Mr. Robot

We recently caught up with Mr. Robot. I very much enjoy the show. I think season two might have been my favorite since it was more poetic and surreal, and it also showed the consequences of the characters’ actions.

During the first season, I wasn’t sure whether or not I was supposed to find Elliot and the hackers at F Society to be good people because their hacking of E-Corp unleashed too much chaos and the characters didn’t seem to care. We had taken to referring to Mr. Robot as Asshole Club.

I sympathize with the fact that E-Corp’s corporate greed led to the deaths of Elliot and Darlene’s father and the death of Angela’s mother. But F Society acted in a way that destroyed our economy and hurt a lot of regular people, who no longer had any debt but also faced widespread economic instability. The people at F Society were immature (their name is not something an adult would choose). They engaged in naïve revolutionary talk about “we need to fight the system” without really understanding how to fight that system or understanding the consequences.

The characters also engaged in casual cruelty and didn’t seem self-aware about this. Elliot hacked the private information of his therapist for no real reason. To gain access to E-Corp’s servers, he humiliated a security guard (for which he later apologized) and tricked an employee that her husband had a disease diagnosis (for which he did not apologize). No, I didn’t think Elliot was huggable or anything like that. He was kind of a douche.

I think Mr. Robot maybe wanted the audience to believe these are not good people from the beginning. The show telegraphed this in the first season, with Elliot meeting Mr. Robot in a Ferris wheel, looking down on the people below like ants, a reference to villains in The Third Man. (See, that film class came in handy.)

In the second season, we saw the consequences of these people’s actions. The hack of E-Corp has led to innocent people not having access to money or hard-earned assets. Half of F Society are on the run, the FBI is onto them and Darlene and others know they’re in over their heads.

They also followed up on a plot point that annoyed me in season one when the characters freed some dogs at a shelter, before they could be euthanized, and let them run free. The show filmed this like some feel-good scene where each person let a dog out of the cage simultaneously. See, these good hackers are setting animals free just like people! I’m not an expert but I remember thinking, “Won’t those dogs just end up back at the shelter? If they wanted to help these animals, they should have fostered or adopted them.” Sure enough, in season two, all the dogs were back in cages, waiting for euthanasia. I like the follow-up on this.

I do like Mr. Robot. I hope the hackers get foiled in the end by a manual typewriter.