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sarea
I started hearing about this show a month or so ago, and people kept mentioning it to me, so I put it on my list of things to watch at some point. When 5 episodes or so had aired, I asked adelagia if she'd heard of the show; she said she'd seen it but felt "meh" about it after a strong pilot. Then after episode 8, she reversed course and said that she wholeheartedly recommended it. That got me intrigued enough to start watching, and now I'm caught up through episode 8.
It's a good thing that I already liked the show for what it was, even had they not dropped the big twist on us in episode 8, because as far as twists of this type go, it was meh.
To be fair, I had seen it coming. After the first couple of episodes, I wanted to look up the actor who plays Tyrell Wellick, who's probably my favorite character. (Just like Snape, I find him the most interesting, even if he's not someone I'd actually ever want to know.) But because publications now report on TV shows, which might be one of the best and yet annoying developments ever, the first thing I saw in my search results was the headline, "Who is the real Mr. Robot?"
SIGH.
Had I not seen that, it may not have occurred to me to question it. Then again, from the beginning they made it clear that Elliot was an unreliable narrator. The drug use, the scenes where he'd zone out, have a monologue or exchange, then zone back in for us to realize that none of it ever happened, all served to make things just slightly off kilter, make me wonder if what was happening was actually what was happening. Still, I think I could have easily accepted that Christian Slater was Mr. Robot, which was what his B-movie fame and name tag on the show told me. According tojade_okelani, it always bothered her that the name of the show was that of a side character, rather than the main protagonist -- and now she knows why.
Anyway, the point is, I was mentally prepped to watch out for something unusual. (The headline plusadelagia's sudden about face both served to do that.)
And since I've seen The Sixth Sense and Fight Club, both of which independently blew my mind in 1999 (as did The Matrix -- 1999 was a VERY good year for movies, apparently!), my first inclination with Mr. Robot was to wonder, "Are they trying to Fight Club me?"
I really, really did not want that to be the case. I didn't want Elliot to turn out to be Mr. Robot. :/ Because the thing is, once you've had your mind blown that way, something else using that trope is kind of a disappointing let down -- it's just a retread of something great/iconic that already went there. It's like if another story tried to make their climatic reveal be that the hero's evil nemesis is actually the hero's father. Hmm, where have I heard that one before? Maybe if Fight Club and The Sixth Sense hadn't been so amazingly excellent, others following in their footsteps wouldn't feel like such a rip off.
It meant that every time Christian Slater was in a scene, I wondered if he was "really" there. The show uses an interesting/irritating framing style, where the principals are sometimes barely in frame, which also made me wonder if this was their way of showing that Elliot was really just talking to himself, or something. (It turns out they just really like their weird and irritating framing style.)
When Christian pushed Elliot off the rail, one of my thoughts was, "Did Elliot just jump off himself? Because if Christian isn't real, that has to be what happens."
That said, Mr. Robot is well done. I'm enjoying the show. I just didn't need this reveal to continue enjoying it. Still, if it had to happen... well, asjade_okelani put it, it's just different enough that it's okay. For instance, I just figured Christian was a figment of Elliot's imagination, and Elliot was the one doing/saying all the stuff (like Edward Norton). I didn't realize the person he was imagining was actually someone he knew, rather than a total made-up person (like Brad Pitt). The thing with Christian being Elliot's dad, though, is that it hearkens back to Dexter... Dexter was constantly seeing/talking to his dead father; it's just that Dexter knew he was talking to his conscience. His brand of crazy went a different way. :)
In retrospect, as with any reveal like this, it's cool to go back to the old scenes and view them with new eyes, given the information now available. For instance, Darlene was always a little odd/manic, but her reaction to him finding her in his shower makes more sense (she was creeped out by her brother seeing her naked). In fact, her BEING in his shower makes more sense, as was her immediate familiarity with him (I was always kind of like, "What? You've known him for like 5 minutes.") -- chattering to him nonstop about her private life, for instance. My one nit is that I wish they'd done the reveal a little more gradually. I'm not sure if they thought they'd lose people by getting too weird over too many episodes, but it basically went from a barely there thing to knocking us over the head with it in episode 8, starting with Angela and Darlene in ballet class together talking about Elliot. They introduced a bunch of random things that would get resolved by the end of the episode... I think I would have preferred to see things get gradually more weird, until it culminated in the reveal, but I'm guessing it was getting pretty complex to write at that point. (I wonder if they'll do what both Fight Club and The Sixth Sense did, which is take us through the scenes from earlier to show us how things "really" happened.)
It went from being one kind of show -- with Elliot trying to break Shayla's rapist out of prison -- to being a whole other kind of show in the space of 3 episodes. I thought the pilot, ep 6, and ep 8 were probably the strongest ones. It'll be interesting to see where they take it from here.
(As an aside, I didn't know FOR SURE what they were going to reveal -- I only hoped it wouldn't be a retread of Fight Club -- so I also tried to think about it in a more linear way. Maybe Christian was real, but he wasn't the mastermind behind it all, and the "real Mr. Robot" was someone unexpected... like Tyrell, or his wife, or even Gideon. But from the beginning it seems Jade and I's brains went to a certain place, because even though she had not been spoiled, when Tyrell's car stops in the street, Jade joked, "He's like, 'Take me to my fight club.'" And then when he gets out and starts taking off his tie and rolling up his sleeves, I was like, "Holy shit, it IS Fight Club." and it was just one more -- intentional? -- clue about where it was all headed.)
Now, the show in general. Like I said, I like it! I liked it even before we found out that Elliot's crazier than we'd even assumed. I like the premise, I like the lead, and I LOVE Tyrell Wellick and his wife (the new Spike and Dru). Their relationship dynamic is incredibly interesting -- they psych us out initially by making us think that he's your typical asshole whose ambitions lead him to cheat on his pregnant wife, when in fact she's the one in control. She's Catherine Zeta-Jones in Traffic, right down to the pregnancy and the lengths she'll go to to further and protect her interests.
I don't much care for any of the female characters (other than Tyrell's wife, and I don't even know her name) -- they seem like caricatures rather than real people. Angela is the typical "it" girl who they want us to ship the male lead with, but they've given her an asshole boyfriend that only serves to make her look bad (seriously, they do this with EVERY FEMALE LOVE INTEREST). The character reminds me of Laurel from Arrow; she's a pretty girl who has history with the hero, but has very little to offer aside from that. (Hmm that also sounds like the love interest from The Flash.) It's a shame that they do this so poorly, because in theory, I love that kind of thing! Hell, my own story that I'm working on is about two people who knew each other from childhood on. Why can't Hollywood get it right? It's either fucked up like Great Expectations, or boring like every single recent show that comes to mind. Also, in terms of history, if Angela is such a good friend of Elliot's, why wouldn't she be his emergency contact instead of his sometime hookup/drug dealer, Shayla? (I guess you could reason that this was deliberate on his part, because if either Angela or Darlene were his emergency contact, they apparently know each other, so they'd tell the other and he couldn't have that, or it would break the carefully constructed world he'd built for himself.) As for Shayla, this naive drug dealer with a heart of gold thing was just too much. She GAVE AWAY all her drugs. She was constantly trying to not accept money. Like WTF? Get in a different line of business then. And finally, Darlene, who I liked initially, but then she ended up being really grating in multiple ways. I seriously wanted someone to hit her when she wanted to go through with the plan once the Dark Army bailed.
The second most interesting character on the show, at least for me and Jade, was one that was on screen for maybe five minutes. Our reaction:
Me: Is that... BD Wong?
Jade: Is that... BD Wong?
Me: It IS him!
Me: I don't know what I'm more shocked by, BD Wong in drag, or the fact that he looks great in it.
Jade: I know! I wasn't sure it was him because he was doing such a good job of being a woman!
But seriously -- fascinating character. Despite the fact that she says it'll be the last time Elliot ever sees her, I really hope that's not true. I'd love to see more of that character!
My biggest problem with the show is that no one's plans make any logical sense. :)))
- Elliot's/Mr. Robot's plan to "even out" the score between the haves and have nots by erasing all debt doesn't actually help poor people. Or even if it does, it's only temporary. Poor people are less likely to own their own homes, for instance. So if you wipe out all debt, guess who stands to gain the most? That's right, rich people who are paying off apartment buildings and mansions and yachts and private jets and hotels and what not. Sure, the middle class will be better off -- maybe -- but the differences at the top and bottom of the hierarchy will be even more extreme than before. Thanks for giving the landlord of the poor person's apartment building outright ownership of the place, Mr. Robot!
- Angela's plan to exact vengeance on the people who killed her and Elliot's parents by falsifying a confession about chain of custody with the .dat file. Okay, great, so you're taking down the dudes who made that awful decision. Will that bring back your parents, or any of the people who died? No. And yet by doing it, she's actually destroying the actual lives of people employed at Allsafe, and destroying the company Gideon (a good man) built. Why would that trade off make sense to any normal, compassionate human being? It doesn't, which is yet another reason why she's an idiot.
adelagia if she'd heard of the show; she said she'd seen it but felt "meh" about it after a strong pilot. Then after episode 8, she reversed course and said that she wholeheartedly recommended it. That got me intrigued enough to start watching, and now I'm caught up through episode 8.It's a good thing that I already liked the show for what it was, even had they not dropped the big twist on us in episode 8, because as far as twists of this type go, it was meh.
To be fair, I had seen it coming. After the first couple of episodes, I wanted to look up the actor who plays Tyrell Wellick, who's probably my favorite character. (Just like Snape, I find him the most interesting, even if he's not someone I'd actually ever want to know.) But because publications now report on TV shows, which might be one of the best and yet annoying developments ever, the first thing I saw in my search results was the headline, "Who is the real Mr. Robot?"
SIGH.
Had I not seen that, it may not have occurred to me to question it. Then again, from the beginning they made it clear that Elliot was an unreliable narrator. The drug use, the scenes where he'd zone out, have a monologue or exchange, then zone back in for us to realize that none of it ever happened, all served to make things just slightly off kilter, make me wonder if what was happening was actually what was happening. Still, I think I could have easily accepted that Christian Slater was Mr. Robot, which was what his B-movie fame and name tag on the show told me. According to
jade_okelani, it always bothered her that the name of the show was that of a side character, rather than the main protagonist -- and now she knows why.Anyway, the point is, I was mentally prepped to watch out for something unusual. (The headline plus
adelagia's sudden about face both served to do that.)And since I've seen The Sixth Sense and Fight Club, both of which independently blew my mind in 1999 (as did The Matrix -- 1999 was a VERY good year for movies, apparently!), my first inclination with Mr. Robot was to wonder, "Are they trying to Fight Club me?"
I really, really did not want that to be the case. I didn't want Elliot to turn out to be Mr. Robot. :/ Because the thing is, once you've had your mind blown that way, something else using that trope is kind of a disappointing let down -- it's just a retread of something great/iconic that already went there. It's like if another story tried to make their climatic reveal be that the hero's evil nemesis is actually the hero's father. Hmm, where have I heard that one before? Maybe if Fight Club and The Sixth Sense hadn't been so amazingly excellent, others following in their footsteps wouldn't feel like such a rip off.
It meant that every time Christian Slater was in a scene, I wondered if he was "really" there. The show uses an interesting/irritating framing style, where the principals are sometimes barely in frame, which also made me wonder if this was their way of showing that Elliot was really just talking to himself, or something. (It turns out they just really like their weird and irritating framing style.)
When Christian pushed Elliot off the rail, one of my thoughts was, "Did Elliot just jump off himself? Because if Christian isn't real, that has to be what happens."
That said, Mr. Robot is well done. I'm enjoying the show. I just didn't need this reveal to continue enjoying it. Still, if it had to happen... well, as
jade_okelani put it, it's just different enough that it's okay. For instance, I just figured Christian was a figment of Elliot's imagination, and Elliot was the one doing/saying all the stuff (like Edward Norton). I didn't realize the person he was imagining was actually someone he knew, rather than a total made-up person (like Brad Pitt). The thing with Christian being Elliot's dad, though, is that it hearkens back to Dexter... Dexter was constantly seeing/talking to his dead father; it's just that Dexter knew he was talking to his conscience. His brand of crazy went a different way. :)In retrospect, as with any reveal like this, it's cool to go back to the old scenes and view them with new eyes, given the information now available. For instance, Darlene was always a little odd/manic, but her reaction to him finding her in his shower makes more sense (she was creeped out by her brother seeing her naked). In fact, her BEING in his shower makes more sense, as was her immediate familiarity with him (I was always kind of like, "What? You've known him for like 5 minutes.") -- chattering to him nonstop about her private life, for instance. My one nit is that I wish they'd done the reveal a little more gradually. I'm not sure if they thought they'd lose people by getting too weird over too many episodes, but it basically went from a barely there thing to knocking us over the head with it in episode 8, starting with Angela and Darlene in ballet class together talking about Elliot. They introduced a bunch of random things that would get resolved by the end of the episode... I think I would have preferred to see things get gradually more weird, until it culminated in the reveal, but I'm guessing it was getting pretty complex to write at that point. (I wonder if they'll do what both Fight Club and The Sixth Sense did, which is take us through the scenes from earlier to show us how things "really" happened.)
It went from being one kind of show -- with Elliot trying to break Shayla's rapist out of prison -- to being a whole other kind of show in the space of 3 episodes. I thought the pilot, ep 6, and ep 8 were probably the strongest ones. It'll be interesting to see where they take it from here.
(As an aside, I didn't know FOR SURE what they were going to reveal -- I only hoped it wouldn't be a retread of Fight Club -- so I also tried to think about it in a more linear way. Maybe Christian was real, but he wasn't the mastermind behind it all, and the "real Mr. Robot" was someone unexpected... like Tyrell, or his wife, or even Gideon. But from the beginning it seems Jade and I's brains went to a certain place, because even though she had not been spoiled, when Tyrell's car stops in the street, Jade joked, "He's like, 'Take me to my fight club.'" And then when he gets out and starts taking off his tie and rolling up his sleeves, I was like, "Holy shit, it IS Fight Club." and it was just one more -- intentional? -- clue about where it was all headed.)
Now, the show in general. Like I said, I like it! I liked it even before we found out that Elliot's crazier than we'd even assumed. I like the premise, I like the lead, and I LOVE Tyrell Wellick and his wife (the new Spike and Dru). Their relationship dynamic is incredibly interesting -- they psych us out initially by making us think that he's your typical asshole whose ambitions lead him to cheat on his pregnant wife, when in fact she's the one in control. She's Catherine Zeta-Jones in Traffic, right down to the pregnancy and the lengths she'll go to to further and protect her interests.
I don't much care for any of the female characters (other than Tyrell's wife, and I don't even know her name) -- they seem like caricatures rather than real people. Angela is the typical "it" girl who they want us to ship the male lead with, but they've given her an asshole boyfriend that only serves to make her look bad (seriously, they do this with EVERY FEMALE LOVE INTEREST). The character reminds me of Laurel from Arrow; she's a pretty girl who has history with the hero, but has very little to offer aside from that. (Hmm that also sounds like the love interest from The Flash.) It's a shame that they do this so poorly, because in theory, I love that kind of thing! Hell, my own story that I'm working on is about two people who knew each other from childhood on. Why can't Hollywood get it right? It's either fucked up like Great Expectations, or boring like every single recent show that comes to mind. Also, in terms of history, if Angela is such a good friend of Elliot's, why wouldn't she be his emergency contact instead of his sometime hookup/drug dealer, Shayla? (I guess you could reason that this was deliberate on his part, because if either Angela or Darlene were his emergency contact, they apparently know each other, so they'd tell the other and he couldn't have that, or it would break the carefully constructed world he'd built for himself.) As for Shayla, this naive drug dealer with a heart of gold thing was just too much. She GAVE AWAY all her drugs. She was constantly trying to not accept money. Like WTF? Get in a different line of business then. And finally, Darlene, who I liked initially, but then she ended up being really grating in multiple ways. I seriously wanted someone to hit her when she wanted to go through with the plan once the Dark Army bailed.
The second most interesting character on the show, at least for me and Jade, was one that was on screen for maybe five minutes. Our reaction:
Me: Is that... BD Wong?
Jade: Is that... BD Wong?
Me: It IS him!
Me: I don't know what I'm more shocked by, BD Wong in drag, or the fact that he looks great in it.
Jade: I know! I wasn't sure it was him because he was doing such a good job of being a woman!
But seriously -- fascinating character. Despite the fact that she says it'll be the last time Elliot ever sees her, I really hope that's not true. I'd love to see more of that character!
My biggest problem with the show is that no one's plans make any logical sense. :)))
- Elliot's/Mr. Robot's plan to "even out" the score between the haves and have nots by erasing all debt doesn't actually help poor people. Or even if it does, it's only temporary. Poor people are less likely to own their own homes, for instance. So if you wipe out all debt, guess who stands to gain the most? That's right, rich people who are paying off apartment buildings and mansions and yachts and private jets and hotels and what not. Sure, the middle class will be better off -- maybe -- but the differences at the top and bottom of the hierarchy will be even more extreme than before. Thanks for giving the landlord of the poor person's apartment building outright ownership of the place, Mr. Robot!
- Angela's plan to exact vengeance on the people who killed her and Elliot's parents by falsifying a confession about chain of custody with the .dat file. Okay, great, so you're taking down the dudes who made that awful decision. Will that bring back your parents, or any of the people who died? No. And yet by doing it, she's actually destroying the actual lives of people employed at Allsafe, and destroying the company Gideon (a good man) built. Why would that trade off make sense to any normal, compassionate human being? It doesn't, which is yet another reason why she's an idiot.
