Hello, friends. I doubt there is anything more specific I can call you all, given that most people who read this article probably already knows me from somewhere. Lame, maybe, but I guess I'm going to go with it.
My parents recently referred me to a show they thought me and my writer brain would really appreciate. I usually don't watch much TV, but my parents wanted me to catch up so it could be another show we could watch as a family, like "Agents of Shield" or "Shadowhunters." I had heard of "Mr. Robot" when it first started airing, but didn't really think much of it, mostly because I was preparing for college/doing other summery things. I just watched the entire first season over the past week or so. My parents were right.
"Mr. Robot" is about Elliot Alderson, a young, technology-savvy man living in New York City. Working for Allsafe, a cybersecurity company, by day and as a vigilante hacker by night, Elliot is very alone, coping with often crippling depression by hacking everybody he meets and taking limited amounts of morphine (just enough to avoid addiction, to be smart about it). One day, he meets a mysterious man on the subway whom he calls Mr. Robot, who inducts him into a secret group of hackers known as fsociety. Their goal is to take down the enormous, amoral corporation E Corp, dubbed Evil Corp by Elliot after a toxic waste leak they covered up led to the death of his father. One problem: E Corp is one of Allsafe's biggest clients.
The complexity of this show's storyline is quite intriguing. Besides the complications rising from the premise alone (one of Elliot's childhood friends Angela both is drowning in E Corp debt, which Elliot's hack would destroy, and working alongside him at Allsafe), Elliot's mental state is often put into question. The series itself opens with Elliot talking directly to the audience, in the form of a person in his head, expressing his paranoid belief about the billionaires who secretly run the world. We even see the men in black suits he believes to be following him. He goes to therapy to (in theory) work out his problems after an apparent psychotic break, and is supposed to be on legitimate psychiatric medication. This information leads us as the audience to doubt how much of Elliot's exploits are real, or just in his head.
The show does a really good job weaving together various story lines through shared characters. For instance, one of fsociety's hacker contacts, the Dark Army, is reached by Darlene, one of fsociety's members, through her ex-boyfriend Cisco. Meanwhile, Cisco plants a virus in a CD he passes off to Ollie, Angela's boyfriend and coworker, to be relayed onto the Allsafe servers so fsociety can bring down Evil Corp. The most impressive instance of this interweaving involves Tyrell Wellick, an up-and-comer at E Corp who goes to extreme lengths to become CTO, who in the series finale does ... something not even the characters know about entirely.
Not only is this show amazingly written, its cinematography is stunning. Every shot, every visual detail helps to build the stifling, dark world Elliot lives in. There are even very well done in-universe videos for E Corp and fsociety, alongside remarkably accurate depictions of hacking ... or so I've read. At times, the show gives the perfect blend of real and surreal. At one point, while headed to a high security facility, Elliot goes into morphine withdrawal, which induces a beautifully confusing and convoluted hallucination sequence that just has to be seen.
So, there you go, that's the show. I highly recommend you all watch it. Quick warning: the show can get very dark and intense sometimes, and will throw twists at you you won't see coming.
