Mr. Robot: 408 Request Timeout
November 26, 2019 3:50 AM - Season 4, Episode 8 - Subscribe

 
FINALLY Dom gets to kick some ass. That was quite satisfying.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 6:49 AM on November 26, 2019 [6 favorites]


Yeah, pretty much any initial menace has been worn away from anybody involved in the dark army - Janice surely posed some in-universe threat, but nothing about her really had depth. This week's episode spent like a scant few seconds in 'villain monologue' attempting to give her backstory, which of course let me know that she was about to die.

I dunno; I'm just watching this because it's a thing to watch at this point- there used to be some pretty exciting stuff always ahead, but I am not sure about that feeling returning. I mean, at this juncture, does anyone expect White Rose's ultimate plan and story to be mind-blowing?
posted by destructive cactus at 2:33 PM on November 26, 2019


On the one hand I like the continuing recovery of agency for our heroines. On the other could the torture be over already.
posted by roolya_boolya at 3:16 PM on November 26, 2019


Overall I have been a huge Mr. Robot fan; but at this point I am ready to skip right over to where we see whether the LHC that whiter0se developed when she slipped and banged her head on the sink is going to make time travel possible. And if so -
a) will Angela and Elliot get high & watch some movie that may or may not be BTTFII?
b) Maybe Shayla & Krista are doin' ok?
c) (and we never have to meet Vera, ugh)
d) Elliot will get to have that dinner in the middle of NYC, to the dulcet tones of that Green Day cover, with all his associates (speaking of which, I still have no idea who that blond woman is next to Lloyd from Allsafe)
f) Dom will get a promotion without also familial death threats
g) and Darlene maybe has a pad in the NYC where she does all her computerings
Not really sure what alternate-universe-Tyrell-&-Joanna do, but it seems like they were on a path towards unlocking business card achievements before the Knowles shenanigans.
posted by bitterkitten at 5:18 PM on November 26, 2019 [2 favorites]


From the daemons ep of S1: "Find your monster, and turn the key."
posted by queen anne's remorse at 7:30 PM on November 26, 2019 [2 favorites]


I chose to squint and interpret Deegan as a defrocked Father Dougal McGuire.
posted by detachd at 9:43 AM on November 28, 2019


I am both impressed and depressed by the writing in this episode.

Someone very close to me is an abuse survivor. Elliot‘s conversation/apology with Young Elliot was so authentic we had to turn the episode off.
posted by FallibleHuman at 9:52 AM on November 30, 2019 [4 favorites]


I sure was missing Whiter0se and the larger Dark Army story here. Like Burhanistan said; again with the torture in the apartments? I'm also still profoundly upset that the Mr. Robot writers decided to escalate to child sexual abuse this late in what used to be a hacker caper show. Some of the treatment of it was fine this episode, certainly respectfully written, but then there's also a necessity of Eliot more or less getting over it in two hours so he can play his part in the narrative. If you're going to take a show in a direction this monstrous and complicated, you gotta give it time. They don't have time.

That was a hell of a Deux Ex Hibernia with Deegan, the Lucky Irish Bastard, riding to Dom's rescue. I guess they'd sort of set that character up with a couple of short scenes of him interacting with Dom after being arrested? I don't remember them. How did she get him to watch over her family? Were he and his crew the ones clad in black who broke into her family's house (to get them to safety)? Or was that Dark Army, and the Irish gangsters managed to reverse a hostage situation with no one getting hurt? None of it really matters, the plot device is done, but I'm gonna complain about the sloppy writing.
posted by Nelson at 8:34 AM on December 6, 2019


The Irish gang was the one that went into her family’s house. I thought it was pretty clear that they killed the dark army people while they were still in their surveillance van.
posted by LizBoBiz at 9:09 AM on December 6, 2019 [1 favorite]


I guess they'd sort of set that character up with a couple of short scenes of him interacting with Dom after being arrested?

dom gets a text from her partner that the guy got off on a technicality in the previous episode (or the one before that, maybe, I dunno, I've been binging to catch up on this season). then he thanks her for it -- so the idea is that she's been working with him for some amount of time as an insurance/safety net against the DA threatening her family.

rushed writing, most definitely (feels like a strong indicator of the two-seasons-compressed-to-one nature of this final run), but I wouldn't call it sloppy.

and since I'm just now sort of catching up on the metafilter discussion around this show (though I'm still an episode back I think? maybe two? it is so hard to do this for shows that are in the middle of seasons without spoiling things right around the corner) -- I've found the dismayed/disappointed reactions to this season a little hard to process, because I have continued to be as in love with this show as ever, and even moreso as the show clarifies its focus on character over plot machinations.

what I find so engrossing about this show is how smart it is about narrative point of view re: elliot's dissociations. so his father's abuse isn't really the "reveal" of the previous episode, it's his denial/rejection of reality as a result. and the stage-iness of the last episode was, again, about Elliot's deliberate emotional avoidance and distance, which has been so particularly on display this season.

(I think Esmail has said in interviews before that the "reality" of what's going on in the show doesn't really matter (I think this was specifically in response to the episode where Elliot hangs out with Trenton's brother), it's about the emotional reality for the character.)

which is why I found his conversations with Young Elliot and Mr. Robot -- his conversations with himself, his confrontations with self-loathing and dissociated survivor's guilt and unpacking the compartmentalization he needed to survive -- so affecting and powerful.

it has gotten pretty relentlessly dark, yeah, but I still find it gripping as hell, even as annoyed as I am at how the show continues to stall on the reveal of Whiterose's ultimate plan. the character beats, and the structural tricks the show deploys in direct service of those moments, are still so often fucking incredible.
posted by Kybard at 2:53 PM on December 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


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