Mr. Robot S01E01: "eps1.0_hellofriend.mov" The original draft of this review started off with a boring paragraph about how Mr. Robot might finally be the show to break USA Network away from its reputation of fluffy summer beach reads transformed into television series and turn it into a major TV player, but that would be burying the lede. The pilot episode of Mr. Robot, created by Sam Esmail, is worthy of all the praise it gets on its own, whether it's on USA Network, Nick Jr., the Playboy Channel, or HBO. If you haven't watched it (it's been available online for free for a month), this is an episode of television that needs to be sought out right now. The pilot episode introduced us to selective misanthrope and computer whiz Elliot Alderson, a cyber-security tech who worked for a firm that protected massive corporations from getting hacked by keyboard jockeys and other online miscreants. It took all of zero seconds for the voiceover that poured out of the episode's introductory black screen to get a grip on who Elliot was: he's the voice of the disgruntled many, an early churn in a sea of rising change against the widening gap between the wealthy and the rest of the 99.99 percent of the world. He also might be totally f'ing looney toons, crippled by social anxiety, schizophrenic paranoia, and a clinical case of the heebie-jeebies. He was the type of person you hear about (he might even be you), the quiet, unassuming cubicle squatter who throws on a hoodie to shut the rest of the world out, but may also be the most dangerous man in the room with the power to change society for good or bad. What's for sure was that he's the most interesting part of Mr. Robot by far, the type of character who can anchor a series and let everything else that's good about it be the icing, cherries, sprinkles, and other confectionary delights. Mr. Robot may be dubbed a hacker drama, but it's really about a person who just so happened to be a hacker. It changed much of how hacking had been represented on television, redefining the stereotype of pastel-colored hair and piercings, underground techno raves, and pyramids of empty energy drink cans. And it's about f*cking time. It made hacking human. And Elliot is most certainly human, a broken one at that, simmering with rage but yearning to make a positive impact because he felt born into an unfair society. It's everyone else who were the robots. Facebook placates, the rich white guys make bucks off the backs of the poor, and celebrity heroes wear masks to cover up their abuses of power but they're still worshipped. It's all angry corner-of-the-room-ranting stuff, but for many—myself included—it's entirely relatable, and it left me nodding and nearly high-fiving my TV screen. Preach it, brother. It also left me wondering if everyone else who watched the pilot felt the same way. Did you smile when Elliot thought, "---- society"? Did you feel a surge of energy when he left his company, Allsafe, as Times Square lit up with images of his target being arrested, all the while Elliot thrillingly said, "It's happening, it's happening, it's happening, it's happening!"? Not everyone will agree with Elliot's viewpoint, but it's impossible not to hear him out, and it's what gives Mr. Robot a fun soapbox to stand on. What made the pilot of Mr. Robot excellent, however, were the potentially dark and sympathetic sides of Elliot. Elliot used voiceover a lot (effectively, I might add), but there's a question of who he's talking to. Was it us? Was it himself? Was it some imaginary person he created in his mind as he suggested? He coped with loneliness (awww) by snorting morphine, careful not to ingest too much to build a tolerance, because that would screw up the entire point of morphine (this show does not over look details). He cried in a nook, sandwiched between his dresser and a wall, and flashed back to his f'd up family who weren't around to help him through these lonely times. He longed for his childhood friend Angela, who was dating that guy from Outsourced and didn't know he was cheating on her... but Elliot knew because he'd hacked the personal information of every person he knew in order to better understand them since he was so bad at face-to-face communication. In this particular case, he discovered Angela's boyfriend was more criminally a fan of George W. Bush, Maroon 5, Transformers 2, and Josh Groban. Run for the hills, Angela! You want to keep Elliot at arm's length, but you also can't deny that his method for knowing someone worked for him. The way he was able to liberate his therapist from an awful relationship was noble, but the methods he had to use to do that were harsh. He may be opening up people's eyes for an ultimately good cause, but sometimes that involves ripping off the Band-Aid. And turning people into this: That's four paragraphs just on the main character and I haven't even gotten to the plot yet. Elliot met a mysterious man we'll call Mr. Robot (because that's what the badge on his jacket said), who hack-attacked Allsafe client Evil Corp as a test of Elliot's ideals. Mr. Robot, played by proven show-killer Christian Slater ( My Own Worst Enemy, The Forgotten, Breaking In, Mind Games), ran a small crew of hackers with one goal in mind: take down the mega-conglomerates who secretly rule society and enslave us all with debt and consumerism. And so Mr. Robot became a technologically updated tale of Robin Hood. There's just one thing. Do we even know if Mr. Robot actually exists? In addition to its idea of erasing debt and shoving a boot so far up the Man's ass he'd be able to tie our shoe through his mouth, Mr. Robot's similarities with the classic film Fight Club extended into the idea of the possibly hallucinating unreliable narrator with Mr. Robot the Tyler Durden to Elliot's "the Narrator," played by Ed Norton in the film. If you watched closely enough, no one else, even Mr. Robot's hacking pals, ever said a word to Mr. Robot, and Mr. Robot frequently entered the action when no one else was around. Is he a ghost? Is he a figment of Elliot's imagination? Is he the Id that Elliot needed to create to push him toward greatness? I love unreliable narrators and the P.O.V. of someone who might be crazy, and here in Mr. Robot it folded into everything else extremely well. I'll put the idea of Mr. Robot not actually existing on pause here to let the series play with that idea on its own, and because that revelation isn't what actually makes the show interesting. The first rule of Byte Club is you do not talk about Byte Club. None of the series' anti-establishment ranting, f*cking of society, and paranoid glances would work, though, without a capable actor to embody it all, and Rami Malek's engrossing performance in the pilot has put him permanently in my mental Rolodex. Malek's biggest assets are his giant eyes, which conveyed the wicked combination of sleeplessness, suffering soul, and sharpness that's tantamount to the character. His tired inflection on voiceover was also pitch perfect, as you could hear the exhaustion, unrest, and stifled passion in his voice. He's impossible to take your eyes off and his handling of the dialogue was so masterful, you might never remember that he played a dead pharaoh in the Night at the Museum film franchise. Watch this kid. Gosh, I need to spend a little time talking about the looks of Mr. Robot, too. It's atypical of what you usually see on USA Network, which is obsessed with sunshine and beaches. Mr. Robot has a dark and gritty look to match its tone, often presenting us as cogs in a machine as the camera snooped around subway cars. The shots of the conversation between Mr. Robot and Elliot on the ferris wheel with the crashing cars and towering revolutions over an abandoned amusement park were electric and symbolic of starting over. Even the typically boring hacking suspense came off great. But there were also moments of optimism, like when Elliot was eyeing the cabling on the roof of a tunneled walkway and feeling like he was part of something new and was following a righteous path. And that's also how I felt watching Mr. Robot: I was energized. Other shows have attempted to reach out to the portion of the population that's disgusted with how things are run, but few actually connected to those people in the right way, instead feeling like someone co-opting a sentiment rather than actually believing it. Mr. Robot felt like it actually believed in the idea of radical change, and when putting out a series that comments on society like this one does, that's the most important thing. Believe! 7331 N0T35 – There's a daring genius to flat-out naming the evil corporation in the show Evil Corp, as if the PR firm hired to brand it couldn't even deny the true nature of the company. – Did you ever feel bored watching the pilot? The pacing was outstanding. I don't think there was one uninteresting scene in the hourlong (before commercials) episode. – "I understand what it's like to be different. I'm very different. I mean, I don't jerk off to little kids, but..." – I have a good friend who works in cyber-security and he says that the show got most of the tech stuff right. – "I'm okay with things being awkward between us." – "Even though he's the head of technology guy at one of the biggest companies in the world, he owns a Blackberry." – Mr. Robot loves to show that rich white guys at the top of corporations are jerks, and the way Colby told his people to have Angela fired and then turned away from her while it was all going down while he admired the view outside was perfect. He's a few levels removed from the firing, and he doesn't even acknowledge her existence while its happening. What a jerk. – The introduction of Tyrell Wellick as an exec who used to be a tech just like Elliot was well done, and his appearance at the table in the final moments was great. Watch out for him! – "What's a root kit?" "It's like a crazy serial rapist with a very big dick."



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