A quick review of tonight’s Mr. Robot coming up just as soon as I try Rosetta Stone…
“Legacy” is a fill-in-the-blanks episode. Its primarily goal is to explain where Tyrell went in between the Five/Nine hack and when he shot Elliot in the season two finale, but it also delves more into Darlene and Cisco’s relationship, Irving’s role in Whiterose’s operation, and even the fact that Dom’s boss is on Whiterose’s payroll.
Most of this is useful information to varying degrees, but for it to work as an actual story, and a compelling hour of television, requires more interest in the inner life of Tyrell Wellick than I was able to muster. So much of the episode rests on his shoulders, and while Martin Wallstrom isn’t doing anything differently from when he was such an important part of the show two years ago, his prolonged absence from season two made him feel extraneous to me by the time he returned for real. That’s the risk of puzzle box storytelling: Tyrell was not only not on-screen for all but a few minutes here and there, but the show turned him into someone who only mattered in the binary context of the question of whether he was dead or not. He stopped being a person and became Schrodinger’s Sociopath.
“Legacy” obviously attempts to correct that by showing all he went through after the hack, particularly the pain of his separation from Joanna, but the necessary emotional linkages never reconnected for me, and after a while the whole hour began to feel like a collection of deleted scenes that had been cobbled together into their own episode. It looked great, like usual, and the more we learn about Irving — including the fact that when he says he’s going to go “work on my book,” he means writing a novel, not reading one — the more fascinated I am with him, but my impatience grew throughout the hour. Departures from Elliot’s story can work incredibly well, as we saw last year with “Successor.” This one just didn’t.
Also, one other thought: I understand Sam Esmail’s desire to comment on the political climate of America in 2017, even though events on the show are now two years in our past — and in a very different reality, besides, given the damage Elliot did to the world economy — but boy did the Trump scene in this one miss the mark. If you’re as opposed to the current administration as Esmail is, suggesting that Trump’s rise could be blamed on the support of an international supervillain and his cabal actually diminishes the horror of it all by taking the blame away from the shifts in our own culture and attitudes that helped get him elected. Whether this was meant as commentary on all the allegations about Russian interference in the election (with Whiterose taking the place of Putin in the Mr. Robot version of the story), or a dark joke about how this is a POTUS only a master criminal from another country could love, it just seemed silly and counter-productive, and made me even more wary of future attempts to link this world to ours.
Next week’s episode is back to business more or less as usual, thankfully.
What did everybody else think?
Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@uproxx.com. He discusses television weekly on the TV Avalanche podcast. His next book, Breaking Bad 101, is on sale now.