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Comment by senior_james | Hacker News Reader

Mr. Robot may be technically correct, but I couldn't get past a few episodes of the first season.

Comically bad/cliche companies that are polluting the earth, killing innocent people, and robbing the poor. A closeted gay, masochist antagonist and a smug, patronizing protagonist that regularly demeans the people around him and feels they are less intelligent than himself. This was all in the first few episodes.

I assume the characters and plots have changed since the first season, but not by much.

I felt like the writers were ignored in high school and used the show as a way to passive-aggressively get back at their perceived enemies.

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The thing you need to keep in mind about Mr. Robot is that it's told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator. Evil Corp is Comically Evil Cliche Corp because that's how Elliot perceives them, regardless of their actual evilness.

From a certain perspective, Mr. Robot is a critique of the very thing you are complaining about. Elliot is able to justify doing many things because of the comic-bookish way in which he perceives his world. He is mentally unstable and a central theme of the show is that the things you see (through him) may or may not reflect the reality of his world, and his actions which, while internally consistent with his reality, may not be as noble or righteous as he thinks they are.

The show's heavy lean on the unreliable narrator aspect is what eventually made me lose interest in it (near the end of the first season). At a certain point, a narrator can become so unreliable that there's no actual story anymore. Just increasingly opaque layers of obfuscation.

What I've heard about the second season only made me more glad of my decision to stop watching.

I think that's a fair critique. S2 definitely went full on "you have no idea what is real or not", which is either going to be extremely satisfying or extremely dissatisfying based on how S3 turns out.

At some point, the obfuscation has to resolve. I felt like it resolved reasonably well in S1, though S2 definitely did the LOST thing and just left you hanging for S3. I'm hopeful, though, as Sam Esmail has apparently written the whole story from start to finish, so he hopefully knows where it's going well enough to give it a graceful resolution.

Totally. I fully 5/5 loved the first season, but it started to go in a direction I didn't love towards the end.

I couldn't even make it through the first episode of season 2.

Exactly how I felt.

It's just more candid in its unreliable narrator aspect than other films.

The Wolf of Wall Street employs a similar trick for part of the film to great effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZhGPH83ZHE

I find that doesn't work, though, because they don't really remind you of it - and if the mechanism is that the world is seen through the eyes of the narrator, you can't show scenes for which the narrator isn't present. And there are plenty of those in Mr Robot. It's hard to have "Oh, this is all through the narrator's eyes" when two other characters are having a chat with the narrator nowhere nearby.

I also find the 'evil corp' thing to be immersion-drainingly adolescent, given that there's no other direct replacement. Everything else is 'gritty and real', and then there's this Loony-Tunes bit in the middle of it.

Elliot routinely talks to us, the audience. That's a pretty blatant reminder that we're being narrated to by him! His internal monologues aren't just exposition, they're him talking to us, his "imaginary friend".

When Elliot isn't present, things are certainly more reliable, though we have to remember that our context for this world is through Elliot, which colors how we perceive these non-Elliot scenes, as well. We have to accept that at some artistic level, there have to be scenes without Elliot present, but we know that it's still colored by Elliot's reality through tells established in E1 - ie, characters referencing "Evil Corp" in conversations between themselves when he isn't present (it's not the company's name, it's the name that Elliot tells us he has explicitly replaced the real name with in his mental processes.)

"Evil Corp" is adolescent, but I think that's the point. It's not a lack of intellectual rigor on the part of the writers, but on the part of the characters. If you latch onto it literally as Esmail railing aginst dem eeeeeviiiilllll bigcorps then yeah, it would be tedious and silly, but Elliot goes out of his way in S1 to tell us that he that in regards to Evil Corp, he actively rejects reality and substitutes his own.

Given that the world is shown as perceived by the protagonist, what irked me was the straw man depiction of how a "hacktivist" supposedly perceives the world. Maybe there exist hacktivists who perceive the world this way, but it seemed completely implausible to me.

I think if we're honest, we all perceive the world this way to one degree or another. It's a lot easier (and more satisfying) to see our heroes as infallible champions for truth and justice, and our enemies as demonized caricatures with no redeeming values than it is to attempt to see them as they really are. The reach and effectiveness of the breathless propaganda that drenched the latest presidential election is solid proof of that.

We all think that we have an objective view of the world, and that it's the other people that must have it wrong. I can only conclude that I would be very foolish to believe that out of seven billion people on the planet, I'm the one that got it right.

(That being said, the extremist hacktivist is sort of necessary for a show like this. A responsible, measured one wouldn't make for nearly so engaging a story.)

Yeah, it's kind of amazing that people can have any sort of an objective view of the world, with the amount of noise being input to their senses. I guess even if you have almost complete garbage in, it is still possible to get mostly not garbage out if the processor is diligent enough :)

I disagree that the caricature protagonist is necessary. I think a more nuanced hacktivist character could have made the show much more ambiguous, and in my opinion, interesting, maybe approaching some of the complexities inherent in the material.

SPOILER-ish comment: I tried not to be explicit about the details.

>Mr. Robot is that it's told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator //

When they drop the bombshell of that reality in the second series, that the narrator is unreliable, was a great moment that had me giggling with glee. I'd been guessing "oh, that guy is another element of his own dissociated personality", but never quite guessed the full gravity of it.

The "breakdown" episode [there's just one!?!] where his family are on vacation in pseudo-flashback with smaltzy sitcom styling whilst not great to watch was a real testament to how different this show was IMO.

> When they drop the bombshell of that reality in the second series, that the narrator is unreliable, was a great moment that had me giggling with glee.

(spoilers) The Fight Club parallels were there from the very first time he saw Mr. Robot in the episode one. So I kind of expected what was coming.

I'm not referring to the father, that was clear very early; the prison though, that had me hook-line-sinker.

Given what happens later in this series your comment reads like someone who watched half of Fight Club and is annoyed that Brad Pitt's character isn't a plausible friend to Edward Norton's character.

Another way to look at it in the context of the show is the 'unreliable narrator' that is Elliot. The show is told and shown through his perspective, which is a major aspect of the plot. So the criticisms you make could be seen as projections of his personality.

Either way, if you don't like it then there's plenty of other good shows to watch these days.

Rami Malek really kills it in the first season IMO. Especially the opiate withdrawal scene.

Also minor nit - I'm pretty sure Tyrell's wife is aware of his escapades. But you're missing the point about it...Tyrell and his wife are concerned solely with power.

I'm fairly certain that he's not meant to be a closeted gay man, but a psychopath who will pretend to be gay and sleep with someone he isn't interested in, in order to get what he wants.

I think this is right. The Willicks are the embodiment of the maxim that "everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power." They are both the most sexually prolific characters in the show, and at the same time, the characters least motivated by sex. It's entirely about power for them.

The later season hints at the antagonist being more than that and possibly alludes to some interesting ideas that I won't spoil for other readers.

Yes, the protagonist is smug and intelligent but that's common in a lot of TV shows for a good reason. Would you watch Suits if the character is an inept lawyer? Or House if the doctor is a mediocre doctor doing routine checkups?

And besides, I'd say that most programmers do feel a bit smug in the same sense about your average person clueless about technology.

Yeah it's cliché but if you call it Evil Corp you kind of imply that that is what it should be. I can appreciate that.

I felt like the writers were ignored in high school and used the show as a way to passive-aggressively get back at their perceived enemies.

It worked for comic books, back in the day.

> A closeted gay, masochist antagonist

Don't you mean sadist?

...Except that they aren't (or may not be), and they're wrong.

The protagonist isn't always right.

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