Season 2, Ep. 4 | Aired Jul 27<\/p>\n
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In darkness, there is knocking. We\u2019ve heard this sound before, this kind of forceful, urgent rapping, and when we get the shot of the door from inside Elliot\u2019s apartment, we remember the end of season 1, and the visitor that had come for him. The police? Tyrell? The man in the black hat, the agent of danger who came for him last week in a dream to torture him? Who is the one that knocks?<\/em> You never know in Mr. Robot<\/em>, where perceived reality is a fussy cat governed by principles of uncertainty. (If you thought that was strained, wait until we get to The Berenstain Bears theory of many possible worlds.)<\/p>\n Elliot sits at his desk labeling his latest hack job. \u201cVan Halen 1984<\/em>.\u201d The knocking has his attention, but it doesn\u2019t make him jump. He takes his time moving to the door, and as he does, the knocking turns playful. This is a flashback, all right, but not the flashback we want most, the resolution to the season 1 cliffhanger. But it\u2019s a dynamite one all the same \u2014 a fantastic launch to an episode that gets Elliot back into fighting shape, revs the season\u2019s story, and dials up the subversive fun. (Now if only we can dial down the length of these episode by 5-10 minutes\u2026)<\/p>\n Elliot unlocks the door and opens it. We see a familiar female form wearing a familiar jacket and a familiar plastic mask. \u201cTrick or treat,\u201d says Darlene, rocking the Monopoly Man plastic. Her tone is chipper-sweet, as she removes the mask, we see fragility written all over her face. \u201cFound it in the 99 cent shop in Chinatown. I didn\u2019t know they made a mask from that movie. Did you?\u201d What she\u2019s asking isn\u2019t what she\u2019s really<\/em> asking. She\u2019s appealing to some shared history and some old communion to gain entry, to acquire his company. Darlene needs some brotherly love, a Good Samaritan, and she wants her blood brother to play the role. While Elliot figures out whether he\u2019s strong enough to be that man, we wonder: The monopoly mask comes from a movie? What movie?<\/em><\/p>\n Elliot asks Darlene when she got back into the city. She doesn\u2019t answer the question. \u201cWell, it\u2019s Halloween. Seeing since that used to be our thing, I thought I\u2019d hit you up.\u201d Elliot still hasn\u2019t invited her inside, and she\u2019s tired of waiting. She enters the apartment and half-feigns some hurt for his apparent lack of enthusiasm for her. Truth is, he isn\u2019t enthusiastic, but he doesn\u2019t have the sack to say it. Instead, he goes passive aggressive \u2014 a big theme in this episode \u2014 and tells her she\u2019s welcome to the couch, but he\u2019s going out. Darlene calls bulls\u2014. She knows her anti-social loner brother doesn\u2019t \u201cgo out.\u201d And she needs him to stay. She pushes the button he can\u2019t resist, the coded command she knows he won\u2019t refuse.<\/p>\n \u201cInit-1.\u201d<\/p>\n Init-1.<\/em> I had no idea what this meant in the moment, but here\u2019s what the Interwebs tell me. \u201cInit-1\u201d is Unix jargon that refers to a certain run level or configuration of a multiuser operating system. Init-1 is single user mode. It\u2019s also an emergency modality, and that\u2019s the context here. She\u2019s crashed; she\u2019s needs some tech support to reboot. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say it if I wasn\u2019t being serious,\u201d says Darlene. \u201cPlease. Hang out with me tonight. For real. I need this.\u201d<\/p>\n Elliot agrees. And with that, the funny games begin.<\/p>\n Elliot knows what will cheer his sister up. \u201cThat movie.\u201d He goes to his computer and clicks on uTorrentPlus and accesses some pirated movies. (Freakin\u2019 hacker, destroying the media economy with his misguided entitlements. What\u2019s next, the banking system?) He goes to an alphabetical directory \u2014 the C section. We see a bunch of movies, and if someone were to tell me that every single of them is somehow referenced in this episode, even in a small, cheeky, indirect way, I\u2019d believe it. You\u2019ve already heard the title of them in a line of dialogue. Here they are: Capote, The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie, Carrie, Child\u2019s Play, Chinatown, Chungking Express, Citizen Four, Citizen Kane, A Clockwork Orange, Closer, Comet, The Conversation, Cool Hand Luke, Creep,<\/em> and Cries and Whispers<\/em>.<\/p>\n A few notes about a few of these movies. 1. Carrie<\/em> is the story of a special but troubled child (kinda like Elliot) with an abusive, religious mother (kinda like Elliot\u2019s nameless mom) driven mad by marital violence (???). 2. The Conversation<\/em> is a psychological thriller about surveillance, involving a mystery in which perceived reality is either misunderstood or being manipulated. 3. Comet<\/em> is a romance told in flashbacks and with glimpses into parallel realities. It was written and directed by Mr. Robot\u2019s<\/em> creator, Sam Esmail. While the movie was screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June of 2014, it wasn\u2019t officially released on December 5, 2014 \u2014 more than a month after this flashback.<\/p>\n This is weird. In Mr. Robot<\/em>, a film made by the maker of Mr. Robot<\/em>exists. (In this alt reality, perhaps someone else made Comet<\/em>. Perhaps it was a bigger hit here, too!) But officially, the movie isn\u2019t commercially available. Right now, in Elliot\u2019s world, The Comet<\/em> is Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat, it won\u2019t technically exist until it\u2019s released and seen. So why is it in on uTorrentPlus? (Piracy?) I swear, stuff like this makes me think that at some point, Elliot is going to open another door and confront another person hiding behind a mask, and he\u2019s going to rip it off and see a monkey face, then rip that face away and see his own face, and then rip that one off and see a teeny-weeny Sam Esmail inside a hollowed out head, sitting at a computer, typing furiously.<\/p>\n Anyway, it\u2019s another piece of metafictional business that gets us questioning the nature of the reality we\u2019re seeing. It\u2019s also a bit of subversive gamesmanship in an episode with a lot of it. Who\u2019s in control? What\u2019s real? Who\u2019s zooming whom? Who\u2019s dreaming <\/em>whom?<\/p>\n But The Comet<\/em> is not the entertainment that Elliot selects for their Halloween night hang-out. He chooses The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie<\/em>. It\u2019s a cheesy horror movie, dated to 1984, about a masked serial killer preying on young adult preppies at a New Year\u2019s Eve dinner party. It\u2019s also a slasher flick homage\/parody of Luis Brunel\u2019s The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie <\/em>(1972), a surreal satire of class politics that uses metafictional gambits and dream sequences and is full of delightful, arguably indulgent style. Sounds familiar. Oh, and one more thing about this movie dated to 1984: I\u2019m pretty sure it wasn\u2019t made in 1984, because I\u2019m pretty sure The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie <\/em>is totally bogus, a fiction invented by Esmail, making it another kind of metafictional text, one more kind of reality blur. Elliot\u2019s uTorrentPlus movie folder is basically the box in the Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat thought experiment \u2014 a container holding infinite possibilities, real and unreal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mr. Robot Season 2, Ep. 4 | Aired Jul 27 In darkness, there is knocking. We\u2019ve heard this sound before, this kind of forceful, urgent rapping, and when we get the shot of the door from inside Elliot\u2019s apartment, we remember the end of season 1, and the visitor ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":48703,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4450],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diafora-en"],"acf":false,"yoast_head":"\n