1.1 eps1.0_hellofriend.mov Unusually for this genre, it’s not the tech that feels as if it belongs to another time, but the ideology. Episode one’s monologues on disaffection, alienation, phoneyism, economic anarchy and evil conglomerates are drenched in Fight Club, The Matrix and American Psycho-era cynicism. With his raised black hoodie, vacant good looks, withdrawn demeanour and counselling sessions, Mr Robot’s lead Elliot Alderson (Malek) even channels the hero of another turn-of-the-last-century cult favourite: Donnie Darko. Moving even further down the timeline, casting Christian Slater as a co-lead almost certainly knowingly takes the influences back to 1990’s Pump Up The Volume and 1988’s Heathers, and Slater’s anarchic, criminal mischief-makers characters, Hard Harry and J.D. What heart, you might ask? This is a cynical piece of work from creator Sam Esmail, channelled through the narrative filter of cybersecurity technician by day, vigilante hacker by night, Elliot. Elliot views the world as a prison, with corporate consumerism as humanity’s jailer. He’s medicated, socially phobic, paranoid, the product of an abusive childhood and a methadone habit. He’s not on Facebook. He has a goldfish named Qwerty. He says IRL in real life. His favourite film is Back To The Future II. In voiceover, Elliot unironically tells us things like “the world itself is just one big hoax”. Did I call him a Millennial Donnie Darko? Perhaps I meant Holden Caulfield. In true cyber-thriller style, actual running is absent from this first episode (which debuted online last month and has been picking up word-of-mouth ever since), with the tension and action coming from fingers rapidly tapping on a keyboard accompanied by a thrumming bassline. The story combines an ongoing arc about the all-pervasive E-Corp (or Evil Corp, to give it its full satirical title), the target of underground hacking collective to which Elliot is drawn, with a subplot about exposing his psychologist’s boyfriend’s adultery. The hackers, The F Society, are holed up in a quirky Coney Island headquarters. Other than Slater’s eponymous ‘Mr Robot’—the one who offers Elliot the red pill—the only hacker we meet is acerbic, retro-styled, chain-smoking Marla, oops, Darlene. She’s the yin to Elliot’s preppy co-worker and childhood friend Angela’s yang, a rootkit-coding thrift-store femme. Prior to meeting The F Society, Elliot’s keyboard vigilantism establishes his moral core. Yes, he has no qualms about routinely invading the personal privacy of those around him (“I’ll hack him eventually, I always do”), giving him the power of information over them, but he mostly uses that power for good, exposing a local businessman as a child pornographer and warning off bad dates to ‘help’, as he sees it. To quote another late-nineties popular classic, it’s not right, but it’s okay. The result is an intriguing tangle of ethical quandaries about information, power and imprisonment. Who are the bad guys, Mr Robot asks. And who are the really bad guys? Over the course of the next nine episodes (and a second already-confirmed season to reassure premature cancellation-phobics), we’re going to find out. Mr Robot continues on the USA Network next Wednesday at 10pm. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
