First thoughts on Mr Robot season 2

The first season of Mr. Robot was about as pleasant a surprise as you’ll ever see on television. Maybe “pleasant” isn’t the right word. I mean, the whole thing was about a mentally disturbed man’s quest for anarchy, and at one point a character committed suicide during a live television broadcast. But what I mean — and this is a point I’ve made many times, and will continue making until it stops being incredible to me — is that Mr. Robot was a show on the USA network that was literally called “Mr. Robot.” It had no right to be as good as it was. If history had taught us anything, it should have been, like, a show about a handsome robot who solved mysteries at or near the beach while wearing sunglasses and a series of brightly colored dress shirts. Across Mr. Robot's first hiatus, those concerns felt more amplified than normal. No, Rami Malek wasn't likely to become less riveting in his second go-around as damaged computer genius Elliot Alderson. And the show's story of Elliot's vigilante hacker group fsociety trying to retake control of a broken world feels even more resonant in light of all the politicial, social, and financial insanity that's gripped our own world in the 10 months since season 1 ended. But at the same time, Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail was new to television, and while he had blended up pieces of a half-dozen movies and TV shows (most notably Fight Club) into something that blew the cobwebs off their respective cliches, the show was the rare Peak TV drama more interesting for its directing than its writing, and now Esmail was planning to pull a Soderbergh and direct every episode of the second season despite a scant resume in that area? And though Esmail insists that he wanted the audience to realize before Elliot did that the title character, played by Christian Slater, was just a Tyler Durden-esque alternate personality encouraging Elliot's most anarchic impulses, the question of what was and wasn't real fueled a lot of discussion about the show in the first season. Those 10 episodes were often riveting, but in a very precarious way suggesting things could crumble in an instant.