The second season of USA Network’s cyber-thriller, Mr. Robot, returns one month after Elliot Alderson, a cyber-security engineer, took part in the now infamous fsociety 5/9 hack on multi-national company Evil Corp, and he is dealing with the consequences of his actions as well as with the idea that he has control. But the power of his mental illness is continually haunting him. Season 2 of Mr Robot airs on U.S. every Wednesday.
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Of course, imaginary characters have as much substance in fiction as “actual” ones, so things do get muddled, and I would not be surprised to learn that I have got things in this show upside-down or backward.
“As we continued to shoot episodes it continued to mirror things that were actually happening in the world, and next thing you know, USA newspapers are calling Sam [Sam Esmail, Mr Robot’s writer and director] and saying, ‘Hey, what can you tell us about this?'”
But here is where we are (spoiler alert): A bank that’s too big to fail, Bank of E (a division of the Manhattan-based zaibatsu E Corp), has been hacked and its records deleted. They have grown from the ragtag group of hackers to a whole group of followers who admittedly seem like total idiots.
It sounds all doom and gloom but in fact it’s kind of a miracle. Luckily, while we’re not super class-A hackers ourselves, we do have the information about how you can legally access the Mr. Robot season 2 premiere live stream. The joy of the season two premiere then is seeing that the drama has lost none of the vision, tension, or ambition that make this series so special. Even better, now it’s free to move on to less Fight Club-gimmicky explorations of isolation, identity, and our broken society, the topics it already handles so well. Like Elliot’s relationship with Leon, he just sits and listens to Ray talk about life (“Maybe truth doesn’t even exist.”).
In the world of smart phones, smart TVs, smart houses, smart cars, Mr Robot is probably the smartest TV show out there.
Things aren’t going to get easier for Elliot any time soon.
The final twenty minutes or so are a tennis-like back and forth between Elliot and Mr. Robot for an upper-hand in Elliot’s brain. He cleans. He watches sports. And he spends time with friends-if you could call sitting in silence while another person drones on and on “spending time with friends”. You’ll see that with the dynamic between Elliot and Mr. Robot as Elliot struggles to maintain this part of himself or try and control this part of himself. Like Elliot, Angela also lost a parent – her mother – to the toxic waste leak at Evil Corp. Grace Gummer and Aasif Mandvi also join the cast this season as Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, as the government takes a special interest in Fsociety.
But it’s not just Elliot (Rami Malek) you can’t trust, it’s everything you see and hear on Mr Robot. And The Office’s Craig Robinson appears as a dog-loving, garrulous beacon of light intent on warming up to Elliot, whether he likes it or not.
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On the whole, we still don’t know where Tyrell Wellick is and we still don’t know who was knocking on Elliot’s door at the end of season one. I get a lot of, “Hey Mr. Robot!”. It’s not just the characters or the plot, which keeps you guessing. Mr. Robot is focused on getting everything in place for a season that will hopefully stand on its own. What happened in the three days before Elliot woke up in an SUV? In this new world, a revolution has happened, but everything is far from settled. It’s so weird that the packages have to come from Tyrell but Mr. Robot leaves us in the dark. In short, it’s a new season and Joanna is still the most interesting, scariest and weirdest character on this show.
