MR. ROBOT

[J.T.]

I sorta knew about it because it was a pretty well known fan theory, but Elliot and Mr. Robot are such unreliable narrators, I have no idea what to believe.

Spoiler

If Elliot has been in prison the whole time, then who is Ray and what was up with the Silk Road site stuff or the FBI hack for that matter?  How did Whiterose plant Leon in there to protect Elliot and more importantly, why?  Xe seems to regard Elliot as nonthreatening at best and a liability at worst and it seems like Xe just used fsociety's revenge as a means to wreck the US economy and have China rise from the ashes as the dominant economy after the revolution subsides.

Did Elliot's whistleblowing of the underground site get him an early release?

Every time Darlene and Angela have visited Elliot "at home" it was really the visitation room at the prison?

If Elliot has been in prison the whole time for 5-9, then why did Gideon discuss all that shit about cooperating with the feds?  If the FBI already has its man, then what is going on unless Gideon wants Elliot to exonerate Gideon and (more importantly) Allsafe as being non complicit with the E Corp hack.

If Mr. Robot killed Tyrell, then what the fuck is up with the interludes with Mrs. Wellick and her pursuit of Tyrell's severance cash?  Who has been sending her the gifts or is any of that shit even real?  Why did she have that poor asshole whacked last week if Tyrell is not in hiding?   Is this shit happening at the same point in time as the rest of the story?  Is Mr. Robot telling the truth about Wellick's murder or is he lying yet again in another attempt to shield Elliot from troma?

Speaking of murders, who killed Romero and when?  Mr. Robot (Elliot as Mr. Robot has already pulled a gun on him once already, remember)?  Whiterose?  As per the events surrounding Joanna Wellick, I'm beginning to suspect that Dom's investigation of fsociety and the continuing cyberwar against E-Corp isn't exactly time-syching with Elliot's current perceived reality.  Everything is totally non-sequitur and the flashbacks lend credence to the theory that that the show is jumping back in forth in time and in and out of lucidity when it comes to important events.

And speaking of Whiterose, since Dom has noted that Minister Xe refers to a sister that he doesn't have (Whiterose), is Xe transgender or is he (like Elliot) also suffering from a disassociative personality disorder that manifests itself in cross dressing when he assumes Whiterose's persona?  Is the Dark Army an outlaw hacker collective or is Sam Esmail taking a veiled swipe at the reality of Chinese state sponsored cyber-espionage?

 

[Chaos]

This show really does a good job at obscuring its big moments while not exactly hiding obvious clues from you.  When that reveal happened, I both had the "holy shit" reaction that a show like this would want to pull off, and I also was mad at myself for not picking up on the clues because they were all there.

[Technico Support]

I have such a love/hate relationship with this show.

It is shot beautifully, pretty well acted and has some cool ideas but I'm still not convinced that Sam Esmail isn't a derivative hack.  There's a good review on i09 about this episode where they made the point that an unreliable narrator is fine for a movie, but when you use on in TV it can have diminishing returns and end up being detrimental because TV is a long-form narrative and you have to buy in and trust the narrator at some point.  After two Shymalan-level gotchas, why should you be invested in this show? The narrative loses its weight when the specter of "it could be that none of this is actually happening" is always in the back of your mind. In other words, why should you give two shits about any dramatic events from here on out when there's always a possibility it isn't happening?

The big reveal that the narrator lied is supposed to be the end of the story.  St. Elsewhere didn't keep going after the snowglobe thing because that would be dumb.

[A_K]

You clearly do not pay attention to the show: the lens through which the story is told is unstable, but the essential narrative remains the same. Ray existed; Whiterose's bodyguard existed; there wasn't a lie, we simply saw the reality as coloured by Eliot with his own sense of distortion.

Extremely good season.

[Casey]

Guys, we're all ignoring the fact that

Spoiler

Elliott hacked the FBI from prison

That's pretty gangster.

[J.T.]

:Well, to be precise:

Spoiler

Elliot didn't remotely access the FBI's network directly so he didn't hack the FBI in the most holistic sense of the term..

Elllot coded the malware exploit executable for the FBI Wipe while migrating Ray's DW site.  He coded directly into the chatspace on that secret usenet channel so all Darlene had to do was copy/paste the dialogue onto her mchine..

I assume that Mobley and Trenton compiled the code and prepped the femtocell and Angela and Darlene finished up by bypassing the physical security, planting the femtocell, and deploying the exploit.

The gangster thing about the hack is that it was a topic of discussion at the Black Hat Briefings and the presenter?  An FBI consultant!

What they showed on television was once a fucking in the wild exploit. Well patched by now, but at some point in time it was VERY doable assuming you had access to the proper switch.  That is fucking scary.

I did see some technical shortcomings though:

Spoiler

I am from the measure twice cut once school of pentesting, so all of that command line training for Angela seemed pretty idiotic.   No one bangs on a keyboard any more than they have to.  Far too much room for error.

She didn't really need to learn all of that techno gobbldygook or input those commands directly into the terminal to get those services running. 

This is why we keep code we've already slaved over for hours and hours in toolboxes for use in scripts and launchers.

Darlene could've prepped that pocket boot of Kali LINUX (an actual existing LINUX OS flavored for computer forensics and intrusion testing so nice realistic use of the OS there) with the necessary text files or launchers so that Angela could've cut and pasted those commands to terminal using the highlight / wheel click method in LINUX or simply double on a launcher clicked to get the exploit running. 

All of that typing was there for dramatic flair to reinforce the idea that Angela was a newb that might fuck things up with the wrong keystroke or forget a command and of course she looks like a champ when she gets it done.

It also reinforces Angela's importance to the story since that hack doesn't work without Angela being able to wander the E-Corp building with impunity.  You're not going to sosh some brainwashed E-Corp lackey or hardcore FBI agent into personally delivering your splat box to the feds and plugging it in to one of their core routers. 

You need someone on the inside who is already on your team for that shit.

 

[Technico Support]

@A_K  

@J.T. Exactly.  But Scripts or Teamviewer wouldn't be sexy for TV.  I hate when a show throws realism out the window for drama's sake.

[J.T.]

A lot of that stuff is done for the sake of time compression and even so, there are some complete WTF moments like how did Elliot smuggle the code for that zero day on Ray's machine?  If he pulled it line for line from his eidetic memory then I guess we're turning autism spectrum disorder into a super power now.

I can suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoyment, but there are only so many things you can explain away with the Elliot Has Savant Syndrome & He Is An Unreliable Narrator gimmick.

As far as sexy software goes, I thought for sure when Darlene hacked the smart house, they would've shown her at a laptop with Shodan up and active showing her that the entire house had live connections to the internet..

[J.T.]

Last season, an episode without Eliot would've felt like filler, but this one actually made sense and it was also really fucking good..  

• The Trenton / Mobley callback to "Ron's Coffee with the great wifi" was a great scene.  I like the fact that Trenton knew that what few feminine wiles she had would still be more than enough to sosh poor nebbish Mobley.
• Angela singing a joyless rendition of Everybody Wants To Rule The World on karaoke night had so much double entendre.   It speaks directly to E-Corp naturally and the idea that Mr. Robot really is a much darker version of Real Genius with eccentric geeks trying to speak truth to power and all.
• So that black guy that Angela banged back in the season opener was just a personal conquest.  She's really into older white dudes (DUCK PHILLIPS~!)... more importantly older, more white powerful dudes.. Or is she?  I have no fucking clue what Angela's real angle is.
• It is in every physical security manual ever written since 2000.  DO NOT PUT ANY IMPORTANT INFORMATION ON A FUCKING POST-IT NOTE~!
• On this Mr. Robot equivalent of the Blink episode from Doctor Who, we get a glimpse of what things would be like in fsociety without Elliot's constant presence.  Holy fuck.  Darlene is even more batshit crazy than her brother is.  "I didn't believe I could do that..."  Wow...  Who knew that our beloved emotionless autistic savant was also the moral compass of the collective?  Or is that Mr. Robot's role?
• The whole Susan Jacobs thing was pretty surreal.  Esmail painted her with the worst brush possible and Sandrine Holt (man, she is fucking hot!) did not fuck around playing Madame Executioner to the hilt.  I felt genuine loathing for Susan Jacobs and it still felt that what went down was totally unjustified and completely wrong.  That is some kickass writing.
• Cisco, you moron.  You are in a friends with benefits relationship with a notorious hacker and neither of you trusts the other.  Password lock your fucking computer and your phone when you are in the bathroom, bro.  Better yet, invite her to shower with her so you can smack her on the ass as she passes you the shampoo and (more importantly) SO THAT YOU KNOW WHERE SHE IS AT ALL TIMES~! 
• With all of the Dark Army shit going down, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that Darlene could read Mandarin.
• I appreciate being able to trust the events I see on screen as real in this episode since I am a spirit in the air now instead of being Elliot's imaginary friend viewing the world through his clouded lens.  However, given what has happened in this episode, we may be better off in the box.  As the previous episode taught us, ignorance can indeed be bliss.

[Technico Support]

On 8/25/2016 at 1:40 AM, J.T. said:

It is in every physical security manual ever written since 2000.  DO NOT PUT ANY IMPORTANT INFORMATION ON A FUCKING POST-IT NOTE~!

Technologically-speaking, the most realistic thing I've seen on this show so far. 

On 8/25/2016 at 1:40 AM, J.T. said:

Password lock your fucking computer and your phone when you are in the bathroom, bro. 

His laptop was definitely at a password screen when she looked at it.  What's less realistic is that a hacker like Cisco apparently had a pw she could easily guess, I suppose.  Or a password that could be cracked in a few minutes.

[Greggulator]

They're really taking so many stylistic chances this season and it's awesome to see. The whole crazed Adderral scenes and the dream sequence with the dinner table are just afterthoughts in a season that now gave us a fake 80s sitcom and an episode without the lead character(s). It's such a confident show at this point.

The whole big "reveal" of both seasons so far -- whether you saw them coming or not isn't the point. Fight Club and The Usual Suspects were pretty much completely about the reveal. But Mr. Robot's reveal adds to the main character and fills in backstory and gives greater context to everything. Lost tried to give us some of this with its reveals (Loche's legs, for instance). But I ended up walking away from the show because I didn't care about the characters after a while.

The first season reveal made us realize exactly what part of Elliot was the charismatic leader who wanted to save the world because the main one we saw was an antisocial misfit who can't even talk to others. The second season's given us a lot more about Elliot's internal battle for inner peace, and his isolation from the rest of the story has let Angela and Darlene develop further and given Dom time to develop, too.

This show is a total masterpiece. I love it so much.

[J.T.]

On ‎8‎/‎26‎/‎2016 at 7:18 AM, Technico Support said:

His laptop was definitely at a password screen when she looked at it.  What's less realistic is that a hacker like Cisco apparently had a pw she could easily guess, I suppose.  Or a password that could be cracked in a few minutes.

My guess is that it was the former.  It was probably his birthday or something.  

[shameless excuse] More than likely she's either shoulder surfed him before and already knew the pw or prepped for his treachery far in advance by installing a keystroke logger on his machine without him knowing about it. [/shameless excuse]

Hackers can be the worst offenders when it comes to weak pws because they never think that someone is smart enough to crack them in turn.

[Technico Support]

Holy shit this show is so frustrating.  An amazing hour and then they shit the bed in the last few minutes like a gymnast falling on her face on the dismount.

Cisco is at the smart house.  We hear panting/gasping, he sees who it is.  Who is it?  WE DON'T KNOW!

Darlene is at Cisco's house and just found out Phase 2 was Elliott's idea (what a tweeeest!).  There's a knock at the door.  Who is it?  WE DON'T KNOW!

Elliott is going home and it turns out Scary Swedish Lady is waiting for him. Why?  WE DON'T KNOW!

This is some Vince Russo writing here.  "Bro!  What's better than a cliffhanger bro?  THREE CLIFFHANGERS BRO."

And sweet mother of fuck am I done with this show (unless the missus wants to keep watching ) if it turns out Elliott was Tyrell all along.  That would make no sense without the already-past-its-welcome "unreliable narrator" get out of jail free card.

[A_K]

It's an episodic TV serial not a wrestling show on loop: they've done a superb job of tying everything together so far. The opening scene in prison was excellent. Any 'Russo' tendencies are what you're projecting onto the show yourself. 

The most interesting twist here was the water plant. Is it a nuclear waste facility? What's the end game for the Dark Army there. Also interested to see why Price was gleeful after the hack at end of season 1 but is rattled now. What was he expecting/promised to happen?

And of course Eliot is not Tyrell. Though I suspect the Mr Robot persona may be a lot more malevolent than suggested. 

[Technico Support]

@A_K My point was piling up THREE cliffhangers in the final minutes of an episode is amateur hour, tryhard, hamfisted garbage, done only because a cliffhanger is usually more interesting than the payoff -- especially on a show that is more often than not very dishonest with its cliffhangers. 

Look at the episode before last.  Cisco is spying on Darlene for the Dark Army!  Darlene smacked him with a bat!  What's going to happen next?  Holy shit, the ground of the show literally just shifted!  And then the payoff was.....Cisco was just telling them he has her and she's safe?  And she overreacted?  Amazing.  They just pulled a bait and switch that added up to nothing just for the sake of having a cliffhanger. 

Again, I like this show, but it's definitely all style over substance.  Really good looking shots, neat little narrative contrivances, ballsy plot twists, etc all camouflage the fact that there's some dishonest, sub-par storytelling going on.

 

[Greggulator]

Holy crap.

[Greggulator]

Spoiler

Interesting things to tie together:

1) Whiterose and Price at the end of Season 1 had their infamous meeting. The first thing Whiterose talked about was coltan mines located in Congo. Not the hack. But mining entities in a far-off land. It seemed like a throwaway line.

2) But today Price had Colby engineer the White House looking the other way while China annexes (literally or metaphorically we don't know) coltan. Coltan is used in the manufacturing of cell phones. Or pretty much anything in modern technology. China having full control over that market is insane.

3) Especially when you consider that the only real form of working currency in America is now E-Coin. The Mr. Robot world is now even more dependent on technology. Without a phone in your hand, you have up to $50 a day in cash to broker for goods and services. And now, from what Eliot said, E-Coin is now more valuable than the dollar.

4) Whiterose (the minister of state security in China) owns/operates the Washington facility and is obsessed with it to the point she will engineer a plane crash to keep it. Price manipulated Angela to keep the feds hands clear of it. And Angela tried to bring this information to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who were set to trap her and knew who she worked for.

5) Does Whiterose know about Elliot/Darlene's connections to his Washington plant? Price said at the meeting last year they knew who was behind this. I assumed at the time that was Tyrell. But I also had a suspicion that Angela was recruited because they knew of her connection to the plant and that her former employer was ground zero and thought she had a hand in it. And what better way to strike at Elliot (if they knew he was behind this the whole time)

Obviously we don't know where this is going. But it sorta feels like Whiterose might be using the coltan play in conjunction with the Washington plant. Between that and the presence of the Dark Army and an America suffering through blackouts and four-hour workdays and homelessness and garbage piles, why not strike? And Price doesn't care as he is the ultimate mercenary. He's fine as long as he has power, and what could possibly be more powerful than brokering every transaction for a good and service in the world? (And he said there are only one or two rooms in the world where he is not the most powerful man. I assume he understands Whiterose has him a bit.)

That would be such a great irony. Elliot formed fsociety because he wanted to save the world from the 1% of the 1% that control it. Only his attempt to create a revolution has backfired and now the iron fist rules the world with an even stronger grasp.

 

[J.T.]

I personally think that:

Spoiler

Chinese control of the Coltan market also serves a more basic purpose.   Control of that commodity means that the Chinese could eventually become the world's most prominent manufacturers of the world's smart phones and they can price fix and work with E-Corp to eventually flood the market and overtake Japan and the US.

Naturally you can count on a state run Chinese cell phone manufacturer to not give as much of a shit about security and privacy as Apple or Samsung, so Whiterose will make sure that each phone has some sort of back door that is remote accessible by the Ministry of Security and if it has access so will The Dark Army... which I am convinced is also state run and not some outlaw hacker enclave.

And who will be the US distributor of these Chinese cell phones?  E-Corp!  Which means that E-Corp will have access to the marketing data gleaned from these phones just as Whiterose will have a cellular botnet at his disposal for whatever he has in mind for it.

 

[Technico Support]

LOL this fucking show.

Whiterose cares so greatly about time that she spends her allotted 28 minutes with Angela leisurely smoking and speaking in a circuitous, meaningless and manufactured mysterious way that would make the David Lynch say, "man, that's just too much."  You'd think someone so obsessed about not wasting time would have just gotten to the point but hey, painfully manufactured mystery is Mr. Robot's stock in trade.  I was legitimately angered by the contrivance that was Angela's kidnapping and interrogation.  Yeah, someone really concerned with not wasting time sure would have had no problem whipping up that masturbatory clusterfuck.  What was the point to all that?  It was only done to have something weirdly interesting and different on screen.  It was just weirdness for weirdness' sake, in the greater service of nothing at all.

And I just remembered this scene had no onscreen payoff.  It seems Whiterose and Angela are at an impasse: Whiterose wants belief but Angela only has fear.  The they just cut to Angela at the lawyer's house, seemingly all-in on Whiterose's goals.  How did that happen?  The writers have no answer either, they just needed a way to put their cute little setpiece on screen.  I'd like to be in that writer's room where someone whips up a random, weird scene and they all ask, "well how do we get there?"  Then there's a pause and they just laugh.  Who cares how we get there?  Just write the scene!

Aside from the need of the creators to prove their cleverness at the expense of everything else, a big issue with Mr. Robot is that  writing and plot are so paper thin that it needs to fill time with bizarre contrivances like this.  Strip out all the foot dragging and this episode would have been 10 minutes long.  Why did Tyrell need to use a coded message to talk to Mr. Robot?  Just call him and tell him where the fucking cab is.  It was just another "oh look at our cool and mysterious intrigue!" segment.  It's so maddening to watch a show creator just jerk off all over the place and waste everyone's time.  OH maybe that's the meta point!  Esmail is wasting all our time so we feel like Whitetrose?

This show is so heavy on style and so unbelievably light on substance.  It's like Lost in that I have zero faith the finale will wrap up all the shit they've left hanging.  It feels like they're afraid to pay off anything; just keep piling up the mysteries and hope the audience gets lost in a fog and never sees how threadbare this shit is. 

[Casey]

[J.T.]

Grats to Rami on the Emmy win.

Every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp dressed men.

[kiguchi]

On 9/16/2016 at 7:12 AM, Technico Support said:

LOL this fucking show.

This show reminded me a lot of my experience with Homeland. I read great things about it so I started watching it. Loved the first few episodes and its subject matter. Then it devolved into something I was not interested in until I became apathetic and annoyed at the ridiculousness of the rest of season. I went into a wait a see attitude; monitoring the feedback for season 2. When it looked like it was more of the same; I jumped off.

[Technico Support]

4 hours ago, kiguchi said:

This show reminded me a lot of my experience with Homeland. I read great things about it so I started watching it. Loved the first few episodes and its subject matter. Then it devolved into something I was not interested in until I became apathetic and annoyed at the ridiculousness of the rest of season. I went into a wait a see attitude; monitoring the feedback for season 2. When it looked like it was more of the same; I jumped off.

Absolutely.  I stuck with Homeland but the Brody shit strained credulity.  It's gotten much better since they killed him off at least a season too late.

[zev]

Can they work out a way to bring ALF back next season?

 

 

 

[kiguchi]

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.