He’s a vigilante hacker who exposes the dirty little secrets of people who disappoint him.
The first episode of Mr. Robot is your fairly standard “pilot setting up the premise of the series” episode. Likewise, the protagonist, Elliot Alderson played by Rami Malek, feels like a fairly standard superhero-type character. By day, he is a mild mannered tech guy who works for the Allsafe security firm. By night, he is a vigilante hacker who exposes the dirty little secrets of people who disappoint him.
What separates Elliot from, say, your Batman or Superman type character, however, is his questionable mental status. Elliot suffers from Social Anxiety and Antisocial Behavior, but his actions seem to border on the sociopathic. He develops imaginary relationships with strangers, but becomes disillusioned by the information he discovers about them when his stalker-ish fascination leads him to hack into their lives online. Once they have disappointed him, he exposes them and moves on to his next case. It is also possible that Elliot suffers from Paranoia. Everywhere he goes, he sees men in black suits and a crazy homeless man (Christian Slater) following him.
The one bright spot in Elliot’s life is his co-worker, Angela (Portia Doubleday): the Lois Lane to his Clark Kent. Like her love interest counterparts, Angela is a real go-getter at work and wants to climb the corporate ladder as quickly as possible so that she can pay off the student loans that are dangling above her head. And, of course, she is dating some douchey guy who probably has some bizarre fetish that Elliot will expose in the next couple of weeks.
Things start to get real for Elliot when Angela calls him one morning at 3am. She’s still at work because hackers have gotten into the mainframe of Allsafe’s biggest client, E-Corp, and downloaded a virus that is shutting down operations and costing them millions of dollars a second. Elliot, being the brilliant tech guy he is, rushes in and saves the day. However, just as he is about to delete the virus, he discovers a message attached to it telling him to save it. Torn between his loyalty to Angela and her job and his vigilante good guy status, he decides to save the program, but encrypts it so that only he can access it.
On the way home, Elliot runs into the homeless man who’s been following him. Identifying himself only as Mr. Robot, the stranger takes him to an abandoned arcade where the group of cyber geniuses responsible for the attack invite him to join their secret club cleverly called “fsociety”. See, everyone (including the people at Allsafe) refers to E-Corp as Evil-Corp, so, clearly, they need to be stopped. Mr. Robot babbles on for awhile about some techno conspiracy theory, but the gist of the conversation is that they want Elliot to help them take down the big bad guy from the inside and redistribute all of the wealth in the US by wiping out the debts of average citizens. Step one of the plan is to frame Terry Colby, the CTO of the company, for the security breach.
There’s a song montage where Elliot makes two files: a white one that will expose Mr. Robot and his group and a blue one that will activate the first step in fsociety’s plan. He struggles admirably as the music swells, but ultimately decides he should be loyal to his boss and co-workers. At a staff meeting with Evil-Corp the following morning, Elliot pulls out the white file and waits to speak. Unfortunately, Mr. Colby picks that moment to be mean and snarky to Angela. Of course, Elliot cannot abide this injustice and, at the last minute, reaches into his bag and pulls out the blue file instead.
The episode ends with Elliot being picked up by a group of the black suited men that always seem to be following him. They escort him into a conference room where he is greeted by Tyrell Welick, one of the junior executives from Evil-Corp and the screen fades to black.
Although not inherently terrible, there is a lot about Mr. Robot that feels formulaic. In addition to his other “super hero” tropes, Elliot comes with parental baggage in the form of a father who died of leukemia due to exposure to toxic waste at the company he worked for. Even Elliot’s morphine habit harkens a comparison to the literary drug use of Arthur Conan Doyle’s, in Sherlock Holmes. Time will tell whether or not Malek can transform this character into a hero for which the audience can root. Right now, the performance seems a little one note with the actor playing most scenes blank faced and wide eyed simultaneously.
It will also be interesting to see if the show stays consistent with some of the subtle lighting design that was utilized in this episode. Not only is Mr. Robot dark in tone, it is also dark in illumination. Aside from scenes between him and Angela, Elliot’s physical world is dimly lit. It is only when he meets Mr. Robot and they ride on the Ferris wheel together that the character experiences brightness, suggesting he has finally found redemption.
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