Explaining my Reservations About the Season 3 Finale
I had never written a post critical of Mr. Robot before I wrote my recap of last week’s finale.
So, what went wrong? Why was I so critical? Here are my four complaints (it feels strange even typing that).
Changing The Rules of the Game
I have often characterized what makes Mr. Robot so unique is its co-productive process.
During episodes of Mr. Robot, the audience is invited to be an active participant in what, in seems to be an interactive set of games that operate using a very specific set of rules.
Sam Esmail and his crew set up one game for the fans who were hackers and cryptographers (the ARG game) and another game for the rest of us (figuring out and predicting what would happen on the show).
The rules of the “plot” game are pretty simple:
Sam implicitly promises that all of the elements necessary to uncover future events are accessible to every person watching Mr. Robot but he makes the game hard by continuously challenging us with distractions, character peculiarities, slight of hand, and surrealism.
If we figure out future events in advance of his reveals we win and if we don’t figure it out in advance of his reveals we lose.
Pretty simple, right?
I have used this understanding of the rules to discover the “Ray’s computer problem” Season 2 and to predict the 71 buildings attack (a month in advance) during Season 3.
But, when we learned that Edward had, in fact, not pushed a young Elliot Alderson out of his own bedroom window I, for the first time, felt entirely unmoored.
Don’t get me wrong, Sam provided plenty of clues that Edward did not push Elliot out of the window (there was a TON of evidence this could be true and this was a long-running theory on Reddit).
My complaint was that Sam provided NO alternative explanation for Elliot’s Dissociative Identity Disorder or for his anger towards his father Edward (who now has been restored to his original status as a great Father/Saint).
Sam also provided no alternative explanation for why Mr. Robot (Elliot’s darker Alter) wears Edward’s face.
People don’t catch Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) like they would a cold,
DID is usually foregrounded by trauma, most often in childhood (which is why the window story made so much sense, kid who loves his father deeply is betrayed by him in a moment of anger and dissolves his trust in both his father and in the universe).
A few readers of my recaps suggested that Elliot could have been traumatized by his father’s diagnosis and by his anger at E-Corp for “killing” his father.
I agree that these were traumatic events but not the kind of trauma that causes a dissociative break.
A person suffering from DID finds themselves so emotionally incapable of coping with a traumatic event that they fragment their personality into parts and send ONLY the “part” of themselves most able to cope to deal with the traumatic event.
In other words, DID is a protective device.
In addition, while it would make sense to put Edward’s face on his “strongest” alter it would make no sense to have that alter also be the one in charge of his darkest impulses (Mr. Robot is the Dark Ops agent in the Elliot Prime ecosystem).
Last but not least, why would Edward ask for Elliot’s forgiveness in the movie theater right before his death (Writer and Tech Consultant Kor Adana confirmed that the event in the movie theater happened on the day Edward died)?
If not the window, what?
Ultimately, I have no problem with Edward being restored to goodness…What bothers me is that as hard as I try (and if you are familiar with my writing you know I take Mr. Robot very seriously) I can’t find any alternative explanation for Elliot’s traumatic break.
IMO, this breaks the established rules of our co-productive Mr. Robot game.
And, while this might seem like sour grapes, Sam himself suggested something similar during an interview with Entertainment Weekly when he suggested that injecting time-travel into a series in the third season would be inappropriate because it would, essentially break all the rules of the already established universe of the show.
I am not sure what would be the difference between breaking the rules by injecting a new backstory and breaking the rules by erasing the past (by including a new future).
Which leads me to my second concern.
Writing A Consistent Universe
My second problem with the resolution of “The Window Incident” is that I fear it signals a new approach to the writing of Mr. Robot.
My least favorite kind of Television writing is the kind where writers constantly write themselves out of the corners they paint themselves into by simply changing the rules or adding new and previously undisclosed character backstory elements (just because they can).
As great as Game of Thrones is, it has been a demonstrably WORSE show since Benioff and Weiss went off-canon and started up events that undermined a great deal of the carefully constructed logic of the characters, the mechanics of how the GOT universe worked, and the meticulously curated history of Westeros.
- How can a bunch of ice zombies pull a dead dragon out of a body of water (which they are essentially allergic to)? Oh, no problem, they carried a gigantic heavy set of chains with them as they marched across an entire continent.
- How can a leader famous for his ignorance of military tactics almost, but not quite, win a spectacular battle? No problem, just make him invent Roman Legion tactics on the fly.
- How can large numbers of troops get from one side of the world of Westeros to the other in virtually no time? Just make it happen, forget about the map and the rules. People won’t care, they just love the spectacle.
I don’t think all television writing has to be grounded in a universe that I immediately recognize or fully understand but I do think that once the rules of a television universe (and the backstory of its characters) has been filled in that the writers have an obligation to stay true to the characters, situations, and backstories that formed the foundation of that universe.
Mr. Robot’s entire story was spawned by and was grounded in two originating events:
1). Elliot’s anger towards Edward for pushing him out of his bedroom window
2) The death of Edward Alderson and Emily Moss as a result of working at the Washington Township Facility (WTF).
Reversing either of these without providing any meaningful explanation or already-existing alternative originating event (hiding in plain sight) signals some really troubling things to me.
It is not a good sign when central tenets of the motivations of your main characters are erased In Toto without meaningful explanation.
My worst fear is that Mr. Robot turns into a show that just makes things up as they go along and write themselves out of every corner too conveniently like “Suits” or like virtually any show on CBS.
No Payoff?
One of the very first things that happened in Season 3 was the disclosure of the particle accelerator inside the Washington Township facility (WTF) and the callback to the discussion between Angela Moss and ‘whiterose’ during Season 2.
We now know that ‘whiterose’ is moving the WTF to the DR Congo (with Elliot’s coerced assistance) and we know that ‘whiterose’ wants to do something with either time travel of with parallel universes or both.
But neither of these pieces of information is a very big payout considering they had ten episodes to add some shade and anticipation to the plans of ‘whiterose’ and the Dark Army.
In other words, No Duh!
We were pretty sure ‘whiterose’ was serious about “hacking time” well over a year before this season started.
I am not saying we needed to see ‘whiterose’ whole plan come to fruition but we should have gotten a TON more hints about what they were up to (this kind of anticipation is what keeps us interested over the 42 weeks before we see the premiere of Season 4).
I have historically been vociferously opposed to the Sci-fi theories of Mr. Robot but even I think it is kind of BS to start your season off teasing the particle accelerator and then rarely mentioning it again for all of Season 3.
And there is also this…
We still have no idea what the Dark Army wants at the end of this odd rainbow.
What are they fighting for? Why would people literally be willing to shoot themselves in the head rather than sacrifice the Dark Army’s ultimate goals?
We have finished 30 episodes of Mr. Robot and we still have no idea what is motivating the villains (aside from that ‘whiterose’ wants to hack time).
The Dark Army were enthusiastic participants in collapsing the world economy (probably hurting millions or billions of people) and of purposefully killing over 3,000 people in the 71 buildings attack. We know they are setting up Iran for war with the United States and we know they have purposefully killed Trenton and Mobley in pursuit of this goal.
But WHY?
This is what we have so far:
- ‘whiterose’ is a mistress of time and she wants to ‘hack time’
- War is good for business
- ‘Whiterose’ is pissy at Phillip Price
Great…As fascinating as these characters are, is that really enough mana to keep sustaining the fan base? Throwing Fernando Vera out there just isn’t enough to alleviate my irritation over the lack of additional information about the Dark Army.
Why Is Elliot Still Alive?
Batman vs. Superman “The Dawn of Justice” may not have been a very good movie but it asked an important question:
How can you leave someone who is the only ongoing and omnipresent existential threat to everything you believe in continue to exist?
In the Mr. Robot version of this scenario, Superman is Elliot Alderson and it has been demonstrated time and again that the ONLY person maybe on the face of planet earth that poses a real threat to the Dark Army (Batman) is him.
Yes, Elliot helped them figure out how to implement 5/9 and stage 2.
Yes, Elliot just helped them figure out how to move the Washington Township Facility materials to the DR Congo (in about 12 seconds when the entire nation of Dark Army hackers was making no progress).
But Elliot also just hacked the Dark Army network and learned a ton of their secrets.
Did hacking the Dark Army network pose an existential threat to the Dark Army? Maybe not. But there is only one person who could have done it and who might be able to use that information to figure out how to take them down.
Why in the world would they leave him alive?
Just because he might solve problems for them later?
I mean at least you would think they would give him a version of the lecture Irving gave Dom after killing Santiago?
Personally, I would have thought that they would just put Darlene in great pain or risk of death and made him fix the WTF problem and then kill them both.
I don’t mean to be cold-blooded at all.
I don’t want Elliot (or Darlene) to die, but that made ZERO f’n sense from any strategic perspective and yes I totally get that ‘whiterose’ doesn’t always follow conventional notions of “logic.”
But come on…dude just figured out how to wrong-foot your entire organization and you had NO idea it even happened until he told you.
There were a million ways that they could have written things from when Irving found Elliot (and Mr. Robot) in Santiago’s office and I feel like this one made the least strategic sense to me.
Mea Culpa
I am sorry for being so negative. I love Mr. Robot, I hope I am wrong and I am very willing to be proven wrong.
On the whole, I loved Season 3 and am very much looking forward to Season 4, I just don’t like the shape of some of the storm clouds I see brewing on the horizon.
Of course, some of this might just be lingering PTSD from season 6 and 7 of GOT’s
Hope everyone in Mr. Robot nation has a wonderful holiday season!
Josh is a blogger and freelance writer. Please consider following him on Twitter, throwing a tip into his hat on Patreon, or adding his blog OnPirateSatellite to your feeds.
