The Rager Review: Mr. Robot "eps2.1k3rnel-pan1c.ksd"

Elliot is a smart guy. It's something easy to forget after the way season 1 ended and how season 2 has begun because the stigma of mental illness tends to overshadow any sort of mental capability. Let's put it this way, Mr. Robot is like a program Elliot created for his mind to stay on track to carry out fsociety's plan and when Elliot was about to stray from that plan, the Mr. Robot program took over his brain completely and auto-piloted Elliot to a world-wide cyber attack. So now that the deed is done, Elliot is alone with the program and is noticing the bugs, hence the error code he sees in this episode and it's discussed in the scene with Ray (Craig Robinson) that the solution is to fix the code and continue on. We as a television audience has a short tolerance for really any multi-episode arc. I praised the Elliot isolation thing in the review of last week's 2-part season premiere but now that it's carried over into the third episode even I had a twinge of a "okay, let's move this along" sentiment while watching this episode (how I survived a full season of Walking Dead with everybody on that farm, I'll never know). So now I can't help but be hopeful that Elliot's intelligence will override everything else and he'll find a way to manage and move on because he's not getting rid of it (it's the name of the friggin' show, for Pete's sake). Elliot's first solution was a metric ton of Adderall which was a temporary relief for him from Mr. Robot but led to Elliot not sleeping for six days. And as much of a failure as it might have been, during the crash sequence, Elliot saw the error code that he wrote in his journal. It was broken down into code, the one thing Elliot can make sense of and almost immediately was met by Ray who offered solutions that Elliot seemed to respond to. This furthers my belief that Ray is another personality created by Elliot, this one to eradicate any bugs or viruses within the Mr. Robot brain-program-thing. Sure, we can poke holes in that theory by talking about Ray's scenes without Elliot where is seems like Ray is in desperate need of someone with Elliot's capabilities but all that could very well be something Sam Esmail included to throw the audience off the scent. Either way, I'm ready for Elliot to find a solution because with characters seemingly being picked off one-by-one, fsociety are going to need his help sooner than later.

Also, I give the "Fun Society" arcade another 2-3 episodes before it gets torched, regardless of how many people's DNA is mixed up in there.