'Mr. Robot': 'I Am Mr. Robot'
This week’s episode of Mr. Robot — the second-to-last of the season — had a lot of work to do in terms of dispensing information about Rami Malek’s Elliot and the revelations of the previous hour, and show creator Sam Esmail wrote an hour-plus of info-cramming that still played well as drama. Warning: Spoilers follow for Wednesday night’s Mr. Robot.
A flashback to the mid-1990s confirmed that Christian Slater’s character is/was Elliot’s father, and that was no joke or misunderstanding last week about Darlene being Elliot’s sister. The scenes between a little-boy Elliot and his computer-repairman dad (who owned a store called Mr. Robot) were handled with a sweet deftness, right down to father offering to take son to a movie (“Timecop or Stargate?”) and son opting for Pulp Fiction.
As pulp fiction itself, Mr. Robot is falling into the tradition of alienated modern heroes (no young person has ever used his hoodie more like a cape or an invisibility cloak as convincingly as Elliot) who have father issues. This week, we were told that the Mr. Robot we’ve seen all season in the body of Slater was a ghost in Elliot’s cranium machine. (Hence the “I am Mr. Robot” voiceover-narration line.) You could wince a little at the site of the revelation — having Darlene and Angela confront Elliot with their “Who are you talking to?” question while all three were positioned in front of Edward Alderson’s gravestone was a tad on-the-nose — and more winceable stuff occurred at the end of the episode.
In between, this was mostly another fine Mr. Robot installment, full of nice touches such as the early-morning breakfast with Gideon and his boyfriend (husband?), and the quietly brutal firing of Tyrell (happy fatherhood, by the way, Tyrell!) by Michael Cristofer, an actor I would always call upon to execute such stuff with his combination of shrewdness and strength.
There’s a lot more to be wrapped up — or left dangling — in the season finale next week, but already the show has been streamlined and pointed in a more swift narrative direction. As Darlene summarized it, all of what we’d been watching about the Evil Corp hack and F Society plotting has been Elliot’s invention, and the question remains whether he’ll continue this work now that he’s had a couple of the many cobwebs in his mind cleared away.
My only reservation about this week’s episode was a scene toward the end, which suggested a weakness in the series. Tyrell came to Elliot with a threat, and went into a long, mostly terrible, rubber-gloved, American Psycho-like monologue about how much guilt-free pleasure he’d taken in snuffing Sharon Knowles. I really thought — hoped — that Elliot would, right in the middle of this maundering menace-speech, just reach over to the kitchen stove and bash Tyrell’s head in with a frying pan, Roadrunner-versus-Coyote style. I had believed that Esmail in Robot had created the kind of show where such rank villainy was dealt with mercilessly. But, alas, unless the final shot of Elliot glancing into the popcorn machine where we know Darlene stashed a gun portends the quick shooting of Tyrell next week, we may be in for more melodrama than we’ve come to expect from this fine, lean series.
Mr. Robot airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on USA.
