It has been a while since I wrote my views on TV series as I had been doing a lot of catching up for ongoing series such as Game Of Thrones (season 6) and The Walking Dead (season 6) and also finishing some of the series that have ended such as Justified, Bitten, Glee, Cougar Town, Downton Abbey etc. So now I had the chance to start seeing new series and possibly continue catching up other series that I have not been able to watch for a while. This series caught my attention when I read somewhere that it was very good. The lead actor also had won Emmy awards few weeks ago. So should be interesting, right? Anyway, what was the story all about?
Brief Story Line
The series focused mainly on the lead character Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek - Night at the Museum trilogy, Need for Speed etc) who was a security engineer at Allsafe cyber security company led by its CEO, Gideon Godard (Michel Gill - House of Cards TV series). However, Elliot was actually a very very good hacker who loved hacking people and usually did the hacking during night time. Some of the people that he hacked were really bad person such as someone maintaining website of child pornography (in the pilot episode) who Elliot threatened to stop the operation, otherwise he would release the information to police.
Elliot had a very good friend named Angela (Portia Doubleday - Big Mommas: Like Father Like Son, Carrie etc) who was his childhood friend and also worked at Allsafe as Marketing. They shared the same background where Angela's mother and Elliot's father were among some of the people who died because of toxic poisoning due to the illegal dumping of waste by E Corp, one of the biggest conglomerate in the world. Elliot was quite protective of Angela and he did not really like her boyfriend Ollie (Ben Rappaport) who also worked at Allsafe, even though Ollie tried his best to be close with Elliot as well.
Elliot had a very good friend named Angela (Portia Doubleday - Big Mommas: Like Father Like Son, Carrie etc) who was his childhood friend and also worked at Allsafe as Marketing. They shared the same background where Angela's mother and Elliot's father were among some of the people who died because of toxic poisoning due to the illegal dumping of waste by E Corp, one of the biggest conglomerate in the world. Elliot was quite protective of Angela and he did not really like her boyfriend Ollie (Ben Rappaport) who also worked at Allsafe, even though Ollie tried his best to be close with Elliot as well.
The demise of his father, really had a great impact on Elliot. He became an introvert person with anti social disorder and even had to go to psychiatrist Krista (Gloria Reuben - ER TV series) for consultation on weekly basis. Krista was always trying to help Elliot but he always kept to himself and generally withhold a lot more important information to Krista, making her unable to properly diagnose Elliot's problem.
Elliot's so called peaceful life of engineer by day and anonymous vigilante hacker by night, suddenly started to take a huge turn when he met with a mysterious person who seemed to know what Elliot's doing, i.e. Mr. Robot (Christian Slater - Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Interview with the Vampire, etc). He was an anarchist and was able to raise Elliot's curiosity and introduced Elliot to a whole new more complex world of hacking where the main purpose was to erase the debts of people to E Corp. Elliot got to know the rest of the "crew" who named themselves FSociety and consisted of Darlene (Carly Chaikin), Leslie, Shama and Sunil who each has his/her own special ability. In order to bring down E Corp (or what Elliot would refer to as Evil Corp), they had to do a lot of hacking activities on software as well as hard ware. Elliot earlier had real doubts on whether to join Mr. Robot in bringing down Evil Corp, since it was the biggest client of Allsafe and it would have moral complication on Elliot, not to mention it would bring Allsafe & his good boss Gideon down. However, due to some events, he decided to join the crew and immediately have a real major impact since he was a real genius in this kind of thing.
Meanwhile, in E Corp itself, there was a power struggle, where Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallström) the very ambitious SVP, wanted to become the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). He would do whatever it takes including manipulation and even criminal activity to reach that position. He had a very "supportive" and powerful wife who seemed to be very dominant on Tyrell named Joanna (Stephanie Corneliussen). Tyrell also took a huge interest on Elliot and suspected him to be more than he led on as just a low level IT security engineer at Allsafe.
Elliot stayed in a 1 bedroom apartment in New York and he had a bad habit of using drugs. He did however managed to properly use it below his body's threshold which would make him an addict. His usual drugs were provided by his next door neighbor Shayla (Frankie Shaw) whom Elliot grew accustomed and later on some feelings for her. She had a very bad gangster boyfriend named Fernando Vera who was also a major drug dealer and whose special prescribed medicine were procured by Elliot on regular basis through Shayla. He also suspected Elliot's intent on Shayla.
Apart from those characters, there were also some other people that would play some role in the season 1, such as the current CTO Terry Colby (Bruce Altman), Whiterose (BD Wong), the leader of hacker group in China called Dark Army and Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer) the CEO of E Corp.
Apart from those characters, there were also some other people that would play some role in the season 1, such as the current CTO Terry Colby (Bruce Altman), Whiterose (BD Wong), the leader of hacker group in China called Dark Army and Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer) the CEO of E Corp.
So who was Mr. Robot actually and why would he be interested in using Elliot's help when he himself seemed to be able to lead FSociety? Would Elliot be able to lead Fsociety to make the biggest cyber attack in history and bringing down Evil Corp? Would there be a continued relationship with Shayla? What role would Tyrell have in Elliot's life? You can find them all if you continue watching the first season which consisted of 10 episodes.
End of Brief Story line
Well I got to admit when I read the story premise, I was quite intrigued. With the current situation where hacking was becoming more and more apparent in cyber world, the story of a hacker seemed to be very interesting. The first few episodes also made me realize how easy hackers could stole our information if we were not careful. I am not sure though if the codes typed and shown in the episodes were real (as I am not a high tech IT expert who knows computer coding languages), but they did seem real enough. The series also contains some conversation between Elliot and us which is similar to the fourth wall method (I wrote about this sometime back in my review of Deadpool)
Meanwhile, the background story of how E Corp was so "evil" and resulted to the ultimate decision of Elliot to do the cyber attacks on it were quite standard and not really complex. This series were more like a psychological thriller where we would slowly slowly be revealed with the twists and surprises. I was totally blown away in episode 8 which kind of gave me a shock and really did not see that coming. After that episode, it changed the way we see in the further episodes. However, after those cool episodes, the final episode made me feel the series become confusing. I felt the story became too psychologically complex or too difficult too understand and it made me feel a little bit lost interest.
Meanwhile, the background story of how E Corp was so "evil" and resulted to the ultimate decision of Elliot to do the cyber attacks on it were quite standard and not really complex. This series were more like a psychological thriller where we would slowly slowly be revealed with the twists and surprises. I was totally blown away in episode 8 which kind of gave me a shock and really did not see that coming. After that episode, it changed the way we see in the further episodes. However, after those cool episodes, the final episode made me feel the series become confusing. I felt the story became too psychologically complex or too difficult too understand and it made me feel a little bit lost interest.
Honestly when I watched the first few episodes, even though the story seemed to have lots of promises & potential, I was a little bit bored. I was particularly lazy to watch and personally hated episode 4. I started to watch this series quite some time back but after that episode, I lost interest and stopped watching it until when recently I read the news about Rami Malek won Emmy Awards. That was actually the catalyst for me to start watching it again. Heck if people can vote it, then it should be a very good series. And as I said, the next few episodes particularly until episode 8, I suddenly became interested again. I could feel the tension and the suspense watching those episodes. Unfortunately after completing the series, (particularly after watching the season finale), I now have doubt if I want to continue to season 2. It would take some serious efforts for me to spend time to watch the 2nd season. Who knows though, I may change my mind again later?
This does not mean that the series was bad. In fact Rami Malek's performance was over the top. He was very believable as a person with many psychological problems which I believe the reason why he was awarded as the lead actor in TV series. However, it may not be my cup of tea. I was kind of looking forward to a cool hacking story by hackers, but instead the series were focusing more on the struggle of Elliot to resolve his own personal problem and his relationship with his friends & family. So the hacking itself was more like the background rather than the main point.
By the way, this series is an adult series with few scenes that I believe are not appropriate for teens (definitely children). It is a quite heavy drama series, so those looking for light series and hoping for lots of action, then this series is definitely not for you. I love to watch series that have lots of suspense, but not necessary full action and occasional thinking of solving cases / problems (Sherlock and Criminal Minds were some of them). But this series delivered too much of the mind psychology part and was just too heavy and made it less enjoyable for me. Perhaps those were what appealed to general audience, as I understand the rating was very high everywhere. I am not one of them though, so with the risk of being judged as too shallow minded, I had to admit that I am unable to see the appeal and was not able enjoy throughout the whole season 1.
Mike's movie moments rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
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