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On 9/25/2016 at 6:15 AM, kiguchi said:

My apologies that this is season 1 griping: for a show with a technology slant, there doesn't seem to be a lot of CCTVs in the settings: Elliot picking the lock of a door in Steel Mountain, Angela sneaking to work early to upload the malware on Ollie's work machine, or Tyrell inviting his boss' wife to the roof deck. None of those actions would be considered if they were aware of the existence of cameras. 

The existence of technology in this show is directly proportionate with whether the plot needs it to exist. 

And LOL at that fucking season finale.  I can't wait for the apologists to justify it but the people here who were defending it haven't posted in this thread in weeks.

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We binged the second season over a week or so. I have zero problems with the finale. It was fine. If anything it was conservative. 

The big "reveal" they were going to was that:

Wellick was real, which was underwhelming. I think just for the sake of variety, we all knew that. The prison reveal earlier in the season was far more powerful. That moment where Darlene is looking at the board and suddenly Wellick is there felt hugely underwhelming. I hadn't even realized that the dramatic weight of it wasn't supposed to be "Wellick is behind everything!" which obviously we didn't care about since we knew he was involved but instead "Wellick is Real!" It was a fizzle in that regard, but maybe we didn't need it to be more. The show doesn't always have to be a gotcha sort of thing.

 

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I spoke with a coworker who binged the show and he enjoyed it a little more than I did.  Maybe that's the way to do it. 

I didn't even even consider "is Tyrell real?" to be an actual plot point because making him also a part of Elliott's psyche would be a bridge to far even for this show's dishonest narrative.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Binge watched over the weekend and I am all caught up.  Here are my thoughts.

Spoiler
  • I like the fact that the FBI has been aware of fsociety's activities all along, but that begs the question how did the FBI drop the ball and allow a known accomplice to get away with the femtocell hack? 
  • Yeah, Esmail needs to get his hands on a Psychology book.  Mr. Robot has a Tyler Durden-esque relationship with Elliot to the point that Eliot grasp on reality is really strained.  That's not how disassociated personality disorder really works.
  • When Tyrell mentioned earlier in the meeting that he was "doing what was necessary," I knew he was the Real McCoy and that he gun in his hand was legit.
  • Mr. Robot lied to Elliot about murdering Tyrell to throw Elliot off of his own trail.  Huh?
  • The smoke and mirrors with Tyrell and the bullet in Elliot's chest being real was more to fake us out than it was an accurate reflection of Elliot's mental illness.
  • What the fuck is up with Mr, Robot's fixation on blowing up buildings with people inside them.  First he wanted to destroy Steel Mountain and now the back-up data collection point?
  • So, Joanna is going to frame Scott Knowles for his wife's murder.  Brutal, as was Knowles beating the shit out of her when she snapped and called him out on his cowardly fuckwittery.  But the most brutal thing of all was finding out that Tyrell not only strangled Knowles's wife to death, he also killed their unborn child.
  • Okay, so Angela is playing both sides of the fence now?  If she's the mastermind behind Stage 2, when did she hook up with Tyrell?  Why did Whiterose kidnap her?  Why did Angela go through the trouble to steal the information about Washington Townshiip incident when she knew that eventually Stage 2 would go down and E Corp would be crippled for good once the paper copy data was destroyed?
  • Hey! it's Trenton and Mobley... uh... Frederick and Tanya.  What did Trenton find that will undo the hack?  Will she be able to now that Leon has found them.  Given Whiterose's obsession with time and Leon's shiv skills, Trenton and Mobley's odds of survival don't look good.
  • Overall, I thought this was a pretty good season.  I like the cyberthriller aspects of the show, so I'm a bit bummed by all of the mind bending shit that has gone on the past few episodes.  Hopefully Season 3 will go back to focusing on the hacking and cracking instead of psychoanalysis.

 

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6 hours ago, J.T. said:

What did Trenton find that will undo the hack?

The key(s), I'm guessing.  The core conceit of the original hack, buried and forgotten under mountains of stylistic bullshit and goofy plot elements, back when the show as more about hacking than about cosplaying David Lynch and leaving viewers holding their dicks, is that fsociety encrypted all of e-corp's data.

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Spoiler

 

10 hours ago, J.T. said:

Okay, so Angela is playing both sides of the fence now?

I think this only happened after the kidnapping. It didn't sound like she actually knew Tyrell, more like the two were made aware of each other for future contact to deal with Elliot.

 

 

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  • 5 months later...

I'm not going through looking at the spoilered comments, but I'm 8 or 9 episodes through the season and I think it's much better to binge watch. I could see how watching it from week to week would be really frustrating or even detract from the quality of story being told or the moments playing out on screen. So far, I'm loving this season as much as the first season. Maybe I'm grading on a curve since season 2 for many shows tend to suck, but this has avoided the sophomore slump. At least for me anyway.

Watching TV week to week is just an awful experience. Oddly enough, with shows made for Netflix or Amazon that you can immediately binge watch, I think those actually suffer from the ability to immediately binge watch them. There's a difference in quality with a series made for tv than there is for Netflix. Using Mr. Robot as an example, I think has to do with things like twists and reveals. A series made for tv goes out of it's way to make a twist impactful to get you to tune in next week, whereas something on Netflix doesn't have the same power because you could just immediately go on to watch the next episode. So the end result with something like Mr. Robot, if you're binging on it, is that you immediately move onto the reveal or payoff and if it's not that impactful, it's ok, because you didn't spend a week theorizing and waiting for that moment to happen. When it does happen though, it's typically bigger than it would be on a Netflix series.

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Man, I really liked this season. I think binging is the way to watch it because I didn't have any of the issues that some of you had. Is it perfect? No, but it was really enjoyable and good. I liked the build to some of the reveals midseason and at the end of the season. Can't wait to see where things go next.

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  • 4 months later...
  • 2 months later...

Season 3 premiered tonight. A+ episode of television. This episode was an A+. It had the crazy visuals and set design, feeling of paranoia, and everything else I love about this show. It was also a lot more plot driven than Season 2 (a big complaint from a lot of people). Information was added but more questions were added onto it. What an amazing and epic show.

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I'm spoilering this just because something many have hypothesized about looks to be true

Spoiler

HOLY FUCKING SHIT T I M E  T R A V E L

YEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

I never delved into any of the subreddit shit, but watching the show, I kept picking up on a time travel vibe. If not time travel, then something with parallel dimensions. Sometimes episodes would blatantly make you think this and other times it wound up being a little something I'd pick up.

So I watch the premiere and right away they get into alternate universes, parallel dimensions, time travel, etc. And then they show the particle collider. Later on Angela talks about making it so that they go back to the beginning. That all leads me to do a search on Mr. Robot and time travel, which brought me to:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MrRobot/comments/4wm29s/spoilers_s2e1_mark_my_words_time_travel_and/

and this one

https://www.reddit.com/r/MrRobot/comments/64hjpt/spoilers_s2e12_time_travel_theory_more_evidence/

and finally this thread from an hour ago that discusses an ARG in the episode

https://www.reddit.com/r/MrRobot/comments/75uyhx/i_think_i_figured_out_where_white_rose_was/

I fucking love this show. That shit that they found off of the QR code was added to Reddit TWO YEARS AGO. This is just crazy.

 

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I dipped out about halfway through last season, but figured you guys might enjoy this:

Spoiler

Just as a general question, totally disconnected from Mr. Robot: Do you think season 3 of a television show is too late to introduce the concept of time travel?
[Laughs] The problem with time travel — I’ve always said in the writers’ room that whenever you introduce time travel, it’s game over. Then all of the rules go out the window. Throwing out time travel in the middle of a series run is a little late.

Source: http://ew.com/tv/2017/10/11/mr-robot-trump-time-travel-season-3/

 

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So, based on the deep dive I took last night, I don't think this is something being thrown out in the middle of the series. I think this has been a part of the series since season 1. I'm doing a re-watch of season 1 because my wife wanted to watch it and, man, there's certainly something going on.

If it isn't that, then it's

Spoiler

parallel universes

 

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I enjoyed the episode but at this point I've got no clue what's going on and have been notoriously bad at picking up the swerves in the series thusfar.  It was only the first episode and it's still one of my favorite current shows but I feel like it's dangerously close to crawling up its own ass a la latter day Lost.

Every season has had one or more bigtime twists so now I'm trying to figure out what it's going to be this time around.  For someone who was gutshot, Elliot seems awful spry after only six days of recovery.  Is it going to turn out that he's actually in a coma after being shot and everything that happens is all a fever dream (Angela's comment of 'turning everything back' a reference to him waking up and fixing it?)?

Speaking of Angela this episode suggested that she's actually one of the people behind the whole debacle (which doesn't make much sense given the scene last season of her needing to be walked through the hack?).  It also looks like she's the only person who's aware of Elliot's multiple personalities.  I'm starting to get the idea that Elliot and Mr. Robot have two completely different plans they're trying to hatch and that Angela is in on Mr. Robot's plan and only collaborates with that side of his personality.

The Winston Wolfe meets Leisure Suit Larry guy was an interesting addition and I'm curious to see what his agenda actually is.

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I love how the world has crashed down all over Elliot. The world in ruins is exactly what would happen if a bunch of 24-year-old know-it-all's hellbent on revenge decided to try and revolutionize everything. Of course it would fail. They don't understand economics or the monetary system beyond "I owe this evil conglomerate a lot of student loan debt." They didn't realize that getting rid of debt would lead to a lack of lending, which leads to a lack of money for goods and services. The debt's erased but along with it is the inherent trust of the global financial system. And while the Mr. Robot world is different than ours in how one corporation has near unlimited power, of course they didn't realize there would be ramifications. And, of course, the people who hold the power will know how to use that power. 

I hope at some point they do an episode or a few scenes that show how a "normal" person -- someone not in f-society or The Dark Army or an E-Corp minion -- lives in this world. We got a glimpse of it last season when someone was trying to show some E-Corp stoodge their mortgage was paid off. But the average person who just goes to work and has a family they love are the ones truly suffering. They didn't want a revolution. It was forced upon them, and they have to deal with these ramifications.

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On 10/11/2017 at 11:18 PM, Greggulator said:

Season 3 premiered tonight. A+ episode of television. This episode was an A+. It had the crazy visuals and set design, feeling of paranoia, and everything else I love about this show. It was also a lot more plot driven than Season 2 (a big complaint from a lot of people). Information was added but more questions were added onto it. What an amazing and epic show.

There's already a Mr. Robot thread, by the way

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  • 2 weeks later...

What an awesome season of television so far.

Spoiler

Episode 2 was spectacular. The sequence of Elliot at E-Corp to "New Sensation" and Mr. Robot's confrontation w/ his doctor were absolutely superb in terms of visual presentation and (especially with the doctor) acting. Crazy twist with Joanna catching a bullet, and a great cliffhanger ending.

Episode 3 is getting panned a bit by some critic types, but I thought it was also spectacular. My film nerd in me has long gone, but apparently there were a ton of Kubrick nods in the latest episode. I love how Sam will do an episode that totally diverts from the current narrative. Sometimes it might be a little much, like with the Alf episode, but this one answered in so many questions. One of the big questions is "How does someone evade the biggest manhunt in the history of the world that destroyed the global economy?" This explained that, along with what happened after the hack, it showed Irving has been involved for a lot of the story and we haven't seen it yet and etc. 

But in just a few scenes, we've also seen just how far White Rose's tentacles reach. It was pretty obvious that Santiago was a sleeper agent of sorts. But Frank Cody as his propoganda arm? That I did not see at all. I am so beffudled as to what The Dark Army actually is. They've gone from "dangerous hacking cabal" to "dangerous hacking cabal that is a shady arm of the Chinese government" to something a lot more pervasive, with "typical" Americans in its midst touting some sort of higher cause. As well as the nuclear reactor that created Elliot, Darlene and Angela. 

I know some people are predicting/hoping for either alternate realities or time travel. I'm hoping that The Dark Army is actually some sort of communist takeover of the American government, done by using the conspiracy believers (and a certain president in the middle of that) to cause disruption and mistrust that will eventually lead to White Rose ruling the world.

This show is so next good. 

 

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I'm really enjoying this season more than previous seasons, and I'm glad they went back and explained what happened to Wellick after the hack instead of leaving it out there as a mystery that may or may not have ever been explained.  I'm also digging Bobby Cannavale's Irving as a long-term operative via retcon.  White Rose putting Trump in office was lolsome.

All that goodwill aside, this shit absolutely jumps the shark if they go with time travel or alternate realities/parallel dimensions.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Insane episode of Mr. Robot last night. Sam Esmail is an amazing director. He's really fearless, if such a word can be used for someone making a TV show. 

Commercial-free 45-minute-ish episode that looked like a single take. (It wasn't, but the editing is seamless.) It hit on a bunch of major plot points (including a tie-up from what we all assumed was a tossaway line in Season 1), was visually stunning, had some top-notch acting (especially from Portia Doubleday who plays Angela). It really captured the anxiety of utter chaos and had the tension of a heist film at once. 

Amazing season.

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I liked the last episode, but the previews put it over like it was going to be some earth-shattering "episode everyone will be talking about" (I'm pretty sure that was the exact line from the preview).  I figured someone was going to throw Angela out the window or something while she was doing the hack.  So I'm not sure what the hype was about.  If it was because it was meant to look like one uninterrupted take, I missed that entirely.

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