Absolutely love this mindfuck weaponized split personality disorder hacking anarchist premise. The end of season plot twists that re-contextualize everything are so good.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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used to love it, it was one my absolute fave shows. revisited after my politics evolved a shitton and i still love season 1 and 2 but HATE 3 and massively mixed feelings on 4 as they pivot into comic book china bad supervillain horseshit. 4 redeems itself a bit with some good character drama separate from the overarching political plot but i really cant stand the dark army/deus group bullshit and it sours the whole rest of the show for me. also cant buy that someone is so good at computer that they become such a central great man of history. show was ruined for me by the fact that sam esmail couldnt contain his insufferable shitlibness and trump derangement syndrome i guess (plus his gross Lib American exceptionalist xenophobia).
still though the first two seasons do capture the malaise of late capitalism under tech dystopia uniquely well, in a way very few pieces of media have IMO so it'll always have a special place in my heart for those reasons. i also have a soft spot for Elliot and think he would be cool if he just read some theory. i always imagined a rewritten back half of the show where he realizes the pitfalls of adventurism and actually decides to do his part to help lead a mass movement, falling back into being a small-but-important part of said movement that goes well beyond hacktivism. but that wld require the show to not be written by sam esmail so oh well. if u want a more stark view of how the show was always going to be inherently limited by his politics, just watch that Obama produced netflix abomination he directed.
oh also wtf is with the big final hack? spoiler if you care about spoilers for a a long-ended show (tried to do the right thing but sites spoiler tags are janky as shit so last chance turn around now if u no want to see) no dude this secret band of oligarchs doesnt just have Big Money Number that can be subtracted and redistributed a lot of their power and capital is gonna be in real assets and concrete state power and shit like wtf? (am i missing something or was this just genuinely v implausible?)
TL;DR big mixed feelings on mr robot but Elliot is almost cool and just needs a little Marx in his life (also it doesn't hurt that i often dress like him lol we feel like soul bros some days)
also have to add that im generally against the internet leftist tendency of Reducing Art to its Politics which might not come thru in what i wrote above, but in the case of mr robot its such an inherently political show that its hard to apply that same metric. like easy to ignore tacitly bad politics in a piece of art where that really isn't the focus vs something where the social commentary is so front and center. (sort of similar to how ive always been puzzled at non-socialists enjoying Disco Elysium)
I mean I necessarily don't reduce em to that. But the central gambit of mr robot revolves dismantling the financial system and getting back at the ruling class. In that process it also kind of loses coherence in the way it tackles the political web it is in. I still like elliot his alienation, and his anger to get at the unjust system. I won't just reduce it to like a garbage show cause it has faulty things in it.
for sure i feel that, i have deeply complicated feelings abt the show myself, a mix of intensely bad and intensely good lol
Well its a mix. Just have to process it for what it is I guess.