I stayed up too late last night watching the Mr. Robot season two premiere, and I'm still turning it over in my head this morning, which is usually a good sign for a show that could've just coasted on last year's twist.
Quick context if you somehow missed season one: it's the USA Network show about Elliot Alderson, a security engineer with a fsociety mask and a serious moral crisis about the banks he's supposed to be protecting. Last night was actually two episodes back to back, "eps2.0_unm4sk-pt1.tc" and part 2, and USA burned almost two full hours on it starting at 10pm. I don't have cable anymore (haven't since 2014, and no I'm not going back) so I watched it the next morning through the USA app on my laptop, which decided halfway through to buffer at the worst possible moment and made my ancient MacBook's fan scream like it was rendering a Pixar film instead of streaming 1080p video.
What I actually want to talk about is the hacking. Every show that touches computers eventually does the thing where someone types nonsense really fast and a progress bar says "ACCESS GRANTED" in green Courier New, and I've made my peace with never getting a show that gets it exactly right. But Mr. Robot keeps clearing a bar almost nothing else even attempts. The terminal windows on screen aren't prop gibberish, theyre actual tool output, actual syntax, things a person who's spent time in a shell would recognize instead of wince at. I caught what looked like real Kali Linux tooling in a background shot last night and it made me ridiculously happy in a way that's probably not healthy for a Wednesday morning.
Christian Slater is still doing a lot of heavy lifting as the Mr. Robot character, and I'll be honest, part of me wishes the show trusted its quieter moments more instead of leaning on him for exposition every time the plot needs to move. Rami Malek carries the show regardless. The way he does silence is more unsettling than half the jump scares on television right now.
Here's the aside I can't not mention: this premiere is happening in the exact same week that Pokemon Go has apparently eaten the entire internet's attention span. My Twitter feed last night was maybe 10% people discussing the show and 90% people complaining about the tracking radar bug where your Pokemon's footstep count just stopped updating, so now nobody has any idea if the thing they're chasing is 100 feet away or three blocks. Kind of a funny split screen moment for tech culture this week: one half of everyone's phone screen is a scavenger hunt game that mostly works by accident, and the other half is a prestige drama about how fragile and hackable all our infrastructure actually is. Feels like there's a thesis in there somewhere but I'm not going to force it before I've had coffee.
Anyway, if you dropped off Mr. Robot after the season one finale because it felt like it was trying to out-twist itself, I'd say give the premiere a shot. It's slower than I expected, almost deliberately so, like the writers know they spent all of last season sprinting and want to make you sit in the aftermath for a while before the next thing goes wrong. Whether that patience pays off is anyone's guess three episodes from now, but for a Wednesday night premiere it did the one thing a lot of TV about hackers completely fails to do: it made me trust that the people writing it know what a shell prompt is for.
Going to go make actual coffee now. The instant stuff I had at 1am watching this doesn't count.