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At its heart, Mr. Robot is a show about being monitored. Its protagonist, Elliot—played by the intense, nervy Rami Malek—hacks everyone he meets, peering into their emails, social-networking accounts, and finances to discover their weaknesses and exploit them. Once he's, say, exposed his therapist's new boyfriend as a philandering piece of shit and confiscated the guy's dog, he exports his findings to a disc, deletes the files, and then often throws his hardware in the microwave. He's the guy who knows everyone else's secrets and who's obsessed with keeping his own secrets to himself.And make no bones about it, Elliot's got a shit-ton of secrets. He's an on-and-off morphine addict who's so invested in orchestrating the biggest hack in history that he's hidden his plans from everyone, even himself. Elliot is the show's narrator, and we see every scene in which he appears from his perspective. From the jump, it's fairly clear that Elliot has some mental issues, as he's trained himself to hear every mention of "E Corp" as "Evil Corp." Christian Slater plays the show's title character, the leader of fsociety, the Anonymous-esque hacking group that's trying to take down E(vil) Corp. Mr. Robot turns out to be Elliot's dad, who turns out to have been dead all along. Meaning, in a decidedly Tyler Durden-ish plot twist, Mr. Robot is Elliot and vice versa, and that Mr. Robot is a projection of Elliot's unidentified mental illness. This throws the entire narrative of the show for a loop—we're meant to retroactively reframe all of the scenes featuring Mr. Robot as scenes featuring Elliot, or at least a version of him. The show's penultimate episode left off where the show's finale will pick up: in fsociety's Coney Island headquarters, Elliot and his nemesis—a sociopathic former hacker/disgraced Evil Corp executive named Tyrell Wellick—preparing to team up to take Evil Corp down.The scariest part of Mr. Robot's dystopia is how close to real life it is.
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