Season 2 of Mr. Robot on iFlix is the show you need to watch right now
It takes a keen mind to appreciate the charms that techno crime thriller Mr. Robot has to offer. There are no dragons. It doesn’t have hordes of sweaty, armoured, sword-swinging men charging in massed hordes across muddy battlefields. It doesn’t have a horde of ice zombies rampaging across the neighbourhood. It doesn’t have a bevy of good looking matriarchs out for world domination.
What it does have is a solid grasp of the latter day capitalistic, Orwellian morass that modern society has become where everything is searchable online and where an online identity and the footprints you leave behind digitally define you more than what you do in your meat-side self. The show adroitly embraces hacker culture in a way that no other drama has ever before, making it the centerpiece of its narrative even as it incorporates innovative approaches to storytelling that have rarely been executed successfully onscreen, garnering it the 2016 Golden Globe for Best TV Drama among other awards including a nomination for the 2016 Primetime Emmy awards.
The hacking methods shown onscreen are apparently the real deal, consulted on by white hat hackers to ensure that even the onscreen prompts and the methods used by Elliot and his team of ne’er-do-wells incorporates real world practices. It’s quite an eye opener indeed.
The show involves one Elliot (Rami Malek), a disconnected, almost perpetually zoned out cyber security engineer who works as a hacker by night. He’s an unreliable narrator – gaps of time are unreliably accounted for onscreen, streams-of-thought discourse giving insight into his brilliant, albeit fractured mind. Through the course of the first season, he recruits, or rather, is recruited by the enigmatic Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) who aims to bring down a large megacorporation by crashing their financial system. As season one wrapped up, it seemed like game over for the eponymous ‘Evil Corp’ as Elliot puts it. Those with saner minds within the confines of the show simply see it as E Corp, hinting that everything seen on the show may simply be a perspective from Elliot’s fractured mind.
The brilliance in season one is fortunately continued with a two-part opener in season two. Elliot seemingly breaks the fourth wall at will as he narrates what has gone on in the hiatus between season one and two. Unable to trust himself and his fractured mind, he seems to have returned to stay with his mother, embracing a rigorously regimented lifestyle to prevent himself from getting back into the hacking game again though Mr. Robot appears at the oddest times, seemingly a product of his imagination to tempt him back into the game. We won’t spoil it for you but it’s one heck of a roller coaster ride.
Season two of Mr. Robot is out exclusively on iFlix and every new episode airs every Thursday local time. Subscription to iFlix is RM10 a month and you can even download shows for offline viewing later. Swing by www.iflix.com for more details or to sign up for a free month of everything you can watch.