MR. ROBOT IS THE BEST HACKING SHOW YET—BUT IT’S NOT PERFECT

IT’S EASY TO be cynical about yet another hacker drama. Hollywood has burned us before with the overhyped and improbable BlackHat, the cliched and boring CSI: Cyber, and the WTF? Scorpion. Given so many cyberflops, the bar was admittedly low for USA Network’s new hacker drama Mr. Robot to succeed. And yet it does despite a few missteps, a convoluted plot that mashes together several headlines of the last few years, and a spotty supporting cast of hackers who so far show no evidence of hacking skills.

The primary reason for its success is Rami Malek, who provides a spot-on performance as Elliot Alderson, a high-functioning, seemingly Asperger-addled vigilante hacker. By day, Elliot spends his days toiling as a computer security whiz protecting the corporate clients of his cybersecurity firm employer, Allsafe; by night he exposes child-porn perps and cheating boyfriends. Elliot believes every problem can be solved with a hack, and he almost makes you believe it too.

But that’s the side story, not the main event. The latter kicks in after Allsafe’s biggest client, the conglomerate E-Corp, is struck by what appears to be a massive DDoS attack (distributed denial-of-service), and Elliot is called in to investigate—only to find that he’s the target of the perpetrators as much as E-Corp is.

The mysterious culprits, who go by the name Fsociety, use the DDoS as a calling card to lure Elliot into helping them take down E-Corp—or, as Elliot refers to the corporate giant, Evil Corp—first by convincing him to plant false evidence to implicate E-Corp’s own CTO in the hack, and then to initiate “the single biggest event of wealth redistribution in history.” Fsociety plans to launch a socialist revolution by erasing all of E-Corp’s data, thereby eliminating all record of debt and freeing the masses from oppressive capitalism. Or something like that. The details are a little murky.

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