My dad told me he watched some of this years back and thought it was good. I remember getting it recommended to me, but I had so much other stuff going on like “maintaining crippling sleep deprivation because of my decision to have a child” to get around to it.
Years later, a love of Severance brings me here. If I like that show, they say, I’ll like this show. Well, since I really, REALLY liked that show, then I wanna really, REALLY like another show too! Might as well be this show!
Etc.
The Premise
Meet the loveable and cuddly Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), a bug-eyed young man who looks 100x more like Freddie Mercury than some kid named “Elliot Alderson”. Elliot works at a place called Allsafe as part of the cybersecurity division. His favorite pastime is crushing up morphine and snorting it, so one can imagine that he spends most of his waking hours in a haze of paranoia and delusion. And anxiety and depression and hallucinations. He seems fun to be around, for sure. And people actually care about him, which goes against all the evidence displayed before me.
Get up, punk! You’ve got some hacking to do!
Elliot gets recruited by a group of rogue hackers known as “fsociety”, lead by Mr. Robot (Christian Slater). They aim to take down the huge conglomerate E Corp (which Elliot refers to as “Evil Corp”) and cancel all debts across the world. E Corp is also Allsafe’s biggest client, so shit gets rather sticky.
While he’s trying to do his thing, there are other players in the game. Some are sympathetic, like Darlene (Carly Chaikin), a fellow fsociety hacker, or Angela (Portia Doubleday), a fellow Allfase employee. Some are antagonistic, like Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallström), the Senior Vice President of Technology at E Corp who is willing to do anything (quite literally) to advance his position in the company.
OH YEAH, AND THINGS MIGHT NOT BE WHAT THEY SEEM! SPOILERS ABOUND, NIMRODS!
Wait’ll hear about the twist, kid! You’ll be really mad at me then!
My Half-Baked Thoughts
After a brief obsession and two watches through Season 1 of AppleTV+’s Severance, my brain craved something similar. The trustworthy internet brought me to Mr. Robot, which is not even close to the same show at all! In fact, I felt ripped off within about three episodes into the season. What the hell was this show about twitchy twentysomethings and their drug addictions and their work addictions and their weird, anti-social leanings? What the hell is all this constant technobabble that means about as much to me as Geordie LaForge going off about graviton polarity distorters that are causing abnormalities in the molecular auxiliary regulator? This isn’t raising in me any existential or morality questions! Boo and hiss!
If you breathe one more word about flux capacitors I will cut you like bread, son.
OK, well there are some morality questions such as “should I kill the wife of the guy that gets promoted to Chief Technology Officer” (some will say “no” to this, but it turns out that there are no other options apparently). The answers to these questions are, in my opinion, very cut and dry. It doesn’t leave much room for ambiguity.
The MEAT of the show is about Elliot’s various mental problems and his giant-eyeballed creepiness. In all honesty, this guy is so off-putting that I don’t understand why all these people are actually friends with him! His boss is like “you’re wonderful at your job” and Elliot answers with something like “I don’t think I want you to tell me that.” The guy is weird is alls I’m sayin’. But since this guy is as about an unreliable narrator as you can get, and he has some hardcore hallucinations, not to mention a morphine addiction, you learn as you course through the episodes that everything from Elliot’s point of view needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
You’ve come a long way from blowing yourself up in Heathers, Bad Boy.
With all that being said, it never even crossed my mind that Elliot was Mr. Robot himself until the reveal. For one thing, I was too fixated on Christian Slater downplaying his “hey theeeerrree, I’m a bush league Jack Nicholson, and I’m the coooool guy of the show.” For another thing, once it was revealed that Mr. Robot was Elliot’s dead dad I was spending a lot of my brain energy on how a white-ass dude like Christian Slater could be related in any way to Egyptian-ass Rami Malek. How funny is that shit? This dude played notorious non-white Freddie Mercury and now he’s Christian Slater’s son! Hilarious!
Performances were decent, with most of my attention on Martin Wallström as Tyrell Wellick. The dude knows how express what I’m going to call “controlled chaos”. The dude is deranged as hell and yet he’s able to maintain a thoughtful placidity, like a true sociopath. Only occasionally does he fucking lose his shit, like slamming and breaking stuff in his house out of anger. Or beating up the homeless! Tyrell is the most compelling character, and although his fate is unknown at the end of the season, I very much hope that his role in Season 2 is just as sizeable! Good looking guy, too. He reminds me of an uglier version of me! Ha!
Just another domestic dispute in the Wellick household. Nothing to see here, people.
I’m in no way doing a re-watch of Season 1. Maybe sometime down the line if I end up completely falling in love with the whole series (I won’t). With the knowledge that Elliot is Mr. Robot IN THE FLESH, I do wonder about the delicious breadcrumb trail they lay out that a second run-through would reveal. Does Elliot, at some point, throw up his hands and yell “I’M MR. ROBOT!”, because that would’ve been a large clue that I overlooked.
Worth the Watch?
I’m going to say yes, mostly because there are payoffs that make the story more interesting than the whole LET’S CRACK THE WAVEBAND INTERFRAME AND INPUT A PROXY ROOTKIT INTO THE WINSOCK SERVER stuff that takes up a lot of Elliot’s internal monologue. I will watch Season 2, I’ll say that much, although I’m not clamoring to do so. I just don’t know what they’ll end up doing except maybe make Elliot addicted to black tar heroin and we get to see him flop around like a fish for 40 minutes of each episode.
My face after finishing Season 1.
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