“Mr. Robot” is one of the most unusual (and I would say best) shows on television, so it only makes sense that the series finale would have most people either sobbing profusely while proclaiming “this is perfect” or scratching their heads saying “What the fuck was that?”
Creator Sam Esmail has always been more than willing to take huge risks. Some of those pay-off extremely well (an episode this season that contained no dialogue could’ve been gimmicky but was one of the year’s best), and sometimes they don’t. [Season 2 was so divisive that Mr. Robot lost about half its audience and never regained a place in the mainstream conversation–with nearly all critics overlooking the superb third season when making their “Best Of” lists that year.]
Spoilers for the finale beneath this point…
This won’t be a straightforward recap mostly because I’m not sure I’m capable of describing events for this strange, singular, challenging, excellent series. But I’ll just say my guess for what was going on was very much wrong…which was a little disappointing.
When the two-hour series finale began in the same place as the penultimate episode ended—with the “Elliot” we know (or think we know) strolling through a bizarrely “perfect” world where his parents aren’t scum, his job is stable, his friends aren’t imaginary, and Angela is not only alive but about to marry him—I thought there was surely only one explanation.
Since “Mr. Robot” isn’t full-on science fiction, it seemed unlikely the series finale would embrace actual alternate dimensions. Whiterose’s machine had not been properly explained–but it looked an awful lot like a Large Hadron Collider, and her talk of alternate, more perfect realities made a lot of people think it was designed to open up wormholes in the multiverse or to a dimension that made a lot more sense than this one. But would a drama series take a sharp turn towards science-fiction in its final episode?
I always thought the machine was something more like a benign version of The Matrix, with digital copies of people’s consciousness “downloaded” there to exist as unknowing avatars in a virtual world they had more control over. [And since this is actually being done, it wouldn’t totally be outside the realm of plausibility.]
The first hour of the series finale sure seemed to tilt in that direction, with the “real,” black hoodie-clad Elliot perhaps being the virus he uploaded to the machine.
In that case, the second hour would be him choosing whether or not he belonged in that world, and if he would destroy it. It would be a pretty awesome and fitting ending for a series like “Mr. Robot” (that is largely about the role of technology in our lives) to debate its core themes of digital privacy (people don’t give consent for their digital consciousness to exist in Whiterose’s machine), and technical oppression masquerading as faux-utopian technical innovation in such an allegorical way.
Would Elliot realize that his digital doppelgänger really is the best version of himself and decide to delete himself so this new utopia could thrive? Or would he take a more New Testament-bent and decide that this is a false idol (a false reality) that he needed to destroy? Or would he realize that no reality is truly false as long as you can experience it (like his season 2 head trip that sure felt real)?
This would’ve been a fascinating, mind-bending end to the series, but Esmail instead chose a second hour that largely centered on realities created by mental illness. Sure, this is something that is related to our technological dependence on false realities but also something that wasn’t really introduced until the end of the first season and sometimes felt like an overly-abstract slog during the series’s weakest stretches.
It turns out that the “Real Elliot” we’ve gotten to know isn’t real at all, but another personality known as The Mastermind who’s been keeping the actual Elliot in a separate, submerged dream state (similar to a coma) and that’s what we were actually experiencing instead of Whiterose’s machine.
So…that would most likely mean all the events of the series were fake since they always seemed a tad hyper-real and maybe The Mastermind is just Elliot’s unexpressed wish for greatness right? No, apparently the events of the series were real, just not the main character–who himself was eventually aware that he was splitting time with an idolized version of his dad Mr. Robot (Christian Slater).
This feels a little bit like Esmail wanting to have his cake and eat it too. “The events of the series–in which a lone hacker brought down The Dark Army, China’s Minister of State Security, the biggest corporation in the world, and a large group of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful plutocrats while being pursued by various psychopaths are real…but he himself is an alternate personality…at first not aware, but then aware of other personalities and childhood traumas.” That seems like a tall order for an alternate personality; not since “Fight Club” has one been so busy.
It may especially feel like “having your cake and eating it too” to have our main character(s) survive certain death at a malfunctioning nuclear power plant. And also strains credibility that Christian Slater’s Mr. Robot has been aware of this the whole time, but didn’t seem interested in saving the “real Elliot” or even alluding to him until the series finale. [And I know I’m alone in this assessment, but I think it was also stretching to have Elliot’s father be a molester, since Elliot’s crusade against E-Corp started as revenge against the sociopathic corporation that gave his dad fatal cancer to start with.]
Plus, what will the real Elliot think when he wakes up to a world he’s dramatically helped shape, but Angela is dead? That might’ve been interesting to find out. “Hope you enjoyed your coma, you both destroyed and then saved the U.S. economy, plus averted a nuclear disaster by taking out the most powerful villain on the planet…You’re a hero and your life-long crush is dead. Surprise.”
All in all, “Mr. Robot” was such a consistently underrated and mind-blowing series (much more so than “The Americans”…which eventually did get its time in the sun), and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who would listen. I’m sure almost any “Mr. Robot” knows that same process–when you mention “Mr. Robot” and other people’s eyes glaze over, either in confusion as to what the show is or then saying “it’s too weird for me.” Roboters have chosen a lonely favorite series…
Probably, I just have sour grapes at my prediction being wrong…but I also think the series is wide-ranging enough to attract people for a variety of reasons. I personally love the more noir-based or techno-espionage elements of the series (The Dark Army, the only movie or TV show with the balls to have a Chinese villain, its realistic depiction of Big Tech being hijacked by regular, soul-dead corporations), and usually found my attention waning during the mental health-focused hours. Other people are the opposite.
That’s a mighty big tent for a niche, quality cult show on a cable network (USA) primarily known for junk food. There truly has been nothing like this show before, and that is reason enough to get involved. Grade for Series Finale: B (even if I wasn’t fully on board with some of the twists, it was a near-perfect “Twilight Zone” episode)…Grade For Season Four: A