Screenwriting, hacked
On Sam Esmail's masterful pilot of MR. ROBOT
This is the tenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Sam Esmail’s masterful pilot for MR. ROBOT, his cyberhacking paranoid thriller series that ran on USA Network from 2015-2019. (Wait, this show is now almost 10 years old??). If you care, big spoilers below for season 1 and 4 for this now “classic” show.
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
“Our democracy has been hacked.” The tagline of MR. ROBOT’s first season, released in 2015, feels moot now. In the year 2024, democracy has been hacked many times over. Not by a social justice-terrorist hacker group in the vein of Sam Esmail’s TV series’ “f.society,” but you know, hindsight is the year 2020. The first season of Mr. Robot depicts a post-Recession Obama-era New York in which multinationals (namely the Enron-esque “Evil Corp”) control the future of the millennial generation through high debt and oppressive banking practices. By the end of Season One, the hackers try to erase that debt by hacking Evil Corp’s servers, and after their success, the world order becomes unglued.
I watched Mr. Robot’s first season in the lead-up to the 2016 election. The night Donald Trump was elected, I could not help but think of Mr. Robot, and how the show had predicted the end of normalcy. Nowadays, what had seemed shocking on television—the show going through with the great hack—now seemed prescient for our real-life experience. In 2015, we were already teetering on the edge of the abyss, and for the better part of the decade since, we’ve been falling deeper into it.
In this essay, I’d like to focus in on two-back-to-back scenes from the pilot of Mr. Robot, the opening in which we meet our unreliable protagonist, Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek, in his star-making role), for the first time and the conflict he faces. Ideally, the first scene of any story should be a microcosm of the story’s main themes and issues. In the case of Mr. Robot, the first scene contains all the seeds of conflict which play out over the show’s four season-run.
Mr. Robot opens with a voice-over monologue narrated by Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) over the image of a shadowy penthouse boardroom in Manhattan. In this scene, Elliot speaks to the audience, breaking the fourth wall:
What I’m about to tell you is top secret. A conspiracy bigger than all of us. There’s a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. I’m talking about the guys no one knows about. The top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. The guys that play god without permission. And now I think they’re following me.
With this quick flash-forward to a higher threat (a visual paid off by the end of the episode, actually), the show establishes the stakes of the story from the get-go. Though Elliot is performing street-level hacks at the present moment, by the end of the season he’ll be trying to take down a multinational company, with implications for the fate of the global economy.
Whereas Mr. Robot’s opening seconds establishes the main conflict, the very next scene displays an excellent example of how to introduce your main character. After the corporate boardroom scene, the screen cuts to a scene of Elliot on the New York subway, from which he quickly flashes back to another scene, from the previous night, when he visits “Ron’s Coffee Shop” and confronts its owner, Rohit. The scene is a simple shot-reverse-shot between Elliot and Rohit, but it serves to establish Elliot’s MO as a hacker for justice and also reveal the vulnerabilities in his personality. Rohit is caught in the middle as they engage in social pleasantries despite the adversarial situation in which they both participate.
Elliot starts his speech innocuously, praising the WiFi speed of Rohit’s coffee chain, but quickly reveals his agenda:
I like coming here. Because your WiFi was fast. I mean you’re one of the few spots with a fiber connection and gigabit speed. It’s good. But so good it scratched that part of my mind, the part that doesn’t allow good to exist without condition, so I started intercepting all the traffic on your network. And that’s when I noticed something strange. And that’s when I decided to hack you.
Once Elliot mentions that the WiFi speed had “scratched” a part of his mind, we know that something is amiss. As we discover later, Elliot is a pessimist who is disillusioned with twenty-first century neoliberal society. Throughout the series, he does not believe “good can exist without condition.” The dialogue also foreshadows the main plot reveal of Season One of Mr. Robot, that Elliot’s mind is not totally present, and he actually has a split personality between himself and Mr. Robot, the hacker leader played by Christian Slater (à la the Tyler Durden plot twist in Fight Club).
So not only is Mr. Robot engaging with these elaborate foreshadowings of the rest of the show, we also have a “hack of the week” mentality with this scene. Elliot reveals that he discovered that Rohit’s servers secretly harbor a child porn database called “Plato’s Boys.” When Rohit threatens to call the police, Elliot emphasizes that he has the upper hand because he controls Rohit’s database and could get Rohit arrested. But then the scene takes another turn when Elliot uses the moment to reveal the cracks in his personality:
ELLIOT
I understand what it’s like to be different. I’m very different, too. I mean, I don’t jerk off to little kids, but… I don’t know how to talk to people. My dad was the only one I could talk to… but he died.
ROHIT
Sorry to hear that. How did he pass, may I ask?
ELLIOT
Leukemia. Dad definitely got it from radiation at the company he worked at, though I couldn’t prove it. Now he’s dead. Company’s fine though. … See I usually do this kind of thing from my computer, but this time I wanted to do it 1. In Person. Trying to work on my social anxiety.
In this bizarre exchange, Elliot elicits sympathy, real or calculated, on the part of Rohit. Technically, Elliot probably shouldn’t be giving these personal details out to a guy he just caught running a child porn ring. But Elliot’s a bit off—he views this as an opportunity to “work on his social anxiety.” This tells the audience that though Elliot is confident in this scene and showcases his skill at hacking, his confidence is a façade, and one that will crack completely by the end of the season. But the story he tells also happens to be his defining backstory, his “ghost.” His goal to take down “Evil Corp,” the company where his dad worked, comes from the fact that his dad was killed by the company’s negligence (and why the figure of Mr. Robot comes in the guise of his father (also played by Christian Slater).
There is an added layer in the subtext of the scene, however, in that the scene also foreshadows the real ghost of the series, revealed in Season Four—that Elliot’s father sexually abused him when he was a child, and part of the reason his mind created split personalities was as a defense mechanism. So the topic of “Plato’s Boys” adds another layer. (It’s unclear how much Esmail had planned of the show from the beginning, but this kernel of backstory seems to be consistent throughout the entire run).
In its best moments (Season One in particular) Mr. Robot is a terrific guidebook on how to tell an action-packed thriller with global consequences and deeply human characters. Though Sam Esmail’s more recent efforts (such as Prime’s Homecoming) have emphasized style over story, one hopes that his career continues at the breakneck pace from which it stormed onto the scene with Mr. Robot’s opening season in 2015.
Works Cited
Sam Esmail (showrunner). Mr. Robot, Season 1, Episode 1: eps1.0_hellofriend.mov (USA Network, 2015).
AWK—”away from keyboard.:” As opposed to “IRL” (in real life).