Transcription
When it comes to groundbreaking television, you'll be hard-pressed to find a show that's as underappreciated as Mr. Robot. Despite receiving critical acclaim throughout the show's run time, Mr. Robot's cultural impact seemingly came and went in the blink of an eye. When looking at other series like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, or even Game of Thrones, it's hard to have a day go by where you don't see something referencing at least one of these shows. And yet, Mr. Robot seems to have completely left the public eye after its finale, despite it easily being some of the greatest TV ever made.
So, what was it about Mr. Robot that made it so great, and why is this show never really spoken about anymore? Well, to answer this question, we'll start with taking a look at the show's protagonist, Elliot Alderson. Parts of what makes Mr. Robot such an engaging show is that it's almost impossible to pin down just who Elliot Alderson is. At first glance, he may seem like your typical 4chan basement-dwelling shut-in, but that really couldn't be any further from the case.
Elliot spends the majority of his free time as a vigilante hacker who takes down criminals that the law can't find. Although, as you might expect from having a hobby like this, Elliot isn't exactly a happy-go-lucky social butterfly. He's pretty much the complete opposite. Elliot has a whole miscellany of mental issues that are troubling him constantly: anxiety, depression, delusions, paranoia, and a whole host of others. Because of this, whenever Elliot isn't spending his time hacking others, he can usually be found self-medicating himself with morphine. He doesn't limit himself to just opiates, however, as he does pretty much every other drug under the sun.
If he can't get his hands on any form of narcotics, Elliot completely shuts himself off inside his empty apartment, trapping himself in his mind, withdrawing from society. And in all honesty, there really isn't a whole lot else for a guy like Elliot to do besides these things. He lives in one of the most impersonal places in the Western Hemisphere: New York. The city in the show is this hyper-real dystopian nightmare where everything is controlled by one mega-corporation, and New York is just the headquarters. Where everything is so hyper-capitalistic, where everything is so atomized and impersonal that everyone is seemingly going insane.
So, when we meet Elliot, he's just badly scraping by off of the highs he gets through drugs and hacking other people. One of the earliest scenes we see Elliot in is the sequence inside of a coffee shop. After taking a seat beside the owner without asking his permission, Elliot starts demonstrating various quirks that are common for an anti-social individual. It's apparent that Elliot has to force himself to make eye contact with others, and when he does, his eyes are dead, fully wide open, and seem to be staring directly into the soul of whoever he's talking to. Along with this, he takes a closed-off posture at an angle and is often shifting uncomfortably in his seat.
Ron, the man who owns the store, is the first in the show to experience a conversation with Elliot. Once he catches Ron's eye, Elliot has no trouble skipping the common conversational formalities like a hello or an introduction. Instead of any of these, Elliot's immediately outed Ron as a fraud by stating his real name. "The real name is Rohit Mehta. You changed it around when you bought your first Ron's Coffee Shop six years ago." And then proceeds to go on a seemingly unrelated tangent about his shop's excellent Wi-Fi. Yet, related the tangent was, as the Wi-Fi's quality was so good that it caused some suspicions to arouse within Elliot. So much so that he decided to intercept the network traffic coming from Ron's coffee shop, and it turns out that Ron is a fraud who had been running a large scam operation through an encrypted web service. Elliot proceeds to put some documents on the table that contain emails and pictures proving all of this. Clearly distrustful, Ron thinks Elliot is here to extort him for money, so he tries to hold his ground by saying that he refuses to pay. Elliot, before he even asks, says, "Yeah, Ron can be more incorrect about Elliot." As he had already called the police well before he even started the conversation. Without skipping a beat, once the police show up, Elliot exits the shop and ends his talk with Ron by stating, "I don't give a fuck about money."
And this scene becomes very important for foreshadowing the rest of the series. This is our introduction to who we'll be spending the majority of the time with throughout the show. It's clear that Elliot just simply doesn't care about money and only strikes back against injustice for fun. In a way, Elliot is the ultimate 4chan troll. And when Elliot says he doesn't give a fuck about money, that's the honest truth, since what's a guy like Elliot really supposed to do with an exorbitant amount of money anyway? Money won't solve his loneliness; it won't solve his emptiness. And it's easy to see why Elliot is completely detached from his surroundings and spending all of his time in his own head.
In fact, this character is supposed to represent all the countless other men in our real world who feel just as dissociated towards society as Elliot does. Since our modern world heavily exacerbates loneliness, there's just so much communication today that is nauseatingly fake, whether it be through impersonal relationships or phony social media discourse or predatory algorithms. With everyone so detached from reality, this is probably why a staggering 40% of young adults report feeling lonely either often or very often. Along with this jump in loneliness, there's been an upward trend of pretty much every kind of mental illness out there, all happening within just the last decade, amplified tenfold since coronavirus and the government lockdowns. And with mental health problems like this, it's no wonder why incels have become such a hot topic issue. Just look at the dwindling testosterone levels, and it's pretty clear that there is a serious issue in society, just like so many others.
Elliot lives in a hollow world. Everywhere he goes, everything he eats, everything he consumes is all fake. He is completely devoid of any meaningful human interaction, only having a couple of friends in this ice age world that he occasionally talks to. So, considering this, what does Elliot think of society? Well, it's fair to say that he isn't exactly a fan. While speaking to a psychiatrist, he goes off on a tangent, tearing it to shreds. Elliot starts listing off all the lies that are commonplace in today's world: phony celebrity culture, child exploitation, faux conversationalism, and fabricated social media personas only scratch the surface of Elliot's disdain for society.
"That we voted for this, not with rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new, we all know why we do this. Not because Hunger Games books makes us happy, but because we want to be sedated. It's painful not to pretend because we're cowards." Society, almost every point made in this rant, is pretty much dead on relating to our current society, at least from the perspective of someone at the bottom of society. I mean, when you look around in these giant mega-cities like New York, you realize people just buy so much pointless junk in the hopes that doing so will make us happy, but all this does is sedate us. We buy technology, we buy more products just to addict ourselves and rob our future potential. And that's why today so many of us just simply shrug our shoulders and ignore major problems like the fact that one of the biggest wealth transfers in history is occurring right now as I speak, or like how faceless mega-corporations like Nestlé and Shell get away with atrocities against children and the environment by simply pleasing their investors, governments, and putting on a phony corporate neoliberal mask to save their face.
Yet, for all these accurate points Elliot makes, the speech happens to just be all inside of his head. These are the thoughts bubbling away at him, and yet he can't release his repressed self. And so, once this imagined psychiatrist rant concludes, Elliot then leaves the office, and we're taken into a normal day in his life where he works as a cybersecurity engineer at a company also subtly called E Corp. Now, as you might have already inferred, the "E" is short for Evil. The name Evil Corp isn't just for show either, as it turns out that the company was responsible for a chemical incident that gave a number of their employees leukemia. And yet, this company controls all of society, which is just hinting at these aforementioned companies like Nestlé and Shell, who have both committed numerous crimes and immeasurable amounts of immoral acts. Companies like these have free reign to head into third-world countries and do whatever they please, whether that be destroying their environments, overthrowing their governments, exploiting their workers, or even replacing breast milk with baby formula.
In Mr. Robot, E Corp is essentially a stand-in for every single one of these types of companies. It's basically just Amazon, Google, and Sentient to Blackrock and all these other corporate giants rolled into one. And so, for a company of this size, accounts causing chemical leaks is likely just one of the thousands of grave errors made by the organization that have gone unpunished. But it just so happens that Elliot's father was among those affected by the incident, and unfortunately for Elliot, it wasn't too long after his dad's diagnosis that he passed away. And to twist the knife even further, E Corp was able to use their massive amounts of influence and finances to easily cover up the legal misstep, sweeping the liability for the accident under the rug.
Now, while Elliot does technically work for his cybersecurity firm that works with E Corp, Elliot is still dependent on E Corp because no other company can escape E Corp's influence. But for now, everything just seems business as usual at the cybersecurity firm. That is until the workday ends, and the company's network starts getting hacked in the middle of the night. This is obviously a very serious problem, and the cyberattack causes one of Elliot's only friends, Angela, to call him up after hours requesting his help. Once Elliot arrives on scene, he discovers that this isn't your run-of-the-mill network intrusion. Whoever the perpetrator is knows what they're doing. However, Elliot, being the technological genius that he is, managed to get access to E Corp's physical servers through his boss, and afterwards, Elliot pinpoints exactly where the vulnerability lies and proceeds to stop the attack promptly before any serious damage is caused.
However, once everyone leaves the room and Elliot is just about to wrap things up, he notices something strange: a course sign left by the intruders, one that is specifically written for him. The hacker organization calls themselves F Society and they instruct Elliot to keep the virus on the infected server, but don't give him any reason why. Just as Elliot is about to disregard their message and wipe the infected files away for good, he stops himself and reconsiders. Elliot has no idea what is making him obey this command, but for some reason, he follows the order and leaves the virus on the machine.
However, it won't take long for some of Elliot's questions to be answered. As back on the subway home, he meets a mysterious figure wearing a jacket with a patch labeled "Mr. Robot," which is the name this man is referred to throughout the show. Mr. Robot strikes up a conversation with Elliot and somehow knows about the cyberattack incident to E Corp the night before, along with the malicious file remaining on the servers. "But only if he didn't delete it. He deleted it? We got nothing to talk about." It turns out that the whole ordeal was simply a test that was specifically designed for Elliot, and because Elliot passed the test, Mr. Robot offers him a spot on the crew, F Society. Interested but hesitant, Elliot follows Mr. Robot to an abandoned arcade situated on a nearby pier, a hidden front for F Society's base of operations. Excluding the Jew who just arrived, inside there's a total of four other members working for the organization. Unfortunately, they all share the same mindset of anti-corporate belligerency, which is a sentiment that Elliot also firmly believes in.
Before any official introductions to the crew, Mr. Robot takes Elliot on a Ferris wheel and lays down what he really wants from him. F Society's endgame is to execute the hack of the century, one that will supposedly wipe E Corp off the map for good. Their plans to get access to the company's secure servers, plant some of their own software, and wipe all of the financial debts stored inside, completely resetting society. Doing this is no joke, as because of the sheer financial scale of E Corp, it would mean erasing the debt owed by pretty much everyone on the planet. And since so much of our world runs on debt, doing something like this in the real world would mean countless mega-corporations, not to mention almost every single government in the world, along with major financial institutions like BlackRock, JP Morgan, and pretty much every other major investment firm and banking institution, would be destroyed. So, it's fairly easy to see why F Society believes this will be the act that finally sets everyone free, but he needs Elliot's help to pull it off. This is their only shot at a revolution, at destroying the fake society. To his so much, and so Elliot, being the social outcast of the years, seems on board with this, and he proceeds to meet the other members of F Society.
While most are relatively normal considering the kind of operation they're running, one of them shakes Elliot off balance: a woman named Arlene. Now, it's fair to say that Darlene isn't exactly the conventional type, as the next time Elliot meets her, she's helped herself to taking a shower inside of his apartment. Yet, strangely enough, Darlene seems to be more upset about getting caught and disregards an explanation about why or how she was in Elliot's apartment to begin with. Likely shaken by the ordeal, Elliot arranges a meeting with Mr. Robot by the pier. The two sit on the fence, and Elliot opens up about his father's death at the hands of E Corp. However, just his passing doesn't give the full context to Elliot's side of the story, as it turns out that his dad was a very private individual and wanted his battle with cancer kept a secret solely between him and his son. This was quite the burden for Elliot, and he ended up feeling so pressured by it that he told his mom about the leukemia diagnosis.
This is where things take a much darker turn, as it's revealed that Elliot's father is not the same as some might have imagined him to be. After discovering that Elliot told the truth, he ended up getting so mad that he pushed his son out of the second-story bedroom window. And after hearing the story, Mr. Robot puts his hand on Elliot's shoulder, almost out of sympathy. However, instead, Mr. Robot says, "Do you ever think he was right?" There, and before Elliot can even give a straight answer, Mr. Robot pushes him off the pier.
Funnily enough, this incident doesn't really faze Elliot at all. As later, he heads back to the arcade to discuss F Society's hacking plan with the other members. Their first step in the operation is getting access to a secured data facility called Steel Mountain, where E Corp stores all their financial information. However, the servers are stored offline, so their trip will have to be in person. But the crew has a trick up their sleeve to get into the facility, and of course, this centers around Elliot. So, they create a Wikipedia article masquerading Elliot as a tech startup billionaire and use this webpage to trick the security guard into giving him a tour on the restricted floors. If the plan works, Elliot manages to sneak away and access the building's temperature control system. He then proceeds to plan to bargain the thermostats, one that will allow him to raise the server's room temperatures high enough to completely fry it. Afterwards, Elliot leaves the building, and this phase of F Society's plan goes off without a hitch.
But soon afterwards, the group is met with another problem. To fully pull off a debt-wiping operation of this scale, they needed to partner with a notorious Chinese hacking organization known as the Dark Army. And unfortunately, they just poured out of the plan without any explanation. This is a pretty big issue since E Corp has the same financial backup stored in China as a failsafe. So, if F Society can't get the Dark Army back on their side of the operation, everything they just did at Steel Mountain will have been for nothing. The scale of this issue means that it can't be solved overnight. So, rather than fixating on it with other members of the crew, Elliot instead starts spending some time with the psychiatrist.
This marks the point where the show starts shifting some of its focus away from Elliot and instead towards a few of his associates, namely his friend Angela and a mysteriously well-informed businessman named Tyrell Wellick. It doesn't come as a shock to learn that Angela and Elliot have been close their entire lives, since the latter isn't exactly the outgoing type looking for new friendships. But their friendship also extends past simply childhood upbringings, since Angela's mom was sent to an early grave by the same chemical leak that killed Elliot's dad. This mutual loss has led the two sticking together through thick and thin, and it's also why Angela has started digging deep into E Corp herself, using documents leaked by none other than F Society.
Angela uses these as grounds to get herself a meeting with the man responsible for overseeing the chemical incident. Although Angela doesn't really get very far when she meets with him, as the CTO isn't really one for morality or remorse. But what he notices is Angela's grit and offers to take Angela under his wing by placing her in a high-ranking E Corp staff position. Instead of trying to take her to court, they're trying to make her into one of them. And to put some sugar on top of the offer, he suggests that she can "change it from the inside." Now, not wanting to turn down free opportunities and more money, Angela accepts her new role at E Corp.
Which brings us to Tyrell Wellick, another important employee working at E Corp. Now, Tyrell Wellick is basically like the brother of Patrick Bateman. He's a high-paid New York yuppie who's also completely repressed and beats up homeless people. In a way, Tyrell is the corporate mirror of Elliot: a man who is deeply lonely, repressed, and full of hatred of the world around him. And yet, he has to hide all of his bubbling resentment behind a sharp and tech-literate public face, which he uses to disguise his true nature, an unhinged hatred of the world around him. But instead of Tyrell going on killing sprees and smashing his co-workers in the face with a fire axe like Patrick Bateman, Tyrell focuses his rage into non-lethal methods, which often comes in the form of using homeless men as punching bags, as well as extreme BDSM with his wife. Because fundamentally, Tyrell is missing any human connection or meaning in his life. His public mask is becoming too heavy to handle, as the culture and lifestyle of post-modern New York is becoming unbearable for Tyrell. The horrible E Corp corporate culture surrounding him is saturating his psyche and, most importantly, his emotional development.
In fact, it's this binding sentiment between Angela, Tyrell, and Elliot that actually leads to F Society's revolution in the first place. This whole plot to raise the debts and restart society is just a mass form of catharsis for all those strangled by the chains of their postmodern lifestyle. You see, Tyrell knows that Elliot is involved with F Society and informs him about it privately in the company's bathroom. Aside from the respect he has towards Elliot, the main reason Tyrell didn't report him was because of the public scandal arising from the E Corp cyberattack, something that was likely to land him the role of CTO since the original one was fired after the incident. Yes, unfortunately for Tyrell, this just isn't the case, as the company decides to go with another employee to hold that position, and Tyrell takes this information about as well as you would expect. The silver lining of this whole scenario is that Tyrell's wife is just as much of a power-hungry as he is. They don't actually care about the implications of the cyberattack; they don't care how much this threatens the whole society surrounding them, as long as they gain more power. So, Tyrell's wife suggests that he should sleep with the new CTO's wife at an upcoming business party to get leverage over her. Tyrell agrees, but their plan doesn't really go exactly according to plan, as he ends up strangling the CTO's wife on the rooftop outside the party. His mask of society is starting to slip.
And on that note, the show transitions over towards Elliot's escapades and his attempts to sway the Chinese hacker organization back to F Society's side. He manages to score a meeting with the leader of the group, and the location is about as secure as he'd expect from someone with that kind of influence. The leader calls herself White Rose, and she gives Elliot only minutes to convince her about redrawing F Society's debt-to-raise plans, which fortunately Elliot does so successfully, or at least he thinks it's the result of his own convincing. Because deep down, White Rose has ulterior motives. She represents China's greater ambitions for world conquest. She is one of the highest-ranking CCP members, serving as the foreign minister, and she is part of a wide Chinese plot to prey on the atomized, lonely culture of America and using that spirit to tear away America's world dominance. These mixing forces of America's failing progressive postmodern ideology and resentment created by it, mixed with China's plans for global domination, served to be an incredibly dangerous concoction. Behind the surface of postmodern America are big cracks ready to take down the entire country.
Once high off the Dark Army joining him, Elliot then arranges to hang out with Darlene. The course of their conversation appears to be getting more sentimental over time, so Elliot takes the opportunity to go in for a kiss. However, everything gets quickly shot back down to reality. Darlene reacts in shock as if she's been struck by a lightning bolt, and through the conversational fallout, Elliot realizes something that had completely escaped his mind up until this point: Darlene is actually his sister. And as you'd expect, Elliot doesn't take this information very well, and he starts questioning if he's losing his mind. He even directly accuses the audience of working against him. "Who are you?"
Elliot has his backup plan for this problem in the form of a blank CD stored in his private data folder. The contents of the CD show childhood photos of a young Elliot with a supposedly dead father, none other than Mr. Robot. Who seemingly out of nowhere appears on Elliot's doorstep. Upon his realization, Mr. Robot manages to interact alone with Elliot just long enough to take him to a graveyard where Darlene and Angela are already looking for him. Elliot appears to them as deranged and rambling, talking to thin air as if it was a person. And here it's revealed that Mr. Robot is indeed Elliot. As right next to his father's grave, Elliot realizes he has been imagining Mr. Robot the entire time. Mr. Robot has been acting as Tyler Durden throughout the entire run time, doing things like founding F Society and having private meetings with Tyrell Wellick, with or without the real Elliot's knowledge. But this is just because this is Elliot's shadow side. This is his repressed dark shadow self. This is the monster within Elliot, the repression that has manifested out of him.
This sends Elliot into a total mental breakdown, only until Tyrell appears in his room, having just been fired from E Corp. Tyrell is through with them and wants to immerse himself fully as a member in F Society. He has known about the organization's debt-to-raise plans all along and offers himself up to take a crucial role in getting the hack executed properly. Everything is now falling into place. F Society's revolution is ready to go. It's all just seemingly too good to be true until Elliot wakes up three days later in an unmarked car with no memory of what transpired over the course of his time asleep. Despite Elliot's initial confusion, it's quickly revealed what really happened. Elliot had been acting as Mr. Robot throughout the three days, working with Tyrell, and they managed to pull off F Society's operation without a hitch. Everyone's debt has now been erased, all thanks to the now publicly celebrated F Society.
Little does anyone know the impending disaster that's waiting now, because for a while, all the regular civilians around New York are partying. Everyone's celebrating their debt being erased; they're celebrating this new transformative period in history. It seems like this postmodern dystopia is finally crumbling into the ground. But Elliot obviously still has a lot of issues to work out, namely the persona who was having no issue taking over his mind by force, causing Elliot to lose it in the middle of Times Square. And it's here where we get to see one of the most poignant speeches ever put to TV, given by Mr. Robot himself. The speech, called "The Kingdom of When," Elias tries to get Mr. Robot to disappear by dismissing him and saying that he's not really there. It's actually Mr. Robot who gives Elliot the reality check. All he has to do is take a look around.
This whole world he lives in is built on a fantasy, full of synthetic emotions in the form of pills, psychological warfare in the form of advertising, mind-altering chemicals in the form of food, brainwashing seminars in the form of media, controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. It's all here, and it's happening right now. Just look at our world, and you'll easily be able to see what Mr. Robot is talking about. This is why F Society happened in the first place. This is why America is on the brink of a revolution. Our society is subjecting people to conditions that make them unhappy perpetually, then prescribes the medication to take away their unhappiness. There is also a constant heavy push by the elites for artificial and synthetic foods that is constantly being shoved down everyone's throats: the Impossible Whopper burger, GMOs, or the synthetic and plant-based meats. And in regards to a controlled isolated social network bubble, one only has to look as far as things like the metaverse and TikTok to see what's really happening. These apps are specifically designed to hook users in and take away all of their attention, as we all know they put you into an artificial reality; they create the culture that we live in.
Mr. Robot summarizes all of these points as well as anybody can, and so the series really ends on this point, and it's clear what Mr. Robot is trying to tell us. The whole reason for F Society is just this release from subversive control. Elliot's pain, his madness, his delusionment, his loneliness, the byproduct of a culture that he lives in, his warped and corroded habitus. It seems like at the end, he's going sane in an insane world, and almost everyone around him are indifferent. The culture is uncaring; all the lives are quite desperate. It's just part and parcel of life in the modern world where we are none to a deluge of wholly meaningless plastic culture that shows us nothing but vicious hostility. Anyone trying to express authenticity—Elliot, Tyrell, Angela, Darlene—all of them feel this deeply. And with the pain of their loved ones dying at the hands of E Corp, they want revenge. Because of this burning resentment, no one in American society is actually standing to defend the system; no one wants to protect it because no one feels the benefits from that system anymore. Nobody in Mr. Robot has any connection to it, so they choose to destroy it and begin anew.
And in the final acts, this repression is finally released when F Society begins their attack, with Mr. Robot really highlighting that when the population is weakened and subverted, society falls. The danger here lies in the fact that this is a breeding ground for foreign agents like China to take over, and in Mr. Robot, this is represented with the Chinese Dark Army exploiting these feelings in American society to conquer and take over. This is all a government ploy for world domination, and it's something that isn't all too dissimilar from what we see today. And the results of this become more and more clear as the series continues. It's a harrowing reflection of where the West is currently headed. In a way, it's this monopolistic, nihilistic, materialistic culture that is tearing down the fabric of Western civilization. Mr. Robot shows that you can't just replace friendship, love, and community—all the things that the radical atomization and isolation of modern life destroys. Which is why Mr. Robot is just so great. It serves as a warning of where the destruction of happiness and community leads to, and it shows even better how this is exploited by foreign agents to further their political ambitions. But sadly, this is a warning that seems to have been totally ignored.