This review contains spoilers from the season finale of Mr. Robot Season Two.
“So much depends/Upon a red wheelbarrow,” Tyrell Wellick intones, reciting William Carlos Williams under the seaside’s dour sky. “Glazed with rainwater/Beside the white chickens.” The poem is a single sentence, broken into parts, and in this—fragments that together form a clean and perfect whole—it might be an analogue to certain seasons of television. In retrospect, once-disparate elements appear inevitable, bishops and rooks arranged in position long before checkmate comes into view. Heretofore unseen correspondences emerge, as if all that’d been required to see them earlier was a slight shift of the viewer’s focus. In those seasons, so much depends upon each episode, tightening or loosening narrative threads and aspects of character to the point that the finale feels complete, even if it concludes with a cliffhanger. That the sophomore season of Mr. Robot is not one of those seasons has been clear for weeks, though the formal ambition of h1dden-pr0cess.axx and pyth0n-pt1.p7z sustained my hope that creator Sam Esmail might end on a high note. Instead, as Elliot’s confrontation with Mr. Robot over the terms of Stage 2 begins to suggest— “What’s this all for?” he asks; “Stop talking in circles,” he demands—”pyth0n-pt2.p7z” proves unworthy of our patience. It’s a snake eating its own tail.
If Williams’ poem, on the page, is an example of form becoming meaning, it’s disappointing, after the dramatic flourishes of the previous two episodes, to see the season finale of Mr. Robot succumb to such flat exposition, for the most part filmed in surly shades of beige, off-white, and grey. In particular, the resolution to one of the central mysteries of the season premiere, in which Joanna receives her first unmarked gift, is no match for whatever explanation one might have imagined; it’s just a stricken, soused man and a mean-spirited woman, whom he beats to a bloody pulp. At least what we learn of Stage 2—the incineration of the titles and deeds E Corp needs to rebuild its hacked database—has consequences for a character we care about: Elliot is “the ringleader, the one in charge,” he realizes, though he doesn’t know what the plan is. Still, it’s altogether enervating that the season’s climactic moment should refer to the God complex that last week’s precise sense of “personal motivation” and “real people’s lives” seemed to consign to the dustbin. “We were supposed to be gods together,” Tyrell says, as Elliot tries to prevent Stage 2 from going forward. “And yet you want to destroy our destiny?”