David Berry on Mr. Robot’s muddled second season.
MR. ROBOT’S MALIGNED SECOND SEASON IS HOPEFULLY TELLING US A STORY SO THAT IT CAN TELL US OTHER STORIES
The second season of Mr. Robot featured a plot line — one of many this season, splayed out across 12 episodes like spilled spaghetti — involving the shadowy E Corp trying to regain its footing by making its own cryptocurrency the de facto monetary unit of the United States. It was the most succinct example of a theme that Mr. Robot made sure you picked up on this season: blowing things up does not immediately make them better. Not only will it lead to literal Dumpster fires, but what rises in its place might be even worse than what came before.
To be fair, the depiction of the world after the 5/ 9 hack was one of the strongest aspects of the second season. If season one was a Fight Club riff, certain parts of season two were the characters punch drunk, fuzzily trying to shake it off. The shadows and accompanying paranoia of season one were followed by more shadows, with a deepened fear because our characters were suddenly aware they were casting them now, too. From E Corp’s threats to take over the entire economy to the potential explosion of Stage Two, everything suggested that we were going to have to go even deeper before we see any light.
It’s a sign of the muddled second season that such a description could just as easily be applied to Mr. Robot’s audience as its characters. Conceptually, as well as structurally, this season was a wander, the efficient centre that kept some of its excesses and quirks reigned to be as scattered as E Corp’s debt records. Leaving aside even the endless digressions — everything from Whiterose’s taste in clothes to Joanna Wellick’s torment — every episode featured some hoary piece of dorm room profundity trotted out like an earth- shattering reveal. Some of the worst was in the finale, with Eliot ruminating on the nature of trusting your eyes and ears, and weren’t they all just inputs, and what can we really know, maaaaan.
For a show that is so obsessed with control — you might even go so far as to say control is the only real currency — Mr. Robot, fully in the hands of creator Sam Esmail, did not demonstrate a lot of it. It was still capable of producing audacious and/or intoxicating sequences, even if it didn’t always know what to do with them: Angela’s interrogation by first a child, and then Whiterose, was probably the closest Mr. Robot has gotten to weaving its solipsistic dream logic and paranoia about losing control right into the very fabric of a scene, no narration or exposition necessary. I will stump for the family sitcom throwback, too, overextended maybe but at least a justified (and fun) left turn.
Still, that sequence does give rise to the creeping suspicion that Esmail has just started to turn the wheel to shake things up, not because he knows where he’s going. It could be too soon to say. The endless arranging of pieces on the board of this season does remind me a touch of what David Simon said about The Wire’s second season: I told you this story so I could tell you these stories. It’s not out of the realm of possibility for a show that is otherwise so singular and stark to need some time to clear its throat before it gets its voice back.
Or, well, not so much get its voice back, as speak a little bit more clearly. Mr. Robot is able to have truly stunning moments in between its long stretches of oppressive cleverness ( the too- slow prison reveal, for instance) because it is never too far from its main themes. With the unreliable narrator as our guide — which, again, the show probably expends far too much energy on drilling home, episode after episode — this is a show about paranoia and control, the former springing from worries about the latter.
For its digressions and penchant for the overwrought, the second season never lost sight of that.
Every plot arch was to some degree about wresting control: Eliot’s attempt to reign in Mr. Robot, F society’s attempt to “own” the FBI with a hack, E Corp’s play to become America’s currency, the Dark Army’s play to blow up E Corp. Even the minor notes fit the mode: Angela’s failed attempt to expose E Corp, a warden forcing Eliot into service to build a Tor website, Eliot’s Seinfeld- obsessed Dark Army minder, Joanna’s apparent ploy to drag up a murder charge against E Corp’s CTO. These didn’t move together with the economy and efficiency of the first season, but there’s a clear spine here.
The challenge moving f orward will be for Esmail to demonstrate that he understands control as well as his characters seem to. That means more than just framing every shot like someone bumped the camera, or spelling out every half- baked idea about the nature of the mind or the metaphor of a hack. It means making sure all these parts have a purpose in both the plot and the themes.
Shoehorning in one or the other only leads to chaos. Whatever else it’s done, this season has shown us how bad that can end up being.