How 'Mr. Robot' Keeps Making the Same Mistake
On July 13, when Mr. Robot aired the first episode of its second season, I wrote a post with the headline, "Mr. Robot Still Hasn't Figured Out What to Do Next." More than a month and eight episodes later I could write the same headline.
At the end of Season One, which now seems so long ago, writer/director/everything Sam Esmail derailed the show with a stunning twist: As, fsociety's big hack successfully toppled the world's economy, we found out that one of the show's main characters, Mr. Robot, was a figment of Elliot's tormented mind. For seven episodes, this dramatic twist had completely stalled the narrative of this show. The characters were scattered, and forced to deal with the fallout of the hack, rather than look ahead to the next development in the plot. This fundamental change in the show put a substantial limp in the rhythm. Everything was thrown off. Suddenly, rather than building at an even pace to a big moment, Mr. Robot was dragging itself away from one.
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Last week, Mr. Robot had another WTF twist moment. Whether you saw it coming or not, Elliot has been in jail all season, rather than away, taking some time off, and visiting his mother. It's a lame crutch to make this season seem more interesting than it actually is. Oooh! A twist, I'm not bored and confused anymore! Not really.
Just like last time, Mr. Robot has no idea what to do after it's big "twist." And just like last time, this marked a startling-and not in a good way-change to the structure of the show.
For the first half of this season, Mr. Robot consisted of scattered individual plots working slowly and ungracefully toward some unforeseen conclusion. We got the sloppy introduction to Detective DiPierro, the half-coherent tribulations of fsociety, whatever Angela is doing, and Elliot's repetitive internal dialogue which also happened to not exist.
Here we are one episode on the other side of the "twist," and there's no sign of Elliot and no answer to whatever the hell is going on with the prison stuff. It's aggravating, yes, but I get that Esmail is making us wait. Instead, we get what seems like an entire episode of a completely different show. Episode Eight is some sort of surprisingly focused and non-scatterbrained murder scenario involving the remaining members of fsociety. After already ruining the world economy and committing a number of international crimes, fsociety crossed the moral boundary into directly taking another human life. Is this worse or equal to the crimes against society they've already committed? That's what the characters are forced to consider. Bringing to mind some of the weighty themes of Breaking Bad and Fargo, the show even directly references using acid or a wood chipper to dispose of a body.
The problem is, this show isn't Breaking Bad or Fargo. In those stories, the tension of the plot involved regular people becoming criminals and being forced into questionable moral situations. In Mr. Robot, these people are already criminals being actively sought by the FBI. After being international hackers already facing lifetime in prison, is it really that much worse-in the eyes of the law, at least-that they've killed someone? It hardly adds too much to the drama here.
This type of episode, as a whole, is preferable storytelling to what was happening in the first half of this season. Taken as a standalone episode, it felt natural and balanced; it even had some of those stunning single scenes-as every episode has-like the cut between fsociety and Angela singing and the striking shot of the body floating in the pool.
The real test will come next week, however, when we see how Esmail handles Elliot's new situation in prison.
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