Mr. Robot Mr. Robot Mr. Robot šŸ‘ØšŸ¤–šŸ‘ØšŸ¤–

My wife ā€“ who wonā€™t watch Dr. Who and has only seen 1 Star Wars film and thinks thatā€™s okay ā€“ was the one who pushed to watch Mr. Robot.

She quite enjoyed it, as did I.

Quite good. A tricky show.

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Which one, though?

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

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

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Thatā€™s my mistake. In general, I think the writers, actors, producers, directors ā€¦ everyone works very deliberately and intelligently on shows. I think thatā€™s often true even on the shows no one enjoys or which are fragmented from being too serialized or underfunded or other problems

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.

Always true. Iā€™m still waiting for the next season of Firefly and a Phantom Menace reboot. :smile:

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

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

Itā€™s definitely got its weak points, but Iā€™m really loving it overall :slight_smile: You may have a point about where the premise of the show came from, but i donā€™t think that makes it a weakness :stuck_out_tongue: Iā€™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 itā€™s really important to be able to critique the things you like and be able to admit they arenā€™t perfect :slight_smile:

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

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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

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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_friendsā€™s post #15 is blurred there in post #15 itself. But it wasnā€™t blurred when I saw it earlier as an expanded reply to miasmā€™s post #13. So the spoiler didnā€™t really fulfill its purpose. I believe Iā€™ve seen this happen in other threads too.

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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?

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

As for crossing the line between homage and reboot, thatā€™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 itā€™s based on may be dear to our hearts, but thatā€™s only the first act - Iā€™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.

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Itā€™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 Iā€™ll see if I can remove the spoilers in the expanded replies.

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And that, boys and girls, is why you always

#Spoilers!

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There actually was a bug with expanded replies (internally called embedded posts) which werenā€™t applying decorators. Itā€™s now fixed but will be deployed here within a week :wink:

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Donā€™t read unless you know what show Mr Robot owes so much to:

[spoiler]Iā€™ve seen people saying sure, rip off Fight Clubā€™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. Itā€™s a bummer the disorder isnā€™t portrayed with the authenticity lavished on the hacking, but I guess thatā€™d be too restrictive maybe. [/spoiler]

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Agreed, itā€™s interesting though itā€™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.

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I donā€™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, Iā€™d qualify that as a lapse in critical thinking.

[quote=ā€œhello_friends, post:39, topic:76909ā€]
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=ā€œhello_friends, post:39, topic:76909ā€]
So a romanticized narrative about revolution by a hyper-individualized genius resonates for irony.
[/quote]

I think thatā€™s the very idea!

(manually added spoiler tags)

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

I donā€™t understand what this part means.

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I was pointing out that the notion of ā€œsocializing economic relationshipsā€ seems to suggest that economic relationships are somehow implicit, a baseline assumption which many make about human interactions generally.

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