Heading into the premiere of Season Two, Mr. Robot had all the hype a TV show could ask for. For Season One, the show was nominated for six Emmys and won two, including Best Lead Actor for Rami Malek. That same year, it won two Golden Globes for Best Television Series and Best Supporting Actor for Christian Slater. The show had struck the vein of the moment—of corporate greed, of the one percent, of evil corporations, and the techno drama of anonymous hackers.
But at the end of Season One, a twist—Slater's Mr. Robot is actually a vision of Elliot Alderson's dead father—changed the entire dynamic of the entire show. On top of that, fSociety pulled off the hack they'd been planning, essentially erasing all bank records and credit card debt. Where could it go from there?
It turns out that creator, writer, and director Sam Esmail didn't really have an answer for that either.
Season Two begins on the other side of revolution. The world is in chaos and our characters are scattered and isolated from one another. Elliot is living in his mother's house, trapped in his own mind, playing chess with Mr. Robot. His sister, Darlene, is trying to hold fSociety together. Angela is slowly clawing her way up the eCorp-orate ladder. There's very little forward progression, and the show seemed to be obsessed with where it had been rather than where it could go. Elliot doesn't even sit down at a computer until Episode Five, and, besides a clever '90s-style sitcom episode, more than half of the season runs in very stylish circles.
To be completely honest, if I wasn't so enamoured with the direction and cinematography and obligated to write about this show for work, I would have given up on it. Angela's plot was a maze of corporate offices, Darlene was more like an occasional guest star, Joanna Wellick had none of the sadistic American Psycho-style insanity, and Detective DiPierro felt like an afterthought. It was like some lazy Mr. Robot spinoff world with enough key plot developments to fill all of three sentences.
Then there was the twist.
I'm not saying I loved the twist—in fact, it seemed pretty obvious in the episodes leading up to it (why didn't Eliot ever leave or see his mom?). And yes, I would have way rather watched seven episodes of Elliot in jail than Elliot sitting in his mom's house. But thankfully, the twist gave us a clean slate—basically a mulligan for us to get back to where Season Two should have started. From there, it found its rhythm down to the pulsing synth music. Elliot teams back up with fSociety and Darlene, and Angela and attempts to track down Tyrell. It ends with a thrilling shootout, Darlene captured by DiPierro, and Tyrell shooting Elliot.
Though it was only a brief few episodes, Mr. Robot finally got back to being the show that deserved the Emmys and Golden Globes it won. (For Season Two, it only received a handful of nominations but no wins.)
But is that enough to bring people back for Season Three? It has been over a year since Season Two ended. Are fans still interested? Since then, there's been a number of shows that have debuted and succeeded that will be occupying people's TV time. Since then, the world has changed, too. The issues surrounding Occupy Wall Street pale in comparison to the reality TV star we have as a president, who is taunting North Korea into a nuclear armageddon over Twitter. Did fans, like myself, lose interest part-way through Season Two more than a year ago?
Thankfully, the show had promise toward the end, and cyber security (or "the cyber" as our president calls it) is a more terrifying issue than ever. Russians have successfully hacked our democratic system, and Facebook has proven to be a purveyor of misinformation as its hoodied utopian leader tours the country for what's going to inevitably be a cringeworthy presidential run. So there's plenty for Mr. Robot to address in Season Three. The show just can't get trapped in its own head.
