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

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?