BENGALURU: If there’s one wagon you want to be on right now, it’s Season 1 of the USA Network TV show Mr Robot that recently completed its season finale.
The show mainly follows the TV show’s very unreliable narrator and lead character Elliot Anderson (played by Rami Malek), an IT engineer primarily entrusted with cyber security, who moonlights as a vigilante hacker by night, in New York.
He is recruited by the mysterious leader of an underground group of hackers, who call themselves ‘fsociety’, and led by the curiously named Mr Robot (Christian Slater doing a fantastic job here), to join their organisation. Elliot’s task is to help bring down all of corporate America, including the company he is paid to protect, effectively putting into motion the largest ever wealth redistribution process the world has ever seen. No biggie.
A mentally unstable anarchist with obvious social and personal issues, Elliot veers between staying loyal to a boss who has protected him through his career, and fighting against a system that tore apart his life and that of several others.’ This dilemma aggravates his personality issues to a breaking point. This leaves us with some interesting television. Apart from the very realistically portrayed hacking culture perspectives, previously absent on television and cinema, Mr Robot also delves deep into the psyche of a person disillusioned by today’s increasingly corporate world.
It’s great to see a network like the USA Network screen such a TV show, that obviously shows the finger to the very sponsors that have paid for this show to be aired on television.
Every time we see Anderson asking the audience to be wary of the products we consume, the advertisements we’re blinded by, even the culture we so willingly accept to drown out the outside world; we are afraid to wonder just how long this show will be allowed to continue. We at least know that it’s coming back for a second season next summer, so that’s a relief.
What’s great about the show is how current it is. If you’ve been following world news, you’ll find references to the Ashley Madison leak, Sony’s e-mail hacks and eerily they even kind of foresaw the chilling shoot-out incident where two TV journalists were shot on live television. For left liberals, the TV show is nothing short of a delight - there’s a monologue right in the first episode that will have you wanting to jump up and give the man a standing ovation. Here’s a transcript of what transpires when Elliot is asked what exactly about society disappoints him so much, by his therapist:
“Oh I don’t know. Is it that we collectively thought that Steve jobs was a great man even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it’s that it feels that all of our heroes are counterfeit. The world itself is just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our burning commentary, bullshit masquerading as insight. Our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this; not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I’m not saying anything new, we all know why we do this. Not because Hunger Games books make us happy, but because we want to be sedated, because it’s painful not to pretend, because we’re cowards….. F*** Society!”
If that doesn’t inspire you to stream the first season of Mr Robot, I don’t know what will.
