K-SCORE: Pending
Creator: Sam Esmail
Starring: Rami Malek, Carly Chaikin, Portia Doubleday, Martin Wallstrom, Christian Slater, Michael Cristofer
Spoiler Level: Minor
SEASON ONE
I’m holding off most of my thoughts on Mr. Robot until I’ve watched the whole thing. After this season, all I can say is that creator Sam Esmail has dug himself a pretty deep hole. His best scenes were many of his first scenes, too many of his characters are mentally unstable for the narrative to be at all reliable, and the ones that are sane are too far removed from the essential conflict. Stylistically the show has teetered towards stupid with shots like this one:
Though to be fair, other times it's genuinely cool with shots like this one:
Also, the show seems to exist in a world where police investigations are little more than cops checking to see if a killer is still there when the body is found, then shrugging and moving on. I predicted the twists far too early for them to be that satisfying upon their reveal, which is a shame, and the whole ideology behind fsociety and evilcorp leaves less room for a complex debate on ethics than would seem to be pertinent for a story like this one. But here’s to hoping that Elliot can get his shit together, link Angela’s plot with his in a satisfying way, and vigilante hack the world and its characters into a better state than he left them.