I also have to admit that I am writing these lines with the spirit of a betrayed lover. Therefore, to explain my feelings, I have to justify both the love and the betrayal.
The love was coming from season 1. I am not afraid to say that Mr. Robot (with Sense8 a close second) was the best show of the past year for the concept, the message and, most of all, the execution. The structure of the narration was nearly perfect, moving the plot at every given episode without wasting any time: every single storyline matters in the big picture of the full season. I can spend many words on the convincing acting or the amazing camera work, or on how much I loved the soundtrack (and how they brutally interrupt it to let a scene suddenly begin). The psychological drama was in a sense hidden in the frame of the plot before revealing itself in that eighth episode and then explode in the amazing next one.
You knew it all along, didn't you?
It is thus clear that living up to that level is difficult for any show. If you try to look at it with a cold heart, you will notice that you have enjoyed a show that is basically a montage of different movies. The high skill of the creators was lying precisely in feeding us something that we knew all along and yet entirely different and exciting. For this reason, I look at the first season as a miracle of TV Shows.
However, considering my high expectations, season 2 turned out to be such a mess on almost every good aspect of the previous one. I can't help to consider this a betrayal.
First of all, the season suffers from a problem sadly common to many many movie sequels/prequels: a good part of it is dedicated to explaining the previous season. Such explanations, like the episode that opens up with a flashback to the moment when they decided to do the hack, do not add anything to the story and, therefore, have no reason to be there. In a season that, as we will see in a moment, has to explore so many storylines, adding unnecessary details to something that already happened makes the narration cumbersome and confusing.
It appears clear that the plots to be explored are 4:
First of all, the season suffers from a problem sadly common to many many movie sequels/prequels: a good part of it is dedicated to explaining the previous season. Such explanations, like the episode that opens up with a flashback to the moment when they decided to do the hack, do not add anything to the story and, therefore, have no reason to be there. In a season that, as we will see in a moment, has to explore so many storylines, adding unnecessary details to something that already happened makes the narration cumbersome and confusing.
It appears clear that the plots to be explored are 4:
- How they follow up the attack
- How they escape to the FBI
- What the Dark Army and WhiteRose have in mind
- What's the next move of the E-Corp
These were the plots to be developed and to some extent they were. My problem is in those useless flashbacks and in what surrounds them. One plot above all: Joanna, Tyrell Wellick's wife. At the beginning of the season, she is covering something up about the hack by paying and then killing (s02e05) the guy that woke up Elliot at the end of the previous season (s01e10). Then she is struggling to maintain a clandestine relationship with the boring but beautiful guy that punches like a little girl. Her continuous presence on screen is not justified by the events, I waited and waited to see if she got eventually relevant, but no. She receives calls for the entire season, that would be interesting if they were coming from Tyrell; except they were coming from another insignificant character! Her presence just slows down the stories and it is, in the big picture, irrelevant.
One may argue that it will be relevant in the next season so they, so to speak, kept her character warm for the viewers. But this is a betrayal of the first season's approach where nothing was there only to set up a sequel.
Another element of confusion is the character of Angela. She is popping out everywhere in the story, in every subplot. She does everything, she even knows how to contact Tyrell and even WhiteRose is surprised of her. Her character takes so many spins and turns along the season to lose any identity: she is just what is needed to move the plot along, the Angela ex machina.
We can all agree that the opening is very dense of plots to be wrapped together, reminders of what happened a year ago, and Elliot descending to madness. Thus I now justify the difficulties that brought Sam Esmail to apologize on twitter. However, after episode 5, the narration is confusing, jumping from character to character without a specific logic. Sometimes the authors interrupt one plot for 1 or even 2 episodes, moving our attention somewhere else. This can be a strategy to transmit the chaotic state of mind of the protagonist, but the effect is rather making the viewer less involved in what was happening on the screen.
One may argue that it will be relevant in the next season so they, so to speak, kept her character warm for the viewers. But this is a betrayal of the first season's approach where nothing was there only to set up a sequel.
Another element of confusion is the character of Angela. She is popping out everywhere in the story, in every subplot. She does everything, she even knows how to contact Tyrell and even WhiteRose is surprised of her. Her character takes so many spins and turns along the season to lose any identity: she is just what is needed to move the plot along, the Angela ex machina.
Control can sometimes be an illusion, but sometimes you need illusion to gain control.The first episodes were mostly dedicated to exploring the psychological drama of the main character, Elliot. This was done perfectly, with him fighting his alter ego and then understanding how to live with it (except falling in another illusion of control). I started to appreciate that only during my second viewing, especially once that I was sure what was the end of the mentioned illusion. It is precisely this difficulty in being involved in this new season that made me focus on another sloppy aspect of the show.
We can all agree that the opening is very dense of plots to be wrapped together, reminders of what happened a year ago, and Elliot descending to madness. Thus I now justify the difficulties that brought Sam Esmail to apologize on twitter. However, after episode 5, the narration is confusing, jumping from character to character without a specific logic. Sometimes the authors interrupt one plot for 1 or even 2 episodes, moving our attention somewhere else. This can be a strategy to transmit the chaotic state of mind of the protagonist, but the effect is rather making the viewer less involved in what was happening on the screen.
I could surely mention a few great scenes or even great episodes, from now and then. I surely appreciated the bold experiment of episode 6, where Elliot finds himself living in an illusory world based on the Tv Show Alf, a situation heavily recalling a scene from Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers that is one of my favorite movies. But if I have to evaluate the season in its entirety, Mr. Robot falls short even if I do not consider my high expectations.
You realize that the episodes that effectively develop the plots listed above are less than 5. In a 12 episodes season long, this is a failure at the level of Game of Thrones. The powerfulness of the show was to create a cluster of episodes where everything ultimately mattered and contributed to the final result. The plot was interesting and loaded with complexity by itself, the narration was then direct because further complications weren't needed. Here we just have another show trying to drown itself in the storytelling. The complexity is now coming from a cumbersome narration rather than from the plot itself.
The entire post could have been shorter, containing the single thoughts that surprised me at the end of season 2: I didn't want to find out immediately what happens next. This is how bad it was. And we can only feel sorry about that because we have probably lost a gem.
The entire post could have been shorter, containing the single thoughts that surprised me at the end of season 2: I didn't want to find out immediately what happens next. This is how bad it was. And we can only feel sorry about that because we have probably lost a gem.
No comments:
Post a Comment