Blu-Ray/TV Series Review: Mr. Robot: Season 2

 

Season two of Mr. Robot continues the strange trip that is the story of Elliot and fsociety versus E-Corp (or Evil Corp as the characters refer to it). Season two is set months down the line from the successful hack of E-Corp. Elliot, now knowing that Mr. Robot (played by Christian Slater) is really his dead father that he has been hallucinating is staying with his mother and trying to get rid of Mr. Robot, only to fight a losing battle with him constantly. Darlene (Carly Chaikin) is now in charge of fsociety and continues to try and take down E-Corp from the outside, continuing the hacks, while Angela (Portia Doubleday) is now working her way up the ladder at E-Corp. Tyrell (Martin Wallström) is missing and is mostly absent (at least in person for most of the season), and Joanna (Stephanie Corneliussen) is trying to find him while also having a fling with a new guy who gets more and more suspicious of her.

The show continues the serial story arc from season one, revealing more and more of the backstory and including a lot of twists and turns. Of course, the audience experiencing events from the perspective of a mentally ill character allows for a lot of weirdness, as things are definitely not always what they seem, and includes some crazy moments like a 1980s/1990s sitcom version of a family road trip with that featured the 80s sitcom character, ALF. The new addition to the cast this season is Grace Gummer, who plays Dominique DiPierro, an FBI field agent investigating the E Corp hack, and BD Wong (from Jurassic Park) makes a couple more appearances as White Rose.

For those who get the blu-ray set, the show once again looks and sounds great in HD. The episodes and the extras are spread out over three discs. The extras include deleted scenes for most of the episodes and a couple of behind-the-scenes featurettes. Not a ton, but what was included is good if you like watching the bonus content.

Overall, the show continues to be very entertaining. Like in the first season, there is a lot of violence, swearing, sex, and drug use in the show, so it is not family-friendly and will not appeal to everyone. It is definitely telling a long drawn-out story, so you have to watch from the beginning to have any clue about what is going on. The writing and acting are both top-notch and the show does a good job of revealing small details about the story while not giving away too much. It also blends the storyline into the real world (using clips of the mega-rich and politicians) to establish how the super-rich controls everything and why fsociety wants to take them down. It is definitely a great show and worth the time to watch.

Blu-Ray/TV Series Review: Mr. Robot: Season 1

 

Mr. Robot is a show that aired on the USA Network from 2015 to 2019, and starred Remi Malek as Elliot Alderson, who by day has a job at a reputable cybersecurity company, and by night is a hacker who takes down bad guys. He is approached by a group of hacktivists called society (as in fuck-society), whose goal is to take down a large, own-everything company called E-Corp, which basically uses the old Enron logo and is a metaphorical stand-in for any of the huge companies that basically run everything like Amazon and Walmart. Elliot has numerous mental issues such as social anxiety disorder and clinical depression and breaks the fourth wall by directly addressing the audience. The show has a lot of twists and turns that play out over the course of the ten episodes. By the end of the season, a lot is revealed but a lot is still unanswered. You find out there is a lot more to the storyline than what you necessarily think there will be at the beginning of the season.

For those who get the blu-ray, the show looks and sounds great in HD. There are not a ton of special effects, but the cinematography is very well done, and the show goes from looking dark and gritty to sleek and polished, depending on where particular scenes are being shot. The extras include a few deleted scenes and a short gag reel. The most extensive extra is on the second disc, a twelve-minute making-of featurette that includes interviews with the cast members and showrunner Sam Esmail.

Overall, the season is very good. Malek is great as the series lead, and it has a strong supporting cast including Carly Chaikin, Portia Doubleday, Martin Wallström, Stephanie Corneliussen, Michael Cristofer, and Christian Slater. I cannot say much about the roles of any of the other cast members because to do so would give too much away. While the show does take some creative liberties, it does try to be realistic with the computer coding and the portrayal of hacking. It is really a show that you will know very quickly if you like or hate it. It definitely uses a serial storytelling format in which the episodes build on each other and more of the story is revealed as the season goes along. It does have some swearing, sexual content, drug use, and violence in it, so it is definitely not a family-friendly show. When the show aired on the USA network, the word "fuck" was mostly bleeped out but in the blu-rays (and presumably the DVDs too) it is not.  One interesting aspect of the show is that it is set in the real world as it uses video clips from actual events and utilized deep fake technology to have real-world leaders, specifically President Obama comment on the events in the show. I definitely put it in one of my best series of the 2010s along with series like Breaking Bad and The Americans. If you have not seen the show and are looking for a good dramatic series, this is definitely worth watching.