Note: if you’re not caught up on USA’s Mr. Robot, two pieces of advice. One, catch up on USA’s Mr. Robot. Two, don’t read the text below until you have, as it contains lots and lots of spoilers.
When Christian Slater first appeared at the 33-minute mark of the Mr. Robot pilot, it took me all of two minutes to think, “wait…this guy might be a figment of Elliot’s imagination.” And compared to a certain kind of savvy viewer—the kind raised on The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense and Fight Club and various other rug-pulling psychodramas told through the eyes of unreliable narrators—I’m sure I was slow on the uptake. We’d just spent a half hour getting to know Elliot, the autistic/SAD/depressed/delusional loner played by the excellent Rami Malek, and it didn’t take a genius to understand that anything he saw, or said, or did, should be viewed with total suspicion.
In fact, the show already seemed to be toying with us, specifically with the way every character, good, bad, or ambiguous, used the words “Evil Corp” to describe “E Corp,” the massive soulless conglomerate at the heart of the drama. We were hearing the dialogue through Elliot’s ears—gone was the neutral, omniscient microphone—so why wouldn’t we be seeing things the same way? In fact, Elliot’s mode of narration emerges as a stream of dialogue addressed to his “imaginary friend”—us. Reality is skewed from the beginning, and certainty is a myth. As far as we know, the entire show could be the mental projections of an insane person locked up in an institution somewhere, and at the very least, any semblance of truth is laced with a dizzy kind of paranoia.
At the center of this ominous field stands Mr. Robot, Slater’s mysterious master hacker, and leader of fsociety (tag line: “fuck society”). He begins recruiting Elliot to help hack Evil Corp in that first encounter on the train, but we’re immediately suspicious of his motivations, his origins, and, of course, his very existence. If you didn’t heed the spoiler alert at the start of this article, then heed it now, because I’m about to blow the whole thing wide open: It takes nine episodes for the big reveal—Mr. Robot is indeed a figment of Elliot’s imagination. He takes the physical form of his father, who died of leukemia related to a toxic waste leak while working for Evil Corp in what became the formative moment of his son’s life. Elliot’s mission to destroy the company stems from his father’s death, and his delusions about the man serve to fill an emotional void—a desperate attempt to escape his crushing loneliness.
And the best compliment I can pay Mr. Robot is that the journey from introduction to revelation is so meandering, exciting, and totally engrossing that the season-long wait never bothered me. In a lesser show, the lingering suspicion about Mr. Robot, and the entire questionable nature of Elliot’s reality, would have given way to impatience and frustration. But not so here—it’s an odd, dark world that show creator Sam Esmail has manufactured from the raw material of New York City, and the pacing has been exquisite from the start. There’s never a rushed moment, but never a delayed one, either. Everything moves according to an invisible rhythm, and it compels the viewer as it compels the character, so that, even with 8 hours of television standing between the question and the answer, the drama proceeds on a tight line, drawing us along at a speed that feels both preordained and perfect.
The fact that USA, of all networks, has pulled off a show of this quality comes as a total surprise to me. Prior to this, I knew it as the channel responsible for Monk, that detective show that old people seemed to like, and not much else. (The full list shows that I wasn’t not missing much, beyond Suits…the track record here has been pretty dismal, and USA has basically occupied the role of AMC’s loser kid brother.) It shows that a flower can bloom even in the cracks of broken pavement, and also reaffirms not just that we’re in a TV golden age, but that the competitive landscape almost forces a company like USA to generate new ideas and fund people like Esmail, a 37-year-old relative unknown, which in turn leads to hidden gems like Mr. Robot popping up in unlikely places.
Not that the show is perfect. Before I list my complaints, I’d hasten to add the disclaimer that these quibbles pale in comparison to the show’s greater excellence, and seem instead like the last symptoms of an old illness; hackneyed tropes slipping into something absolutely original. But anyway, the gripes:
—The show has that Breaking Bad way of asking its viewers to suspend the hell out of their disbelief for some of the nuts-and-bolts, point-A-to-point-B sequences. This bothered very few people in BB, so maybe I’ll be a lone voice in the wilderness on this one, but I became annoyed, for instance, when Darlene hacked into a safe by looking at a diploma on the wall and using the dates as a passcode. In general, I’d love for computer-centric shows to understand that we live in a world where even idiots like me randomize passwords to the point of meaninglessness, and that hacking into systems by guessing birthdays or pet names will not be effective—especially around tech professionals. This happens several times, and it’s like watching the “Bosco” scene from Seinfeld, but without the humor.
That’s a minor example, and a major one would be watching Elliot instigate a jailbreak in the space of a few hours. In contrast to the Steel Mountain operation, which feels as realistic as it needs to be for a tech novice like myself, these deviations from even a baseline realism always end up slightly vexing. (Another example: Who thinks an effective way to hack somebody is to sell them a rap CD—which, former New Yorker here, nobody ever buys—and hope they put it in their computer?) The show functions impeccably on a micro-level, where, like a latent virus, people insinuate themselves into the lives of others. When that element disappears, shit goes off the wall, and we might as well be watching Landry try to cover up murders on Friday Night Lights. It’s just totally unnecessary.
(Although I will admit, I loved Elliot Villar as Fernando. But there’s no way he leaves Shayla dead in a trunk without killing Elliot too.)
