The penultimate decade of the 20th century, the '80s, is the cultural and technological cradle for Mr. Robot, a TV series about a team of hackers, fsociety, who set into motion a world-wide revolution by attacking and destroying the computer system of a bank that's based in Manhattan and is too big to fail. The '70s has its back turned to Mr. Robot, but the '80s face it directly with movies like Tron, Blade Runner, and WarGames, and the novels of William Gibson, which established the cyberpunk genre that Mr. Robot is a part of.

And there is also the sound of the '80s. What do we hear as E Bank crashes and millions of Americans are liberated from all kinds of debt? Time Zone's "World Destruction." The track was released in 1984, and features the father of hiphop, Afrika Bambaataa, and father of punk, John Lydon, howling and rapping about nuclear Armageddon.

(SPOILER ALERT) And so it is not surprising that episode 6, "eps2.4_m4ster‐s1ave.aes," of Mr. Robot's second season takes us back to the '80s by way of a surreal sitcom that's connected with the equally surreal universe of the '80s TV show ALF (an acronym for Alien Life Form).

We are once again in the head of Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), the founder and leader of fsociety. His body is being beaten and tortured by thugs who run a black-market website, but his mind is lost in the '80s, lost in a twisted sitcom with a bad laugh track, a nutty family, and an unknown man trapped in the trunk of the family car. Some may have enjoyed this sequence (it was not short); others, like me, may have found it a bit much.

But there's no doubting the entertainment value of the second section of episode six. It involves the execution of the first part of a plan to hack the FBI’s servers. The Verge provides an excellent analysis of the technical side of this plan, which employs programs and gadgets that exist in of our science-fictional world. Episode six ends with a cliffhanger. No missing next week.