Mr. Robot Mr. Robot Mr. Robot 👨🤖👨🤖

[OtherMichael]

My wife – who won’t watch Dr. Who and has only seen 1 Star Wars film and thinks that’s okay – was the one who pushed to watch Mr. Robot.

She quite enjoyed it, as did I.

Quite good. A tricky show.

[daneel]

@OtherMichael

1 Star Wars film and thinks that’s okay

Which one, though?

[OtherMichael]

1 or IV, depending upon how you look at it.

[daneel]

Okay, that could still be TPM, depending upon how you look at it.

[hello_friends]

@popobawa4u

you make it sound as if this was due to a lack of awareness rather than being deliberate.

That’s my mistake. In general, I think the writers, actors, producers, directors … everyone works very deliberately and intelligently on shows. I think that’s often true even on the shows no one enjoys or which are fragmented from being too serialized or underfunded or other problems

@popobawa4u

there are narrative reasons, for better or worse, why we instead have an alienated, damaged, unreliable narrator.

I think there are also commercial reasons. Like most commercial shows, this one was marketed primarily to viewers likely to identify sympathetically with the story.

@popobawa4u

I think it has room to grow up in interesting ways.

Always true. I’m still waiting for the next season of Firefly and a Phantom Menace reboot.

[smulder]

@singletona082

Tell me why I should look past this hoodie guy being apparently a sneering down his nose asshole talking about how society and people are shit

The show is not really Taxi Driver with hacking, but if it were I would also watch that.

[neonflame]

I see what you’re saying, but I agree with the idea that the writers know EXACTLY what they’re doing. This becomes more obvious as the season progresses, things start to click. Reasons appear.

It’s definitely got its weak points, but I’m really loving it overall You may have a point about where the premise of the show came from, but i don’t think that makes it a weakness I’m really looking forward to seeing where it goes in the future. Thank you for pointing out the other side a bit though, I think it’s really important to be able to critique the things you like and be able to admit they aren’t perfect

[hello_friends]

You and everyone else here are making me want to watch more episodes, esp. now that the BCS finale happened.

[Chaz1]

What it has going for it is that the writer/creator is on board for every episode. I think if he knows what the end point is, everything will be fine. Lost ripped my heart out

[anon3072533]

Somewhat off-topic here. About using spoilers. Paging @codinghorror, or someone else with an interest.

I usually expand and read most replies-to-replies as I go down a thread. I noticed that the spoiler in hello_friends’s post #15 is blurred there in post #15 itself. But it wasn’t blurred when I saw it earlier as an expanded reply to miasm’s post #13. So the spoiler didn’t really fulfill its purpose. I believe I’ve seen this happen in other threads too.

[codinghorror]

Hmm yeah looks like spoiler is actually inlined CSS for some reason. Anything we can do there to make it more of an actual CSS style @zogstrip?

[Kimmo]

@Chaz1

I think if he knows what the end point is, everything will be fine.

Interviews with Esmail confirm he has a preconceived ending he’s working towards; says it’ll take 4 or 5 seasons to get there, max.

As for crossing the line between homage and reboot, that’s fine with me for a couple of reasons - the sheer quality of this show is enough of a joy to allow us to forgive much, and anyway, the story it’s based on may be dear to our hearts, but that’s only the first act - I’d say pretty much every one of us would be enraptured at the prospect of a sequel, and now we have it, in long form.

Fucking yay.

[zogstrip]

@codinghorror

Anything we can do there to make it more of an actual CSS style @zogstrip?

It’s not that simple unfortunately. Blurring is done in JavaScript because we use 3 different techniques for 3 different use cases (text, links and images).

But I’ll see if I can remove the spoilers in the expanded replies.

[miasm]

And that, boys and girls, is why you always

#Spoilers!

[zogstrip]

@zogstrip

But I’ll see if I can remove the spoilers in the expanded replies.

There actually was a bug with expanded replies (internally called embedded posts) which weren’t applying decorators. It’s now fixed but will be deployed here within a week

FIX: also apply decorators to embedded posts

[Kimmo]

Don’t read unless you know what show Mr Robot owes so much to:

[spoiler]I’ve seen people saying sure, rip off Fight Club’s Taxi Driver angle, rip off the destroying credit records MacGuffin, no problem. But the split personality bit? Too far.

I think the reason I always really dug the split personality angle in Fight Club was that for one guy to drive a revolution that changes the world, it seems a bit steep; too tall an order for any one psyche not totally crazy with hubris. But for an uninhibited alter ego fractured off a real person, not an issue.

It makes the scale of the whole undertaking somehow more plausible, and offers a rich seam of material to mine for twists and stuff. It’s a bummer the disorder isn’t portrayed with the authenticity lavished on the hacking, but I guess that’d be too restrictive maybe. [/spoiler]

[hello_friends]

@Kimmo

for one guy to drive a revolution that changes the world, it seems a bit steep; too tall an order for any one psyche not totally crazy with hubris. But for an uninhibited alter ego fractured off a real person, not an issue.

Agreed, it’s interesting though it’s interesting partly due to corporate ideology. A revolution is inherently social, not individual. Socially constructing individual consumers is arguably the largest corporate-made narrative obstacle to socializing economic relationships. So a romanticized narrative about revolution by a hyper-individualized genius resonates for irony.

[popobawa4u]

@hello_friends

I think there are also commercial reasons. Like most commercial shows, this one was marketed primarily to viewers likely to identify sympathetically with the story.

I don’t automatically assume that videos are somehow an exercise in commerce. Of course, people can reduce anything whatsoever into being transactional, if they so choose. I tend to consider video as a medium to be mainly for art and/or communication. As for people identifying with the story or its characters, I’d qualify that as a lapse in critical thinking.

[quote=“hello_friends, post:39, topic:76909”]
Socially constructing individual consumers is arguably the largest corporate-made narrative obstacle to socializing economic relationships.
[/quote]

But I think that this too assumes transactionality as being the ultimate reduction of social activity. Otherwise a given society would decide amongst themselves whether or not to engage in economics. I admit, I am pretty much thoroughly biased against economics and commerce as being pre-scientific modes of (barely) social organization.

[quote=“hello_friends, post:39, topic:76909”]
So a romanticized narrative about revolution by a hyper-individualized genius resonates for irony.
[/quote]

I think that’s the very idea!

(manually added spoiler tags)

[hello_friends]

Agreed about the different possibilities for reading a show or what a show is about (or symptomatic of).

@popobawa4u

Otherwise a given society would decide amongst themselves whether or not to engage in economics.

I don’t understand what this part means.

[popobawa4u]

I was pointing out that the notion of “socializing economic relationships” seems to suggest that economic relationships are somehow implicit, a baseline assumption which many make about human interactions generally.