the new USA show MR. ROBOT: the rise of Rami Malek and the inexplicable solidness of Christian Slater

YOOOOOOO is anyone watching this show? this came out of nowhere, is on a network not exactly known for prestige and is pretty remarkable in its first 2 episodes. basically an anonymous type hacking group vs a diabolical megacorporation. it does so many things that shouldn't work - extreme voiceover, making its political views so blatant - but they do work.

http://www.ew.com/sites/default/files/i/2015/04/27/mr-robot-society.jpg

er rather

http://www.ew.com/sites/default/files/i/2015/04/27/mr-robot-society.jpg

ok lol I'm drunkish and can't post w/e this show rules. watch it.

this is so fuckin good

like some of the dialogue ("thats....when i decided to hack you") & a little of the fsociety stuff (dropping OWS clips into the agit-prop vid starring a guy in a sub-Fawkes mask lol) is too on-the-nose, but i could see this dropping some of the more overt signifiers & getting even better. the paranoia is so nicely screwed in.

the voiceover actually is really what makes this work i think like

except for that second episode hiccup ("did he let me?") it almost seems to be operating at just the same speed as the viewer, which is impressive

this is basically just Dexter. pretty cool so far tho

I watched the first 2 eps & it was okay, but im not gonna stick w it

hoos is prob the #1 target demo fwiw

At first I didn't think I'd be able to handle that bug-eyed freak staring at me for an hour a week (not even getting into the Christian Slater factor), but this is actually not terrible. It has a better grasp of computers than CSI: Cyber, which is nice. As summer TV goes, we could all do a lot worse.

NB: The big discussion around the show is how much of it/how many major characters (Mr. Robot in particular) are actually the main dude's Tyler Durden-like hallucinations. I'm not sure yet whether the eventual reveal will make it more or less interesting.

this is basically just Dexter. pretty cool so far tho

― Spottie, Thursday, July 9, 2015 7:03 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idg the comparison here

alienated from society, walks around with a voiceover describing how he doesn't fit in but he wears a mask and pretends to.

that seems pretty much the emotional appeal of both shows to me.

I definitely get the Dexter comparison. Narration from the main character, a job that runs in parallel to criminal dealings, empathy for the dude even if he's doing some bad stuff

on the other hand, I really hope they keep going with the unreliable narration angle

haven't watched the third one, but did anyone else get a vibe from the first couple that Christian Slater's character could possibly not exist?

I really enjoyed the first episode, i really like the look of the show, can't believe its on USA tbh

was fun to see slater again! i forget how distinctive he is in his mannerisms and way he talks

where is the kid from? he's great

haven't watched the third one, but did anyone else get a vibe from the first couple that Christian Slater's character could possibly not exist?

― Upright Mammal (mh), Thursday, July 9, 2015 3:48 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya def, though imo he throws the whole fsociety squad into question too--we see them interact with him separately from elliot, don't we?

xp he's most notably burned into my brain due to a particularly horrific scene in THE PACIFIC, in which he is great and kind of terrifying

also in one of the twilight movies, the master, short term 12, the oldboy remake, a bunch of TV besides the pacific including 24

really hope that slater isn't a tyler durden character, that would be lame

i've also only watched 2 eps but i am definitely into it, this + unreal = a shockingly good tv summer

I would try UnReal if it was on Hulu.

due to a particularly horrific scene in THE PACIFIC

omg i forgot about this and i wish it had stayed forgotten

I'm sorry man :/ I legit have never forgotten it

this show is 5 eps in and despite being an absurd high-wire act that seems like it could fall apart at any second it has remained fucking great

the drug trip episode was amazing, the heist too

I like that it's been breaking out of Eliot's perspective in the last couple eps, it's helped open up the world and make the whole thing feel a little less adolescent

exactly! like as much as I admire its commitment to Elliot's viewpoint overall because it's reflected in such a strong voice the supporting characters have their own - albeit occasionally nebulous - voice and agency, especially angela and the drug dealer (I can't remember anyone's name atm I'm a tad tipsy)

the corporate swede and even the now locked up dope connect as well provide really strong impressions in their POV scenes

Can't watch it anymore - it's become one of those shows that's only accessible on Hulu if you have cable. Of course, if I had cable, I wouldn't be watching shows on fucking Hulu.

just use one of the questionably legal sites man it's worth it!

(or borrow a cable password from somebody)

Totally enjoying this. The plotting is fine, but it's mostly the production -- so well made, very Fincher-y but with its own subdued weirdness -- and the cast. Rami Malek especially, but most of the leads are good, especially the women. Christian Slater is basically doing his Pump Up the Volume character 25 years on, which is ok but I'm glad he's not the focus of the show.

getting Jim McKay to direct a bunch of it was a good call

haven't watched the third one, but did anyone else get a vibe from the first couple that Christian Slater's character could possibly not exist?

― Upright Mammal (mh), Thursday, July 9, 2015 11:48 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this seems altogether possible considering that the point of the show is to carry out Tyler Durden's dream?

mystified that people are excited about this boring show, death to voiceover.

al do you even like fun

afaict no

i mean when christian slater is the most fun thing about your show, i question how fun your show is

entertaining prob a better word than fun, and unpredictable

voiceover is good here if only bc it's so thoroughly subjective to elliot, it doesn't exist (for the most part) to fill in storytelling gaps, it puts you in this damaged mind in a way that another method couldn't.

and sure I suppoze it can be compared to having the "anti-corporate 4 life skate or die mannnnn" viewpoint of fight club or w/e but I think it's manifested with greater complexity by far here, there is nuance that's not present in fight club - like the hackers question what their revolution would actually accomplish at times instead of being true believers all the way

also, while the anti-corporate viewpoint (that admittedly sometimes resembles that of someone who just read no logo or something) might seem like nothin new to a lot of us in a place like ILX, I'm still somewhat surprised that it's being paid for by nbc/universal.

then again the counterargument as voiced in that one black mirror episode is that that's part of the plan so, shit.

this show rules

the show is definitely getting increasingly fun. I've come to really like the trio of women, esp Shayla, who got the best line of this last episode ("...Obamacare.")

the voiceover is interesting because half the time he addresses "you" and it's obviously something else in his head that he's talking to

or he's talking to christian slater

imo the ideal would be that by the end of the season we find out, in a casual way, that Eliot's been hallucinating Slater, but only some of the time.

enough ppl have been addressing slater directly that i'm beginning to think he might be a real person, but that wouldn't stop elliot from hallucinating him in certain situations necessarily given how often he hallucinates in general, so that could make sense

I think (hope) the show's too smart to steal the Tyler Durden riff wholecloth. It's Durden-esque enough without having him actually be imaginary. I feel like it teased that idea early on, when he goes back to the boardwalk and they're all gone, but then resolved that they are actually real.

i dunno if people have been addressing slater directly - it always seems a bit ambiguous to me whether they're speaking to him or elliott.

i can't help thinking of this show as 'mr rowboat' for some reason btw

http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/i-rowboat-10875

pleeeease don't fight club

so yeah i guess they did just kinda flirt with this & then back away from it

i wish to take a long drive to the sounds of this show's synth score

although slater does speak to other characters in the last episode, Elliot isn't involved in the conversation and is almost invisible in his black clothes against a black arcade machine. when slater storms off after arguing with darlene Elliot steps in and starts talking - they never interact with the other characters at the same time. there's definitely a case to be made that elliot and Mr rowboat are alternate personalities, as much as I hope they're just fucking with us.

yeah i was eagle eyeing that and actually enjoyed the degree to which it felt like they were fucking with us by having robot's voice literally in elliot's head during the steel mountain sequence

also lol @ 'steel mountain,' are we all aware of irl offsite data storage facility 'iron mountain'

http://beforeitsnews.com/contributor/upload/291278/images/iron-mountain.png

iron mountain was one of my company's clients :/

my last job used iron mountain for everything!

we wrote their newsfeed and blog content and whitepapers, it was such a pain in the ass account that required like 6 writers

The World Leader in Pain in the Assery

lol p much

Just watched 1st 2 on a computer monitor that kept pixilating or otherwise breaking down. So hoping I get to watch this on something more stable.
What I could see of it looked interesting.

seems oddly fitting though

I'm enjoying this but it feels like it's moving in an almost inevitably Fight Club-y direction at this point. Is it possible that neither Mr. Robot nor Swedish Patrick Bateman are real? They pop up in inexplicable places with little explanation as to why they're there. And Elliot's cruel interaction with the Steel Mountain employee seemed very Bateman-esque. I want this show to just be what it appears to be on the surface because it does what it does so well, but I fear that we're gonna be going high concept before long.

pretty sure swedish patrick bateman is real cuz we've seen him with other characters away from elliot. i really do hope they're messing with us by making it look like mr rowboat is a delusion but yeah it does feel like a fight club reveal is increasingly likely.

idk, i feel like Inevitable Fight Club Denouement is such a trope at this point that it wouldn't be weird for it to be something they're able to play with & misdirect around. episode five probably had enough moments of sort of unavoidable christian slater participation for it to be retroactively ridiculous if the finale is a shutter island thing. who knows though. also i think the other guy is for sure real, we see him solo/with his wife/&c. anyway i like this series & most all of its cast feel like real finds. it's like michael shannon & kristen stewart: the college years.

did i read somewhere that this was supposed to be a miniseries then usa decided to pick it up for a second season? kinda makes me worried that they had a self-contained story with a shocking mr-rowboat-is-a-delusion finale plotted out.

no way is rowboat durden

i really hope not!

"I have an ending and it's about 4 or 5 seasons away."

https://twitter.com/samthemovie/status/622503766940475393

spoiler alert: turns out they were all in purgatory all along

spoiler alert: it's all just a dream

turns out they were on 77 all along

I sincerely hope they avoid any of that nonsense because I think I'd be done with the show at that point. I'm pretty much over the Shyamalaning of television.

finchering

slater is the least interesting element of the show imo; it's a very good television program(me in teh uk)
if they fight club this i am going to be very pissed.

otm x2

hey as well as the score
something else i like about this show
particularly the first few eps
is
its new york locations
which are v credible & sort of temporally accurate & meaningful vibewise

i mentioned this on another thread but the show is primarily filmed both in my neighborhood at the Church Ave F/G stop, surrounding environs and just off the F stop at East Broad where I do some charity work so it feels VERY accurate and it's fun to see places i spend time in as part of this show
EXCEPT all the "shady areas" are like 1800 dollar apartments

and yes, the score is excellent
kinda surprised that ctrl+f "kubrick" isn't getting any hits here

i don't think i know kubrick well enough to speak to that, it didn't ring bells for me

& re: locations i think maybe one of the pluses of abundant routine voiceover is in necessitating a lot of accompanying silent footage of the guy, usually traversing the city, slumped on subways, &c, & some of those cuts are pretty judiciously picked, like aren't new york in a glitzy skyscrapery way but are just sort of familiar city fabric

but yeah the score is rad

the openings of every ep are studied kubrick homage

Thanks for the recommendations, loving this show - if it reminds me of anything it's Utopia

Yes not bad after 2 eps, guarded optimism for the rest

Well that was quite ruthless and brutal but a very good episode.

Been enjoying the songs that they've chosen from MOR or whatever background. Neil Diamond If You Go Away & the latest one opening with Nancy & Lee's Some Velvet Morning. Hadn't heard the Diamond before but I did recognise he source and the Nancy & Lee is a song I love but never know how many people know.

Not sure what else there is of that sort. Will probably have to rewatch the series at some point. Especially as the 1st 2 were in a format that my computer was struggling with.

Durdenisms of the episode, chance appearance of somebody sitting on a set of stairs at a crucial moment?

I just think the Swedes area pair of psychos, the embodiment of that purple people school that was being touted before the most recent recession.

this was so good! wow. it is also kind of as credible as it could possibly be when pitching nerd vs tough guy & feeding him lines about making the best move.

not foreshadowing this episode for anyone who hasn't seen it yet but just in general i am o_o

Wellick freaking out while his wife snacked in the foreground was a killer shot, this ep was beautifully directed

Was trying to work out what she was eating. was she eating something normal in an odd way or was it a swedish delicacy?

hey what do you think is their Long Term Goal

try to take over the world?

but where are we going to get a mini-pack of red vines and two tons of ball bearings at this time of night?

this is shot so beautifully. worth it for that alone.

this is getting harder to watch because of the tyler durden problem. otherwise, a+ still.

Jesus fuck, this episode. Gah.

just watched it. aw, mannnnnn

incredible episode. just brutal, though.

preview for next ep seems to give further indication mr robot is not a hallucination - scenes w just him and no other character

can't wait to see fuck

that came out wrong

you know what i mean

do i ever

<3 this show. there's been a need for more decent hacker lore like this.

also their website is cute: http://www.whoismrrobot.com/

'420' is the only unlisted command i could find, and i wonder if there are other easter eggs.

jesus fuck

that opening ;_;

nervous to watch

last week was broots

this one was kinda ehh, obviously a stopgap episode. I really hated the scene of Elliott visualizing people's flaws as literal signs.

of all the Big Talky Scenes the only ones that really landed for me were Colby being gross and Elliott's confession at the end

between the colby blowjob threat thing and what wellick ends up doing, I can't believe this show gets away with what it does sometimes on basic cable

not to mention using that fka twigs song in that situation is...an interesting and fucked up transgressive choice

the plotting has been bizarre thanks to that month timejump. Why has the malicious Allsafe hacker guy just been sitting on his hands? Why do they still care about the Dark Army if the window for their op closed long ago?

This is the best thing on TV right now which isn't at all what I was expecting when I initially read about it. Malek is excellent and another thing I love about it is the location shooting, some of the best realness since The Sopranos there.

wellick thing was unbearable & kinda depressing territory for this show

Yeah -- unpleasant, and also made no sense except I guess to show how unhinged he is. Clearly not part of a well-thought-of scheme. My wife's comment was, "I hope they start adding some dudes to the body count."

well-thought-out, I mean.

i think it worked as a logical and repellent progression of wellick's obvious psychopathy; i mean he was (and maybe still is) paying a homeless man to take beatings as an outlet for his impotent corporate rage.

BUT. it's thoroughly ugly not only because it's an act of sickening misogyny but because his stated motivation - gaining a high but not that high corporate gig - is so penny-ante compared to whatever everyone else on the show, good, bad or in-between, is seeking. which might be the point? idk.

the american psycho thread is good
the "elliott is falling apart" thread is good
the "we're different types o' gals but we're gonna change the world" thread is a little off but it's interesting
the whole Evil Corp (I cringe every time) / corporate lawsuit thread is occasionally eh but generally pretty good
all the gangster shit has been good
everything involving one-on-one with christian slater has been the overwhelming low point of the program and i'm including the cialis ads

so that's not a bad twist

it was good, and heartbreaking

yeah i think it's about addiction

so that's not a bad twist

Exactly what I just said. We just watched this episode, and as it was all falling apart/coming together at the end I was dreading some cheap reveal, but it stuck the landing. Recontextualizes everything, but not in some "it was all a dream" way.

http://www.vulture.com/2015/08/mr-robot-twist-omg.html

But among all the surprises in the episode, one stood out as the most surprising, and that was the sense that the show might actually be able to pull this off.

hm, i think they did! it also explains the hacker chick's manic pixie dreamgirl attitude as more sensible given the new relationships of the characters.
so elliot himself is a hacked program of sorts? that's where they're going here?

i agree that this is smarter than it originally seemed, maybe moreso than anything I've watched since breaking bad (which Esmail is visually cribbing from).
Has anyone seen his feature film 'Comet'? Should I try it?

happy with this twist and loved the camera-shake moment

After we watched this week's episode, I told my gf about the theory that Mr. Robot was another personality of Elliot and she wasn't buying it so we put on another random old episode to kinda watch it in the background with that theory in mind. And I didn't see anything that refuted it. But the more interesting thing to me was seeing the scenes with Elliot and <REDACTED> and realizing how much more sense those scenes make in the context of the newly-revealed twist. This is clearly a show I'm going to have to rewatch as they've been doing a lot of shit on the sly that I know I've overlooked on my first viewing.

I still think/hope Mr. Robot is a real person, his stepfather or something

heavy spoilers of course
http://www.vulture.com/2015/08/mr-robot-ends-and-elliot-begins.html

so there it is

tbh I'm sure some will think, ultimately, that the twist was predictable or w/e but I think it's more in the execution, and it's been wonderfully executed bc you care (imo) more about the characters and their emotional truths more than you do the mechanics of the plot, and that's the truest sign of great or near-great art.

I doubt it'll happen bc the Emmys are dumb as shit but really hope rami malek gets a best actor in a drama nom. frankie shaw as shayla def deserves supporting as well. (carly chaikin as darlene has enough scenes to be up for best actress in a drama but isn't quite as good as shaw

yeah i thought this was really well done, & ended up being something different from the obvious & pretty-ominous-seeming comparison it seemed headed toward (nb i think the music cue was kind of unforgivable but that's different). like we were credibly inside his delusion & there's a sort of formal accuracy to the sense in which that's a thin membrane we repeatedly cross over.

hadn't realised there was another episode next week, hyped.

i was probably as anti-durden as anyone but i think they basically made this work.
still would've preferred an earlier giveaway as it's a bit anticlimactic

Yeah been wondering if it is 10 episodes or longer. & is this it? Is it likely to be able to come back for more?

Just saw something that could have been developed into another story arc but probably not going to be explored in that way any further than it has been.
10 does seem neat.

10 eps so next week is the last - show was renewed for season 2 sometime during the premiere of the pilot.

1. can't believe they did the slowed down 90s cover song hacky bullshit. also the obvious nod to fight club was hacky af.
2. angela's plotline is the exact trope that they are making fun of in wet hot american summer with garafalo's plotline.

i read an interview with the guy where he says season two is where it pops off, obviously this is sensible self-protective behaviour but the reality of the new arrangement is a pretty established framework. something that i missed in this episode, not really to its detriment bc it's doing other stuff, is just the thrill of a super-tight procedural, which most episodes of this have; the first five or six, tracking the forward momentum of a plan & its obstacles, were so satisfying, & i feel like it has pretty good prospects if it's able to just plot convoluted, contemporary espionage drama for a few seasons

closing the episode w a that pixies song of all things was a p. bold nod given the reveal in the episode.

ah i see chaki just touched on that above

I hope we see more flashbacks of Elliot's dad, the real version. It seems like we will, because the inner voice version seems to imply that he was a kid with some mental health issues and he might have been more self-critical than anything, creating a dad who chastises him

i hope christian slater never returns but i doubt that's how this is gonna play

I have to say when we get the Slater reveal I was disappointed. It was well done, but I'd been hoping it wouldn't go that way and it did.

The Angela job thing was fantastic

the tyrell-putting-on-the-gloves scene successfully freaked me out ("i felt wonder" fuck)

I would be vv glad to see them shed Slater for s2

I kinda think that'll happen

Possibly just have him in flashback?
I wonder if the window thing was actually fatal the first time? & if that was the traumatic point. But may have the wrong defenestree, so may have to rewatch that bit.

The childhood shop and the burnt one, were they coincidentally the same premises? Or was I reading that wrong? Forgot what was on the hoarding at the end of the sequence.

I got the impression Elliot was self-harming and he threw himself out the window in the past. He had a lot of emotional probs and his dad wasn't actually mean?

I might have misread it, though.

i got a little lost with slater talking about "my secret"

he's ghost dad

is that the secret

thats boring

i could see slater disappearing because elliot is doing "better" ... then elliot relapses or something and he reappears in a "remember me?" type manner

I was trying to remember if Elliott had pushed his real Dad out of the window or vice versa.
Also has he really hurt himself?

well, he threw himself off the boardwalk

right it was father pushed him when he was 8 years old, not sure how that relates to the childhood scene. Can'tyt tell offhand how old that kid is.

Right & the last hoarding, as in shop title over door, on the shop is a Bank Of E thing. & I'm not sure how rapidly after the scene we see the repair shop becomes a to let place.

It's unclear whether his father ever actually pushed him! Maybe his real father did, but the Mr. Robot hallucination version says he never pushed him, it was all his own doing. Which is definitely true for the boardwalk incident.

seeing elliot like 'take on' the injuries after mr robot disappeared was a nice touch

you know what this show is reminding me of, in terms of geek appeal / world building / self aware directorial eye and character perspective / mostly aces casting / punching outside of its weight class is Daredevil
i get the distinct sense that both shows are also doing their first seasons just to set the table and they're gonna elevate above very good to excellent in season two.
at least i hope so

https://hackertarget.com/hacker-tools-mr-robot//

just rewatched the latest one - the last scene killed me on second viewing.

"I wanted to save the world."

yeah fuck

also loved that the mr robot store was in north jersey (a bergen-something storefront replaces the original in the time lapse), after all so many catastrophic personal disintegrations begin in northern new jersey

least surprising sloth post yet

wow rude

clearly referring to the insinuation that northern NJ is conducive to catastrophic personal disintegrations, NOT saying you are known for any catastrophic personal disintegrations

lol i was jk, also tbf i have had several catastrophic personal disintegrations in north jersey (and elsewhere)

evan are u watching this show btw because you totally should be

I just clicked the thread so far, haven't seen it. Avoided reading it too closely in case of spoilers, but yeah I might give it a shot if I can access it on demand somehow.

yea its on demand if you have cable, also you can get it online on USA's website if you have a comcast/cablevision/whatev login

ah, ok!

I feel it is most appropriate to pirate this show

i stole my copy of abbie hoffman's steal this book iirc and told the guy at the register as i left
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PaoLy7PHwk

sam esmail w/ some vague insinuations about how things will develop (no real spoilers):

Honestly, the thing about how I wanted to end this season was that I wanted to set up the larger story of Elliot’s journey. So that’s where we’re ending. A lot of things happen in these episodes that are going to give people who are following the show a lot to process and a lot to rethink and a lot to figure out. I think what I wanted ultimately was the experience coming into season 2 to be, “Okay, now I’ve got everything.” In the feature-screenwriting world, this [season 1] was the Act 1. This is our setup, essentially, to sort of inform you, “Here’s what the series is going to be about.”

Usually television shows maybe do that in the first couple episodes. We essentially took the whole season to do that, and now, going into season 2, you’ll know — you’ll know what relationship we’re going to be focused on, and what ultimately the dynamic of the series moving forward will be. So that’s where I want audiences to be by the end of the season.

on E06 and annoyingly i can't stop watching it

its biggest problem is the almost total dezoning of humor from its repertoire. it's OK to be ridiculously self-serious as long as you've got some jokes (even kubrick knew that, most of the time). i want to say that its other problem is the weird flat airlessness of the direction and editing - scenes just sort of end; long establishing shots lead to slow-ass dialog with long, pregnant pauses - but it's like 90s indie film catnip for me, i can't resist it. the cinematography feels fincherish but the mood is more like "clean, shaven"

its new york locations
which are v credible & sort of temporally accurate & meaningful vibewise

otm. like the scene where elliot takes his neglected dog about 5 feet from the front door of his tenement and points to a little square of non-paved sidewalk as the preferred destination for the dog to "deuce it out". shiver.

the hacking stuff has been alright but i could not resist a guffaw when beardy glutton announces portentously that he's "downloaded the PDFs"

yeah the humorlessness of the show really puts me off it. also it would be so much better with the narration taken out.

i always thought there was a kinda cool harmony in the wire between things the show was ~about~, these being rich & deep & intellectual, & its mode, which was something on a less lofty plain, pretty often vaguely resembling the overheard mcguyver extracts in simpsons episodes, like daniels being such a classic steely boss perpetually on the brink of taking someone off the case, just more in line with the guttural appeal of super familiar genre. the flatness/90sness/sincerity/teenage cool of the voiceover is like ... one of the things about the show that isn't unique & isn't as distinctive or absorbing, BUT: i think it's pretty satisfying? the occasional stretches of super trite anti-9-to-5-ism aren't fresh, are kinda matrixy, fight-clubby, but i think they probably mesh with or contribute to our general magnetic draw toward the space he's in.

the voiceovers are desperately needed as a glimmer of humanity in its unrelentingly nasty gallery of heels (also the drug dealer turned cowgirl waitress is U&K to this) (fsociety is too boring to even talk about) but too often for me they'll veer into portentous watchmen territory. it's major turn-off, but like i say, i can't stop watching. i guess it's rami malek? slater's not in it that much. pretty sweet gig for the ol' dog, he turns up to set, slaters it up for a while and peaces out. at this point he's like a cross between owen wilson and william shatner.

I do think there is some wry humor to the show, especially in its soundtrack and shot choices / technical details here and there. I don't think it's 100% self-serious. I am hoping that s2 is a little less insular, though. I liked the middle stretch of the show best because it mad ebetter use of the ensemble.

also let's not forget the Keith David vocal cameo

yeah, I don't see how anyone thinks of this as humorless unless literally any sign of serious earnest characterization or thematic focus turns on a viewer's "jaded" goggles, which is a pretty bad way to live tbh

like it literally trolled the entirety of the audience portion who were gonna be like "SEE TOLD YOU IT WAS JUST LIKE FIGHT CLUB" once that development arrived, by stealing the most recognizable part of its soundtrack. that requires a sense of humor. the humor is usually via sarcasm or black comedy, but it's there.

sure there are some jokes - i mean the balloon of self-importance inflated near to bursting by pretty much everybody is never punctured, and nobody teases anyone else because nobody loves anyone (except maybe shayla loving elliot)

oh poor shayla :( and still we're stuck with drippy angela. some of the, i don't know what you call them, compositions? are so pointlessly weird, like people's heads at the extreme bottom of the frame

echoes of "the room" at times if i'm being honest

oh come the hell on man, the room?? that's a take of considerable heat

I also don't understand why earnestness is continually assumed to be self-importance almost by default in current pop culture. I'm not criticizing you solely of this by any means, tracer, but it's almost like the newsroom happened - which was earnest but absurdly self-important in the most obvious way - and everyone is paranoid at all times that the newsroom is gonna come back now

(figuratively come back in the form of shows with somethin to say was my primary intended meaning but I'd assume we're also all literally afraid the newsroom might come back, which is understandable)

I want to defend the extreme framing a) because it's one of the only bits of visual flair that doesn't feel ripped off from kubrick or fincher and b) it can reasonably be interpreted as a visual manifestation of Elliot's inability to engage with people earnestly

that's true, and i like them. like i said i'm a sucker for that yes earnest 90s indie vibe.

slothrop i don't have any problem with characters being earnest with each other. but the show is pretty short on the sort of humor i like, which i've described upthread - teasing, basically, taking down a peg - either by the characters, or the script, or the director. but i get that it's sort of an adolescent angsty comic book and have made my peace with that. i'm over it! i like the show! i just get frustrated with it, like i would with some sullen teen.

i find the show quite funny sometimes.

i was kinda wondering if anyone's brought up the likelihood that the unlikely saga of shayla and the drug dealer and his treacherous brother are ALSO all in Elliott's head? Like if we're gonna get a number of B/C plots with a more than passing resemblance to remakes of 90's film that may or may not actually be real but are meant to enact elliott's internal psychodrama? to trump the prior week's revelation with the bombshell that tyrell and his 50 shades of american psycho story are further fever dream would take massive cojones.

someone mentioned that possibility on a grantland podcast - 90s movies he saw w his dad that are manifesting themselves in his head. I do think shayla and the dealer were real tho, same with tyrell

xps tracer I do see where you're coming from more or less, I may legit be slightly too sympathetic to attitudes typically held by sullen teens (I was one/kinda am one at heart still in my late 20s lol)

xp, they certainly baited the hook for that theory with dad taking him to see pulp fiction, yes.

that would be extra super dumb/annoying esp since we've had scenes of his co-workers consoling him for his loss etc

well is the sequence of dad and sis talking at the bar meant to be in elliott's head? or was he acting the role of mr. robot then? I don't really wanna go back and second guess this show too much as it might not take scrutiny well and i'm enjoying it as is.

Mr. Robot ‏@whoismrrobot 42s42 seconds ago
The previously filmed season finale of Mr. Robot contains a graphic scene similar in nature to today’s tragic events in Virginia.

Mr. Robot ‏@whoismrrobot 1m1 minute ago
Out of respect to the victims, their families and colleagues, and our viewers, we are postponing tonight’s episode.

Mr. Robot ‏@whoismrrobot 51s52 seconds ago
Our thoughts go out to all those affected during this difficult time.

critics who've seen it all say it's the right call to delay it a week, i will take their word for it

whoa that's fucked up

Ouch.

yeah if they think its best to delay it then i'm glad they're delaying it

That's a shame tragedy becomes an unintentional plot spoiler?
&just when I got my full size tv back.
Well, will look forward to next week.

Ppl on my FB feed complaining as if the murder of 2 people is such an inconvenience. It'll be on next week ffs.

the principal actor played PSH's son-in-law in The Master, right?

Started watching this show last nite. The missus read some blog saying it was like a mash-up of Fight Club, Matrix, Taxi Driver and American Psycho. Having watched the first episode, would have to add Peep Show to that list - couldn't help hearing the internal monologue in the voice of Mark Corrigan, cf the episode where Mark hacks into Sophie's email.

the principal actor played PSH's son-in-law in The Master, right?

That's him. Mostly people seem to know him from The Pacific (still unseen by me)

No comments on the finale?

Much of it was kinda meh and wheel-spinny compared to much of what came before. That one scene, though. Jesus. Totally understand why they pushed it back a week. Not to spoilerize, but that was maybe the most graphic depiction of that particular act I've ever seen outside of the infamously-filmed real-life version of same.

i dropped this after the roof murder. nothing anybody did was making sense anymore. i feel like the writers were just like "oh this would be crazy" and wrote it.

this season is basically the first act of the original script sam esmail wrote for mr. robot when he wanted to do it as a movie, just with a lot of additions. the general skeleton of the whole overarching story was and is planned - like it or not, these arent seat-of-pants writing decisions a la the latter seasons of LOST

finale was fucking great precisely because it wasnt a big-bang thing full of more #tweests and watercooler shock moments, it centers around how these earth-shaking events are dealt with as traumatic bruises on the main characters, which has been the point of the series all along imo

just started watching
have to say, the music choice is still lovable. "world destruction"!

I feel like I JUST heard "World Destruction" on another series this year?

Anyway I liked how truly disorienting and weirdly paced the finale was, skipping over the actual hack the whole season was theoretically building towards, never showing us Wellick, completely stranding Angela at Ecorp. Loved the scene w/ Elliot and Wellick's wife and baby.

Yeah! "I feel like she can hear us?"

B.D. Wong is the best

for a moment there the times square set looked kinda hokey and when slater started in with "well whats REAL" i worried for half a second they were gonna go with 'actually this is all a tv show'

lol yes I had a similar thought

there were definitely some cornball elements but I'm willing to give the show some room 'cause it's out on a wild limb so often

Overall I think the story is fine but not exceptional -- a fairly smart rewiring of Fight Club and V for Vengeance, with a big dollop of William Gibson thrown in. What makes it for me is the production, filmmaking and casting. It has its own distinct vibe and has sustained it well.

I get more Anonymous-tinged crap than V for Vendetta, although fsociety is an actual meeting group

It was kind of late when I watched, but that was BD Wong in the last scene, right? Meaning the Chinese darknet group is working multiple sides

yep that is whiter0se

using BD wong in that role is another 90s film reference, to cronenberg's m. butterfly

why DID times square look so hokey

because it was a pretty funny green screen composite

also because times square is hokey irl

well and like

*obvious tight shot of 20 people with signs implying large crowd* was dumb as hell

oh also that One Scene was unexpectedly graphic dang

yeah, the individual in question suddenly becoming more calm in his affect was a major "uh oh" and having a character you can relate to noticing that while everyone else in the room is too busy to pay attention....

also I am kind of amazed in 2015 we get that with no cutaway

Stuff that gets a pass on TV (even network TV) in 2015 would've earned a movie a hard R 20-30 years ago.

who am I kidding, I watch and love Hannibal and there's worse stuff there on the reg

Stuff that gets a pass on TV (even network TV) in 2015 would've earned a movie a hard R 20-30 years ago.

Yeah, but that was during crackdown times. You would be amazed what got into G- and PG-rated movies in the 70s.

I had a dark lol @ them apparently exploiting the air delay to ADR in that line about the Ashley Madison hack

I was impressed they got the Ashley Madison ref in there

I assumed that was what happened, unless they'd just filmed the episode sometime in the past week.

just a quick dub prob

ya that was p good

this didn't really stick the landing and the final ep was mostly a lot of loose ends waggled and some new ones added
all in all it felt like an ad for season two
i liked this show a lot but it's not hannibal / americans level just yet. very very good first season, hope they can keep the ball rolling now.

all in all it felt like an ad for season two

yeah the knock at the door smashcut felt like a frustrating copout

also uh is it fair to call the wong scene a "post-credits" scene on tv, that seems weird

Does anybody else worry that this show is gonna have the steepest Season 1-to-Season 2 dropoff in quality since Homeland?

I'm not sure that's the comparison I'd make, since it didn't even take a whole season for Homeland to turn stupid.

nahdawg. for one, homeland never had any plan beyond season 1 (the showrunner has said as much publicly), and it did ok with the seat-of-the-pants method for a little while (like 5 episodes) and then shat itself. it's still shitting.

mr robot, per the creator, has a specific ending in mind, and while it's not perfect I think that having that focus a la breaking bad will prevent it from a collapse.

(xp)

So is Eliot Tyrell?

they certainly suggest it.

tyrell's wife's aloofness was suspicious af

but elliot as tyrell makes so little sense? he's a low level analyst at a contracting firm *and* a rageaholic executive at one of the firm's clients?

I really really hope Elliot isn't also Tyrell, unless they also reveal that Elliot is in fact a shapeshifting psychic alien, because that would be dope

the creator dude claims the ashley madison line was already in the script lol. stupid.

Tyrell's wife doesn't seem to recognize E, but who knows.
As somebody who got strung out on the American version of The Bridge, I can't say I'm beyond Whut Does It All Mean tranceification, but Elliot was born a cyberpunk cliche of the mid- 90s (which is when I finally gave up on William Gibson and his wannabees). I also have to admit I've watched every episode, but think it's more about presence of Malek and Doubleday, who plays Angela. Also Angela's storyline, but now she's surrounded by droning baddies (the balding beardo actor's really trying, though; kind of a squirmy, Vincent D'onofrio effect, which could pay off). Sure hope Sat Night Live does a take-off, with Elliot played by Kate McKinnon, in her Bieber gear.

Somebody upthread suggested that E himself is a defective computer program---now that could be cool! Also like how he seems to be addressing the audience as an increasingly untrustworthy imaginary friend (wish they did more with that and didn't bring back Ghost Dad, now w Ghost Mom and Little Elliot, yeesh)

I posited the 'Elliot = Tyrell' thing upthread, but there are an awful lot of inconsistencies with that theory. I don't see how it would be possible.

Yeah. It just seemed like his conversation with the wife was possibly hinting at that. Or maybe just that she had seem him before, in Christian Slater form.

the whole "okay.... 'OLLIE'" bit seemed pretty telegraphed imo

i thought that conversation was so good
the guy from ny mag talking about this show not entirely understanding its strengths is otm, i think; it has reached these various kinds of perfection, none of which especially relate to its ostensibly key concerns/themes. like i could just watch anxious elliot on the stoop all day.

first second/second season drop off talk is p cynical imo

I dunno I can easily see this following an Orphan Black trajectory: incredible first season carried by awesome central performance, devolving into endless convolution. Found the finale incredibly irritating.

Tyrell's wife looked interested, like he was so furtive, he must be up to something, and maybe he's her type, since E and T do both have that pale, shadowy stare, like those bug-eyed kids in the kitsch paintings (see Big Eyes, starring Amy Adams, based on a true story). In any case, being her, she's bound to give him that android Mona Lisa smile (hadn't noticed her lips seeming slightly inflated). Significance of scene(s) with Tyrell and Elliott's Dad, yet no E to be seen, unless he's T, or hallucinating them both? Maybe Mrs. T is a figment too?

scene(s) with Tyrell and Elliott's Dad, yet no E to be seen, unless he's T, or hallucinating them both?

to me he's just elliot-as-mr robot here, talking to tyrell

D'oh! SNl-wise, should've picked Pete Davidson as Elliot:
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2802672/images/o-PETE-DAVIDSON-facebook.jpg

Kate McKinnon could be Mr Robot, with the face-scuzz she wore as Keith Urban.

Just about the only Pete pic where he isn't looking like a happy hoodrat

That opening scene in the coffee shop. Damn.

I would think Elliott's scene with Tyrell's assistant in this episode would disprove any Elliott=Tyrell theories.

In retrospect the middle stretch of eps 4/5/6 was very easily the apex of the season

also in retrospect I'm even more bummed that Shayla's gone, the show is less fun/funny without her around

i really like this show, malek is the best.

it seemed to me that elliott's father is possibly in his own way every bit as damaging/toxic as the mother, but elliott is hanging on to this idea of the father as a good person and his best friend and blaming himself for (something?) because he hasn't processed grief/anger/etc.. and thus sometimes is behaving in ways he thinks his father would have approved of. hasn't there been some not-clearly-explained references to the father going to prison as well - something else going on with him besides cancer?

i thought wellick might have been the one who went and carried out the final process of the attack on e corp, during this three days when we don't know what happened. and that the CEO when he said they knew who did it, was meaning he believed wellick did it, given that he was just fired and presumably would have had high level access and so on. also, there was a reference at some point to an encryption key which would autodeleted before it could recover the data, but it wasn't necessarily deleted was it? hanging onto that would be a very valuable piece of information.

no idea where they're going with wellick other than he also seems to lack an identity outside of his corporate role and has always seemed not exactly scary but anxious/insecure/pathetic to me.. kind of like pete campbell but with less social skills, and his wife seems to have picked up on this a long time ago and now has contempt for him.

using BD wong in that role is another 90s film reference, to cronenberg's m. butterfly
! i knew it reminded me of something!

So watched all this over the last 4 days. Thought it was kinda incredible.
Opening credit sequence into title display seemed v Kubrick for most every episode.

Did Elliot shoot Welleck? With the gun in the popcorn and that's why he can't find him? Or was that Welleck knocking on the door at the end?

oh Welleck is still alive. "What if Pete Campbell was ACTUALLY evil" is too good of a thread to not keep pulling for a second season.

ha!

I just listened to the song Two Weeks for the first time in a while and the first thing I thought of was that scene, so THANKS A LOT MR ROBOT FOR WARPING THAT SONG FOR ME FOREVER I GUESS

i keep waiting for this to become crap - it's on a tightrope above a lot of big cliche pits at all times - but 3 eps in i really like it. i guess in particular the anti-social media stuff has been done so badly for the most part - like all the "but are we REALLY connecting" shitty thinkpieces etc. i think it's helped by the accompanying graphics and music here - plus the lack of conclusions, and the fact that it's not suggesting we need to go back to an older mode of society, instead a person deeply isolated within this world of technology.

there are some silly hollywood tropes - could jerk bf guy be ANY MORE of a stereotypical character? that mould has been perfected for years. also if being a disconnected nerd involves people calling around to give you ecstasy and sleep with you, then i am fairly sure a lot of people are doing it wrong. and the whole mary jane/spiderman thing with his love interest.

it's p comic book but it moves at a great pace - i guess the dissections of people via their social media and their passwords is the coolest part.

i keep waiting for this to become crap - it's on a tightrope above a lot of big cliche pits at all times

This is pretty OTM. I was hugely concerned after the interminable fourth episode, but then the next two were total rollercoasters. Elliot kind of annoys me mostly though.

SPOILERS
They even pulled the tired Fight Club twist round to something decentish in the end.

at work somebody asked me if i was elliot for halloween

i wasn't in costume

:(

The incidental music is amazing, by the way. I think that and the bits where the title of the show comes up on screen might be my favourite aspects.

the bit where tangerine dream comes on is amazing - i like the music well enough but that a classic like love on a real train put things in perspective. this show does small personal things quite well considering they're part of such a big blockbusting plot.

went to a party as Eliot and people kept asking if I was HOOS

lol

Binged this over the weekend and impressed-ish. Overall it felt like a ten-episode tribute to tvtropes.org, but cast and location work were *excellent* and it was entertaining enough that I'll watch the next season, even if the non-sensical plotting and random fridgings of the last few episodes don't totally inspire me with confidence. Still a fun show though.

I'm a couple of eps away from finishing

The Kubrick-ness is so addicting, especially in the opening scenes every episode. Some of the shots, there's so much beautiful composition going on and geometry and aaaagggghh

those freeze-frame title cards too, I can't get enough

and that's just the arty shit! Anyway I love Rami Malek so much and this show is aces

aside from the obvious show-level use of having the data around, was there a reason why the debt data was encrypted rather than deleted?

Wasn't too bothered by that detail. It does seem like the kind of thing hackers would do, giving an ultimate fuck you to have the data in front of you but meaningless AND showing off. But I agree that it leaves the door open for recovery, which seems like a strong possibility since nobody can remember anything. I honestly thought the season would end with Wellick providing the key and getting his job back, which would have been pretty dumb and explains why I'm not a writer

Totally missed the Durden angle when I watched the show. I chalk it up to not giving the show enough credit - I assumed the writers explained his showing up everywhere as a result of his 1337ness or something. Plus, it's pretty ballsy to borrow two huge plot ideas from the same movie. Malek is awesome. I'll keep watching the show mostly for him.

"I wish I could be an observer like you. Then I could think more calmly."

i only just conned that trenton (sunita mani) was in the turn down for what video

I did not realize that! hope she's in season two, most of the fsociety people were pretty ephemeral in the first.

I didn't catch it on first viewing, but the mid-credits scene at the end of season one... when was that to have taken place? I thought it was post-hack, but on rewatching I noticed that White Rose (BD Wong's character) silences an alarm during his "while Rome burns" dialogue, meaning he was probably there when the dark army activated their part of the plan. So he's at this gathering of powerful people at the moment the hack takes place.

Yeah but he also made that big speech about hacking time and how he wont give any time to anyone who doesnt deserve it. I saw that almost as an act of power over the CEO dude (though he may not have known so).

Just finished catching up with this series. Did my head in. I feel like I missed a LOT of refs, and the sister thing caught me completely off guard (the suicide didnt tho - the minute he grabbed his bag and got out the gun and said "please stay calm" I yelled "HEY MAN NICE SHOT" at the screen lol)

Binged this last night and today. I was 100% on board up until the scene on the roof, and then everything quickly disintegrated for me into narrative anarchy and by the end I was just like "oh no, fuck this!"

I'll watch the S2 premiere just to be sure, though.

That is the EXACT moment I hopped off too

Though I was already halfway there after the bathroom 'seduction' scene

Q: how censored is this show when it airs on USA?

I was trying to figure out how they edited the version I streamed on Prime, but it's got to be tricky. Of course, USA being a cable network, they're not bound by FCC decency rules and could air it exactly as I watched it, but I'm guessing they didn't.

By the time I pick this up again, I don't think I'll remember much of anything except that the first season ended with a knock on the door, and that I think I know who it is.

smdh at ppl jumping off when it was getting good

narrative anarchy

Mentally ill unreliable narrator, it was pretty intentional that this happened.

i really dug it & i think rami malek is great

His nasal monotone got to me from time to time, but yeah it was a suitably intense role.

i cant wait for the second season of this

aw hell yeah

excellent use of sonic youth (among other v. solid soundtrack choices this episode)

guess i should watch this show

Music choices and original soundtrack uniformly great.

I like this show, it's very watchable, well-made, but it sure does pull a lot of trope-y, narrative cliches.

I'm 4 episodes in. Not sure I LOVE it, but it's watchable. As LocalGarda says, there are some pretty daft tropey moments that make me want to switch off and never watch it again, but something about it makes me come back. Ep4 felt like it took a cool tonal twist that I wasn't expecting. I found myself getting mixed up between the random/cool/freaky girl who lives next door and the random/cool/freaky girl who works with fsociety, but maybe that's the idea?

the similarities there are 100 percent deliberate imo

so in a completely unsurprising development the season 2 premiere was fucking lit

i have no idea what craig robinson's deal is but his presence is v welcome on the show - also like getting a look inside e corp from multiple perspectives (grunt level, higher-ups, PR, etc.)

(SPOILERS) not sure how long they can play out the tyrell wellick string but it's understandable of them not to reveal what's up with that right away (SPOILERS)

on a more general note, the fact that the most general aspects of the plot have been done before kinda plays in the show's favor. its mastery is in the execution, and its examination of mental illness (the main element of which is outsized for dramatic purposes, obvs, but it nails the day to day aspects of things like depression and anxiety in a genuine manner).

I didn't notice it was going to be over an hour, making the second section a pleasant surprise

also EMMY NOMINATED YO

I did not like most of that double premiere :(

2 much ~mr robo mythology~
not enough ~people just boopin around nyc~
but more of the latter as it went on so it's fine it'll be good once it's back to anxious tap-tap-keyboard-tappin' + eli initiating

BEGIN TROJAN.VIRUS PROTOCOL ? 

it wd be a bummer if its fundamental tension + only option for continued longevity was contingent on the by-now-not-fresh suspense generated by waiting for carrie to dissolve in time for an action sequence in homeland, waiting for christopher moltisanti to get high again in the sopranos, &c; it is so much better when it is just in smooth ultra-modern procedural mode. i cd've watched the woman jog around union square for hrs

I love this show but I stuggled a bit with these 2 new episodes. Felt like not a lot happened? I did read the writer/showrunner hinting this season was going to be more of a focus on his mental illness which is cool, but a risky move given it could end up being confusing and drawn out.

I just watched the first two episodes of S1, and I... did not enjoy it at all. Really slow and dour and humorless. Does it get better or is this the whole thing?

Humorless is definitely not a word i would choose to describe this show

Yeah stick with it, but if you find things like internal monologues hard to get with it might not be yr thing.

Ok I will. So far the only humor I've seen is the arcade game is changed from Duck Hunter to Mallard Murderer, which I don't care for.

Also the villain who looks like Cillian Murphy playing Patrick Bateman is bad. And usually cliffhangers pull me in but these seem weak so far.

ultra-monotone monologue is biggest ish w/s2 so far i think; there are a couple of moments in s2 when eliot disengages Corpse Mode & reminds you what a great + weird presence + plasticity he has but dialing up the inertia feels a lil too close to cliche i think

Different sucks for different folks

I wasnt looking to this show for humour at all, fwiw.

honestly the biggest bummer of the s2 double premiere for me was the scene of E-Corp guy explaining The Way Things Work. zzzzzz

I liked his new Seinfeld-obsessed friend.

that is totally a thing in the world, people who are suddenly aware of and obsessed with seinfeld

idgi but I am an old

craig robinson playing a regular dude instead of an avatar of ridiculous comedy is a nice change of pace

I'm waiting for the reveal that Robinson is fbi

https://0x41.no/mr-robot-s02e01-easter-egg/

ways this seasons premiere evidences the series has jumped it;

Black dude from the office showing up - no ones asking for you here man

Sonics youths bull in the heather - as if

both of those things are gd imo

bonus lol if you are comic book guying someone who works in an office listening to SY

The dialogue in this episode was definitely OTT portentous, and his buddy who just discovered Seinfeld disappears immediately after Craig Robinson shows up, for whatever reason.
Not sure you can drive a whole season of this show on a single mystery, especially not one as potentially inconsequential as "where is Tyrell Wellick?"

Also way to just off the most sympathetic character right away, what is this, GoT

Yeah the boss being killed was brutal :( He was the one guy in the show who really didnt deserve any of this shit.

TBH I wasnt feeling this new season much, but I'm willing to give it some time. S1 needed some patience too really.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/18/12213340/mr-robot-digital-aftershow-hosted-by-the-verge-starts-this-week

Every week after the show, Emily Yoshida, Russell Brandom, and I will be breaking down the episode, looking at the tech and hacks involved, talking to guests from the cast and crew, and taking questions and feedback from fans on Twitter and (of course) our very own Mr. Robot IRC channel.

obviously I will be joining the irc channel via a vanity domain

my reaction to this show reminds me of nothing more than how I reacted to Pump Up the Volume (waddup C Slate) which also took punk rock themes and presented them in a super cartoonishly corny way. I am aware that this is what ilx likes but I couldn't stomach PUTV and I can't hang with this either.

I feel like you have confused this show and the excellent movie Hackers

The dialogue in this episode was definitely OTT portentous, and his buddy who just discovered Seinfeld disappears immediately after Craig Robinson shows up, for whatever reason.
Not sure you can drive a whole season of this show on a single mystery, especially not one as potentially inconsequential as "where is Tyrell Wellick?"
--El Tomboto

something tells me wellick will ultimately end up being the reddest of red herrings. there's only so much you can do with him now that he's fully unhinged before it becomes one note

he's in a village in northern europe with no internet access imo

or possibly trying to work with eastern europe hacker groups

i watched the first season a week ago and now im caught up on the new episodes. outside of some episodes of Mad Men and maybe True Detective (both ultimately better shows imo), I don't think I've seen a tv show really lean so heavily on evoking a particular mood and for the most part do it really well. in the case of Mr. Robot I guess it's the dread-laden ennui of the protagonist, someone who finds himself adrift from the world at large and therefore sees its full contingency clearly. cyber-gnosticism. (or "techgnosis" in erik davis's phrase.) long takes! unorthodox framing! deep rumbles on the soundtrack!

are we talking True Detective season one or two in your rankings, here?

one

*whispers* season two wasn't even remotely as bad as the internet made people think it was *runs away laughing maniacally*

sry what were we talking about? right. stoked for tomorrow's episode!

oh agreed, it was...
tomorrow is the day, robot fans!

depressed fbi agent who is a walking advertisement for the lonely human talking to amazon's computer voice... good stuff

Not quite sure that was a ringing endorsement of Amazon's product

not at all! very realistic, though

when you're not sure how to go forward, you go backward. *cue flashback

I'm trying real hard to dig this season but it kind of seems to have dissolved into self-parody. It seems more like an SNL skit than itself.

I'm not sure how Craig Robinson's character is going to play out, but he'll be somehow as damaged as Elliott, I would guess.

Which parts seem parodic? There have been some over-the-top bits but nothing as out there/inexplicable as some of the things that drove people away earlier in this thread. I know that filling in backstory can very easily tarnish things, but extrapolating on the few characters in f society that we saw actually in action in the first season doesn't seem any weirder than Elliott's journey through his own past (and out the window)

refresh my memory -- the exec that Angela is working with, was he the one we saw meeting with White Rose at the end of the last season?

Yes, he's the CEO of Evil Corp

if this theory's right it's pretty corny http://www.vulture.com/2016/07/mr-robot-theory.html

Relevant glitching

https://twitter.com/archillect/status/755092285889675264

don't think I agree w/ the psych ward theory tbh

(then again I didn't think the truth of mr robot's identity was what it was in the first season so my guessing track record is tarnished)

The hospital theory should get a good test when his sister visits him. IMO, Ray is a counselor with a side hustle involving bitcoin (pharmaceutical reseller!) and the dog is a therapy dog. Maybe his sister checked him in? Seems obvious Mr. Robot knows Wellick's phone number but Elliott of course doesn't, so that's how the phone call happens.

Which means at some point Ray is probably going to connect the dots and figure out not only can Elliott solve his hacker issues, Elliott can lead him to the most wanted man on earth, if only he can talk to Mr. Robot through Elliott. Ray strikes me as a very bad, bad man.

Why does sad FBI agent fixate on her name on a file printout if that information was supposedly already leaked (and who cares about the names of FBI agents? They print them on business cards for crying out loud)?

Can we find out who killed Rome, please?

I'm enjoying it. The first season was a slick, enjoyable but predicatable thriller, this one appears to be something stranger, less plot-driven and more interesting so far. Dark, compelling and very stylish.

2 stylish

aronofsky-hard-on post-trainspotting max-prestige stylization overload imo

also something that made me laugh thinking abt ep iii yday was realising that, after the ambiguity of the first season, we are now in the position of slater appearing as a figment of elliott's imagination in the tradition of TV ghosts or supernatural sidekicks, ie someone leans over & he is suddenly present in a puff of smoke, his face talks to elliott thru the clouds, is reflected in pools of water, he rises from the back seats of empty cars, the season finale includes frequent cutaways to slater's yapping taunts materialized in the still water of a toilet bowl

aronofsky-hard-on post-trainspotting max-prestige stylization overload imo

― schlump

Nah it's more restrained and well done than that, imo also.

i guess i just think it's more 'like' that, tho, now; that the first season had so many kind of slightly formless incredibly satisfying 'present'-feeling sections of just people bopping around ny, montages of subway riding or mundane clerical activity or whatever. now it's a tighter form of montage invariably set to music & quite often in that like exact requiem-for-a-dream quick-cut ratio. i am complaining about it & i still think it's okay, & i think sometimes it seems to overshoot & then redeems itself - the scene where elliott's kidnapped, but then is vomiting, say - but it being consumed by weird vague fight club shit & almost parodic monotonous delivery over deadpan cityscapes would be a rly sad derail from where it was last year, i think, great as a procedural, novel as something thoughtful that wasn't contingent on devices like flashing ACCESS DENIED screens, & with a guy who was sort of zeitgeistishly affectless

I get the sense that this show is slowly starting to fall victim to that anxious critical tic whereby ideas presented in the show as text (rather than subtext) are vaguely dismissed as shallow or sophomoric without any actual engagement of said ideas by the critic--as if they are aesthetically unappealing and thus dismissable in an aesthetic medium?

But tbf I frequently watch this show with only the vaguest idea of what's going on. I just like the long takes and monologues.

I also like the frequent kubrickian device of banal conversations with a minimum of 5 seconds between every response.

It is rather Kubrickian all round actually, as has surely been pointed out before.

So far minus a few cool moments I have found the show suddenly excruciatingly boring, and the unending pointless arguments between him and ghost dad are excruciating

I meant to say exceedingly, then excruciating

Exactly. Show seems to be going nowhere slow.

And does anyone really care about Angela? How many more scenes of her sitting mute and listening to the e Corp old man do we have to sit through?

yep the most fascinating aspect of this show is its adulation imo

"going nowhere slowly" is kinda why i'm still loving s2. i've actually really enjoyed angela this season, watching her remaining scruples wash away, and like all good tragic characters, it's something she's completely aware of. certainly better than her wet fish 1st season.

Idk it feels one dimensional to me. Also I don't the entire exchange where the woman tells the prostitution anecdote it rang false

yeah, that was clunky and a bit on the nose.

always knew teh backlash taeks would come for this show, hoped against all reason that they wouldnt tho

White Rose is baaaack

I'm bailing out on this after S2E3. I'd have to force myself to continue and I'm just not gonna. Totally lost interest.

if the Big Evil plot is going where I think it's going, I'm gonna nerd out a little bit

I watched the opener and I realised I just don't care any more.

Honestly this season could just as easily have started with this week's episode

When i found annoyed that they didn't bother to make sure he knew how chess was played I got disproportionally upset about it

I was hitherto enjoying the leisurely pace but this one tipped over into torpor. Something needs to happen soon. Still very atmospheric, mind.

OTM. Felt like they took two hours to fess up that 1. Slater is not leaving the show, as if that was ever in question and 2. Elliott is ready to hack again!!! about fucking time, JFC

really, really, REALLY don't give two shits what's going on with Wellick's wife. She's like a perfume ad.

also dragging out the reveal that he's an inpatient is really unhelpful

and about blacking out in the server room and smashing everything up; it's not great when your show is cribbing character backstories from the same fakebook as Halt And Catch Fire.

glad to see at least the AV Club is on the case re: peculiar (or is it?!?) spelling of "Operation Berenstain"
http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/game-chess-almost-destroys-everything-mr-robot-240248

I love perfume ads

/still don't think he's hospitalized just sayin/

b.d. wong bringing it

Watched Comet w/o knowing it was related to Mr. Robot. Worth watching for Emmy Rossum and Justin Long, by far the best acting I've seen from either of them.

ok all the recaps were headlined like "oh good the show is back on track" and all I got was more dumb stuff about the Lady Wellick, a tease of Elliott going hacking again (with no payoff) and then two cliffhangers that aren't actually (let me guess, Dom and Elliott both survive - and we still won't know what is going on!) At least last season you had the illusion of understanding the fundamentals of the plot. I don't know what the S2 story even is at this point. Is it about something? Is there a theme?

"Look what we can get away with"

I'm really not sure what y'all are missing here lol the plot is not fuckin rocket science? then again this show's pleasures have never been about plot for me anyway. also yo where the heck is hoos to revel in this show's lunacy with me

the first 10 minutes of this one was so gleefully batshit

Yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially the "Too Many Cooks" style theme song (apparently written by the dudes who actually wrote the Full House theme song)

I miss Gideon, was nice to see him even as a sitcom police officer murdered by Alf.

I haven't been able to watch until now and I'd either forgotten your second sentence or thought it was hyperbole but... wow!

The theme song definitely sounded like Family Matters

omg they have motd enabled on the computer Angela is learning the hack on

Oh wait maybe that's part of the OpenWRT text :/

Second season is gradually devolving into a complete waste of an amazing cast.

Beijing shootout: waved away in one scene. Who killed Jerome: nobody cares. Why is Elliott dragged out of the hospital into a cellar? No reason. What were the stakes in Angela's big hack? Nonexistent. Whose hotel room are they squatting in? Minor details.

Not as bad as true detective season 2 but I am really starting to worry that this sentence ends with yet.

The hotel room was explained by Darlene stealing the skeleton key from the housekeeper - it's an open hotel room.

I imagine that they took Elliott out of the hospital into a cellar because they wanted to torture him, not kill him.

The stakes of Angela's hack--admittedly unsure about this one from the hacker perspective. I guess they need to know what the FBI has on fsociety. For me, the stakes were high because I care about Angela as a character and I don't want her to go to jail/get fired from E Corp/get murdered like Gideon

Who killed Jerome? It's looking like the dark army...Whiterose is getting nervous and murdering everyone, it seems.

The Beijing shootout thing did bother me a bit, but there have been clues that Dom has trouble relating to people, showing empathy (as shown in the bodega scene from this episode) and since the FBI scenes are filmed from her POV, sad things like her co-workers dying in front of her might not phase her?

Idk. I have faith in Esmail and besides one bum episode a couple weeks ago, I think the season has been solid. They really need to integrate Elliott with the rest of the characters though.

They took Elliot because he regained consciousness and could rat them out!

I just feel no tension during this show anymore. Angela is not going to get caught. Dom is not going to get shot. Elliott is not going to wind up in a wheelchair. Truxton Spangler or whatever is not going to get kidnapped. Whiterose is not going to get outed. Christian Slater is not going to fade away.

God, I miss Rubicon.

its a shame with everything else good the show has going for it, the dialogue appears to have been written by a precocious 16 yr old. especially obnoxious this episode.

otoh it explains why the show makes do so much with silence and dramatic monologue.

(also yes agreed on rubicon being the great should that could have been but wasn't of the hr-long tv renaissance)

God, I miss Rubicon.

Seriously. I'm not expecting a DVD release, but I wish AMC would throw it up on Amazon Prime.

rubicon used to available via prime but for some reason (rights??) they took it down

I imagine that they took Elliott out of the hospital into a cellar because they wanted to torture him, not kill him.

The stakes of Angela's hack--admittedly unsure about this one from the hacker perspective. I guess they need to know what the FBI has on fsociety. For me, the stakes were high because I care about Angela as a character and I don't want her to go to jail/get fired from E Corp/get murdered like Gideon

― you think Lou Bega gave up after Mambo Number One??? (voodoo chili), Friday, August 12, 2016 4:30 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's more than that, they're trying to erase all the information the FBI has on them (I think the original plan was just for Angela to drop off the device and leave, but security being upped due to the Beijing shooting meant she had to also instigate the hack from inside the building). The stakes are Angela getting caught and leading the FBI to the other members of fsociety and Elliot.

Craig Robinson and his goons need Elliot to work for them(which is why they didn't just kill him like the previous IT guy), but they also don't want him walking around knowing what he knows, hence the beating/kidnapping.

all the cards on the table time?

you know when people who do really low risk hacks of dumb websites and put
HACKED BY CHINESE
or some other bullshit on the page?

end game of 5/9 in this show is some stealth deep hack that seems more and more linked to
~white rose~

and some assault-happy dudes in an alley just got hacked up. "let white rose know" holy shit

all that will-they-or-won't-they stuff in season one about the dark army supporting the e-corp hack really had much higher stakes than implied

lol never mind the conspiracy theorists were right

Could Angela act more guilty all the time? Sheesh.

Just started watching this week's ep and figured out she had her husband killed, didn't she. that would explain all the time spent on her boring shenanigans

this fuckin' show

oh, nope, ok. at least that was fairly straightforward

I overthought and avoided Occam's razor once again re: the latest reveal, but unlike most ppl this happens to with shows, I don't particularly mind, because imo the need for people to constantly outguess or predict the plot of any piece of fiction is gauche af, it started with lost and never really stopped

interesting tho that they didn't say what elliot is in for. I'm guessing it's not anything half as severe as the things he actually did, or that whiter0se is in a position to pull strings/arrange for elliot's release as suits his needs

Interestingly, the CC kept in a couple of voiceover lines that got cut in the final. As he's leaving Ray's house after leading the FBI there, he says to himself, I gave Ray the chance to make the right move, and he took it. Or something like that.

the need for people to constantly outguess or predict the plot of any piece of fiction is gauche af,

If you hand me a crossword puzzle I'm going to probably try and fill it in. Writing fiction full of "twists" is what's gauche af

the assumption that fiction is a crossword puzzle is.........weird, and that's like the nicest term i can use?

matt zoller seitz, who didn't like the whole thing, wrote why in eloquent fashion http://www.vulture.com/2016/08/mr-robot-and-why-tv-twists-dont-work-anymore.html and also included this choice tidbit

I should probably ’fess up here and admit that I don't watch Mr. Robot, or any other TV series, to test my knowledge of TV tropes and say, "I called it!" whenever I successfully predict where a show's plot might be headed. That particular viewing approach doesn't interest me. I know there's a pretty sizable contingent of people who watch films and TV series mainly to see if they can successfully guess what will happen next — Reddit is a virtual mecca for this sort of viewer — but I've never encouraged that impulse, because it seems to me that it rewards screenwriters who are thinking about their plots and characters on the most superficial level, constructing a puzzle for others to solve and to feel good about having solved; this also encourages some writers to cheat a bit, withholding evidence that might tip their hand early, or just obscuring details and piling twist upon twist and reversal upon reversal until none of the characters make sense anymore as anything but figures in a nonsensical dream.

the fact that esmail makes his "twists" fairly easy to guess is readily indicative that they're not intended to provoke the reaction that say, m night or bryan singer (in writing usual suspects) went for

it's more about what this all means for the lead character, and how/why he creates these illusions. if that's not interesting to ppl, then fine, but that's literally the point of the show and was pretty much right from jump even when the specifics of season 1's illusion werent blatant - in earlier episodes, esmail was talking about dealing with introversion and anxiety and societal discontent in a more general sense.

this one's just jarring due to the drawn-out nature of the illusion

I think we have three concurrent things going on: Elliot's retelling of the story, of which he has changed details; Elliot's missing time as Mr Robot, which he can't quite remember; Elliot's denial world, which seems to be a combination of the former two. Did he actually believe himself to be outside of jail, or is he just creating that fiction as a metaphorical version of his jail time as something to tell the listener and his therapist?

and if Leon is a real inmate, and did save Elliot from a white ppl gang at the behest of whiter0se... has Leon really been watching Seinfeld? I guess they could have it on in the common area in jail since it's in syndication.

I watched about five minutes of the aftershow this week and, since it's co-hosted by The Verge, noticed a certain one of the dudes was on it. They were taking live questions on twitter and all I could think of was "show me your wristbands!" but I held back.

did anyone other than me watch the Mr Robot VR experience? not bad as a mood piece

i think that he was at least 65 percent aware of the illusion the whole time. (wondering about that, imo, makes total sense as a quibble with the episode.)

once you proceed w that notion, everything else is at least /relatively/ plausible within the context of a fictionalized universe, as shit that could take place inside a like, medium security prison. prisoners on that level of confinement still have highly monitored internet access. (some max prisoners might as well - that prob varies on an instutional level.) and if you knew inmates who could execute that high a level of encryption, ray's site makes sense as a black market that prisoners could operate.

tbh, prison is one of the only environments in which leon could murder and hideously maim six nazi fuckboys during the day w/o immediately drawing some sort of attention.

I can't really get me head around the Ray plot in light of the prison revelation. Is he a warden? Or a prisoner who has corrupt guards working for him?

He has to be one of the wardens. He has an office, he walks a dog around.

Remember early on when he was having breakfast with somebody offscreen who was (IIRC) in a hospital bed with life support or something? Glad we're never going to get an explanation for that. The entire Ray plot seems to have existed so that we would get to see Elliott wrestle with whether or not to hack again. Which was stupid, anyway, and now who cares?

What's Elliott in jail for anyway? It's not the 5/9 hack and it's not for shooting Tyrell. Who was at the fucking door at the end of last season? Who killed Jerome? JFC.

What is the story on what episode is being currently broadcast. I've seen a couple of places are 1 or 2 episodes behind where I've got to. I saw #7 last week I think.
So is something leaking them ahead of broadcast or are IMDB and Wikipedia behind the actual running.

But been good so far.

Thought the life support system was a home dialysis machine?

OK, maybe so. So who has kidney disease? Are we supposed to care?

So,reading the IMDB entry episode 7 is on on August 31. Is that right? I think Wikipedia are running on the same schedule
Is that the one with the big reveal?

Just wondering how come I got it in the middle of last week.

The women in OITNB do not have computer access, and that's a minimum security prison, so I doubt that wherever Elliot is penned up, the prisoners have ANY computer access. And even if they were had access to a computer, I doubt they'd have Putty installed on it.

PS BD Wong's Mandarin sounds so damn weird.

accent-wise or what

Yeah, it doesn't sound like any accent I've heard before. The white Dark Army guy's Chinese is so much better!

Just caught up with this (the show and the thread) after recently reacquiring cable. I don't see the drop in quality some of you have suggested. I'm digging the long game fake-out. Feel like a degree of patience take get you a long way with this show.

It just occurred to me while watching this the other night that we're in the era of Vertigo Comics tv shows. Not just because there's been a spate of recent shows that were actually based on Vertigo series (none of which felt particularly Vertigo-y, imo) but because shows like this and Orphan Black and Fargo and True Detective (season one, at least) feel very much like the better stuff Vertigo was putting out in the '90s. I'm digging it.

This season has been constistently trying to do interesting things at least, to varying levels of success (and occasionally at the expense of coherant storytelling). I definitely find it intruiging enough to keep watching, there've been a number of very striking sequences. I'm not particularly trying to closely follow the plot any more, just drifting along with the mood.

Observations:

- The last we see of Elliot, he doesn't look scarred up at all, so either a LOT of time has passed or the beatdowns he got weren't real.
- Angela gave that FBI guy the same "Is that all you've got?" line that what's-her-name gave to Tyrell before he killed her.
- Mr. Robot doesn't always know what Elliot's thinking, which also makes me wonder if Mr. Robot is lying about shooting Tyrell for yet ANOTHER twisty reveal.
- But if TW is dead, who's sending presents to his wife? Her bodyguard?
- Gideon visited Elliot in prison, so it doesn't look like E's in there for the 5/9 attack.
- Elliot = Evil = ECorp?

Re: Mr. Robot's confession to killing Tyrell, as soon as the words left his mouth, I shouted "YOU LIE!"

I wish Elliot had asked Mr Robot what the ALF thing was all about

Price's scene with Jack/Mary/Janet scene was very Hollywood re: bad.

guys this show is actually bad

Worst show ever, probably.

It's like some of you haven't suffered through decades of unambiguously shitty tv, I swear. Pouring yourself into a show as a creator must be the most disheartening thing ever the second you crack open the internet.

I went out with actual humans a couple times instead of watching this show live, that's something, right

this - the seething, practically mouth-foaming need for people to either a. be smarter than a show by predicting its plot surprises or b. demand that EVERY plot thread be EXPLICITLY resolved and explained with no ambiguity or minor confusion - is basically all the fault of famed entertainment weekly lost recapper jeff jensen, and lost's own continually confused writers

-the leftovers writing room, lunch break-

LINDELOF: tell me, intern, what's going on on the internet? that places scares me now after all the tweets.
INTERN: well, the message boards got tired of another show
LINDELOF: gasp! was it billions?
INTERN: no, mr robot, the one about the hacker with the synth music that made you feel uncomfortable and then cry?
LINDELOF ah yes! what do they dislike?
INTERN: uh, the plot can be ambiguous sometimes, I guess? it's really not that big a deal because it's character-driven anyway and if you think about it a little most of it falls tog-
LINDELOF: SILENCE! it's too late now. it is already doomed. add it to the LaFleur Memorial of Shows The Internet Turned On.
INTERN: yes sir
(intern leaves, lindelof eats silently for awhile)
LINDELOF: they'll never get you, leftovers, even the millennials like you now

~scene~

this - the seething, practically mouth-foaming need for people to either a. be smarter than a show by predicting its plot surprises or b. demand that EVERY plot thread be EXPLICITLY resolved and explained with no ambiguity or minor confusion - is basically all the fault of famed entertainment weekly lost recapper jeff jensen, and lost's own continually confused writers

― if young slothrop don't trust ya i'm gon' rhyme ya (slothroprhymes), Tuesday, August 23, 2016 1:26 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the twists don't make the show bad or good. the writing makes the show bad, and the direction and acting somehow makes it ok again.

i think the acting's pretty good! but most TV acting's pretty good tbh

I feel like the world-building is more interesting than the dialogue and character work, but not sufficiently interesting enough for me to watch season 2. I liked the first season though!

I'm not sure why but I find the derivative ideas in this (c.f. Palahniuk) much more annnoying than the (much more) derivative stuff in Stranger Things. This show just felt like it was more capable of transcending its influences, then whiffed it at the end of S1.

(Sorry, "transcending" is an annoying phrase. I guess I mean it leans on too many tropes and used ideas, when the writers are clearly smart enough to be generating their own.)

I think dislike of ambiguity in storytelling amongst some people precedes Lost by probably millenia, fwiw.

Perhaps it's not so much ambiguity with this show, as over-reliance on idiot plot, or using Eliot's mental health problems as a lampshade for them.

Idiot plot is not an issue with this show. Please see aforementioned example of L O S T for the platonic ideal of that trope.

'What key piece of information can character A nonsensically withhold from character B to ensure a plot that's propelled solely by a misunderstanding which would never happen in 99 out of 100 interactions between actual humans?'

idiot plot only works as a crit if you treat mr robot and elliot as separate people, and then the former hiding tyrell's fate from the latter is /sort of/ that, but "a misunderstanding that would never occur between actual humans" doesn't really cover a mentally ill brain at constant war with itself

Sorry if I was unclear, that hypothetical question was intended to have originated from the L O S T writers room.

Lost earned it's ambiguity/dumbness, at least through the first five seasons, because it was entertaining and most of the characters were likable, or at least colorfully hateable. I think the reason I haven't watched Season 2, despite really enjoying the first, is that I don't really enjoy watching the characters enough to care about decoding more mystery. (And ripping Fight Club at the end was *really* disappointing).

Ehh, I called the Slater reveal halfway through the first season. A little disappointing but pretty well telegraphed if you paid close enough attention. And I don't think encouraging the viewer to decode the mystery is as much central concern of Esmail & co. as it is just the way viewers are increasingly approaching shows like this.

Yeah, that's true, that way madness and tedious Reddit threads lie.

Yeah I think people are watching this as plot driven when it's character/mood driven.

is basically all the fault of famed entertainment weekly lost recapper jeff jensen

I didn't watch Lost and definitely didn't read the recaps.

The show sets up some things that seem interesting and then abandons them to do other, dumber things.
I'm not demanding everything be explained, I'm asking for the show to live up to its own standards of storytelling from Season 1. It's in a difficult position, sure, but don't do lame shit like the Beijing shootout and then throw it away the following episode with one interior dialogue scene. I'd rightfully pan any show that did that.

I actually appreciated the way they handled that scene. It was abrupt and shocking and almost doubly so because they cut away from it so suddenly, and framing it in a third person variant of Dom's perspective was a fantastic choice. It would've been overly-staged and yawnworthy and taken up half an episode on a different show. I think it served its purpose in showing what lengths the Dark Army is willing to go to and in contrasting Dom's realization of that fact against her superiors' insistence that it was just some freak terrorist thing.

More than most shows, it feels in this case like people are criticizing chapters of a book before they've taken in the whole story.

at least people are basing thoughts on a few episodes!

there are a few tv shows that have been critically well-received where I've seen articles implying one episode that marked a change in tone was a death knell, that maybe this show was never good, what were people thinking

Yeah, remember the days when it often took like a whole season for an eventually good show to eventually get good? And, because there were so many cooks stirring the pot on a show, there could be like half a dozen shitty episodes in a season of a show that people still dug because it was generally good?

no risk, no reward? when the reward is something culturally and artistically interesting. love to tear apart and criticize shows that actually try to do interesting things, while ignoring the stuff that gets churned out

Listen, I'll be super stoked if some of these threads come back around and all the Chekhov's herrings and red guns and dark white army roses transform into a reason I should give two shits about the Lady Wellick, but sophomore jinx seems pretty real and I'm allowed to complain about it, it's a free country, god dammit.

I just had lunch with my friend's coworkers and one was trying to say that sling tv's advertisements decrying the "old way" of subscription television are misleading as they're owned by Dish Network and they're trying to have it "both ways." Actually, he implied that was his view, but attributed it to angry people on reddit.

So yes, people can have vocalized opinions about lots of things

I will defend with my life your right to complain about Mr. Robot's sophomore slide. I just don't see it! Kinda feels like some of the criticism (not necessarily itt) is based on an initial suggestion that the show is this one thing but now it's this other thing, but it's not like it's been on for five years and has such a well-established identity that veering away from that is a betrayal. Particularly when the show in question chucked a whole lot of what we thought we knew into the gutter towards the end of its first season.

Another line of criticism seems like 'I want answers to the mysteries now!' There's a lot of threads running through this season that are going to run who knows where. Mr. & Mrs. Wellick, f'rinstance. If it ultimately crashes into a dead end by season's end, I'll complain with great vigor and gusto. For now, I'm content to sit back and let the crew slowly lay out their cards.

maybe season three is the really good one

Maybe!

I'm still inclined to give shows an extended chance if they're doing something worthwhile. The first season of Fargo really left me cold on a number of levels but I was intrigued enough to give it another shot and I'm glad I did because that second season was the bomb.

I should be more measured here and say that a fair portion of my shooting back at the complaints is me projecting frustrations with culture-related twitter/interwebs groupthink - I often feel that in the rush to not have a show or movie pull something over on them, today's audiences can prematurely shit on that piece of art, or redditize it. if the season adds up to nothing in the end then I'll have a lot of crow to eat & will rightfully eat it

just in case anyone thought sam esmail payolaed me (one of my recently moved out roommates is acquainted with him bc he's from jersey, I personally am not)

I stand by my lindelof joke tho

this show was writing checks its ass couldn't cash by the middle of s1 imo but as a collection of tropes designed to push the buttons of a putative 30-something kubrick nerd set it's pretty unparalleled

Right, it'll be interesting (I guess) when the new Star Trek starts - I think it's a 13 episode series? Even the good seasons of TNG barely had 13 good episodes (out of 26).

I'm here for the Hackers references

this show was writing checks its ass couldn't cash by the middle of s1 imo but as a collection of tropes designed to push the buttons of a putative 30-something kubrick nerd set it's pretty unparalleled
--illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand)

lol reasonable diss but I don't even like kubrick how am I loving it so much?!

imo it goes for the visual Kubrick mechanics and not the plotting side

Is it really that Kubrick-y? I mean, some of the shots are, but not the pacing, the editing, the scripting, the tone, the settings...

Sorry - what mh said

well kubrick nerds like all sorts of things

"we're all true scotsmen aren't we"

i cant quite follow the plot of this show so im more attuned than usual to the stylistic motifs (and/or crutches) and one thing this show does a lot that strikes as simply unusual for a TV show especially is the framing--i'll have to pay more attention but id wager the number of times you get a typical cut/reverse cut conversation is very small, and often its a two shot with the characters a minimized in the frame as possible (right now im thinking of the shot with angela and the old E corp dude sitting in front of a large abstract painting--itself like a minimalist Starry Night--and almost dwarfed or oppressed by it). I dont think this is a particularly kubrickian device--his framings are usually pretty classical, no? maybe you'll get an oddly low angle at times. anyway--a lot of these stylistic choices strike me as pretty interesting, at least at first, but with the plot slipping out of my grasp they start to feel one-note and repetitive. not sure how many monotone angela conversations with excessive pauses i need to sit through.

often its a two shot with the characters a minimized in the frame as possible

Yeah noticed this too, the characters are facing the the lower corner of the frame.

a bunch of reviews have pointed that out - i think it might be an esmail shooting trademark (not saying he invented it, bc obv not, but it's def not something i see often outside the show)

it's one of the show's many sub-film school tics

:)

a lot of these stylistic choices strike me as pretty interesting, at least at first, but with the plot slipping out of my grasp they start to feel one-note and repetitive.

Yes. And while my grasp of visual rhetoric is basic at best, I keep trying to figure out if the framing choices are supposed to be emphasizing / amplifying things about the characters and their circumstances. And most of the time it just seems gratuitously weird (which I'm fine with but like you said, sometimes the mood gets old)

the drugs don't work

xpost I'm with you on that one. They seem to make these very specific and unsubtle decisions wrt framing shots which are starting to feel more decorative than like an intentional means of communicating something.

Yet another reason I feel like I need to rewatch and see exactly how/when they employ certain tropes and techniques.

imo the Kubrick-like part of the framing is that Kubrick was notorious for shots that placed the actors within the scene instead of centering on the actor. so the character is moving around and emoting but the scene is about how the three-dimensional space is framed. you're seeing a room, and the things are happening within it.

Oh, total aside but since I haven't seen it mentioned itt and people might not be aware: Dom is played by Meryl Streep's daughter.

I somehow didn't realize that

Her sister Marnie was on The Good Wife, and they look just like each other.

I was trying to place her face since seeing her. So may be from that family connection but she was also in the Newsroom and one series of American Horror Story. But yeah did think she really rang a bell.

drove by an Iron Mountain truck on the way home today

"I didn't know I could do that"

Walked by an Iron Mountain bin at work today.

Okay, so making basically no contingencies for the possible return of the occupant of the home you're squatting in...kinda idiotic. Unless Darlene was planning for that likelihood...in which case...still fairly idiotic.

The FBI plant who they tried to get Angela to date!

Dude: "Then she started talking to some old guy at the bar!"
Dom: (excited) "Her contact?"
Dude: "Nah I think maybe she's just into old dudes"

that moment was amaze

lack of prep for lady executioner's arrival was dumb, but i kinda think darlene wanted it to happen and i'm not exactly mad about it? reason it's dumb imo from an in-world perspective is the risk it puts other fsociety members at, but it's not as if darlene being reckless is exactly new activity for her

WAY happier about her getting wise to cisco, who has obv been a weaselly little double-agent shit from jump

viewers just starting to get wise that fsociety isn't a group of altruistic hackers who enlisted some help from a shadowy chinese hacker group, but a group that was being watched and cultivated by the a shadowy organization that's led by someone in the friggin chinese government

well yeah, of course they were. are People Online finding this surprising?

not that I know of, but it's being communicated to the viewers more quickly than the fsociety characters, for sure

for a show that plays a lot with how much the viewer really knows and whether the narrator is reliable, those pieces have been communicated fairly directly

It's dawning on me that my biggest beef with this show is the casual murder. When it's like the Dark Army, cool, they've been established as a shady group whose motives and means of dispatch are hazy. But there are way too many central/secondary characters who have either demonstrated that killing others is nbd to them or who have been offed way too offhandedly. It makes sense that sudden death or at least grievous harm are an increasing threat as you raise the stakes of a criminal enterprise but the manslaughtering on this show is feeling increasingly low stakes.

really? the only people who are sympathetic to the viewer who I can think of (and I'm going to be corrected) are:
- Wellick (killed coworker's wife on roof and he's a creepy fucker)
- Elliot (his alter ego maybe killed Wellick but it's hard to know, and he's really fucked up about it)
- Whoever killed the dude who worked with fsociety
- Dark Army or whoever killed a bunch of FBI people in China
- E-Corp (killed a lot of people but it's a corporation and it was due to negligence and is the impetus for the hacking)
- Darlene (new plot developments about her unknown moral boundaries)

who else has been killed?

Gideon! Shayla!!!! And the Lady Wellick's casual contract killing and Leon's slashfest...and who knows wtf is gonna happen after this week's cliffhanger. The body count is a little ott atm. Bracing myself for Krista's inevitable beheading.

oh yeah duh

Gideon and Shayla at least had plot relative killings? Shayla was mixed up with a psycho drug dealer and Gideon getting killed kind of hammered home that people's lives are fucked up after the e-Corp crash

Leon's bit was o_O

oh my god this show fucking sucks

then don't watch it, el shakey

cold open w/android hack lulz - dumb as balls

dialing into FBI conference call on unclassified "everybody shares a dial-in code" joke line - dumb, dumb, dumb

guy threatening other guy - dumb

chief counsel of e-corp coming home like nobody saw that shit coming - dumb

angela's family friend making pithy shit talk, followed by angela's TFF karaoke - awful, dumb, dumb, awful, horrible, dumb

the writing on this has just beaten True Detective S2 for sophomore "I can do whatever I want!" stupidity

I don't give a shit what happens to a single character on this show except oh wait it's DUCK PHILLIPS!!!! maybe he can save it

Maybe this episode is just a really dumb person having a dream about what happens next?

magical taser that can cause a person to drown in pool water that's shallow enough for them to stand in - dumb

postmortem revelation that she had a heart condition because didn't you read all her emails with her doctor?!?!?!?!?!?!?

I look forward to understanding what other people get out of this, after this I can't imagine how you don't feel insulted by this preposterous, posturing, arrogant nonsense

The karaoke scene seemed a little too on the nose. Felt like a student film homage to Donnie Darko's Tears for Fears sequence.

i liked her rendition, somehow.

el tom are you mad the nsa got hacked and it was prob as dumb as this

sorry, a little salty about the point-by-point list of not buying this show

otm about duck

Oh it's way more than not buying it, I understand that I am watching fictional television entertainment, it's that it's careless and badly done and not thoughtful at all anymore.

The scene near the end where Dom's boss is yelling at her, for example, is bad on several levels: Gummer has nothing to do in the scene; the guy playing her boss is hamming it up like he's in on the joke that his lines are; btw, his lines are a joke; and THEN on top of the bad writing and direction it's also ridiculous to imagine the FBI giving half of a hummingbird's shit about its public image in the wake of a surveillance scandal.

I really wouldn't care if the show hadn't been so memorably good last year and full of nice touches. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong.

I think you're remembering it wrong. Not in terms of whether it's good or bad but it's been fairly consistent. There have always been problematic elements. I like it but I've suspected from early on that the show was wrapping a lot of immediately appealing and prestige-attracting elements around a somewhat hollow core (reminiscent of Homeland, which I loved for the acting but which I thought revealed itself to be pretty dumb and kinda junky about midway through the first season, a couple of years before the critics and award givers of the world caught on).

Again, I like it, but tbh I haven't been particularly invested since they killed off Shayla. Krista is just about the only other sympathetic character and she's barely on the show.

i think it really was better. the action now is taking place more in new places -- fbi offices, evilcorp. i just think esmail can't write for those places -- he can't imagine the inner lives of the people there, much less the way they conduct their jobs in the day to day so it becomes a flat fantasia that rings false to anyone with even a little understanding. but in the first season, when he was just writing lonely people in front of computers or arguing in motel rooms, he had a good grasp of how to make tick.

and in the first sesason he didn't have to speculate about how society would react and change, so it could take place essentially in the present. now, he's got to have an imagined response to imagined events that shook the world, and so that adds another element of unreality.

this season is definitely not as fun to watch as the last one, and i say that as its biggest stan on this borad and the creator of this thread

it is essentially the /same/ show, with the same sociopolitical and psychological concerns, the same filmmaking flourishes (which are ymmv but they havent changed, really), the same tone in the writing from both a plotting and dialogue-writing perspective, the same performances - although if you wanted to say it feels like elliot and everyone else are in two different shows that'd be fair

anyone who hates it, though, it's prob not gonna change so just don't watch! no one is forcing you. im not gonna post up in the halt and catch fire thread to say i think that show is hella overrated

Fridging Shayla, plus inevitability of the Fight Club reveal, plus feeling that female and gay characters were all disposable and/or enigmas, was what did the show in for me.

Alhthough weirdly you're all making S2 sound kind of interesting

It would have to go really, really far to be as bad as True Detective 2

Angela is the only thing that is REALLY bothering me about the show right now. I enjoyed the last episode, and was happy that Mobley asked for a lawyer rather than breaking under the molehill of evidence that Dom tried to scare him with.

But Angela. Ugh. She looks so guilty all the time. She just ignores people when they talk to her. That speech about how "I have a six-figure income at the biggest corporation in the world..." Lamest burn in history. Family friend guy should have laughed in her face.

Fairly certain, when the fsociety folk are scrambling to find leverage on the lawyer, there's a semi-closeup on the lawyer's e-mail stack and a heart condition subject e-mail either selected/highlighted or right above a selection. The post-mortem revelation is all verbal between the characters.

I'm enjoying this season, particularly the camera set-ups. Was impressed that folk caught the faux-reality as quickly as they did. Particularly the b-ball and circle of support scenes seemed ... off, but I didn't make the connection.

Yes, there was absolutely an email about living with a pacemaker. I wondered why nobody mentioned it at first until I waited ten minutes. But they did set it up.

I get what they're trying to do with Angela but I kinda think the actress might not be up to the task. I think her hardass shit is supposed to come off as sorta pathetic because Angela clearly doesn't believe what she's saying most of the time (hence the constant self-affirmations) but instead of playing on two levels (scared and out of her depth woman projecting some convincing degree of false confidence) we're getting what feels like a scared and out of her depth actress failing to convince us that she'd be able to actually muster the false confidence to navigate her new world.

you know, if e-coin is anything like bitcoin and it's usable and has legitimacy in the show's world... this crash is a ploy by Chinese speculators to drive people to e-coin to drive up demand before hacking the exchange systems, right?

Okay, so making basically no contingencies for the possible return of the occupant of the home you're squatting in...kinda idiotic. Unless Darlene was planning for that likelihood...in which case...still fairly idiotic.

― Two Kisses and Three Wet Mouths (Old Lunch), Wednesday, August 24, 2016 10:49 PM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They had a tracking map set up that they showed on screen but no one was paying attention to it. I didn't mind that moment

Generally speaking though I agree with tombot