When Elliot Alderson was a child, his dad shoved him out a window. It was an accident, wasn’t it?
“God says there are no accidents,” Elliot’s mother screams.
Mommy and Daddy are fighting. Elliot knows the drill. He is in a miniature version of the get-up Mr. Robot viewers know well, head tucked into his hacker hoodie. When Elliot wakes up in a hospital, his vitals beep-beep-beeping, the doctor pulls up Elliot’s brain scan on a screen.
“As you can see by the images,” the doctor says, “everything appears to be normal.”
The line is almost too on-the-nose for a show like Mr. Robot, in which a mentally-disturbed, deeply unreliable narrator is the closest thing we get to a trustworthy tour guide. We see the world through Elliot’s eyes; according to Elliot, images lie, corrupt, seduce, and destroy. He sees people who aren’t there, hears words that no one says, talks to us — not in a cute, winking, Kevin Spacey in House of Cards way, but as if we are a disjointed, disembodied voice echoing in his mind — an audience no one else in Mr. Robot ever acknowledges.
Never in Elliot’s life has everything appeared to be normal. And knowing what we know about his battered, unbalanced brain, that doctor was misreading those scans. Or, more likely, everything appeared to be fine while, underneath the surface, nothing was fine, not even close.
Season two finds Elliot still reeling from a couple of reality-shattering revelations. Mr. Robot, leader of the outlaw hacking collective fsociety, was not, as Elliot thought at first, some random guy, but was a hallucination with the body of Elliot’s long-dead father who only Elliot could see, because Elliot is Mr. Robot. During a bit of a blackout — Elliot can’t remember what “Mr. Robot” does when he takes over the cockpit of Elliot’s consciousness — Elliot-as-Mr.-Robot led fsociety in a hacking of E Corp, known to Elliot and his comrades as Evil Corp, a nightmare conglomerate of big banks, Google, Amazon, Apple, and every other major tech company known to man.
‘Mr. Robot’ Finale: It’s All In Your Head. Or Is It?Mr. Robot, USA’s unlikely breakout hit of the summer, aired its finale Wednesday night, a week after it was originally…thinkprogress.orgIt’s not clear what Mr. Robot or his fellow vigilantes envisioned the aftermath of this hack would be. Their stated goal, to erase all debt and thus create equality, does not materialize, and even it had, it’s hard to imagine that utopian vision would have satisfied them. What they convinced themselves was some massive act of debt forgiveness designed to upend social order and knock down every Goliath wound up derailing the lives of millions of Davids. The CIA director tells America “the direct result of these attacks could be a cyber Pearl Harbor.” It’s a global financial meltdown that has left the suits scrambling to restore normalcy while the skeleton crew left at fsociety fights to maintain total disarray while they figure out their next move. They wanted a revolution; they got it, kind of. Now what?
Fsociety is also without its leader: Elliot has gone into monastic hiding, taking Mr. Robot with him. He’s living with his mother — the strictest person he knows, who may or may not even still be alive and/or really exist anywhere but Elliot’s imagination, now that I’m thinking about it — cut off from computers and internet access. He’s making hilarious efforts to socialize, going to a church group that calls to mind Jesse Pinkman’s addicts’ anonymous meetings and hanging out with a guy named Leon who “just discovered Seinfeld. It’s really fucking with him.” (Sample Leon line: “Maybe that’s the point. Most shit is pointless… I’ll tell you, the human condition is a straight-up tragedy. Word.”)
Now that the mystery of season one is solved, the show can stop asking “who is Mr. Robot?” and linger on the bigger, weirder questions that haunt Elliot. But there’s still this kind of conspiracy, furthering-the-hackers-agenda stuff going on with the remaining fsociety crew; their Anonymous-style tactics to get attention and instill fear in the corporate overlords are like the half-baked, 4 a.m. ideas of drunk college freshmen in Che Guevara T-shirts. Their petulant, unfocused actions are far less compelling than the internal monologue (well, technically, dialogue) occupying Elliot’s mind.
Series creator Sam Esmail is directing this entire season himself (he’s also written every episode of the series) and brought back season one’s director of photography, Tod Campbell. The result is a premiere that’s as visually gripping as the show has ever been, unnerving and spooky and otherworldly even in the most mundane-seeming places: diners, cubicles, a pick-up basketball game. The violence is stunning and shifty; if your hallucination shoots you in the head, do you die? When is a throat-slitting scene for real and when is it just a nightmare that will be undone when Elliot shakes himself out of it?
Last season, Mr. Robot was so tuned in to our modern frequency it accidentally predicted our future more than once — first by anticipating the hack of infidelity website Ashley Madison and again by depicting a graphic on-screen shooting so disturbingly similar in nature to the on-camera killings of two journalists in Roanoke that the episode in which the scene appeared had to air a week later than planned.
From ‘Buffy’ To ‘Mr. Robot’: When Pop Culture Collides With Real-Life ViolenceIn the aftermath of a shooting in Roanoke, Virginia on Wednesday that left journalists Alison Parker, 24, and Adam Ward…thinkprogress.orgThis season, though, reality might be giving Mr. Robot a run for its inaccessible-because-the-banks-are-in-shambles money. Bernie Sanders came thiiiis close to clinching the Democratic nomination by promising, basically, the sort of socialist revolution that isn’t too far off from what the fsociety vigilantes claim to want. The relentless horrors of last week sure as hell left a lot of people feeling like, as Leon said, the human condition is a straight-up tragedy, or that, as Mr. Robot put it, we’re all trapped in “our infinite loop of insanity.”
So, you know, just some light, summer viewing to mess with your sense of security in our fragile, volatile world and feed your paranoia! If the show leaves you rattled and you need to take a sick day to recover, you can always follow Mr. Robot’s advice: “Tell him you’re slowly descending into madness.”
The second season of Mr. Robot premieres Wednesday, July 13, at 10:00 p.m. on USA.