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9 minutes ago, J.T. said:

Malek and Villar have a better protagonist / antagonist chemistry than Malek and BD Wong did, IMO.

Great point, and you're absolutely correct.  I never bought Whiterose and especially her attachment to Elliot.  Her only justification was "I don't believe in coincidence so it must mean something that the son of one of our former valuable cohorts is now with us."  It just felt so flimsy.  Overall, just in general, Whiterose just felt gimmicky and insubstantial.  I appreciate the delving into her backstory briefly in one episode but they didn't do enough to really establish Whiterose as a person driven mad by loss and rejection of her true self, bad enough to want to destroy and reshape the world.  The loss of her lover and the problems with her culture's lack of acceptance of trans people just felt like inconveniences.  I do applaud the show's absolute balls in hand waving Whiterose's entire plan as, "yep, she's just crazy and petty, just like Price said."  

 

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Whiterose is interesting because she's a polar opposite of Elliot and I applaud the respect in which Esmail handles Whiterose's transgender issues.  She is not ashamed of who she is and her crazy ass plan is to mold society into one that will accept her... Literally mold it by destroying the fabric of society and maybe even the fabric of time itself.  She will not be made to conform to society; society will be made to conform to her.

Her diabolical plan (moustache twist) is far too abstract and (as you say) gimmicky for it to be on the level of Dr. Doom world domination so despite the chaos she causes and the people murdered under her watch, Whiterose is not a scary BBEG.

Vera OTOH is a very scary bad guy.  I can believe that there is a person like Vera out in the real world and relatability is what make Vera terrifying.  Shayla's murder isn't even personal to him; it's just business. 

He doesn't beat Shayla because he's jealous that she's boning Elliot.  He hits her because she shouldn't be sleeping with the customers.

Vera also doesn't kill Shayla because of her relationship with Elliot. He kills her to send Elliot the age old message of, "You fucked with me, so now I have to fuck with you."

You can just see all of the arrogant wind come right out of Elliot's sails when he opens the trunk of the car....

It is clever how Esmail uses Vera as a parable to snidely critique social media. 

Elliot forms his low opinion of Vera by hacking Vera's Twitter and criticizing Vera's club footed use of the platform to handle business.  Only an idiot does the things he does, right?  It is funny how we have the bravery to say mean things about people we've never met from the comfort of our own homes? 

Of course when Elliot is kidnapped by Vera's men and has to deal with Vera's menace face to face (so to speak), all of that false courage goes right out of the window.  Elliot finds out quickly what a dangerous person Vera really is. 

This is what happens when we confuse anonymity with security.

 

Edited by J.T.
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Vera is pretty crazy as well.  He has a brief interaction with Elliott and then spends his days post-Elliott mystified by Elliot's "power" and plotting a way to get Elliot on his side in his quest to rule New York.  "This guy has power and I want it."  Mr. Robot's easy takedown of Vera's goals, his nebulous hip hop bullshit idea of becoming "King of New York" was tremendous.  None of Vera's ideas could ever make him much bigger than he already was; he'd never be in the ruling class (the 1% of the 1%).  It's that whole idea of "rich" vs "wealthy."  Vera had no plan at all or any idea of what he wanted, in a true concrete sense, and he was easily called out on it.  He's a mirror to Whiterose in that regard.  A villain that's all bluster whose goal was flawed from the start.

One thing to really dig about this show is how it undermines tropes and big ideas.  The hero's big plan to save society just makes it worse, so much so that he has to roll the whole plan back and then just settle for revenge instead.  The villains' plans are ill-conceived at best and insane at worst.  In the end, we're still locked into this society and the small things like relationships are the only things that actually matter.

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I'm a big fan of the FBI cellular phone system hack job, myself.  It was so accurate that US-CERT had to issue a fucking bulletin to US government agencies about how to properly secure femtocell stations.

 

Edited by J.T.
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44 minutes ago, J.T. said:

I'm a big fan of the FBI cellular phone system hack job, myself.  It was so accurate that US-CERT had to issue a fucking bulletin to US government agencies about how to properly secure femtocell stations.

 

HA!  Nice.

Maybe issue a bulletin about watching out for non-IT staff crawling under desks and plugging shit in!

I'd say that really secure agencies should lock down ports by MAC or whatever so unauthorized equipment can't just be plugged in, but I remembered that the FBI location in the show was a temp space at E Corp, so that's some cool attention to detail. 

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Finished the show last night.  GREAT finale that made even more sense knowing about it beforehand.  I'd love to see a timeline of the show since it is definitely mentioned that the hacker Elliot persona took over "about a year ago."  But anyway, yeah, very good rewatch.  I'd definitely recommend it even though season 2 feels unfocused and gimmicky at times. 

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I binged S3 earlier this year, but I think I need to watch the whole series in one complete run .  I will try to do it over July 4th weekend if I am feeling brave and masochistic.

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