Mr Robot: from show of the zeitgeist to TV's biggest disappointment
Recapping a TV programme requires a very particular set of skills. Passion for the show? For sure. The ability to string a sentence together? Maybe. An enthusiasm for nailing down every single detail of every single episode then indexing them against every other incident just in case it becomes useful later? Completely non-negotiable.
I was the guy who used to recap Mr Robot for the Guardian and I’m afraid I let people down. I struggled to keep up with the many complexities and revisions of Sam Esmail’s hacking-cumglobal conspiracy drama. That may be why we gave up the recaps after season two.
Having just watched the first episode of the fourth season, I feel a little less guilty. Mr Robot, a show I loved in
its giddy first season, is now a bit of a mess. That may be harsh – there are another 12 episodes in which to provide a satisfying conclusion for those viewers who have stuck with it – but, as hostages to fortune go, I am comfortable with it.
For those who don’t watch, here is a short recap anyway. In the 33 episodes aired to date, Rami Malek’s Elliot Alderson has gone from hacker with drug problem to young man with dissociative identity disorder, then anarcho-terrorist, prisoner, high school sweetheart (a curveball), self-saboteur, humanity’s last hope and, in the latest instalment, the kind of amateur detective who sticks cue cards on the walls of abandoned buildings and tries to find a pattern. At the end of this new episode he even goes through his own resurrection, in a scene featuring a cameo from Esmail himself.
Suffice to say, a lot has happened, but it is hard to argue we have got much further than we were at the end of the first season, when Elliot (as his alter ego Mr Robot) had managed to sow chaos in global capitalism by performing a massive hack of corporate hegemon and apparent big bad, E Corp. Since then there has been, among other things, the introduction of the real bad guys, Chinese underworld villains The Dark Army, and also of lone FBI investigator Dom DiPierro (Grace Gummer), a compelling character whenever she is on screen. But while the plot grows ever more complex, what we know and think about Mr Robot – its themes and considerations – have not progressed or developed. What once seemed prescient, then part of the zeitgeist, now feels out of date.
This season is the last one and it has been two years in the making. Esmail has been able to write a “final showdown” without having to keep one eye on potential further episodes. The new instalment begins at the end of the fourth act, the darkest night before the dawn, with each of the remaining good guys likely to come together in some necessary alliance to stop the Chinese (I don’t mean that glibly, by the way – the Dark Army is led by a transgender woman called White Rose, who also happens to be the male Chinese minister of state security in her day job). Perhaps the climax will be a battle royal in New York, a bit like Avengers: Endgame, only, instead of the Infinity Gauntlet, someone will be grabbing desperately at a USB drive.
That is all well and good, and reading some of the recaps still being written, there is enthusiasm for such a reckoning, providing it is dark and depressing enough. But if that is all Mr Robot manages to pull off in its final run then it will end as a disappointment. The initial promise was of something modern both in its aesthetic and in its observations about the world. But the show’s real success was in weaving those observations through Elliot’s psyche, showing how he was a product of the world he lived in and how his isolation and cynicism, but also his irreducible yearning for something better and pure, made him the ideal man to blow up the world.
I hope very much that we get some closure on all this. That, after two seasons of bouncing around from one baffling situation to another violently traumatic one, Elliot will work through his issues and realise something about himself. That is the hero’s journey after all. At this moment in time, however, Mr Robot seems just as likely to spend its final episodes chasing its tail, trying to tie up all the cryptocurrency and geopolitics and buying and selling of the Congo that it wilfully brought upon itself when it ran out of plot. If so I will shed one single cold tear as White Rose would, then move on.