I was intrigued after a couple episodes of USA's Mr. Robot, but damn if I'm not hooked. This is Fincherian work of mystery that keeps you guessing and shocked throughout the series, and I'm eager to get started on Season Two (which either just started or is starting soon - there are billboards all over LA.)
Given the twists and turns of the show, let's do a spoiler break just to be safe.
A bit like the Prestige (a Nolan film with twists, but I think because I saw Memento and Fight Club on the recommendation of the same friend within a short span of time, I sort of associate the two,) Mr. Robot is not all built upon a singular twist, but in fact several. The biggest one is somewhat telegraphed.
Mr. Robot concerns itself with a lot of the same themes as Fight Club, but the last seventeen years (holy crap, I feel old) have given us a period of time in which the megacorporations have become far more brazen and wrought far more destruction. The detached, sullen narration and the plan to wipe out debts to free people are strong connections with Fight Club, and that really telegraphed to the audience that the show might borrow Fight Club's famous twist (spoiler alert for a seventeen year old movie,) in which Tyler Durden, the ubermensch appropriately played by a guy who was at least then considered one of the most attractive men alive, was in fact an alter-ego created by Edward Norton's nameless narrator. There's even a sequence scored by a cover of Pixies' Where is My Mind, the song that (in its original form) famously scores the very end of Fight Club.
And the show lets us have that one. Yes, Christian Slater's Mr. Robot is in fact just a figment of Elliot's imagination. He's the one who has been running fsociety all along.
But that's just the surface. To spoil an eleven-year-old movie, it's a bit like when the Prestige gives you plenty of hints that Borden and Fallon are actually twin brothers who have taken great pains to live a single life between them, but all of this distracts you from the creeping realization that the Prestige is, in fact, a science fiction story, and that Angier has committed an act of Tesla-Technology-aided horror in order to sate his obsession, cloning himself and killing himself every night of his performance.
So what are our other twists?
Well, for starters there's Darlene. After going through the trauma of losing Shayla, Elliot is drawn to Darlene's warmth and love as their plan gets ready to go ahead. When he leans in and kisses her, however, she retracts in disgust. Because she's his freaking sister.
And with that, suddenly all of her behavior toward him makes perfect sense. She's not just some crazy chick he knows who hacks with him - she's his playfully bratty sister. So of course there would be nothing weird about her showing up inside his apartment and basically inserting herself into his life. She's supposed to be part of his life.
But then there's the other big reveal. We all kind of figured out that Mr. Robot wasn't real. But the narrator of Fight Club creates an image of unshackled masculine perfection on which to project himself. Why does Elliot come up with Christian Slater?
Because that's his dad. Not only is Christian Slater's character Elliot's dad, but it's also that connection that gives him the identity of Mr. Robot. The elder Alderson ran a computer repair shop in the 90s called Mr. Robot, and the jacket he wears bears his store's logo.
There's a whole lot more to unpack here, but the thing that really, really troubles me is Tyrell.
Tyrell was introduced as a potential villain - a kind of representative of how the young and clever don't necessarily become idealistic revolutionaries - some of them become monstrous corporate predators.
Tyrell's life has been utterly spiraling. After he allows Evil Corp's CTO get drawn into a scandal that gets him fired, some other guy winds up with the job Tyrell wants. Planning with his wife, Joanna (in Swedish - I don't know if the characters are both supposed to be Scandinavian, but both actors are) he plans to seduce his rival's wife. This backfires when she tells her husband and all of Tyrell's machiavellian scheming is going nowhere.
At the party to celebrate the new CTO, the wife (I really wish I could remember the character's name, especially given what happens next) responds to his invitation to the rooftop, though she ostensibly rejects his advances. Still, he moves to kiss her and even it even looks like they're going to have consensual if ill-advised sex when Tyrell wraps his hand around her throat and strangles her to death.
This was not the plan, and all of Tyrell's master-planner cleverness falls apart. While his wife even sets off her labor early in order to avoid being questioned by the police, Tyrell winds up fired after he's named a Person of Interest by the police in the murder.
Tyrell's a horrible guy, so I can't say I'd be heartbroken if he wound up taken in. But there's a troubling exchange that could have disturbing implications.
His world falling apart around him, Tyrell goes to Elliot and finds out about fsociety and their plan. It almost seems like he's going to assist, but Elliot blacks out for three days, only to wake up after everything has gone off and the world slides into a financial panic. Elliot wakes up in the front seat of Tyrell's car and Tyrell can't be found anywhere.
So did he kill him? Or is it worse?
Elliot shows up at Tyrell's townhouse and knocks on the door just as Joanna arrives, baby in his carriage. There is a confused exchange that implies heavily that Joanna knows something, and at one point speaks to Elliot in Swedish, untranslated.
Given what we know about Elliot - namely that he's had at least one split personality doing its own thing while he's been unaware - the frightening possibility is that there might be more. Could it be that Tyrell Wellick is really just an aspect of Elliot Alderson's fractured mind? Is this actually his own wife that he's speaking to as if she's a stranger? And did Elliot strangle Sharon Knowles on the top of that building?
The show seems to be hinting at this, but I don't think it fits unless we throw a whole ton of what we know about the characters in the series out the window. Angela and Elliot work together at Allsafe, at least at the beginning of the series, and are both childhood friends (one of the early hints in the episode where we find out Darlene is his sister is that Angela and Darlene somehow seem to be buddies at a ballet class together.) It seems highly unlikely that an E Corp executive could also be a low-level tech at Allsafe without anyone noticing. It would also seriously lessen the shock that Angela would take a job at Evil Corp if her buddy Elliot had done so as well.
There are definitely some surreal touches to Tyrell, especially the end of the first episode, but for him to be just an aspect of Elliot (or vice versa, for that matter,) would mean really upending almost everything we know about one character or the other or both.
I'm really impressed with how they pulled off the first season of this show. Resolving just what or who Tyrell will be a key part in my evaluation of season two.
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