYTHING else...
but don't know she dead?
I liked it and hated it.
complete mindf*ck
salute to all those who hated Super Dom from the jump
it just DOESN'T"T make sense.
The FBI isn't gonna sit back and let MILLIONS be lost people dying left and right when they KNOW who causing it.
This is my theory..
Dom don't know sh*t.
That was all just a SHOW to make her THINK the FBI got this.
I don't believe a RANDOM bullet killed Romero...
and notice one thing
the E-Corp exec that owned the smart house?
Whose body they incinerated at the animal shelter?
How they know EVERYTHING else...
but don't know she dead?
http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/mr-...m-esmail-elliot-shot-tyrell-alive-1201867301/
‘Mr. Robot’ Creator Sam Esmail Breaks Down Season 2 Finale, Previews Season 3
What a long, strange trip it’s been. After a mind-bending second season of “Mr. Robot” that saw more than its fair share of twists, creator Sam Esmail delivered a finale that answered many of the lingering mysteries that have intrigued us all season long. We finally learned — chillingly — what Stage Two is, where Tyrell Wellick has been hiding all season, and the fates of Darlene and Cisco after the shoot-out at Lupe’s restaurant.
Naturally, though, Esmail raised just as many questions as he answered. Here, he breaks down the pivotal moments of the season two finale and tells Variety what’s in store for season three.
First of all, congratulations on Rami Malek’s win at the Emmy Awards.
It was fantastic and if I can speak objectively, the best speech of the night. He was great up there. It was funny, it was emotional, and it was really genuine. I kept telling him he was going to win. I don’t know why he was so surprised! But we were all really happy for him.
So Tyrell’s alive, and he is in fact real. But I’m not sure who was more surprised that Elliot got shot — him or the audience.
That is the point of that scene. I’m glad you brought that up. The whole time, whenever we talk about the show in the writers’ room and making the show, we always want the audience to be with Elliot. When he believes something, we believe in it with him. If Elliot’s confused about something, which he oftentimes is, we’re just as confused as he is. And if he’s in contradiction to us, which he will say to us, then we’re opposing him. I love the relationship we’ve created with Elliot. It’s a little unlike anything I’ve personally seen. I think it’s in a weird way its own dynamic and it’s allowed us to create these scenes where you can direct attention where you otherwise wouldn’t have if we didn’t have that offscreen relationship with him.
We finally find out what Stage Two is. It’s terrifying.
It is incredibly terrifying, especially given what just transpired over the weekend. It’s an interesting dilemma that we always put our characters in. Honestly, we want him to be the hero, but he’s doing something that a villain would do. Obviously it’s unbeknownst to him that he’s at the epicenter of all of it. We just thought what a great moral ambiguous ground to put Elliot in. And obviously it’s a thing that he’s battling internally within himself and with the world. It’s a great predicament to always find your main character in those crossroads.
Elliot seems horrified by it, but the plan has Mr. Robot’s fingerprints all over it.
It’s Mr. Robot from the get-go. We teased this volatile element of Mr. Robot in the beginning of the whole show. In the second episode, Mr. Robot’s solution to destroying the backup tapes at Steel Mountain was to blow up the power plant near the facility and that would destroy all the tapes. Being the other half of this personality, (Elliot) wanted to find a less volatile way. In the first season we saw that tendency inside him. And now that came to fruition in this season.
Tyrell sounds terrified, though, when he calls Angela. Why was he so scared?
Tyrell loves Elliot. The interesting thing about Tyrell and Elliot is that they have this bond, this connection. That’s what we set up in that first scene, actually the first time they met in the pilot. They have this relationship where they connect on this much deeper level. Tyrell’s set up as this villain but they’re not in this antagonistic back and forth. They actually have this weird deep bond. That was set up in that first scene in Coney Island when Tyrell tells this story about his father and not wanting to be like him. That resonates with Elliot, and 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. In the end, when Tyrell shot him, he didn’t want to shoot him. He felt like this was a partnership that was on the verge of victory that they were going to complete this Stage Two. And Elliot was going back on it. When he shot him, he was literally in tears. That conversation when he tells Angela that he loves him, it’s true. From Tyrell’s perspective, he really does loves this person. He feels that he gives him the fulfillment that he’s always been looking for in his life.
Angela’s been an incredible journey this season, with her ever-shifting loyalties. Is she now working with the Dark Army?
The great thing about Angela, it reminds me a little bit of Jackie Brown, where we never knew what Jackie’s true motivation was. She was always playing both sides, and not until the end, did you finally reveal it. It has a lot to do with Portia Doubleday’s performance. You can just never quite read her. She does it in such an exquisite fashion that we played up the notion where she’s a character that’s riding down the middle. On the one hand, you could feel that she’s flipped and turned to E Corp, and on the other hand, no, she’s trying to bring them down. We played with that the whole season. We thought that was so fascinating. We’re double-downing. Our assumption by the end of the season was that she’s siding with the Dark Army. As we move forward to the next season, it’ll be interesting to play that dynamic. Is she really with them or is she not? It’s just something with Angela’s journey, we can always keep people off balance in terms of what directions she’s actually going in.
The one thing we’ve always believed is her love for Elliot. She tells Tyrell, “I should be the first person he sees when he wakes up.” Can we at least believe in that?
One hundred percent. I don’t think that will ever change. That’s one thing, as much as the plot machinations can always be a little overwhelming, we always try to ground everything in real human emotions and relationships and connections. Because ultimately this is a show about a bunch of lonely people struggling to connect, and when they do, that should feel very real and very grounded and one of the connections that’s always been very pure and genuine. From the start it has always been that connection between Angela and Elliot.
What did Whiterose say to Angela to convince her to drop her lawsuit involving the Washington Township documents?
I can’t tell you that. I’ll respectfully decline to answer. [But] we will learn one day, yes.
Darlene doesn’t get a chance to mourn Cisco’s death before she’s confronted with the unstoppable force that is Dom.
Portia, Carly (Chaikin), Stephanie (Corneliussen), Grace (Gummer) — all have been amazing this season. The one thing about this season is that everybody has been spread out, struggling to get their lives back in order. The one thing that we’re going to see a lot more in season three is some of these storylines colliding. And what that collision is going to look like. We started to see that in those scenes between Carly and Grace. That’s when fireworks happen. Because they’re both these amazing actors a the top of their game. I love shooting those scenes.
Dom gives Darlene that amazing speech about the “python approach” — it echoes her own approach to capturing her. That’s how she was playing her all episode, trying to get her to open up.
When I look at the whole second season, that whole python speech that Grace gives, I remember shooting it and feeling that’s what this whole season has been about. It’s been about all of these people lying in wait. With Whiterose and Angela, she explicitly tells her “I could have killed you 90 days ago but I didn’t.” And now with Elliot and Mr. Robot and the whole enactment of Stage Two. All of the storylines have been about these plans happening underneath all of our main characters without their knowledge. And it all paying off in the end. 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.
We finally learn who’s been gaslighting Joanna — Scott Knowles, the CTO of E Corp. But she has her own nasty plan for him — framing him for murder.
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. Joanna, it’s hard. She can flip right on a dime. Stephanie plays it perfectly. She can be the sweetest and then she can be the harshest.
That coda at the end of the episode was a delicious nugget — not only do we find Trenton and Mobley, but Leon resurfaces, too.
We wanted to resolve all of the mysteries we’d been setting up all season, Trenton and Mobley their whereabouts being one of them. We find out they have gotten away, or so they think. And here comes Leon, who’s definitely an agent of the Dark Army. His intentions remain to be seen. We’ll definitely get into it in the third season.
One last question: I couldn’t help but notice the reference to classic USA taglines, from “characters like you aren’t welcome here” to “blue skies” to “Burn Notice,” in that interrogation scene. How did USA respond?
Can I just say that was done with pure love and USA knows that. When they read it, they thought it was hilarious.
‘Mr. Robot’ Creator Sam Esmail Breaks Down Season 2 Finale, Previews Season 3
What a long, strange trip it’s been. After a mind-bending second season of “Mr. Robot” that saw more than its fair share of twists, creator Sam Esmail delivered a finale that answered many of the lingering mysteries that have intrigued us all season long. We finally learned — chillingly — what Stage Two is, where Tyrell Wellick has been hiding all season, and the fates of Darlene and Cisco after the shoot-out at Lupe’s restaurant.
Naturally, though, Esmail raised just as many questions as he answered. Here, he breaks down the pivotal moments of the season two finale and tells Variety what’s in store for season three.
First of all, congratulations on Rami Malek’s win at the Emmy Awards.
It was fantastic and if I can speak objectively, the best speech of the night. He was great up there. It was funny, it was emotional, and it was really genuine. I kept telling him he was going to win. I don’t know why he was so surprised! But we were all really happy for him.
So Tyrell’s alive, and he is in fact real. But I’m not sure who was more surprised that Elliot got shot — him or the audience.
That is the point of that scene. I’m glad you brought that up. The whole time, whenever we talk about the show in the writers’ room and making the show, we always want the audience to be with Elliot. When he believes something, we believe in it with him. If Elliot’s confused about something, which he oftentimes is, we’re just as confused as he is. And if he’s in contradiction to us, which he will say to us, then we’re opposing him. I love the relationship we’ve created with Elliot. It’s a little unlike anything I’ve personally seen. I think it’s in a weird way its own dynamic and it’s allowed us to create these scenes where you can direct attention where you otherwise wouldn’t have if we didn’t have that offscreen relationship with him.
We finally find out what Stage Two is. It’s terrifying.
It is incredibly terrifying, especially given what just transpired over the weekend. It’s an interesting dilemma that we always put our characters in. Honestly, we want him to be the hero, but he’s doing something that a villain would do. Obviously it’s unbeknownst to him that he’s at the epicenter of all of it. We just thought what a great moral ambiguous ground to put Elliot in. And obviously it’s a thing that he’s battling internally within himself and with the world. It’s a great predicament to always find your main character in those crossroads.
Elliot seems horrified by it, but the plan has Mr. Robot’s fingerprints all over it.
It’s Mr. Robot from the get-go. We teased this volatile element of Mr. Robot in the beginning of the whole show. In the second episode, Mr. Robot’s solution to destroying the backup tapes at Steel Mountain was to blow up the power plant near the facility and that would destroy all the tapes. Being the other half of this personality, (Elliot) wanted to find a less volatile way. In the first season we saw that tendency inside him. And now that came to fruition in this season.
Tyrell sounds terrified, though, when he calls Angela. Why was he so scared?
Tyrell loves Elliot. The interesting thing about Tyrell and Elliot is that they have this bond, this connection. That’s what we set up in that first scene, actually the first time they met in the pilot. They have this relationship where they connect on this much deeper level. Tyrell’s set up as this villain but they’re not in this antagonistic back and forth. They actually have this weird deep bond. That was set up in that first scene in Coney Island when Tyrell tells this story about his father and not wanting to be like him. That resonates with Elliot, and 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. In the end, when Tyrell shot him, he didn’t want to shoot him. He felt like this was a partnership that was on the verge of victory that they were going to complete this Stage Two. And Elliot was going back on it. When he shot him, he was literally in tears. That conversation when he tells Angela that he loves him, it’s true. From Tyrell’s perspective, he really does loves this person. He feels that he gives him the fulfillment that he’s always been looking for in his life.
Angela’s been an incredible journey this season, with her ever-shifting loyalties. Is she now working with the Dark Army?
The great thing about Angela, it reminds me a little bit of Jackie Brown, where we never knew what Jackie’s true motivation was. She was always playing both sides, and not until the end, did you finally reveal it. It has a lot to do with Portia Doubleday’s performance. You can just never quite read her. She does it in such an exquisite fashion that we played up the notion where she’s a character that’s riding down the middle. On the one hand, you could feel that she’s flipped and turned to E Corp, and on the other hand, no, she’s trying to bring them down. We played with that the whole season. We thought that was so fascinating. We’re double-downing. Our assumption by the end of the season was that she’s siding with the Dark Army. As we move forward to the next season, it’ll be interesting to play that dynamic. Is she really with them or is she not? It’s just something with Angela’s journey, we can always keep people off balance in terms of what directions she’s actually going in.
The one thing we’ve always believed is her love for Elliot. She tells Tyrell, “I should be the first person he sees when he wakes up.” Can we at least believe in that?
One hundred percent. I don’t think that will ever change. That’s one thing, as much as the plot machinations can always be a little overwhelming, we always try to ground everything in real human emotions and relationships and connections. Because ultimately this is a show about a bunch of lonely people struggling to connect, and when they do, that should feel very real and very grounded and one of the connections that’s always been very pure and genuine. From the start it has always been that connection between Angela and Elliot.
What did Whiterose say to Angela to convince her to drop her lawsuit involving the Washington Township documents?
I can’t tell you that. I’ll respectfully decline to answer. [But] we will learn one day, yes.
Darlene doesn’t get a chance to mourn Cisco’s death before she’s confronted with the unstoppable force that is Dom.
Portia, Carly (Chaikin), Stephanie (Corneliussen), Grace (Gummer) — all have been amazing this season. The one thing about this season is that everybody has been spread out, struggling to get their lives back in order. The one thing that we’re going to see a lot more in season three is some of these storylines colliding. And what that collision is going to look like. We started to see that in those scenes between Carly and Grace. That’s when fireworks happen. Because they’re both these amazing actors a the top of their game. I love shooting those scenes.
Dom gives Darlene that amazing speech about the “python approach” — it echoes her own approach to capturing her. That’s how she was playing her all episode, trying to get her to open up.
When I look at the whole second season, that whole python speech that Grace gives, I remember shooting it and feeling that’s what this whole season has been about. It’s been about all of these people lying in wait. With Whiterose and Angela, she explicitly tells her “I could have killed you 90 days ago but I didn’t.” And now with Elliot and Mr. Robot and the whole enactment of Stage Two. All of the storylines have been about these plans happening underneath all of our main characters without their knowledge. And it all paying off in the end. 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.
We finally learn who’s been gaslighting Joanna — Scott Knowles, the CTO of E Corp. But she has her own nasty plan for him — framing him for murder.
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. Joanna, it’s hard. She can flip right on a dime. Stephanie plays it perfectly. She can be the sweetest and then she can be the harshest.
That coda at the end of the episode was a delicious nugget — not only do we find Trenton and Mobley, but Leon resurfaces, too.
We wanted to resolve all of the mysteries we’d been setting up all season, Trenton and Mobley their whereabouts being one of them. We find out they have gotten away, or so they think. And here comes Leon, who’s definitely an agent of the Dark Army. His intentions remain to be seen. We’ll definitely get into it in the third season.
One last question: I couldn’t help but notice the reference to classic USA taglines, from “characters like you aren’t welcome here” to “blue skies” to “Burn Notice,” in that interrogation scene. How did USA respond?
Can I just say that was done with pure love and USA knows that. When they read it, they thought it was hilarious.
.... Should've chilled with one
*thoughts?
In Season Two, Mr. Robot’s Biggest Weakness Is Trying to Be Too Clever
“All we have is a garbled reality, a fuzzy picture we will never make out.”
Our fourth-wall-breaking antihero Elliot Alderson says that in the season-two finale of Mr. Robot, and it sounds equally like a self-diagnosis and an instruction to viewers on how to watch the show. But if it’s the latter, where does that leave us, Elliot’s invisible friends, as we head into season three?
With questions. Lots and lots of questions. Some seem urgent and necessary, others arbitrary and baffling and suggestive of a series that has a tremendous amount of confidence but no discernible plan going forward.
Is Elliot in control of his own destiny? Did he really mastermind the 5/9 hack, or was he just a pawn manipulated by the Dark Army in cahoots with Tyrell? What’s Tyrell’s role in the show’s drama? And is it actually Tyrell that we’re seeing in conversation with Elliot, and later, Elliot and Mr. Robot, or another bug in Elliot’s program, another of the voices he hears in his head? Tyrell shoots Elliot to stop him from interfering with his attempt to destroy E-Corp’s paper records (I guess they’ve been blasted back to 20th-century record keeping by the hack?), but is it actually Tyrell shooting him, and was that an actual bullet that entered Elliot’s body, or are both Tyrell and his bullet symbolic of psychic forces rattling around inside the hero’s subconscious, like Mr. Robot repeatedly shooting Elliot near the start of the season? “You’re both the same,” Elliot tells Tyrell and Mr. Robot in the warehouse, then adds in voice-over, “This is another of Mr. Robot’s mind tricks,” but does that mean what we assume it means — that Mr. Robot, never shy about its Fight Club allegiance, is on the verge of being able to change its title to All My Tyler Durdens?
Probably Tyrell is real — otherwise why would series creator and writer-director Sam Esmail have ended the warehouse scene with that low-angled point-of-view shot from Elliot’s perspective showing Tyrell remaining solid while Mr. Robot flickers like a streaming video losing its connection to the internet? But if he is: whoooo, boy. Setting aside the mundane but valid questions of where presumably real Tyrell lives whenever he’s not plotting in that warehouse with tented fingers, and why he’s still wearing a sharp business suit everywhere instead of wearing something less attention-grabbing like, say, a hoodie (his suit probably smells terrible by this point, yes? Or does he still have access to a closet-full?), Esmail is looking at some pretty severe narrative-management issues in season three. If that was a real bullet that Tyrell shot into the hero’s body, I hope the story will skip ahead in time to Elliot’s recovery; otherwise we’re in for an even longer-haul version of the first half of season two, which sidelined Elliot from the show’s main action while shifting focus to supporting characters that ultimately weren’t anywhere near as fascinating as him.
And then there are subsidiary plot-character questions — maybe I should say “issues”— that will need to be resolved, and that won’t be easy to resolve without making Mr. Robot feel less like the new Breaking Bad, an audience-tormenting potboiler that nearly always played fair and maintained psychological plausibility in its characters from start to finish, than the new Lost, which kept dropping new and increasingly contrived revelations about its people to help the show’s writers dig their way out of deep holes, and that routinely tried to solve large storytelling problems by pulling a rabbit out of a hat, then producing new hats with new rabbits the following week. I adore Lost, and being another Lost is not the worst fate for a TV show, but you know what I’m getting at.
Still: Is Darlene going to become a (reluctant) tool of the FBI? The show went in that direction during those scenes between Darlene and Dom, but I don’t believe she’d deceive Elliot in that particular way (she’s been portrayed as even more of a fanatic for the cause than her brother). I guess Angela is in cahoots with Whiterose and in league with the Dark Army, but the conversion required to get her there seems to have occurred mostly offscreen (a pity, because their conversation in that room with the fish tank was such a highlight of the penultimate episode that I wouldn’t have minded a whole hour set there; between the fish tank, the minute-by-minute beeping of Whiterose’s timer, the allusions to Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampff test, and the cutaway shot of Lolita, and B.D. Wong’s delightfully haughty interaction with Portia Doubleday, the scene represented the show at its most gleefully David Lynchian).
Speaking of Lolita: The show’s references to Vladimir Nabokov’s novel have been just frequent enough to make me wonder if the show won’t ultimately reveal Elliot’s father as a child molester. If so, it’ll be a rare instance of Mr. Robot referencing a Stanley Kubrick film (he adapted the novel in 1962) not merely to tip its hat to Kubrick but to pay allegiance to one of his sources, a novel about a secret sexual predator who doubles as the book’s charming but thoroughly unreliable narrator. The seeds of aLolita reveal certainly have been planted: Tyrell’s anguished monologue in the season-two finale is about his own miserable failure of a father, and the series opens (literally, in its very first scene) with Elliot vigilante terrorizing a pedophile. And there are a number of throwaway lines scattered throughout the story to date that would seem to point in this direction, including Tyrell’s allusion to Elliot’s “dirty little secret … there are people close to you who wouldn’t be happy that I know what you know.”
Am I up or down on Mr. Robot? Neither. It annoys and frustrates me, not always for good reasons, but I can’t stop watching it because even at its least coherent, it’s more assured, more mysterious, and more viscerally intense than any other drama on commercial television. That, and Rami Malek’s now Emmy-winning performance in the lead role. He’s the most original lead actor on television, and he’s playing a character who,culturally and generationally, means something. I’m still fascinated by his adventures, even though the second season of Mr. Robot felt much more scattered than season one, and I had plenty of reservations about the first season. The show feels increasingly scattered even as it insists to us that it knows exactly what it’s doing at all times. At key moments it seems to forget where and even what it is — as its heavily medicated hero sometimes does — and once it wakes up, it appears to improvise a hasty solution to whatever problem it created before.
One example, I suspect, is all that business with Brian Stokes Mitchell’s chief technology officer, Scott Knowles. He was revealed to have been the mastermind behind the torment of Tyrell’s wife, Joanna (Stephanie Corneliussen), but he hasn’t been around much this season, so his sudden, very important appearance here (climaxing in Scott’s savage, if strategically provoked, beating of Joanna) had a rabbit-from-the-hat quality. Who cares about either of them, really? Who ultimately cares about any other recurring character except Elliot, and maybe Darlene and Angela, who are established as having deep roots in Elliot’s past? One of my previous observations, that somewhere inside Mr. Robot is the greatest half-hour drama of all time, is admittedly snarky, but I don’t think it’s wrong.
My chief complaint about Mr. Robot is that it continues to botch the basics while doing seemingly impossible things with great assurance — such as building an alternate universe of apocalyptic decay that is just like ours but more desperate and creating a great lead character with one of the richest, most allusive voice-overs this side of a Don DeLillo novel, and carving out a safe harbor on commercial TV where anti-capitalist satire and warnings can flower. I can’t think of another American series that’s not merely concerned with the flow of large sums of money, but with how individuals in the private sector and the U.S. government (and international governments, too) angle for their piece.
Too often, though, the show expends great energy on narrative strategies that have a played-out cliché quality. What was the point of waiting until more than midway through season one to reveal that Mr. Robot is Elliot’s Tyler Durden? What was the point of waiting until halfway through season two to reveal that Elliot was in Riker’s Island the whole time, even though he told us he was living with his mother and decompressing from the internet? If we’d known from the jump that Mr. Robot was a figment of Elliot’s subconscious, that Darlene was actually his sister, and that he was incarcerated throughout the first half of season two, the show wouldn’t have been any less compelling, and it could have been just as visually clever (see NBC’s late, lamented Hannibal).
There’s imaginative and there’s clever, and it strikes me as strange thatMr. Robot so often choose to be clever, when being imaginative is so much more impressive, and also neutralizes that section of the audience that’s obsessed with guessing what’s coming next, the better to prove that they’re smarter than the show. No individual who watches Mr. Robot is actually smarter than Mr. Robot, a heartfelt, occasionally insightful, always visually and aurally brilliant show; but thousands or millions of people all making individual guesses about what’s “really” happening are guaranteed to be smarter, because they’re operating in a hive mind where at least one of them is bound to be correct in their guesses.
I am vastly less impressed by shallow plot twists that tell us, basically, “That thing you thought was X was actually Y the whole time!” than by scenes like the one between Whiterose and Angela, which teetered on the edge of metaphor or dream logic without tipping over. That sort of balancing act is much harder to pull off than “X was really Y,” and it has the added virtue of being impossible to “solve” by viewers because it’s not a puzzle; it’s more of a vibe. Mr. Robot might travel this route more often in season three; at least I hope it will. There’s been talk of lucid dreaming (“Mind awake, body asleep”), which seems to tie into that old psychologist’s adage “Everyone in a dream is you,” or a reflection in a “Hall of Mirrors,” to invoke the Kraftwerk song that played at the start of the season-two finale. The most exciting scene in the entire season, for me anyway, was the bit where Elliot seemed to stand over the shoulder of Mr. Robot at his computer and eavesdrop on his thoughts. You don’t get much more dreamlike and lucid than that: One invisible friend eavesdropping on another eavesdropping on another. I’d rather the show delve even further into this kind of storytelling strategy, embracing a deeper kind of misdirection, and championing complexity and ambiguity — all in the name of doing what the show keeps purporting to be doing, even when it isn’t: giving us a highly subjective portrait of a reality that is impossible to fully perceive.
I can agree with this. It was still an amazing season, but I think it tried to be to smart. Especially with the last two episodes. It was almost dream like. There is a part of me that thinks that the show's creator might be doing to much with the writing and directing these episodes.
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