TV Review: Mr. Robot

TV Review: Mr. Robot

The revolution, apparently, will be televised.  And on basic cable.

USA Network’s new series Mr. Robot served up what is probably the most fascinating pilot episode since Dominic Monahan uttered the words, “Guys, where ARE we?” on the first episode of Lost.  I don’t know if Mr. Robot can sustain the kind of wholesale insanity Lost served up, but it is off to a great start.

Saying the show is fascinating is not the same as saying it is original.  It is a heaping helping of Fight Club’s anti-corporate philosophy, part urban paranoia from the short-lived series Rubicon, with just a dash of flair from The Third Man, with a shout out to Heroes.  The show stars Rami Malek as a young hacker named Elliot who stumbles into either an international conspiracy to ruin the world’s economy, or a nut calling himself Mr. Robot (played by Christian Slater) claiming he wants to ruin the world’s economy (or “the single largest incident of wealth redistribution in history,” as he puts it).

Elliot works for a computer security firm whose major client is E Corp (whose logo bears a strong resemblance to Enron’s).  Elliot calls them Evil Corp; other people call them Evil Corp, including their own advertising, which doesn’t quite make sense unless Elliot is an unreliable narrator.  He’s been diagnosed with several psychological conditions, sees a sympathetic but ineffectual shrink (Gloria Reuben), and self-medicates with morphine and other non-prescription pharmaceuticals.  He also thinks the television audience watching him is a product of his delusions, so maybe there is something to his world view being un-related to reality.

Elliot is a social outcast (what a shock for a hacker) who has one “normal” friend, a platonic childhood friend named Angela who works with him as an account manager for the security firm.  At one point he hacks into her files and sees she has nearly $200,000 in student loans, which explains her anxiety about keeping her menial, somewhat degrading job (one could question the value of her investment in education as she seems unclear on the concept that 2:30 AM is Saturday morning, not Friday night).  Her debt underlines something Elliot was told by Mr. Robot; the world is enslaved by debt.  What good is an education if you have to spend your life as a slave in order to pay for it?  Mr. Robot’s plan is to free the world of debt by crashing the world’s interlocking computer systems, thus eliminating any records of debt that can be enforced.

The first episode ran for 70 minutes and was nearly commercial free (that raises a good point; what company would advertise on a TV show that portrays corporations as, literally, evil?), and the time flew by; I thought fifteen minutes had passed and found I’d been watching for nearly an hour.  The entire production supports Elliot’s paranoid world view; in the first scene I noticed a random extra looking at Elliot, and I assumed he would be a major character but instead he faded into the background not to be seen again (like other extras in nearly every scene). The lighting is drab and harsh, accentuating Elliot’s pallor and deep-set eyes.  The editing is jumping, mirroring Elliot’s somewhat fractured attention span.

The show is overt in its homages, most notably the scene between Mr. Robot and Elliot that takes place on an abandoned Ferris wheel, mimicking the classic scene in The Third Man where Orson Wells laid out his nihilistic philosophy to Joseph Cotton.  Slater, who played a much younger but similar anti-establishment character in Pump Up the Volume, doesn’t chew as much scenery as Welles but is similarly oily in laying out his plan to liberate the world from the debt that has been accumulated by acquiring things.  The scene is also where Slater comes the closest to channeling his inner Tyler Durden from Fight Club, another script that harped on how people were slaves to their possessions.

Mr. Robot also lifts a move from Heroes, when Elliot is standing in Times Square and sees the news feed that a target of Slater’s group has been arrested and he raises his arms in triumph, much like Masi Oka did in Heroes’ most iconic moment.

I’ve said before how difficult it is to judge how a series will develop from a pilot.  Sometime a pilot will be lovingly crafted, but then have nowhere to go; other times the pilot will be slap-dash, but work effectively as a weekly series crafted by a number of hands.  Mr. Robot smells more like the former, a script that would have been a movie if the author could have crafted another hour of plot and an ending.  It is unlike other USA programs (Royal Pains, Suits), which usually feature attractive people with relatively well-defined moral compasses.  It isn’t clear who is right, Mr. Robot’s dream of financial anarchy or E Corp’s view of world domination, and Elliot’s role in either is up in the air (which makes rooting for one side or the other difficult).

Mr. Robot is a well-made, well-scripted show with a definite agenda.  The AMC series Rubicon also dealt with global conspiracies over control of the economy, and it sunk under its own weight.  How Mr. Robot plays out depends on how well its creator, Sam Esmail has foreseen its future.  In one respect the future is already determined; it has already been renewed for a second season.  As someone once said, the future ain’t what it used to be.