The first episode of what has to be the best science-fiction TV show since Battlestar Galactica, Mr. Robot, aired last night. Of course, it faced this one big question: Will the second season be as good as the first? Sadly, the first episode did not provide an answer to that question. It was much too confusing to offer a clear direction or lines of potential development. But it was a pleasure to watch and hear; indeed, at certain moments it was much less a TV show and more a music video.
But here is where we are (spoiler alert): A bank that's too big to fail, Bank of E (a division of the Manhattan-based zaibatsu E Corp), has been hacked and its records deleted. This has brought confusion to the financial markets, confusion to everyday life, and confusion to the mind of the show's star, and the leader of fsociety, Elliot Alderson. (Fsociety is a team of hackers that resembles in many ways the global association of hacktivists in our world called Anonymous.) One of the show's main villains, former E Corp executive, Tyrell Wellick (his first name references the name of the biotech corporation that rules the world of Blade Runner, Tyrell Corporation) is still missing. At the end of season one, he captured Elliot, learned of fsociety's plot to hack and destroy E Corp, executed the plan while Elliot was passed out in his SUV, and disappeared. Elliot woke up to a different world.
In this new world (the world of episode one), Elliot is trying clear his mind (one bullet at a time) and find Tyrell. In this new world, a revolution has happened, but everything is far from settled. Is this new, debt-free world better or worse than the one oppressed by Wall Street? There are hints here and there (for example, an ugly motivational speech is delivered by a member of fsociety, Darlene, to new recruits) that fsociety might have opened the gates of another hell. This one looks very much like the The Reign of Terror of the French Revolution.
But is it even possible for a form of popular entertainment to imagine life after capitalism in a positive way? This is the question at the back of my mind, and one that will keep me watching this series. In the TV show Dark Angel (2000-2002), the destruction of the banking system by cyber-terrorists transforms the richest country in the world, the US, into a "third-world country." What will fsociety's action (the deletion of trillions of dollars of debt) do to the US? What will the country become? Is this even a revolution? Is it just disruption? I leave you with the words of America's leading Marxist critic Fredric Jameson: "...[I]t is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism."
