'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real
recode.net
recode.net
POI is a pre-snowden series about a world "in which the NSA has a system which spies on every american citizen in order to fight terrorism" (sounds familiar?).
The show begins with the weak premise of "help us fight crimes we predict will happen", but don't be fooled by its appearance of a run-of-the-mill CBS show. Without spoiling it too much, I do want to say that by the end of Season 1, it transitions from "monster of the week" to an extremely high quality science fiction show, nearly invisibly.
I don't want to oversell it, but if you're reading HN it's very likely to be a show that you will appreciate. And like Mr. Robot, it's one of the very rare shows that has a lot of respect for tech and doesn't vomit gibberish on their audience.
The only downside is that they let some techno babble seep in by S3 and the hacking has become a bit odd in its explanations.
Overall a solid 5/7. You should watch it.
And unlike Mr. Robot, it's watchable to nontechies so if your SO couldn't do Mr Robot, they'd probably watch POI with you.
The upside is the ensemble is very strong and likable, the writers worked hard to preserve continuity and development of the characters, even a few side characters that only show up one or two times per season, and it rewards careful watching.
My issues with Mr. Robot are they have been overusing some of the tricks you saw in Fight Club for example, and the characters are much more Breaking Bad in that you can like them but not admire them. The portrayal of tech is amazing though, and the direction and editing stays mostly in the "clever homage" of Hollywood genre films rather than straight ripoff of them. The cast is also very good.
And let's not forget the other big genre series, Orphan Black, which I highly recommend.
At times the show with its dialogue became very CSI, NCSI, aka other CBS cop crime crap. Reese and Ebbg's (Rot 13 name per spoiler avoidance request) one liners became fairly irritating.
It also didn't help: <rot13> gurl ryvzvangrq bar bs gur orggre npgbef naq punenpgref va gur fubj (Pnegre... V'z nyy nobhg xvyyvat znwbe punenpgref ohg gurl unq orggre bcgvbaf) </rot13> (spoiler avoidance).
Edit: Thank you :)
Everything from the 'machine' itself, to the cringe acting and writing, dumb tech concepts (woman who 'speaks' for the machine) and all their vigilante killings that only happen in New York. I couldn't take it.
Watch Halt and Catch Fire - it's a thousand times better.
I watch a ton of TV and I honestly think Person of Interest is the best show I've ever watched.
It may not have the production value of Game of Thrones, the suspense of Breaking Bad or the comedy of .. um.. Seinfeld? but [rest of this comment rot13'd for spoilers]
vg vf gur bayl fubj V'ir rire jngpurq gung chyyf bss fhpu n fzbbgu "traer fjvgpu" sebz cebprqheny gb fpvrapr svpgvba, gb rira penmvre fpvrapr svpgvba.
Vg vf nyfb gur bayl fpvrapr svpgvba fubj V'ir rire jngpurq juvpu vf cynhfvoyr. Gurl gnxr yvoregvrf bs pbhefr: Gur gebcr bs gur "travhf cebtenzzre" gung "qvq rirelguvat ol uvzfrys" vf gverq, ohg jung ur cebqhprq vf fgvyy cynhfvoyr. Vg'q gnxr qrpnqrf, uhaqerqf bs lrnef znlor, ohg gung'f jul vg'f fpv-sv naq abg n qbphzragnel.
Gur punenpgre qrirybczrag bs gur NV vf snfpvangvat naq vg tbg zr gb pner nobhg ure n ybg. Fnznevgna jnf nyfb na rkgerzryl vagrerfgvat punenpgre.
The POI team produced the most unique experience in TV I've ever watched. I won't pretend everybody will like it, but it is the show I recommend to people the most.
I don't expect a lot of people to agree with the statement. But I did just put it in front of breaking bad, game of thrones and yes even the sopranos. Those series are all amazing in their own right, but I'll reiterate that Person of Interest is the most unique TV experience I've ever had.
I really enjoyed season 1 of Mr. Robot but season 2 really hasn't been the same, it is way too mind trippy for me now.
There are some silly slips, and I doubt they'd mostly be running on C64s, but overall it gets the feel of the period pretty well.
The transition into sci-fi was very subtle, and where they took the show was interesting for it's time. But the technical aspects are like almost other TV show. NCIS levels of inaccuracies.
Mr. Robot should not be utter in the same context as POI, because unlike POI, they did their research. They made a show that has both a good story, but also mostly technically accurate and plausible.
I strongly disagree. You could maybe say that about season 1. It devolved into a pretty crappy show after that and I bailed completely by season 3.
Also the part about vilifying companies and loving big government is not my cup of tea. At least in Person of Interest both were bad.
Last part, vilifying money as a medium of exchange is just absurd. Are they expecting to exchange their computer services for eggs at the supermarket?
TV shows centered around normal people are really boring.
I believe that the show was so popular because many people saw connections between the characters and people they actually knew in real life. Compared to Mr. Robot, I would say that the characters in Seinfeld were far more normal.
So maybe relatable doesn’t necessarily mean normal, but that’s what I was thinking.
I think it’s starting to happen with Mr. Robot already. I liked season 1 a lot, but I’m not as big of a fan of season 2. I think they’re going too far with the whole “delusional acid trip” kind of thing.
I can’t speak for everyone, but it’s been my personal experience that many groups of friends partake in “shit talking” or “gossiping” when no one is around.
This leads me to believe that many people can be uncaring behind closed doors (which is what I think Seinfeld was meant to show, and which is why many people could relate to the show).
You should watch season 2. All of the above are directly addressed.
I chose the former when it came time to design a protagonist for my totally unrealistic hacking-themed mobile game.
> Also the part about vilifying companies and loving big government is not my cup of tea.
Watch Season 2 before you make any judgments on who the bad guys actually are.
When government is continually debasing money through forced inflation, it's not surprising that people develop a distaste for money itself. Rather than functioning as a virtuous representation of value creation, inflating money just represents political connection to the central bank. Rather than being able to build up savings to gain security and negotiating power, the common person's primary interaction with money is having to service the debt driving their wage-slavery.
If you believe in free markets, you should want to make money sound again. Writing off people's rational distaste for the role money is presently playing just allows the fundamental problem to continue growing.
In inflationary economies, there is nothing stopping individuals from saving value in the form of assets; you can store your value in pork bellies or gold or ownership of a company or whatever other asset you'd like, in order to build up savings to gain security and negotiating power. The oft-repeated idea that inflation precludes saving is silly; it does make it costly to save by stuffing your dollars into a mattress, but it would still hold true in an economy without managed inflation - such economies are still subject to inflation and deflation (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Historical_Inflation_A...) so if you need to actually spend your money during one of those 20% inflation spikes, well, good luck with that.
Store your value in an asset rather than a medium of exchange and managed inflation is a tremendous boon thanks to its tendency to decrease the risk (and thus cost) of investment.
The disconnect in your analysis is that price inflation hits hardest the areas where the conjured money is injected into the wider economy. Saving in gold works to pay for food, but not to pay for housing. To keep up with the latter, you must invest in housing to cover the entirety of your consumption. Until you achieve that, you're over the barrel servicing debt. This encourages everybody into further helping to inflate that bubble, with those who've succeeded then lobbying for even more housing inflation.
Historical record is not aligned with the fantasy that eliminating fiat currency would cause price stabilization and promote savings. It would eliminate long-run inflation, but at the cost of price stability and medium-run investment.
The core of your argument seems to be that there is little economic difference between natural technological deflation and forcing a slow inflation, that the market can adjust to either condition. But if markets were perfectly efficient like this, then forcing inflation would have no effect and in fact bubbles would not occur because they would be immediately corrected
Real markets have inefficiencies and lag time, and altering the macro environment is straight endorsement of specific policy, but cloaked as science. If prices were allowed to go down and people were able to save money (actual savings, not simply leveraged between stocks and debt), then they could choose to work less and we would be able to actually see widespread gains from technology. Instead, the government is running the same tired Keynesian playbook for getting "full employment" while the need for human work is being ever reduced.
> You're presuming that 100% of price level changes are due to changes in the money supply
No, just the majority of them. Even though demand for housing is going up (population), we would expect prices to rise to stable premium over the cost of creating new housing (corresponding to the lag between demand and production). Instead, what we're observing is a continual inflation in "values" that seems to actually be constrained by the cost of interest on the value. This makes intuitive sense based on how people are actually encouraged to view houses (like various acquaintances thinking a $5k earnest money deposit is serious business, while seemingly oblivious that they're actually spending much much more).
Furthermore, shamelessly implicit in the idea of forced inflation is the viewpoint that people should be forced to "invest". This certainly keeps the financial sector in demand, but obviously hurts the average person who has their savings eroded either passively through inflation or actively through transaction fees and time spent managing relatively small investments.
"Politics is for puppets."
"We voted for this, not with our rigged elections..."
"I'm talking about the guys no one knows about, the guys who play God without asking permission..."
I hate this so, so much. I enjoyed Orphan Black but the biologist character was just such a babbling idiot that I kept having to fight the urge to fast-forward through her scenes (I have to say though, the actress that plays the clones has a pretty amazing range. Not all of the characters are great but sometime I had to remind myself that it was the same person playing all the roles).
This seems to have originated with the procedural crime dramas; the "geek tank" full of adult children that spout technobabble to eye-rolling detectives and are unable to communicate technical concepts to non-technical people. I have a few friends in research. None of them have lip rings or dreadlocks and they are all able to carry a conversation with people of diverse backgrounds and education.
This is probably the main reason why I love so much this series.
FYI: I think I'm kind of a introvert person. I have small problems with myself. And yes, I am programmer.
The funny thing is if it didn't even involve hacking I would still consider my favorite show. The psychodrama existentialism of the show is so good. The plot is so damn good. The acting is so damn good.
Th music, the timing of title screen and the font used. I love it all.
I mean, if you're making a movie about an island zoo of dinosaurs, it's OK to pay homage to Jurassic Park using dialogue or the composition of a specific scene. But if the main plot of your movie turns out to be about dinosaurs escaping their zoo... well, that becomes a bit too much, in my opinion.
S02 has far more truly hidden twists.
I mean even in Ex Machina I had some rough idea of what was going to happen in the end but that doesn't make it a bad movie.
S02 has been so much better than S01.
> I actually wanted the audience to be a little ahead of Elliot on that. And we were telegraphing it intentionally, to the point that people thought it was a misdirect.
That said I was somewhat irritated when I realized that the twist, along with the main plot arc were lifted from the same movie, which is also referenced almost explicitly in a couple of episodes.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rot13+V+yvxr+ubj+gurl+syng+hc+gbyq...
- The actors are often out of character (or their development isn't clear) and mumble unintelligible sentences targeted at milennials with existential crisis (there are a few rants from the main character that would make 14-year-old-me cringe).
- The plot reads a bit like Fight Club fan fiction with some American Psycho and geopolitics bits thrown in.
- The pacing could be improved. Some chapters feel like a mere excuse to shoot cool and edgy scenes where you don't see any progress until the expected cliffhanger.
- And the worst of all: Main character uses GNOME, codes in Python/Ruby, makes heavy use of the mouse (and not to use ACME) and doesn't use Gentoo. I also find his lack of anime wallpapers disturbing.
It is really well shot though.
Oh boy.
Agreed on everything else though.
In season two he is seen using Vim and then Leafpad. I think the character uses whatever is at his disposal.
Oh and I used Gentoo years ago (like 2003) and stopped using it because of the whole recompile the world. I don't think recompiling everything is the best option when so much of hacking is about speed and timing.
The show is also fully aware that the underling motives behind the hack are immature. That is why in the 2nd season they show that the world is worse off than before. Freeing people from debt didn't solve everyone's problems. It shows that F Society is really a bunch of childish vandals who got in over their heads. I mean they literally have them cutting off the balls of the bull statue on Wall Street. They aren't meant to be flawless heroes that we are supposed to 100% agree with.
1. The plotline is pretty much Fight Club with computers and telegraphs this early on. This is clearly not on purpose as we see hints dropped all the time and the reveal is given with such a flourish. Lets stop defending Esmail here. The reveal is really hamfisted and the show borrows VERY generously from Fight Club, for better or worse.
2. The twists are largely unpredictable. Sure you can argue that some clues were dropped beforehand, but they're so ambiguous as to be meaningless. Anything can happen on that show and to me, that's lazy writing. The universe that show lives in should have a rational set of rules that govern it. Its basic world-building. If the finale involves aliens or time travel, it woudn't surprise anyone, in fact /r/mrrobot is full of people expecting this. Anything should not be possible, especially when you're 30+ hours in.
3. The pacing isn't very good and gets especially bad in season 2. I don't think we needed several episodes dedicated to Elliot being in [spoilers] or other events that look stretched out to fill episodes. This is a common issue in TV, and I'll let it slide, but the first few episodes of S2 are like pulling teeth and turns off viewers. I know people that quit watching during this period. Its a hard sell to say "Look there's about 10 hours of nothing, but it kinda picks up after an experimental episode where the characters are bizarrely on a 90s sitcom for artsy fartsy cred."
4. The content is lacking. My understanding is that Esmail and his team originally wrote a movie and pretty much retrofitted that into one season of television. Once the [big event] happens in season one, the show lost its footing. I would have loved to spend more time at Allsafe instead of jumping straight into [big event].
5. The politics and hacktivism are pretty naive, if not just stupid. Its a lot of alt-left/far-left politics and having the characters act dumbfounded and guilty when regular people lost their homes and jobs seems ridiculous. What exactly did they think would happen after [big event]? We never really get to see anyone's moviation for this, other than some throwaway comments about "evil bankers" and "evil ceos." We know Elliot has a secret motivation and master plan (of course we have no details of it), but what about Trent and Mobley and Darlene? Why are they doing this? None of them remotely seem to have the zeal of a revolutionary and very soon regret all their actions. Its like some middle class hipster kids decided to overthrow society on a whim.
6. The show has a lot geek fan service where it can alienate non-geeks. I think its possible to show hacking without getting into the weeds of it and have it be semi-authentic. I can go either way here, but it would be nice if the show was more accessible to people like my wife and her friends.
7. The exploration of mental illness seems hackneyed and, well, boring. Season 2's long strange cinematography focusing on Elliot's tortured face just doesn't make for good TV. I think this stuff works best in small doses and has been done better by almost everyone else, including season 1 of this very show! Thankfully, Esmail has moved away from this kind of thing about mid-way through S2.
8. Whiterose as an unstoppable mastermind is a cliche and she's tiresome to watch on the show. Writers please stop using the mastermind cliche and start making your characters have flaws and screw-ups. For a show that's suppose to be complex, most of the characters aren't terribly deep or anti-cliche. Its almost distasteful to play up "the Chinese are inscrutable" cliche and have almost all the Chinese characters be unstoppable, unpredictable, and near perfect robots, constantly toying with the dumb and emotional westerners. We see the Dark Army, Chinese state hackers, the CCP, etc win pretty much every engagement but the FBI is clueless and there's no NSA or CIA at work at all here.
9. Less so than Whiterose, but Price is written to be stereotypically evil. He's only missing a mustache to twirl. I wish he was a more complex character, not just a sociopathic CEO who cares about nothing but himself. This doesn't necessarily upset me considering the general low complexity of secondary characters on this show, but the actor playing Price is so good, it seems like a waste of talent for him to play a two dimensional character. Price has a lot of potential that has so far been ignored and perhaps anything humanizing him would upset the far-left politics of the show, which I find disappointing.
10. The show has slowly degenerated into Lost, where meaningless clues lead to a surprise. Fans argue on /r/mrrobot but no one is ever right because its all so damn ambigious. Or someone is right, but only by dumb luck or perhaps marketing plants. I wish the show had less of a mysterious air about it. I also don't like the marketing led approach of "Check out the finale to get the real answers you've been waiting for all season!"
I feel this show is a bit like Halt and Catch Fire. Its decent, but not very good and is constantly trying to find its footing. Like Halt, I suspect it will never really find its proper footing and will be passable geek popcorn fare with moments of brilliance. It doesn't seem to be reaching out past modest ratings. I've heard comparisons to Breaking Bad, but BB had a general appeal that Mr Robot doesn't.
That said, this is destined to live in geek fandom, which frankly has a low barrier to entry. I just wish it was a better and more accessible show. I do look forward to the shows that will be made after being inspired by this. Mr Robot 2.0 will be good. 1.0 is just too uneven and unfocused. Compare how tight Walter White's world was or the world of The Wire compared to the manic world of Mr Robot or how complex and flawed the secondary characters were on that show compared to Mr Robots'. Those are mature and very good shows. Mr Robot? Not so much.
2) The vast vast majority of twists have been predicted far in advance if they are of any significance. And frankly the ones that people missed the missed clues are dug up after the fact to show what people missed. Having problems with Mr Robot is fine, but claiming LAZY writing is lazy analysis.
3) in the short term the pacing felt weird, but as things have been revealed everything has started to fit together and see WHY it is paced the way it is.
4) This is entirely incorrect. He started writing a movie, but when he was 90 pages in (1 page = 1 minute of screentime) before he hit the end of act 1 (which was the first season of the show) he changed his intention and plotted it as a TV show after that.
5) this if fair, the characters are wildly naive.
6) Eh this can be argued both ways so can't really disagree
7) I've seen at least some people who struggle with similar issues who are impressed with how accurate Elliot seems. Others may not feel that way, but like anything else relating to people how different people experience different things means no one person can represent an entire thing.
8) She hasn't been unstoppable, though she is the most daunting character in the show other than possibly Joanna.
9) This is totally fair. He's a psychopath as was shown by his whole talk on wanting to be the most powerful person in the room.
10) What? People have CONSITANTLY been right on subreddit. Obviously bad theories are also going to show up, but the accurate ones regularly bubble to the top.
Honestly, a lot of these predictions feel like leaks disguised as pointed predictions, like we saw in GOT. At least the ones I've seen on reddit.
Mind you aside from coding my main passion is writing so I can smell a lot of the tricks of the trade a mile away.
It's an entertaining show, but only in the same sense as corny superhero movies. Esmail has been trying to wrangle a sensible plot with an interesting premise, but unfortunately he's not as skilled as his execution implies.
I have no clue why you're getting downvoted.
I also think the whole Chinese domination against a weak and emotional West is a tired cliche, the same way the 80s had Japanese domination over a weak and emotional west in fiction. Mr Robot could be our Rising Sun (1993), where it will seem ridiculous, baiting, and pandering to future viewers.
I keep seeing comments that the show is not accessible (e.g. previous poster " I just wish it was a better and more accessible show.") but then comments that it is pandering to the audience by being unoriginal with tropes.
I would argue in large part to be "accessible" aka relevant to many is to be contextual of the current times and slightly unoriginal.
China right now is hacking the US. This is widely known. What other entity should be picked? You could go ultra scifi and go with aliens but I would imagine that would make the show fairly targeted to inaccessible (scifi has historical had a tough time in prime time).
I admit the whole evil company / sticking to the man motive is overdone but that is sort of inline with the hacking we have seen (which is what the article sort of delves into).
Sometimes I keep forgetting that I'm well over my thirties.
But in any case, the show did make an awesome debut, but all the cliches and weird pacing(especially in 2nd season) ruined it for me.
Re: The politics and hacktivism [...] like some middle class hipster kids decided to overthrow society on a whim.
... _yes_, I think that's the point. The mere fact that it's possible and the consequences of this is the drama.
Re: Price ... frankly I like the way he's characterized in this show. Some people have very simple motivations and this makes them very dangerous and the perfect antagonists. He's surrounded by people more nuanced or conflicted than him, which makes that interplay interesting.
How can someone so unrelenting be undermined? That's what I want to find out.
If they made Price some ignorant money driven CEO (just asking to be manipulated) than White Rose would be too powerful (which the previous poster alluded to as well but then has problems with Price being just plain evil).
I'll be curious to see if Sam Esmail gives any hope/intelligence to the government(s) other than the single FBI agent.
I'm not so sure. From my perspective The Wire had a lot of Freshman psychology, philosophy, and civics mixed in with pauses where characters would stare at one another and let silence pass between them.
Mr. Robot is clearly a mature show to a subset of an audience; Rami Malek even won an Emmy, this year. Perhaps you are not hearing the music. In that case, I hope you do. : )
Not my favorite rendition (full disclosure: "Hackers" is my favorite), but they do really drive home the "otherness", which is the core of any "hacker culture" story.
(not my site, just a handy tool)
The second season has veered quite dramatically from the first season, and part of me misses the hacking-focused plots (particularly the realistic handling of social engineering). But I can't fault the creator for avoiding expectations, even if the show's pace feels slower (apparently he had both seasons planned out before he started).
One of my favorite things about the twists though is that I feel like they actually lay a lot of groundwork and foreshadow them very well. For example, I think the twist before the main "first season twist" that you mention was foreshadowed beautifully at the beginning of the episode. By the end of the pre-opening credits scenes, I knew something was up.
Similar story this season. There were so many scenes that felt weird to me (things weren't "matching") that I knew something was up. And as soon as that twist was revealed, they had laid the background/groundwork for it so well enough in season 1 that I immediately knew why it was that way.
Edit: My point was that I've heard some people complain about the twist in season 1 being predictable, but I don't think a "twist" being unpredictable is always a good thing, sometimes it's shitty writing. Almost every time I'm surprised by something in Mr. Robot, I had suspected something was up and thought, "I should have seen that coming". It's almost like watching a really good magic show: I know how a lot of tricks are done, I know they're going to try to trick me, and I'm still surprised when they pull it off.
So where is Mr. Robot going?
Damned if I know. That's what I like about it. As you say, some of the scenes were so odd that it was clear something was up - why is he watching the game from the bench? Why were they so angry with Elliot, and why was the friend such an influence on them? I didn't pick that one, although perhaps I should have re-watched season 1 before starting 2. I don't think that was the big twist, though, that came later - Juvgrebfr'f fhecevfr gung Ryyvbg qbrfa'g xabj jung Cunfr 2 vf tvira gung vg'f uvf cebwrpg, naq nyy gur cbgragvny snyybhg sebz gung. Vf Juvgrebfr hfvat Ryyvbg sbe uvf bja raqf? I think the other shoe has yet to drop on that one.
I think that people who write it off as "just Fight Club" are hugely missing the point - the narrator in that is just too reliable after we learn the twist, and after all, Fight Club was just a backlash against the overall commercial exploitation of the world at the time. Mr. Robot is about n qryhfvbany cnenabvq fpuvmbcueravp jvgu n fbpvny nakvrgl qvfbeqre, jub unf n zhygv-ynlrerq cyna. Jr'ir bayl frra gur Svtug Pyho cneg bs vg pbzcyrgrq, jung ryfr vf pbzvat?
Really hanging out for the finale tonight.
They get the technical details right enough to earn respect. Sometimes you need to give artistic freedom to the writing as long as it doesn't devolve into a graphic of Pacman eating data. Gives you some meaningless pride when you see a protagonist empty a can of Pringles into the trash, knowing exactly what they are doing.
If someone has a problem with the series, my natural reaction at this point is that they're pretentious... it's not fair but imo really that's what all the criticism has boiled down to:
You noticed the heavily telegraphed twist? Good job! Gold star for you!
You're going to criticize a show with such wonderful atmosphere building for having long episodes? Wow, your time must be really important!
He uses the wrong text editor or Linux flavor? You must be a master, could you please fix my iPad?
The characters are flawed or mercurial? Could you please elaborate on the strengths of two-dimensional characters?
'python hack-it.py' would have sufficed. If you haven't seen it, it wasn't much better than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4 and at least that was entertaining.
Except the basic CLI knowledge prepared her for when she needed to run some emergency commands e.g. to restore the network connection. I'll allow them a tiny bit of artistic license here, it certainly added to the tension.
Side note: Why is everyone using Kali Linux all the time? Does anyone (who isn't 14) really run that as a daily driver? They use it to surf the web and check their email. It makes no sense.
There's a scene where we can see Elliot running CentOS on his personal laptop. Not that lends any realism (CentOS is more common on servers, not PCs) but it does show their awareness of Linux beyond Kali.
so joke is on you :)
Hacker (film) was painful to watch. So much cheesyness.
Edward is/was known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and A Delicate Balance (1966).
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/16/462191417/...
Otherwise society at large is poised to think of hacking in the laziest Hollywood depictions:
--
-sofprosjgpwiguwpgegepvueifuvu
-"I'm in."
[0] http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/mr-robot-halt-and-catch-fire...
Amazing monologues, realism, extreme tension, brilliant writing and acting, Mac Quayle, Sam's directing work, an attractive cast, the unreliable narrator, good story arcs and wonderful narrative styles. This show is pure art.
I enjoyed most of season 1, but started to get turned off by the philosophy/politics towards the end and kind of stopped paying attention.
Now I'm seeing people say S2 is more critical of the characters and explores the ideas in some more interesting ways, which has pretty much convinced me to start watching again.
You're the first I've seen who specifically didn't like S2.
Season 2 is slow, not as exciting, and who knows what the goal is, maybe to survive after the hack, maybe something that will be revelead in the last season episode that only Mr. Robot knows, still, it is more slow paced, and tries to over analise the complicated behavior of the characters. IMHO,Elliot's double personallity should have ended in season 1. Another thing is that despise the collapse of the banks, the series doesn't show an apocalyptic world, everything is just like season 1, like if nobody cares about the collapse.
And
Every character is overcomplicated, Elliot with his double personallity, Angela with her ackwardness, Darlene a control freak, White Rose a time freak, and so on, and every damn character always has a monologue, it gets boring, it tries to hard and there is little substance in the story.
If you have such a short attention span that you need something to shock you into continuing the show, perhaps television like this isn't for you.
Just google Fight Club and Mr. Robot. There are plenty of interviews with the creator of Mr. Robot where he explicitly discusses the Fight Club connection. Straight from the horses mouth.
I don't have a problem with referencing other works, but it's got to the point of a simple rewrite.
Fight Club: A prototypical, disillusioned male worker with daddy problems has a psychotic break causing him to make an imaginary friend, and this immaginary person pushes him to destroy all debt records to set everyone free to have a fresh start. In order to do this they start an undetground club that collects members who band together to accomplish this task, who are not totally in the know regarding the immaginary friend. In the process one of the main members of thr club is shot in the head and dies. There is a woman who has a very close relationship to the main character, who is central to plot development, who is portrayed as being very antisocial and rowdy.
I could go on. Sound familiar?
Watching Fight Club is absolutely not the same experience as watching Mr Robot.
Of course I can see the parallels. But, like I said, watching the two shows is a completely different experience. I work in the games industry, I'm quite familiar with what a "rip-off" looks like. Mr Robot is not a rip-off. Inspiration is not a rip-off.
So for someone to dismiss out of hand with so little consideration, as you did, the artistic licence which was taken with the material in this instance, and then to follow-up without considering my follow-up comment, that is condescending in its own right. To right off the other's thoughts so glibly.
And sorry, but working in the gaming industry does not give someone authoritative rights on being able to call out a rip-off. It's possible you missed something here. In which case it might not be the worst thing in the world to fully consider the other person's arguments prior to responding to the comment by simply stating you hadn't changed your position. A very dismissive response.
Anyway, I totally get why you feel that way about the Fight Club similarities, and at first I felt that way too. But if that is the main reason you stopped watching, I urge you to give it another shot! I think there is so much more to the show than that story thread.
Edit: Also, just curious, how far did you make it before you decided to stop watching?
Being an uber liberal-minded hacker in the US today is mainsteam and trendy, not rebellious..which is exactly the antithesis of the hacker credo.
I just wish there was more original thought and less pandering to the Reddit community.
Truly great shows make us think, not just tell us something it thinks we want to hear.
The hacking scenes are accurate, but I would rather open up a terminal and do it than watch a poor representation of it on television.