Since this is literally the third “Mr. Robot” article I’ve written today, I won’t spend too much time writing this up. I just hope you enjoyed the series as much as I did, and look forward to seeing your rankings.
The “Worst” Season: Season 2…This is a relatively easy one since season 2 lost the series more than half its audience, and nearly all of its cultural conversation. [The final season just ended, and even though it had December mostly to itself, the lack of buzz was deafening.]
Still even the “worst” season of this series is better than most. It just feels paradoxically overstuffed with gimmicky subplots (one episode trapped Elliot in a sitcom) and yet under-whelming from a narrative perspective, as not much of consequence actually happens. Some of the best aspects include the introduction of hapless, compelling FBI agent Dom (her survival of an attack in China was one of the most exciting moments in this season), and an against-type Craig Robinson is a revelation as a villainous Dark Web merchant. Grade for Season 2: B-
Season One…I know most audiences would rank this one as the “best” because it’s the least challenging and most accessible. It’s a terrific opener, but it’s really nothing compared to seasons 3 and 4. Several of the twists are easy to see coming, and I like that the season-ending hack that is supposed to bring about a transformative revolution was actually just a trap that benefitted the real villains…of course, we don’t actually know that by season one’s end, and it looks more like Philip Price is the series’s main villain. How little we knew. And you can begin to see the seeds of season two’s downfall by overstuffing the series with pointless characters (Tyrell Wellick was never great, but Joanna Wellick really felt like a time drain). Grade for Season: B+
Note: To me, seasons 3 and 4 are both strong and nearly interchangeable in quality. It was honestly a coin toss to decide the “best” one.
Season Three…One of the strongest episodes in the entire series is “Runtime Error” which looks like an Alfonso Cuaron-worthy tracking shot for the whole episode, as a building is under siege from protesters who only think they’re serving a revolution, but are just Dark Army pawns. This season dramatically ups the pace of season 2 and is built more like a 70’s paranoid thriller, to terrific effect. Not as experimental as the season before or after it, the episodes are consistently solid, and contains a great message of how revolutionaries may actually be serving the interests of unseen tyrants. [By contrast, even Elliot admits his season one self was a little naive.] Grade for Season: A
The “Best” Season: Season Four…A little bit of a sampling dish of all previous seasons: season two’s experimentation (one episode is a five act play, one episode contains no dialogue), season one’s crowd-pleasing moments, and season three’s faster pace.
It starts with a bang (the death of Angela and the near-death of Elliot) and gets wilder. Plus, this season does a good job of pairing down unnecessary or annoying characters (Joanna is dead, Tyrell barely factors, even Angela had grown tiresome), and some of my favorite experimental moments are the already-mentioned dialogue-free hour (featuring a heist that’s more exciting and realistic than the latest Hollywood thriller) and putting the series’s climax (Elliot’s master plan against the Dark Army) at episode 9 with four more to go. Grade for Season: A