Mr. Robot, a far cry from the traditional USA Network formula of blue skies and sunny beaches, works within a strikingly modern aesthetic. It zigs and zags, flirting with prescient invocations of discourse and conflict while its protagonist – the analytical, alienated and addiction-prone Elliot Alderson (the terrific Rami Malek) – emerges piercingly attuned to, and condemning of, contemporary life.
Mr. Robot thrives on its sense of difference – on a template of deranged idiosyncrasy. Its pilot bursts out with an assuredness that’s shockingly rare for series television, one characterized by near-gleeful streaks of cynicism, unreliable stream-of-consciousness narration from Elliot and a nightmarishly cyberpunk rendering of New York City. These flourishes are complimented nicely by creator Sam Esmail’s weighty premise: Mr. Robot opens with Elliot, an anti-social programmer at a cybersecurity company, being recruited by the enigmatic ringleader (Christian Slater) of the radical hacker organization “fsociety.” (He goes by Mr. Robot.) Elliot is convinced to help them pull off a grand scheme, in which they perform history’s most drastic redistribution of wealth by eliminating the world’s debt.
A characteristically intimate medium, TV doesn’t usually go this big. Successful thrillers like 24 have traditionally relied on a mix of ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy and suspend-your-disbelief logic. But Mr. Robot, in typically defiant fashion, veers toward hyperrealism as its method of conveyance. It doesn’t feel like a reflection of our times so much as it does an immersion in our times. The series presents our day-to-day interfaces with damning accuracy: Apple, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter – MSNBC is made nauseatingly recognizable, for Christ’s sake. Separately, the details are innocuous, but cumulatively they build with force. Elliot hacks into the corporate elite as part of a broader mission, but it’s when he digs into the lives of people hurting those he cares about – the deceitful lover of his therapist, or the monstrous supplier of his drug dealer/girlfriend – that this show so darkly and yet so acutely captures modern life. Everyone’s texting and communicating and lying and deceiving here as we actually do, and as the majority of people in TV and movies still don’t. By immersing itself in ours, Mr. Robot immerses us in its world: a dystopian nightmare of an anarchist bent.
The series keeps you aware of its skewed perspective. In voiceover, Elliot is constantly second-guessing both himself and us – his listeners, his participants. His is disarmingly active narration, then, as although it’s our window into the story, there’s the persistent reminder that it cannot be trusted. The hypnotizing cinematography furthers this, managing startling photographic beauty along with a pervasive, off-kilter edge: characters are consistently pushed to the frame’s corners. Mr. Robot works to establish a distance from the audience and, by extension, reality. Its winks and nods allow for a deeper engagement with its ideas, and a reinforcement of its identity. The series consummately embraces difference, from Elliot as its center to the camerawork that captures him. Thus, Esmail and his team of directors settle on a mood that’s grim, but palatable – serious, but weird.
And Mr. Robot is very weird, indeed – confidently so. Like many first seasons, this freshman run is playfully experimental, but there’s a throughline – a degree of character – that seamlessly runs through its every twist and turn. Two early episodes are contained hours of epic visual panache, as Esmail fashions a heist movie and prison break-out, respectively, within the Mr. Robot set of boundaries. Later, as the mystery of the physical Mr. Robot deepens – eventually, he’s revealed to be a manifestation of Elliot’s submerged grief – secrets pour out and the entire fabric of the show transforms. And if that weren't enough, the corporate institution at the top of fsociety’s target list is universally referred to as, of all things, EvilCorp. Even if writing to Elliot’s point-of-view, that Esmail makes this choice is demonstrative of Mr. Robot’s disregard for subtlety, adoration of bluntness and commitment to the unusual.
In its broad scope, Mr. Robot constructs a scathing capitalist critique. Critics have found intriguing points of comparison – textually, as a sort of bizarre successor to HBO’s mini-epic Enlightened, and tonally, as a direct product of David Fincher’s work, specifically Fight Club – and they’re surely onto something. Esmail throws the biggest brands and the brightest iPhones in our faces, merging those visual cues with a grander narrative that boldly confronts income inequality, and complexly explores the potential of technology as a combating force. Elliot, as the story’s guide, is a conventionally unconventional hero, an endearing, troubled outsider who can proclaim with utmost sincerity, “I want to save the world.” His disgust with Facebook photo-sharing and Starbuck lattes is bracingly honest – and, let’s face it, acutely on-point – but it also makes for a sneaky narrative strategy. He’s positioned centrally against the greedy forces behind such mildly irritating minutiae as, well, Facebook photo-sharing.
Led by Niels Arden Oplev (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Mr. Robot’s direction evokes this sense of foreboding dread – of a contemporary tale of winners and losers, and the natural consequence that is revolution. In the City’s underbelly, Esmail and his team of directors film the subway with eerie anticipation; they tap into that sensation of everyone’s looking at me to exude a chilling, overriding paranoia. Above ground, Elliot and his cadre plot away in an abandoned Coney Island arcade, while Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallstrom), an unhinged EvilCorp executive, frequents with the NYC elite in ballrooms and hotel suites. Mr. Robot tells a compelling story in its imagery alone, fluidly working with space, dimension and mood to completely absorb its audience. (Even the credits, so artfully placed at the beginning of each episode, contribute.) Placed against an invigorating techno-pop score, these images – and what’s going on within them – are realized with intense vitality.
Mr. Robot is about as flawed as you’d expect from a new drama in that top tier of potential – which is to say, not insignificantly. Esmail is a tremendous thinker and an excellent plotter, but he occasionally runs the risk of turning his characters into mouthpieces. (Most of them are working to start an anarchist revolution, which means the balance to strike in that regard is delicate.) The supporting cast, aside from Carly Chaikin’s wonderfully droll Darlene, lacks definition – Elliot’s confidante Angela (Portia Doubleday), for instance, is left in a narratively interesting albeit unconvincing place to end the season – and Esmail’s penchant for the blunt can lead to stiff, even opaque dialogue.
But Mr. Robot will always reel you in. The final scene of the season finds Elliot battling himself, or Mr. Robot, in Times Square. They argue loudly, and passionately, before Robot essentially gives young Elliot a laundry list of what they’re fighting against: he rails against corporations and the government in a lengthy, mostly unnecessary and undeniably overwritten rant. He sums up the world as a “kingdom of bullshit,” and you’re hoping Mr. Robot doesn’t end on such a cranky note. But then Elliot screams “I just want to be alone!” and, in a neat visual trick, he promptly is – isolated, surrounded by digital mega-screens and deafening quiet. The evocation is so haunting, the ensuing images so commanding, that any concern just melts away. Elliot, a direct product of social media encroachment and limitless capitalist greed, is – when it comes down to it – a lonely, damaged guy. He is different. And that final image serves as a blistering emotional reminder: that’s exactly why he’s the perfect guy to save the world.
Grade: B+ to A-