“And then the Sony hack happened, which really brought it to everybody’s attention and made [hacking] much more of a mainstream topic”.
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At the end of the Season 2 premiere, Elliot picks up the phone to, what appears to be, Tyrell’s voice. Find out a bit more with this brief synopsis for “Mr. Robot” Season 2 Episode 3 (Spoiler alert!). Here’s how they’re all connected.
The theatrical and mysterious denouement, filmed amid Times Square’s glowing walls of advertising, sees Slater in balls-out Hard Harry declamatory mode against the “kingdom of bullshit” that is the modern world. The guys that play God without permission. His wife, Joanna, is just as willing and at one point induces her own labor to stop the police from interrogating Tyrell. Aside from that, Elliot is incredibly smart. But it is striking more for its form than its contents, which are familiar, including its unreliable narrator with an invisible frenemy and the decadent corporate Goliath that pulls the levers that drive the wheels that turn the pulleys that work the strings that make the world go round, to the “V for Vendetta” masking of its anarchist rebels. He lacks social skills, but he does just enough to skate by much to his childhood best friend Angela’s chagrin. They have grown from the ragtag group of hackers to a whole group of followers who admittedly seem like total idiots. While she meant to get inside “Evil Corp” to take it down from within, it is clear that her motives have taken a complete 360.
Esmail’s camerawork – characters tucked into corners of the frame, among other nontraditional compositions – continues to give the sense of disorientation and never feels exhausted. That’s helped along by the enormously talented Rami Malek, who plays a troubled computer hacker whose huge, unblinking eyes seem to offer a window into a microchip powered heart.
That means you’ll be tuning in Wednesday night to see where things pick up for Elliot and fsociety now that hackers have taken over the world. (Big surprise: Anti-establishment types don’t take kindly to being told what to do.) Across town, Elliot struggles to maintain control over his angry impulses, which manifest in the hallucinatory guise of his dead father, “Mr. Robot” (Christian Slater).
“When I read the script, I was like, is someone really going to make this?” You’re just as disoriented as the people of Mr. Robot who just got all their banking history wiped. The former executive from E Corp was last seen joining forces with fsociety and Eliot but since then nobody has seen them.
“Mr. Robot” Season 1 ended with the hack working. Thankfully, Esmail knows from history that revolutions need to grow in order to be something more than a stunt. Let him be part of a story that’s as, yes, disruptive as the world around him.
The first episode of what has to be the best science-fiction TV show since Battlestar Galactica, Mr. Robot, aired last night. Gideon is under suspicion of being complicit in the fsociety hack. Elliot walks over to answer the door with a creepy smile, but who is there and what do they want? Early on in Season 2, I realized, I had only scratched the surface.
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And even that can be an illusion.
