Mr. Robot season 2 in review: Identity crisis run amok
Entertainment Weekly
Updated
We were prepared for apocalypse. Mind-blowing epiphany. Cosmic calamity. A tumble down the rabbit-hole, maybe even a trip through a wormhole. Instead, the season 2 finale of Mr. Robot gave us the anti-apocalypse. Oh, sure, there were revelations. But we, the observant and over-thinking viewer, already knew them, strongly suspected them, or ridiculously theorized them. Such things happen when you become deeply enmeshed with imaginary TV friends -- and when TV seasons take a little too long resolving the previous season's business. So it was slightly anti-climactic, too. The emotional peak of Darlene's season? Finally learning that her brother, the fearless yet f’d up leader of fsociety, was in league with the enemy, Tyrell Wellick. Meanwhile, Joanna Wellick learned that Scott Knowles, not her husband, had been gaslighting her all season long. Not a surprise, although it does keep some of Tyrell Wellick's mystery alive. Where's he been? Hanging out at "Mt. Olympus" for some of the time, it would seem. That was the wannabe god's romantic frame for the dingy, dirty, take-out reeky flat that's been his office perch for the past few months, plotting to throw lightening bolts at the world in hopes of changing it forever. But the finale did not let him hurl, and in fact, told a story about trying to stop him. Behold Stage 2 of The Dark Army's master plan! It wasn’t about hacking the fabric of the space-time continuum – it was about shredding documents. It was an elaborate scheme, hatched (and forgotten) by Elliot, to blowing up a building storing the back-up paper records of E Corp.'s brick-and-mortar assets, thereby cementing the effects of the Five/Nine jubilee. But the explosion didn’t happen. (Not on camera, at least.) Elliot chickened out and tried to pull the plug, but Tyrell — completely baffled, even heartbroken by his mentor-partner-prophet's bizarre turnabout — stopped him by shooting him. In doing so, Tyrell did to Elliot for real what Elliot thought he did to Tyrell last season. Neat. But after waiting all season to get clairty on Elliot's missing days after the Five/Nine hack, we still don't know if he really shot Tyrell or everything that happened. Frustrating! But we might need to get used to it. Mr. Robot, his agent of self-deception and blnkered thinking, made it clear he was doling out secrets as needed for fear of self-sabotage. Funny how our brains work like that, and how clever Mr. Robot is at dramatizing that. Tyrell's feelings of betrayal were poignant and nurtured the episode's interest in leader-follower relationships, how they're fraught with issues trust, faith, doubt, anger, second-guessing, subversion, rebellion, guilt, forgiveness and grace, and they're even more fraught when both leader and follower are, well, kinda crazy, when the blind are leading the blind. The finale served us metaphors for religion and believer, government and citizenry, and Mr. Robot and its fans. Like a lot of the season, "pyth0n-pt2.p7z" was about showrunning and all the questions that come with it. Do you have a master plan? Do you know where you're going? Or are you just making this up as you go along? Where are my answers? Screw you and your art, Sam Esmail! Just satsify me and confirm my theories, dammit! THIS IS ALL ABOUT ME, NOT YOU! Ever the sensitive soul, Tyrell’s violence against his partner left him shaken. They had a shared destiny! They had such great grok! Elliot, why have you forsaken me? “I love him,” he wept to Angela, who is now a fully activated agent in this shady cult of power-suited society effers. She flew to Elliot’s side, so she could be the first face he saw when he regained consciousness, effectively telling us that Elliot isn’t dead — a curious subversion of the cliffhanger cliché of the gunned-down hero. As Angela winged away to play her favorite role, caretaker to men, the lights went out in her apartment and across the city — a massive blackout to fulfill the foreshadowing of all those rolling brownouts. Such was the ironic enlightenment of “pyth0n_pt2.p7z.” We were expecting an electrifying, transcendent corker. Instead, the snaky little devil deconstructed our more fanciful expectations of the show. The finale was a pretty little “Nope” machine. Was there a Back To The Future II time travel/alt-reality twist? Nope. Was Dom pals with Elliot and Darlene when they were all kids? Nope. (But Dom does share a passion for The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie.) Was Tyrell a figment of Elliot’s imagination, a ghost, or a quantum double from an alternate reality? Nope, nope, and nope. Just a deluded, despairing dude with daddy issues, just like Elliot. Oh, and would Mr. Robot go wildly meta and reveal that Elliot and company were, in truth, just characters in a TV show? Nope. Esmail torpedoed that one in the episode’s most meta moment, when Dom’s boss went off on Darlene (and set her up for Dom’s good cop manipulation) with a ridiculous bit of bad cop bullying. "[You] are not on some TV show. This isn’t Burn Notice. There are no blue skies for you out there. Characters like you are not welcome here.” (Of course, this crack-up was also foreshadowing for the episode's post-credits scene; more on Mimageobley and Trenton in a second.) The finale putting us on (burn) notice, and maybe itself, too: Mr. Robot is not about our theories. It’s about characters. It’s a psychological, existential, and politically-minded paranoid thriller about incoherent, alienated people searching for coherency and connection, set in a fallen alt-world in desperate need of redemption and grounded in reality. Surrealism, meta, and far-out ideas are meant for thematic, metaphorical, and subtextual purposes only. No Stranger Things wackadoodle is intended. It was the culmination of a “F—God!” season that equated religion with a “a poorly written sci-fi franchise.” In debunking genre-stretching notions, Mr. Robot said, nope, we’re not going to be that franchise. Maybe. Hopefully. The two-part finale was a one-two punch. Part one was the proper thematic and aesthetic conclusion to a season about stressed-out, blurryfaced people whose identity crisis run amok was reflected in the risky, audacious, genre-blurring, aggressively meta, mind-game storytelling. It leveraged the success of season 1 to take shots at exploring and testing the range of creative expression at the risk of being messy and chaotic. Part two was a return to order. It knocked down many (but not all, I think) nutty ideas and settled, to some degree, the show’s formal identity crisis by being a sure-footed paranoid thriller — the kind of storytelling that the show does best (see: this season’s stand-out episode, “h1dden_pro0cess.axx”), the kind of show that Mr. Robot was all of last year. The two faces of the finale might also be a metaphor for Elliot's series stakes and character arc, an Altered States saga of a mad mind with mad ambition learning hubris, finding some catharsis and healing, and acquiring grace for his limits and falleness. Seen from this perspective, I have a new theory about the Back to the Future II soundtrack songs in Part One. Focusing on the time travel and alt-timeline angles is to be distracted by the wrong things. The premise of the film is that Marty’s life in the future had gone all kinds of wrong due to mistakes and meddling, and the key to fixing it was addressing things in the past. That’s clearly Elliot, too. They also could have represented a confession that season 2 was a little too gonzo for its own good. Frequently fun and always inspired, but confusing and convoluted, too — all things that can be fairly said of Back to the Future II. Some thought the songs were foreshadowing a quantum leap twist, the way season 1 used “Where Is My Mind” by The Pixies to speak to the show’s Fight Club-esque twist. But maybe what it was foreshadowing was a throwback season finale — and maybe even a throwback season 3. A way of saying: We need to take a step back to take a step forward. RELATED: Breaking down the Mr. Robot finale Which brings us to the finale’s post-credits scene. It echoed last season’s post-credits scene, which also took the form of an epic, unbroken camera shot that traveled great distance and pushed in on a conversation between two peripheral but important characters. Here, we got Mobley and Trenton drinking Big Gulps under mostly blue skies outside a Fry’s Electronics in California (?), not Phillip Price and Whiterose drinking cocktails inside a mansion. We found them living a Burn Notice life. "Frederick" and "Tanya" were living with new identities and working at the aforementioned Fry’s. The store had a peculiar, temple-esqye facade with a duel snake motif. It was a two-faced Janus, the god of doors, time, and transitions. One head was looking one way, one head was looking the other way -- one looking to the past, one looking the future. Back to the Future, yo! But hey, snakes. Can we trust it? Trenton revealed that she had made a game-changing discovery. “If what I discovered is real, do you know that means? It means we could potentially undo this whole thing and put everything back the way it was.” Once again, we were being goaded to think: time travel. Even more so after Dark Army assassin Leon showed up and asked: “Do you have the time?” (Uh oh. Frederick and Tanya, ya burnt!) I’d be shocked if Trenton has found proof of a time machine locked away somewhere, and it could be an acknowledgment that the show has some adjustments to make if it wants to keep its audience or win some back. The song chosen for this sequence: “We’ve Got Tonight” sung by Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton. I know it's late/I know you're weary/I know your plans/Don't include me… The refrain: We've got tonight, babe/Why don't you stay? Of course, it’s possible I'm reading Mr. Robot’s all wrong. The finale used Kraftwerk’s “Hall of Mirrors” to comment on Elliot. The verses: “The young man stepped into the hall of mirrors/Where he discovered a reflection of himself/Sometimes he saw his real face/And sometimes his stranger at his place/He fell in love with an image of himself/And suddenly the picture was distorted/He made up the person he wanted to be/And changed into a new personality/The artist is living in the mirror/With the echoes of himself.” The refrain: “Even the greatest stars lives their lives in the looking glass.” This song is so on the nose, you wonder if it inspired the whole damn show. How long has Sam Esmail been waiting to play that tune? It’s interesting, then, that he chose to play it here, in an episode that shatters our theories of Mr. Robot and our conception of what kind of story it is. The verses don’t just speak to Elliot, they speak to us and our relationship to TV shows, how we can get lost in them, and how our theories of TV shows, reasonable or crazy, say more and reveal more about us than they say or reveal about a TV show. But the verses also surely speak to Esmail, too, and his relationship to Mr. Robot, how it’s a personal work born of so many inspirations. And not just Fight Club. To be clear, I think Mr. Robot is always going to be lively with mystery and wink. It wouldn’t be Mr. Robot if it wasn’t. And honestly, I haven’t retired all of my crazy theories yet. I still think there’s something to be discovered at the Washington Township power plant, mythological ground zero for the Mr. Robot universe. (Super-collider! It’s a super-collider, I know it is!) Still, perhaps this show would be best with a just a teensy more structure. Remember the famous line from Back to the Future? “Roads? Where’s we’re going, we don’t need roads.” Mr. Robot might need roads. They can be a wild and looping, like the tracks of a Coney Island roller coaster. But it needs the rails. NEXT: Bits and megabytes from my Commodore 64 live journal[pagebreak] Bits and Megabytes: ELLIOT AND TYRELL +The finale’s opening scene revisited the mysterious moment from season 1 when Tyrell met with Mr. Robot sans Elliot. Did this scene mean that Tyrell was hallucinating Mr. Robot, too? Nope. We got a new version of the same scene, only with Elliot in place of Mr. Robot. Rami Malek’s soft impression of Christian Slater was impressive. The distinct persona he adopts when Mr. Robot takes over Elliot — commanding, confident, slightly scary — is cult leader compelling. You get how the members of fsociety or anyone could fall for him. I think we can conclude that Tyrell’s lunatic God talk was the result of ideas that Elliot-as-Mr. Robot put into his head like some insidious, incepting Mesmer — or rather, a con man working an exploit. Tyrell is mentally unbalanced. He also aspires to be a “master of the universe” like Phillip Price. Elliot recognized this and fogged Tyrell’s brain with hyperhuman, overman blue sky dreaming. Thus Spoke the Mock Zarathustra. +Allusions to “blue sky” and heaven — one a canvas for projected daydreams; the other a realm of wish-fulfillment — were abundant in this episode. But so were cloudy skies and clouded minds. In one image, they all came together: Tyrell on Coney Island, roller coaster in the background, his eyes a luminous blue, stormy skies above him, seduced and confused by Elliot’s crypto-talk, wanting to believe, begging for clarity. +The poem Tyrell’s bad dad adopted as a mantra: “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams. It’s a classic of Imagism, a kind of poetry that meditates on the “luminous details” of objects. An interesting choice for a season that attempted to create meaning with ambitious visual storytelling — and a show in which obsessive fans like me fixate on details in hopes of finding meaning. “Red Wheel Barrow” was the title of Elliot’s prison journal, which we now see was his way (or Mr. Robot’s way) of nagging him (with a luminous detail!) to get back on mission. The menu that contained the cipher which Mr. Robot cracked last week — another metaphor for fan puzzling — was from a place called “Red Wheelbarrow BBQ.” +Tyrell took Elliot to their secret lab in a building in what appeared to be lower Manhattan. They rode up in a freight elevator operated by a Dark Army guy in a white hazmat or PPPS biocontainment suit… chowing on a sandwich from Red Wheelbarrow BBQ. +As they rose in the elevator, Elliot ruminated on perception and reality. The combination of the suited-up Dark Army goon and Elliot’s narration teased the idea that Elliot was about to gain illuminated eyes and see through the illusory nature of his reality like Neo gleaning The Matrix. Elliot’s reverie was a set-up for the mistake that nearly cost him his life: believing that he couldn’t trust his eyes, believing that Tyrell was a hallucination, believing that the gun Tyrell held in his hand wasn’t real. Nope. Elliot’s game of shoot-me chicken with Tyrell was a full-circle moment for the season, as we remember that the premiere had Elliot playing a similar game of shoot-me chicken with Mr. Robot. There, the bullets weren’t real and did Elliot no harm. Not here. As John Locke said at the end of Lost's second season when he made the mistake of thinking The Hatch wasn't real: "Oops." +The finale paid off one of the season’s implicit quasi-sci-fi references, if only to blow it up. Elliot came off like a lunatic in his showdown with Tyrell. “He doesn’t exist,” he told Mr. Robot. ”I’m the only one who exists. It’s time to finally take back control. Real control.” Well, remember the name of Ray’s black market website? “Midland City.” That’s a location in the far-out and often very meta fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. In Breakfast of Champions, a businessman reads a science fiction story that tells the reader that they are the only person in the world with free will and everyone else is a robot. He believes it to be true and goes nuts. The novel builds to a metafictional apocalypse. Vonnegut, the book’s self-aware narrator, informs his fictional alter-ego, the sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, that he’s a fictional character. The novel ends with an illustration of Vonnegut crying. Vonnegut returned to Midland City in Dead-Eye Dick — and destroyed it with a neutron bomb. +Was Mr. Robot foreshadowing the true nature of Stage Two — blowing up a building containing E Corp.’s paper records — in the episode earlier this season when Elliot dreamed his dream of what happily ever looks like for him? If you recall, that vision ended with Elliot sitting at a table in the middle of a downtown Manhattan street with all his friends, family, and enemies (and us!) cheering as they watched E Corp. HQ crumble to the ground. (In my recap of that episode, I wondered if the Mr. Robot part of Elliot dreamed that dream as part of his long play effort way to move Elliot out of his prison funk and out of prison altogether.) NEXT: I am the moth.[pagebreak] JOANNA, SCOTT AND DEREK +The most disturbing story in the finale was the Joanna-Scott Knowles stuff. Joanna confronted him on messing with her reality. Scott copped to it, revealing that his wife was pregnant when Tyrell murdered her, making her loss doubly catastrophic for him. He explained that he wanted to hurt Joanna by making her feel hope, just so he could crush it, just as Tyrell crushed all hope in his life. He then apologized to Joanna, which might be one of the worst things a man can do to Joanna, because there’s nothing Joanna hates more than a weak-ass man. Anyway, my guess is that Joanna went to Scott’s house intending to do what she did: goading Scott into attacking her. Her insults were outrageously grotesque and abominable, and I won’t repeat them here, but I will say that I won’t be forgetting “F--- her and her fetus corpse” anytime soon. +Joanna might not have known exactly how she was going to do to Scott, but I assume she had the general idea, she knew she had the talent and ability to do it, and she had no doubt she could pull it off once the missing pieces revealed themselves to her. In this way, Joanna’s scheme mirrored Dom’s manipulation of Darlene, an act of informed, skilled, and gutsy improvisation led by vision. And in this cunning, queasy way, Mr. Robot gave us one more allegory for TV showrunning in a season full of them. +Joanna then used her own powers of persuasion to compel her weak-willed, weak-minded, macho-posturing bartender/deejay boyfriend — life role model: Tom Cruise in Cocktail — to tell the police a lie that would finger Scott for the murder of his wife. She scripted his confession, performed it for him, and asked him to perform it back. Basically, Joanna played director, guiding an actor through a performance. And after some initial reservation, Derek bought into it, completely. Three thoughts: 1. Is this what it’s like to be directed by Sam Esmail? 2. Joanna should moonlight as Whitrerose's hypnotist. 3. Joanna turned Derek into a “crisis actor,” making this scene an echo of the premiere scene when the conspiracy nutjob seduced Gideon in the bar, then accused him of being a “crisis actor” and murdered him. DOM AND DARLENE +According to Agent DiPerro, “python” refers to a long-play, long-con "patient predator" strategy of waiting and baiting a bad guy to make one false move. She claimed that the FBI was running one to smoke out Tyrell. She also told Darlene that the mystery that catalyzed the season and caused the fsociety to freak out and fall apart – Romero’s apparent murder – wasn’t actually a murder at all. He’d been accidentally shot by a stray bullet fired by a neighbor. Did you guys believe all of her? Was she bluffing and fluffing her story as part of her smaller “python” play on Darlene? +I did enjoy the duel between Dom and Darlene, particularly the latter’s refusal to be snookered by the former’s attempts to bond with her, cultivate false intimacy with her. I also equally enjoyed Dom’s amused response to Darlene’s tough-talking, foul-mouthed “s--- a dick” attitude. Their war pivoted on the matter of proof. Dom thought she could get Darlene to spill by flooding her with physical evidence linking her to fsociety — the Monopoly Man mask, the video camera, a VCR. Darlene parried by proving that she could come up with any number of narratives to counter Dom’s narrative of her guilt or subvert it with reasonable doubt. Dom then played her trump card: a bullet casing from the gun Darlene swiped from Xander Jones found in the Fun Society HQ. This, finally, made Darlene nervous, because she didn’t quite understand it, but probably suspected it might mean trouble for Elliot. But this begs a question: +If Tyrell is alive… how do we explain the shell-casing then? Did Elliot shoot Tyrell or not? +Rest In Peace, Cisco. You were the love of Darlene’s life. Bygones about the bacon. +Dom seemed to break Darlene with a risky, two-part gambit: guessing at Darlene's exploits and working them; and sharing a secret. Dom began by being transparent about herself, albeit the purpose of playing Darlene. She told her that the only reason she was so invested in the case was because she had no life. She enticed her with the promise of revelation, one that would make her feel special, a very important character in a very grand story. Darlene pushed back: She knew she was no great shakes. But Dom insisted she could prove otherwise. “If you’re open to changing your mind, I’d like to show you something,” she said. The scene echoed two Whiterose scenes from earlier this season: Dom’s hang-out with Minister Zhang in China, when Zhang showed Dom the secret closet of dresses; and the Whiterose-Angela black room rendition sequence, when Whiterose bent Angela to her will by insinuating that her life was a conspiracy and rocking her mind (or brainwashing her) with an unspecified revelation — the snake-tempting Eve with forbidden knowledge, causing her to fall. Dom did the same with Darlene. She brought her into the inner sanctum of their investigation. There was a grease board charting the fsociety conspiracy and even more filled with notes. To my eyes, it looked a lot like the writers room of a TV show. (If my mind worked better at this late hour, I’d explore the idea that Dom was a metaphor for showrunning.) What Darlene saw got under her skin. The conspiracy board overwhelmed her. It suggested to her that the FBI knew everything, including something she didn’t know: Elliot’s alliance with Tyrell. Fear of betrayal by the people she loves the most is her exploit. And Elliot lying to her about an alliance with Tyrell would qualify as betrayal. Dom knew it or guessed it — she could recognize an emotionally fragile Jersey girl when she sees one; she is one! – and she worked it. +The song during Darlene’s slow-mo perp walk through FBI HQ was a cover of the Aimee Mann song “The Moth.” What do you think it says about Darlene? About Dom? About the relationship between fan and show and vise versa? The moth don’t care when he sees the flame He might get burned but he’s in the game And once he’s in he can’t go back He’ll beat his wings till he burns them black The moth don't care if the flame is real 'Cause flame and moth got a sweetheart deal And nothing fuels a good flirtation Like need and anger and desperation So come on, let's go, ready or not 'Cause there's a flame I know, hotter than hot And with a fuse that's so thoroughly shot, away. Mr. Robot, you’re my flame, and I’m your moth. Can’t wait for the game to resume again next year. And thank you, dear readers, for reading and rolling with my crazy (and my typos) this season. See you again next season?
Mr. Robot drove us insane in season 2.
That’s not a criticism. It’s a description. A recurring motif put our divided-mind anti-hero Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) — and by extension, us, his “hello, friend” buddy — in the backseat of a car and took us for wild rides by mad men and toady tools. This was the premise of the madly meta “Mr. Robot” sitcom, when Mr. Robot (Christian Slater), Elliot’s rogue alter-ego and frequent altered state, seized the wheel of his consciousness and took him on a great escape. This was the cliffhanger of last week’s trippy and tricky outing, with Elliot riding shotgun in a cab with a dark passenger he thought was dead, Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallstrom). He freaked and demanded his immediate release, a hair-pulling panic that might have spoken for us, too.
Such was the thrill, frustration, and meaning of season 2, a saga of identity crisis run amok in a high anxiety culture on the blink and on the brink. All of its characters became unreliable narrators of themselves, and their distortions and their dimness became threatening to everyone as they executed reckless campaigns for change. Each of them had ideas for how to make the world great again. Each of them made a hash of the truth and screwed up bigly.
After weeks of mounting dread and uncertainty, Elliot and his friends have been brought to a crossroads: a season finale that has impishly teased the possibility of a reality-shaking apocalypse. I wouldn’t say season 2 reflected our election year, but I dare say it has captured a sense of what it’s felt like to suffer it. Disorientation. Exasperation. Terror. And now, nervous anticipation, as the season prepares to play its trump card.
Look, something is going to happen in “pyth0n-pt2.p7z.” Something that might change the world of Mr. Robot and the show itself, especially if it plunges into noodle-cooking, Back to the Future II time travel. Is this slippery, serpentine story about to make a looping ouroboros and eat its own tail? Would that be a transcendent, quantum leap forward for Mr. Robot or a calamitous fall backward? Or does showrunner Sam Esmail have other destinations in mind?
+++
Season 1 of Mr. Robot was a many-minded marvel. The dimensions were legion: it was a character study of post-modern, digital age alienation and solipsism, a psychological mystery, a self-implicating, audience-indicting pop critique of capitalism, a paranoid thriller, a cyber-thriller, just plain thrilling. These themes were embodied in Elliot, a magical pairing of ingeniously conceived character and actor, Rami Malek, whose imaginative and empathetic tour-de-force won him a justly deserved Emmy last Sunday. A season of unreliable narrator storytelling that knowingly assimilated a variety of cinematic inspirations culminated with the revelation that Elliot himself was a man under the influence of his culture, his traumatic past, his broken mind.
Mr. Robot belonged to a rush of shows that have used mental illness to dramatize themes of inauthenticity, hypocrisy, grief, yearning and identity issues of all sorts. It’s important to acknowledge that these shows are often sketchy representations of psychological disorders. Some critics took issue with Mr. Robot’s indulgence of rigged game conspiracy rhetoric, but the show undercuts that shamefulness by circling back to the fact that Elliot is so profoundly wrong about his experience, so immature in this thinking, and so beholden to “issues” that you can’t trust anything he says about the world. (Season 2, in fact, blew up the ideology of fsociety, exposing them as short-sighted radicals lacking any real ideology at all.) The drama lives at the fraught intersection of social and psychic, objective and subjective. In Mr. Robot, the world suffers the price for the individual’s unchecked, uncorrected incoherence and fraudulence. In season 1, Elliot’s discontents crashed the operating system of civilization — the economy. It ended with the world sliding into dystopia and our stressed-out hero with a dirty heavy soul. How would he respond to the problem with his blurryfaced brokenness?
Poorly, it turned out. Season 2 had everyone biting off more than they could chew and deluding themselves into thinking they could handle it – an ironic, humble and perhaps not accidental theme for a second season show facing the challenge of matching and even surpassing a phenomenal first season.
Anyone who thought Mr. Robot would follow-up head-trip with clarity was grossly mistaken: Mr. Robot, for now at least, has decided to be a story in which quagmire is a state of mind and mystery intrinsic to its storytelling franchise. Season 2 continued the show’s skeptical rumination on redemptive heroism by exploring various strategies for personal and social transformation. It was about people trying to shovel up this “kingdom of bullshit” and slipping in big piles of their own. It was about people trying to change the way they think and thought about themselves, only to wind up more confused than ever, and worse, their mental housecleaning may have even left them brainwashed.
Elliot tried to save his world by unplugging from it and trying to delete Mr. Robot from his operating system. He locked himself away and embarked on a project of rehabilitation, a self-improving life retreat with an ironic twist. He didn’t trust himself, and he didn’t trust us, his imaginary friend — so much so, that he deceived us by obscuring the truth of his circumstances. He wasn’t hiding out in his mother’s house; he was in jail. His withholding was his way of punishing us for our withholding in season 1: Elliot was stung that we didn’t share with him our suspicions of Mr. Robot. Friends don’t let friends let their delusions destroy the world, you know.
Elliot’s deception indicted his punitive redemption quest as flim-flam and cowardly escapism. In choosing retreat and fabulist denial, Elliot was shirking his responsibility to the world he had royally f---ed over with his “F--- Society!” anarchy. He was his own fiery “F--- God!” critique, a distant, neglectful, absentee landlord. Upon his release, Elliot had to confront his mess — in another memorable car ride, he cruised the desperation on the streets and felt shame — and the psychic mess he remains. Here at the end, his prison rehab is flickering and failing. His glitching mirrors the rolling brownouts afflicting the Eastern seaboard. He’s still hiding secrets from himself, and he’s still an out-of-mind, out-of-control mystery to himself. His strategies for introspection and remedy remain tortured and disingenuous. Last week, he used lucid dreaming to hack his brain and get into the head of Mr. Robot, i.e., himself. Elliot’s careening identity crisis is still in full swerve, and cranking into it is bringing him to a turning point.
Elliot’s escape from reality impacted others, and his story was mirrored in others, too. Their arcs diversified the season’s reflection on different modes of cultural engagement. Darlene (Carly Chaikin) tried to save the world by furthering the revolution Elliot launched last season. But it was always a bad revolution, misguided, lacking vision, and compromised by personal issues, and Darlene was a bad agent for it. She tried to convince herself and her fsociety cohorts that she could be someone she wasn’t: a leader, a genius, her brother. Further subverted by unresolved anger over the past, Darlene spiraled into moral horror. She murdered. She got others hurt. She may have gotten herself killed, though not before veering back toward humility and humanity. She was last seen getting ambushed and shot up by a suicidal agent of The Dark Army — a metaphor for a woman undone by her own sabotaging, self-destructive shadow self.
Angela (Portia Doubleday) wasn’t exactly in her right mind this year, either. Like Elliot, she could recognize her bugginess, but chased dubious strategies for correction. She began the season trying to rewire her brain with a regimen of affirmations designed to boost her self-esteem and self-confidence. She was gaming herself, even molesting herself, and setting herself up for further abuse. We now see that the show was foreshadowing a climax that may involve a more nefarious kind of mind control.
Her self-help program was in service of building up her nerve for her own risky heroic project. She sought to save the world by changing it from the inside, by working within its most corrupting, controlling, custodial institution, E Corp. She tried on a variety of personas. Negotiator. Saboteur. Whistleblower. But she, too, was duping herself, and she frequently became the tool of others — Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer), fsociety, and now, it seems, Whiterose (B.D. Wong) — who worked her exploit, her need for affirmation, to be somebody’s somebody, to be “an asset.”
Angela’s season of constant dead-end questing brought her to a surreal terminus: a dark room rendition chamber, stocked with ironic symbols for her under-interrogated self: a power-suited mini-me and allegedly abused child; an old school, interactive video game, a hero’s journey through a mysterious, druggy Eden called Ecodelia; a weathered paperback edition of Lolita, a story with a queasy, pervy unreliable narrator, and a precocious young girl named Dolores Haze with a thing for father figures who becomes exploited by one. The room was also home to a slowly dying fish, which should have reminded us of Qwerty, Elliot’s fish, the pet she agreed to care for during his incarceration. Angela, the quixotic caretaker, empathetic and gullible, is locked in a prison of daddy issues and busted identity. Did Whiterose truly free her mind with some eye-opening secret about the true nature of reality? Or did she fog her brain with false revelation in order to bend her to her will? Was this intervention or inception?
Season 2 added a fantastic new character, FBI agent Dom DiPerro (Grace Gummer), and she was a great, grounding element for the show and entertaining investigator of its mysteries. You got the sense that work was her way of connecting with others, and her coping mechanism for alienation and profound loneliness. This season, her frustrated search for truth left her bothered, bewildered, and nearly riddled with bullets. A pair of close encounters with death threw some existential terror into her — or exposed the terror already in her and forced her to confront it. Will she survive the season? Or will she lose herself for good with one last journey into mystery?
Mr. Robot’s corporate overlords and the invisible hand ruling elites of Mr. Robot weren’t immune to flux and frustration, either. Their identities were made of stronger stuff than the rebels trying to overthrow them, but they were threatened all the same by circumstances they thought they could control: we learned at the end of last season that Phillip Price and Whiterose (who moonlights — or daylights? — as Zhang, China’s minister of state security) had co-opted and even permitted the fsociety hack to further private agendas. In Mr. Robot, cultural revolutions don’t topple regimes, they just get absorbed, internalized, neutralized, and homogenized. Yesterday’s scary counter-culture punk is today’s top 40.
Still, the vagaries of Five/Nine dystopia challenged their delusional belief in their own supremacy. Exacerbating their angst: mortality. Price, a graying “master of the universe,” found himself unable to easily live the life to which he had become accustomed. He had to pay upfront for a meal at his fave restaurant, just like every other peon in Austerity USA. The protestors camped outside his office made it oh, so hard for his driver to pick him up at the door. The principalities he thought he controlled — which is to say, the United States government — and the partners he thought he could trust proved difficult to wrangle.
Price spent most of the season manipulating Angela in a long, labored con that perhaps even he doesn’t understand. (That strange feeling in his chest… could it be… a crush?) His primary objective, though, was to secure a trillion dollar bailout to finance a legacy project. In a stunning moment, Phillip declared that he held himself to a standard set by God himself after making man in His own image. He was referring to the Biblical command that humanity “subdue the Earth.” Yep, that does sounds like the motto of a world-conqueror, or at least, a 1 percent Walter White, breaking bad to finance some immortality project in some vain, venal denial of death. The theology is more nuanced: God’s tasking is a charge to man to be conscientious stewards to a creation that doesn’t belong to them. Price doesn’t exactly resemble some good steward or shepherd. He resents even husbanding lowly sheeple. He’s on a mercenary chase of his own glorious transfiguration. Still, I also suspect that he, like all demented villains, thinks himself the hero in a race-against-time story that’s all about him.
This is even more true of Whiterose, a mournful soul who lives her life on the clock, down to the very second, with fundamentalist fervor. She doesn’t believe in accidents, she doesn’t believe in coincidence, she acts like she knows the secret fate of all things. Perhaps on this show, time really is a flat circle. She and True Detective’s Rust Cohle would be quite the double date.
Whiterose had two sensational scenes in season 1, but Esmail dialed up her presence in season 2. Her growing significance to the plot and mythology — and B.D. Wong’s evocative performance — reminds me of the game-changing impact that Michael Emerson’s Ben Linus had on Lost during its second season. Ben wasn’t supposed to stick around, but Emerson’s performance captured the imagination of the writers and viewers. He was a happy accident that changed the direction of the series. Perhaps Whiterose was always part of Esmail’s vision. Regardless, her mystery and carefully phrased utterances have flooded our attention and focus. She so owns us, the way she owns Angela right now.
Like Price, Whiterose is deeply invested in a legacy. Her history contains the histories of other characters, too. For decades, she’s been working on a project. The lethally leaky Washington Township nuclear power plant is either key to it or is host to it. She’s probably known Elliot and Angela since childhood and she might even be responsible for the deaths of their parents. She’s so odd I sometimes wonder if she’s even real, one more uncanny element in a world fishy with them. She collects clocks. She likes to talk about the psychological symbolism of doors. She likes to ruminate in alternate realities. Her dual (and maybe dueling?) male-female identities symbolize many paradoxes. She’s establishment and revolutionary. She suggests fluidity, yet her perspective is overly deterministic. She’s all kinds of poetic and poignant, but I confess I’m distracted by the glitter of geeky theories, conjectures that might be pure fool’s gold. What treasure is buried at Washington Township? A super-collider to harvest dark matter and access parallel universes? A double-making, alt timeline-producing time machine? A quantum computer capable of reprogramming reality?
I wouldn’t make this observation if it wasn’t for the fact that Mr. Robot is prone to thunder on about religion and gods, but it’s interesting to note that Whiterose bares a resemblance to Janus, the Roman deity of time, doorways, and transitions of all sorts. He presides over beginnings and endings and movement between them. Birth and death, trade and travel, war and peace. His defining feature: two faces, one looking to the past, one looking to the future.
No, I’m not saying that Whiterose is the modern incarnation of an eternally recurring, periodically appearing higher order being. (I’ll let the upcoming Starz series American Gods tell that story.) But Janus is a fitting association for a constantly commuting character with two faces who talks a lot about time and doors — and for a season of wild trips and arduous ordeals, of characters and a society in a tumultuous state of becoming. A more profound transition might loom in the form a hard sci-fi makeover. Might. But even if the show doesn’t make the switch, floating the ideas serves a story about a world gone crazy and incapable of trusting anything amid the chaos and flux.
+++
Reflecting on Mr. Robot, I’m reminded of (brace yourself for pretentiousness) Kierkegaard. “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” In retrospect, the season has a compelling clarity to it here at the end. But in the midst of it, the journey was turbulent and the destination was unclear. The show was clearly aware of its taxing potential. Season 2 often struck me as an allegory for the show’s relationship with the audience — for the relationship that all big saga shows, and especially mystery serials, have with their audiences. Elliot locking himself (and us) in prison and tricking us with a risky hallucination gambit spoke to the show’s anxiety about keeping an audience and its strategies for doing so. All those car rides were metaphors for the showrunning and show-following. There was even one set to song “Guiding Light” by the band Television. By season’s end, Esmail was putting posters on the wall calling out his gambles (a yield sign that read “Risk Ahead”) and maybe even apologizing for them, like the poster with a cat hanging from a tree limb and the words “Hang in There!”
In the penultimate episode, Elliot’s lucid dreaming — a technique he learned from a childhood friend named Sam (last name Esmail, maybe?) — led to a funny beat in which Elliot spied on Mr. Robot as he tried to solve a cipher. It struck me as a complex metaphor for theorizing fans trying to hack and crack the show’s mysteries; and a showrunner skillfully solving the puzzle of his story. Angela’s surreal black room sequence could be seen as a metaphor for what mystery serials owe their audience — answers — and what mystery serials require from their audience, a leap of faith. Whiterose shared a secret* with Angela — an answer to a mystery — that assuaged Angela’s anxiety. But Whiterose wanted something in return. “I don’t want your proof,” she said, referring to evidence that could expose and derail her ambitions. “I want your belief.”
*My theory? Angela’s mother is alive— or Angela has been made to believe she’s alive.
Of course, Whiterose may have bent Angela to her will by brainwashing her, too. This possibility summed up a season of psychic driving and confidence scams, from Elliot’s hallucination gambit with the audience to Mr. Robot’s takeover attempts of Elliot’s mind, to Ray’s seduction and slaving of Elliot (and Elliot’s heroic revolt against him), to whatever the hell is going on with Joanna Wellick (Stephanie Corneliussen). Was Tyrell really sending her mementos to bolster her confidence during the ordeal of his absence? Or was someone messing with her, gaslighting her?
I never felt Esmail was trying to trick us. He made us suspicious of the hallucination ruse and gave us clues to see through it. He tipped us early to the secret that’s driving the end game and contributing to Elliot’s current psychological breakdown: that he is author of “phase two” of the conspiracy playing out, and that for some reason, he doesn’t — or won’t — remember this. From start to finish, Esmail’s storytelling sought to capture Elliot’s surreal, uncanny experience of himself and the hypnotic, mind-games he runs on himself. The dim lighting, the aggressive use of meta, the long, spellbinding, sometimes vertiginous tracking shots all feed into this attempt to capture a portrait of a dangerously deluded, detached, and deceptive mind.
Season 2 had flaws, for sure. The Hallucination Gambit went on much too long; and the decision to keep characters isolated from each other robbed the season of the relationship dynamics that helped give season 1 its emotional resonance. The early episodes often exceeded an hour, running head-long into a TV moment when too much TV is longer than it needs to be. While those super-sized episodes contained spectacular sequences — the smart house meltdown; the “Take Me Home” money burning; Elliot’s Adderall overdose; the Halloween flashback featuring “The Polite Massacre of the Bourgeois” and Mr. Robot’s first mental hijacking of Elliot; so many more — they were also often opaque or dense with too many themes. (The episodes play better sans commercials, which is how I experienced it, via the courtesy of press screeners. Honestly, I think the too-many ad breaks do a disservice to the flow and design of each episode.) We were made to wait all season to learn what really happened to Tyrell at the end of last season. I was intrigued by the move, but we’ll see if it pays off. The second half of the year — everything since Elliot got out of prison — was stronger. It was a stretch of killer, focused paranoid thrillers, the show’s most sure-footed modality, that reunited the characters and dug deeper into them, particularly Darlene: the late season investment in her psychological and moral conflict has imbued the endgame with emotional heft and tragic consequence.
Yes, I struggled with season 2. But I enjoyed the struggle, too. Part of it is just me. I enjoy grappling and playing with mysteries that grip and play with me. But I look back on the season and see beauty in its audacity and meaning in the madness. The visual storytelling was often exhilarating and the commitment to innovation is important to growing the medium of TV. And Malek continues to be a magnetic marvel. The center holds, and Mr. Robot does not fall apart, because of his imaginative, committed, humanizing performance. Thanks to him, Elliot remains TV’s most engrossing depiction of outsider alienation, and more broadly, the importance of managing your chaos with clear-eyed perspective as you engage culture and toggle between identities in alternate realities, digital and otherwise.
As Mr. Robot goes into the off-season, I suspect it will have to make some critical choices about its future. Will Esmail continue to direct every episode? (I hope so.) How long does it stay on the air? (Please, USA, do not make this show last any longer than it should.) What are its best strategies for entertaining an audience? Can it keep up with the unreliable narrator storytelling? Should it? And will it — should it — push into Fringe territory?
Here, my mind is as divided as Elliot’s. Part of me wants to see the Slaughterhouse-Five version of this show. Listen: Elliot Alderson has come unstuck in time. For realz! At the same time, I don’t want to see Mr. Robot become — how did Elliot conspicuously put it at the beginning of the season during his roast of religion? — “a poorly written sci-fi franchise.” Was that line coyly foreshadowing an embrace of Stranger Things? Or was that a sly assurance that no matter how weird Mr. Robot gets, this is ultimately a story rooted in a world we can recognize, about an escapist, fragmented personality resolving his identity crisis in a culture we know, learning to engage society and impact it with greater coherency and grace. Still, where you go, Mr. Robot, I will follow. You have the wheel, and my belief.
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