Review: Mr Robot Season 1

There'll be spoilers! Away! Run! Aaa!

I think ultimately I was both impressed by the way the show pulls off this deeply unreliable narrator and also really disappointed in the lack of hacking. Almost every piece of media about hacking either eventually makes the process shorthand enough that it's factored out to solve the quadratic. Whether it's any of the Watch Dogs games, hacker movies, wherever I go. It's just as important as set dressing. I feel like I'm being looked at the same way as a server at a Dennys would look at me if I said I wanted to have a pound of hash browns for a meal. It's balanced to be a side, something about the nutritional value, whatever the reasons it just feels like I'm being impractical.

And I understand this, fundamentally. I've written hackers before. Last year I was working on a novel with a hacker protagonist and it was constantly a struggle to imagine technology and then its subversion. Let alone Mr. Robot's desire to portray hacking accurately, which drastically increases the amount of research necessary to pull it off. It's difficult, it's time consuming. But mystery novels manage to create a facsimile of detective work and satisfy the reader's itch to solve crimes and I feel like there ought to be something similar here? 

I appreciated Elliot's struggles this time around. Being inside of his perspective (more or less) made the transitions into unreality and delusion vital and the show did a really exceptional job of blurring the transition between those spaces. It never felt like plunging into a silent hill style otherworld, but rather that the delusions and reality were so solid that questioning anything required questioning everything. It was a really neat game. 

It's just that towards the end of the season, I was no longer treated to explanations of hacking, no deep dives into what it looked like but rather montages, burning a CD, hitting execute, chatting in an IRC console window. And they discussed particulars but mostly as chaff, mostly as a backdrop to the greater, personal conflicts that were taking place. 

I'm interested to know more about this show, but it failed to scratch the itch in my brain after the prison break episode. Likewise, no one interrogated the actual ramifications of the prison break except for the personal stakes? I mean he released a lot of prisoners. I would like to hear good or bad about that. Not pro-prison, but just... that was a hell of a way to cut the gordian knot, where's the rest of the fallout?

We'll see if I continue, though I'm glad I at least finally know what's going on in that first season.