For those who have been watching Mr. Robot, a TV show about a hacker who, with the help of a motley crew, deletes the debt records of a massive bank owned by the even more massive E Corp. This action destabilizes the world's financial markets and leaves everyone wondering what happens next. Will capitalism recover from this big blow? Will a new society rise from the ruins of the old one? And, finally, will the show's hero, Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), find his way out of the maze of mental illness? The premiere of the show's second season only threw lots of balls into the air. The second episode of the second season "eps2.1_k3rnel-pan1c.ksd" continued to throw balls into the air, but not as many as before. Things are still nutty, but three big and definite things happened.
(Spoiler Alert). Big thing number one, Romero (Ron Cephas Jones), a member of the team of hackers, fsociety, led by Elliot, is found dead at his mother's apartment. Who killed him and why? Two, Angela Moss (Portia Doubleday), a close/childhood friend of Elliot, gets seriously mind-fucked by the CEO of E Corp, Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer). Will she go over to the dark side? Three, an FBI agent, Dominique DiPierro (played by the daughter of Meryl Streep, Grace Gummer), begins to investigate fsociety and actually makes some progress. She finds their headquarters in Coney Island.
As for the developments concerning Elliot, they are still very much vague. When ever we're in his world, it is hard to tell what's real and what's not. Is he speaking to an actual person or persons? Is that black guy with the compact afro and the waggy dog a figment of his imagination? Are the men in that dark room in his head or in a church? With episode two, these doubts start to lose their poetry and start to become tiresome. We are now in need of some answers, some hard developments, some separation between what is going on Elliot's (hacked?) head and what's happening outside of it.
As for life after capitalism—a subject that's dear to me, a Benjaminian Marxist—episode two had nothing to really say about that. People in the post-debt world are still buying things, still going to bars, still watching TV, still showing up to work. It seems as if nothing has really changed about this society. Or has it? One hopes to see some developments along these lines next week.
