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

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?