![]() But I always felt that creator Sam Esmail had more up his sleeve. Robot in its first season was that its main philosophy, espoused by Elliot, was basically a knockoff of Fight Club - anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist in a way that seemed reactionary at best and completely misinformed at worst. Eventually, the finale ends with Elliot seeming to reverse the massive hack from season one, but its post-credits scene suggests that nothing is ever that easy when capitalism is involved. And then the two personalities finally start working together, to try to find a way to stop the Dark Army from furthering a plan that seems designed to turn planet Earth into an anarchic wasteland, ruled by super-corporations. Elliot vows to return the world to the way it was, as many of his colleagues and friends fall to the Dark Army. Robot learns he’s been played for a patsy by corporate overlords who unleashed a seeming economic revolution to line their own pocketbooks. Robot has been about, for better or worse, began to turn itself inside out. Robot see a far worse one coming - everything Mr. So as season three hit its midpoint - where Elliot succeeds in stopping the terrorist attack, but neither he nor Mr. And when you have Slater on the payroll, you’re going to have him do more than just leer menacingly at the camera for a few seconds every episode. Robot and the mysterious Dark Army are planning will never come to fruition.īut Mr. Robot at bay, the devastating cyberterrorist attack that Mr. ![]() He makes himself a good worker bee, in hopes that if he can keep Mr. Indeed, season three begins with the two men not speaking to each other, and Elliot doing his level best to hold off Mr. (It’s always been telling that season two’s best episode didn’t feature Elliot at all.) Robot negotiate their relationship with each other” material to succeed. Robot starting to do this by the end of season two, but it ultimately had to abandon a lot of its “Elliot and Mr. It was infuriating TV - conceptually and thematically interesting, but never as gripping on a character level as it needed to be.īut this sort of slump is one that lots of TV shows, from Friday Night Lights to Homeland to Justified, have bounced back from, simply by better integrating their characters and their ideas. Robot ( Christian Slater), a devilish alternate personality who took the form of his deceased father. Robot season two apologist, but even I will admit that season two’s early episodes were lengthy slogs that spent way too much time on Elliot trying to reconcile himself with Mr. Robot pulled off almost everything it wanted to pull off in season two, but in far stronger fashion I’d stack the season’s last six episodes against any TV made this year. It revolved around Elliot (the still magnetic Rami Malek, whose performance remains one of TV’s best) attempting to shove the genie he loosed upon the world in the form of a massive economic hack back into the bottle, both because he realized it was the right thing to do and because he had forged stronger connections with those he cares about, from his sister to his former best friend to the imaginary man that lives in his head.Īnd that deeper, richer story benefited from having more space to unfold in a world that wasn’t so impatient for it to get where it was going. Robot’s superheroic hacking exploits to its deepest character story, about an isolated young man slowly coming to realize he’s not an island. ![]() What the season did have was a thematic unity that wedded Mr. You could still hear his shouts, but only barely, and the landscape was on fire up ahead. But in season three, it felt a little like a prophet of doom warning you not to continue on your current course as you pass him in your car. Robot felt downright prophetic when it debuted in 2015, with its tales of angry, alienated young men and a political system rigged even in the case of revolution. But on the other, the conversation had also moved on. That probably played a part in its relative obscurity, since the twists drove much of the discussion in the first two years. On the one hand, the show didn’t have any major twists this season for audiences to second guess. Robot was only able to pull this off because almost nobody was paying attention to it. Robot is finally its best self in season 3Īnd I agree with something the Ringer’s Alison Herman recently suggested: Mr.
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