Earlier this year, I made my
argument that Mr. Robot deserves to
be ranked in the halls of some of the greatest TV series ever made. And in the
final season, Sam Esmail went to great lengths to prove that they were not
going to end this series by going through the motions. Some of the greatest
episodes they ever did – not just for the series, but for the entire decade –
have been done this last season, as if to challenge even the high standards
they’ve already established. There was ‘method not allowed’, an episode which
was done almost entirely without spoken dialogue, there was ‘Proxy Authentication
Required’ a literal five act drama, which started as a hostage situation
between Eliot and Vera, the thug who caused so much trouble for Eliot in Season
1, involved a confrontation with Mr. Robot, and in what was the most bizarre
therapy session in history had Eliot and his therapist Kirsten discuss a
problem he’d been denying all his life – that his father had spent his
childhood sexually molesting him. While all this was going on Eliot and Darlene
managed their final confrontation with White Rose, managed to bring her down,
all the while going through a body count so high, even the writers of Game of Thrones would be impressed.
But none of this would mean
anything unless the final episode managed to work. In this decade alone we’ve
seen the final episode cause an entire series to sink or swim. It worked like
gangbusters for Breaking Bad and The Americans, it caused mass confusion
when it came to Mad Men, and it
absolutely sunk Game of Thrones, even
though the Emmys refused to acknowledge it. And I’ll admit, I had my doubts
going into the first part of the finale.
For almost the entire series, White
Rose has been obsessed with the construction of ‘her machine’, something that
has only been discussed in the vaguest of terms – that it would create a ‘better
world’. When Eliot had his final meeting with White Rose, she seemed utterly
determined to destroy this world to bring about her vision, forcing in her
final act, to make Eliot bring about her dream. In the last fifteen minutes of
‘Exit’, it seemed to work as Eliot was brought to what seemed to be an
alternate universe where everything was perfect. He and his father loved each
other. He was the head of AllSafe which had just landed the ‘FCorp’ account
headed by Tyrell Wellick. And he was finally about to marry Angela, the love of
his life. The constant viewer must have had vision of the ‘flashsideways’ that
to do this day has divided the world was to whether or not in ruined everything
that was good about Lost. I certainly
felt that way. Until the episode ended with Eliot in the same room with… Eliot.
Slowly, I began to regain
confidence. It wasn’t easy through much of the first part of the series finale,
where ‘our’ Eliot walked through Washington
Township, his childhood
home, and saw that his parents were still alive. That his mother, who had been
considered a cruel woman though we never saw her other than flashbacks, was a
warm and loving woman. He went to Angela’s apartment, and saw her parents –
including Philip Price, now openly Angela’s father – treating him with warmth.
But all through the episode, Eliot couldn’t realistically believe it, sure
something was wrong. Eventually, he performed his final hack – on himself – and
found out this Eliot imagined himself
a vigilante hacker. Then when the two confronted each other, one of the tremors
that had been shaking this world occurred, and Eliot used it as an occasion to
murder the one of this world. I began to regain confidence that Esmail knew
what he was doing.
It still was shaky – Eliot was
determined to marry Angela, even though Mr. Robot kept trying to tell him he
couldn’t do it. And I was still a little antsy when Eliot’s murder was
discovered by Dom DiPerro – as a cop in this world. Even when Eliot arrived at
his wedding, and Mr. Robot tried to tell him the machine hadn’t work, and that
he’d kept him in a loop, I wasn’t entirely confident that Esmail was going to
tie this together. I had forgotten that so much of this series had never
entirely been about a dystopian vision of future – it was about Eliot Alderson.
And then, it was resolved in a way
that was true to everything we’d learned about him. We knew that Eliot was
dealing with DID since Season 1 - the revelation that Mr. Robot was an
alternate personality of his was one of the first big reveals of this series.
But now, we got a picture of just how extensive this disorder was. We knew that there was a child personality
that had emerged to deal with the molestation he suffered. And that his mother
had been an alternate personality as well. But the final revelation came that
the man we’d spent the entire series watching was not the real Eliot. Rather,
he was an alternate personality who had been developed to bring about the world
that the real one could never accept.
I imagine a lot of viewers were
having doubts as to whether all of this was a delusion of Eliot’s - another possibility that could’ve destroyed
the series as effectively as the alternate universe. Esmail avoided this trap
as well, by not having Darlene be a part of the alternate world at all. When
Eliot regained consciousness in a hospital, Darlene was there, telling Eliot
that everything he – and the viewer - had been through was real, and she had
lived through it all. When Eliot confessed that he was an alternate personality
himself, Darlene admitted she had always known. She realized when Eliot hadn’t
recognized her as his sister that something was wrong, but had gone along with
so much of the charade, partly to bond with Eliot and partly out of guilt for
not being able to help him when he was a child.
And in the final minutes, we
realized who the ‘friend’ was who the vigilante had been talking to – the Eliot
he had spent the entire series trapping in his own mind. The final monologue
was a bit cheesy, but it made up for the fact that we were seeing something far
more important – Eliot was accepting his condition and allowing his real self
to emerge into the world. Perhaps our
only complaint was that we never got a clear picture of the ‘real’ Eliot
Alderson, but in a way, that was right. Mr. Robot had always been the story of
the Eliot we knew, not the real one. And his final sacrifice made his act of
saving the world somehow less important than what he was doing now.
Mr.
Robot truly nailed the ending, like Jane
The Virgin did earlier this year and The
Americans did the year before that. It managed to nail a truly dystopian
vision, and yet somehow in the last few episodes, become a story of hope and
reclamation. Maybe as horrible as things can be – and the world that Mr. Robot created could make series like
The Handmaid’s Tale seem positively
chipper - there is hope in the action of
human beings. It can be as large as working together to bring down the ‘top one
percent of the top one percent’ or as small as giving up your inner darkness so
that someone whose been through so much pain can find whatever happiness he can
in a broken world. Mr. Robot made
clear that both of these decisions hold equal value, and that is something that
is well worth learning.
And regardless what you think of
the ending – and at the moment, it has a rating up there with the last episode
of The Americans, so it clearly
landed better – the triumphs of Mr.
Robot, the way that it shifted with form, visuals and combined them with
brilliant character development and writing demonstrate just how utterly banal
the world of shows like Game of Thrones was
when it came to deal with good and evil. The Emmys will have one more chance to
make it right to a show that, with a few exceptions, it basically shafted,
though already there are a group of formidable contenders, and 2020 has not
even begun yet. Suffice to say, Mr. Robot
was a great show. Please tell me you saw it too.
My score: 5 stars/
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