There is an oddly delicate dance at play throughout the first season of Mr. Robot. The series seems to split its story up like waves of light through a prism, creating layers for different people depending on attentiveness. Smoke and mirrors may affect those who aren't used to this sort of story (a hard-to-imagine individual, but fortunately or not I've known some in my lifetime), but the show spends just as much time making those smoke and mirrors interesting that to notice them isn't killing the tension of the show, it is ramping it up. If it isn't obvious already, Mr. Robot is a difficult show to talk about without going into full spoilers. The gist of the series follows Elliot, a socially anxious hacker who hacks people in order to get to know them, overcoming his difficulties in real life with an invasion of privacy. Elliot, being a good person at heart even when his actions threaten that identification, often uses what he learns to help good people and thwart awful people. In the world of Mr. Robot, a corporation like Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet combined has virtually (no pun intended) taken over the capitalistic world. They have their hand in everything from tech products to banking, and it is virtually impossible to live in the modern (that is, 2015 America) world without somehow shaking hands with them. It is the modern day from the view point a lot of us probably hold, that of a corporate dystopia. Mr. Robot is hardly far from the truth, either - tech companies are essentially the same as the show's evil E Corp, which Elliot refers to as "Evil Corp" (whose logo looks awfully close to that of Enron, one of many references to tech's past). Mr. Robot has a lot to say on the subject, a lot to say that has, to be fair, already been said. But that doesn't mean Mr. Robot can be written off so easily.
For a majority of the pilot episode, I was pretty largely on the fence. It was obvious there were seriously talented people at work here, with stellar direction, an effective score, and wild talents of pretty much the entire acting body of this thing, but while skill can get you a long way there is still something to say of good writing. In the first episode of Mr. Robot, I predicted most of the twists that would unfold with one or two outliers in the actual plot to surprise me along the way, but the biggest twist of all was that all of my predictions would be revealed by the end of the season. What a lesser show would have drawn out over multiple seasons - perhaps even more seasons than the entirety of Mr. Robot's run - here, it comprised the first act. The set up was a keen eye towards cliche, a jumping off point to something that, now, I can no longer predict, and that is incredibly exciting.
But back up there a bit - cliche? While watching the first season, a fight was developing in my head. Mr. Robot has next to no subtlety as to what it wants to reference. Shot and scored like a David Fincher film - specifically The Social Network, Fight Club, and maybe a hint of Gone Girl - Mr. Robot doesn't feel immediately original. As a TV show, perhaps it gets some leniency here for taking the style to a sister medium, but remember also that this follows David Fincher's show House of Cards (the American version) by a couple of years. Layered within its obvious stylistic influence are obvious references to Anonymous, the hacker organization (with its own bootleg Guy Fawkes mask as symbol, no less, and even references to the Max Headroom hack of PBS in the 80s). And the obvious references don't end there, but getting into too many of them threatens to spoil the latter half of the season. Mr. Robot wears all of its references and influences on its sleeve, and for someone like me that obsesses over media it can be more than a little distracting. It is to Mr. Robot's credit, then, that I was able to not look past this, but see it as an intrinsic part of the show. These references are grounded points, showcasing real life versions of what is happening on screen all at once. Mr. Robot isn't convincing you of an alternate possible present, but rather sending what is our present through the meat grinder and forcing you to contend with what is there, and that is a rather powerful thing to do.
Mr. Robot does buck with my preferred writing style, but I can't really complain about that all too much. Mr. Robot's high-strung tension (much like the dramatized super reality of shows like Breaking Bad) is far away from my more messy, character led preferences in Mad Men or even the surrealism of The Leftovers. This sort of high anxiety, melodramatic storytelling can grate on me as time goes on, where eventually I just want to see more realistic people struggling with grocery shopping or something, a slice of reality where the banal and the internal become a war zone of existential dread and societal reflection. Not necessarily so with Mr. Robot, because between the lines of hyped up dramatics is something horrifyingly real. The moves players make in this show may be unrealistic at times, may be drama led to hook viewers and never let go, but between the lines is a very real sense of isolating despair, of reality peeking through the fringes of our perceived reality. The very key aspect to this has to do with Elliot, the central character and linchpin to this entire story working.
Mild Spoilers below - but enough to perhaps predict some things.
Elliot is not mentally well. He has severe anxiety and PTSD from his childhood, but also finds himself at odds with reality. In particular, he hears and reads "Evil Corp" instead of E Corp at every instance of the name. It isn't just Elliot, either, as even when he isn't in the scene we hear it too. This is set up in the first episode, where Elliot mentions that he scrubs the original name for the new one he has created, done so thoroughly as to not even notice it. This is where the prism of light I mentioned above comes even more into play - the show has signaled to you, very early on, that you are not getting a clear picture of things. There is a big lie - perhaps several - at the core of Mr. Robot. You can go through a majority of the first season without noticing this slight winking away of reality, but by the end you have no choice but to confront it. There is a cult anime show called Serial Experiments: Lain that comes to mind. In that show, a teenage girl becomes a hacker, and reality seems to disintegrate around her. One of the clever (albeit disorienting) aspects to that show is that it consistently felt like you were missing two to three episodes between episodes, so you were always trying to catch up with a story you could only see in patches. It created a sense of detachment, of misstep with reality that I hadn't ever seen until Mr. Robot. One of the most thrilling aspects to Mr. Robot, and one of the core reasons why all of these obvious references and cliches work, is because we are seeing an augmented reality. We can sense there is a reality beneath what we are seeing, but we can only see snippets here and there, with scenes missing all over the place. The most evocative moment in the season for me was when Darlene, a hacker Elliot meets early on in the season, met with Angela, Elliot's childhood friend, and they not only knew each other, but both had a tight relationship with Elliot. It felt like whole episodes had been skipped over, like there was a hidden reality I wasn't able to see through the frame of the show. This is what Mr. Robot does extremely well, signaling to you what is off without totally revealing its hand.
Mr. Robot is a slight of hand trick where there is a slight of hand to the slight of hand, a distraction in the distraction to the execution so that you don't realize that perhaps there isn't any stage at all. This review is concurrent with how much of the show I've watched - I have no idea what happens in season 2, or what it is even about, but I am unbelievably excited to see what comes next. Mr. Robot's first season was the first Rotten Tomatoes 100% score for a TV season, and while I cannot live up to the praise that implies (which, debate about what Rotten Tomatoes scores actually mean is a topic for another time) I can still say that I haven't been this excited by a new show in a long time. I don't usually write about TV seasons on here because I find it incredibly difficult to do, but I made the exception for Mr. Robot. This is a show that should at least be watched. Whether it lives up to the hype it has instilled in me remains to be seen, but what a season it has been.
8.5
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