'Mr. Robot' Season 2 was overly ambitious, but that's what made it great in the first place
Warning: if you're not a fan of spoilers or fictional conglomerates hellbent on taking over the free world, you should probably stop reading here.
This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a poem about a red wheelbarrow.
That's essentially what the finale of Mr. Robot came down to on Wednesday night. Season 2 of Elliot's long, enigmatic journey to topple superconglomerate E Corp and, quite frankly, society, faded to black with him nursing a gunshot wound to the gut, falling to the ground and spewing blood all over the floor of an abandoned warehouse.
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All of it was a result of Elliot's struggle to grip his own, broken reality and symbolic of the theme of Season 2, "Control is an illusion." Elliot finds himself testing the ever-elusive Tyrell Wellick, as he's convinced that Wellick, like Mr. Robot, is just a figment of his imagination. Wellick is trying to execute "Phase 2" of their economically crippling hack and destroy the massive factory in which E Corp is housing the physical copies of its financial records, human casualties be damned.
Tyrell claims everything is going just as Elliot had once planned, but Elliot remains oblivious and demands the two stop. And when Elliot doesn't budge, in an act that seems as if he is finally gripping what is real in his incredibly unreliable mind (spoiler alert: he definitely isn't), an emotionally volatile Tyrell trains a handgun on Elliot's gut and fires away.
Sound convoluted? It is. But that's, more or less, where we're left. There's no word on Agent DiPierro's massively damning case on fsociety — even if we do learn Darlene is alive and that the FBI has massively more info on the group of hactivists than previously thought. There's also no word on E Corp's growing infatuation with taking over the Congo, and there's barely any mention of Angela — other than a brief scene at the end of the episode in which it appears she's joined forces with White Rose and the Dark Army.
In fact, the finale did little the quell the laundry list of questions that remain -- it simply added more to it. But all of that is symptomatic of how the second season of Mr. Robot has gone.
No matter whether you loved it or hated it, Mr. Robot took countless giant, moonshot-type chances in an ambitious second season. Some landed, most didn't. But that wasn't really the problem with the season overall. Because while creator/writer/producer Sam Esmail's twists and turns began to ring tired and gimmicky, the mere confidence to try them was what made fans fall in love with the series in the first place.
Mr. Robot was never a show that cared for the rules. It's partly how it came bursting out of the shadows into critical acclaim within mere days of premiering on a network known more for blue-skies television than prestige dramas. The risks it took demanded attention. It had voiceover. It depicted a world that many hadn't seen before it — all in a year marred with cybersecurity breaches. And it made the often-complicated unreliable narrator work.
So, while Esmail may have struggled a bit with a sophomore slump (and the ratings agree), the answer may not necessarily be to dial back. Mr. Robot works, and works well, when it traffics in things that others don't. The problem arises when Esmail falls on the tropes that he's used before, a lesson most likely learned after directing every episode this season.
Good news is that for a show that uses the zeitgeist as source material, Mr. Robot is hardly running out of things to work with. Hacks are nearly becoming every day vernacular, Edward Snowden is now a movie star and the upcoming general election continues to look more unhinged by the day.
It might just be the right pieces to rebuild the believable, and downright frightening, alternate reality Mr. Robot created in Season 1. And it might be enough to lure back the viewers it's lost.
Just — please — no more big reveals.
BONUS: Miss the scene after the credits of the 'Mr. Robot' finale? Watch it here:
