Mr. Robot Review

Since clearly this month I’ve been writing about sci-fi, hacking and engineering, I feel this might be the perfect momentum to write about one of my favorite TV shows: Mr. Robot.

The Matrix made hacking look cool. Mr. Robot made it look familiar.

Unironically, I stumbled upon Mr. Robot when I was staying at an Airbnb in São Paulo, right during the first days of COVID in early 2020, and the previous visitor had left his Amazon Prime account logged in. I had heard about the show before, but never paid too much attention to it. I gave it a shot and got instantly hooked.

I was actually lucky that all four seasons were already out by then. I started watching it in Brazil and finished the show after arriving back in Portugal, while doing my quarantine days. Considering the atmosphere of early 2020, being isolated inside a house while watching Elliot slowly lose his grip on what is real was perhaps a little too fitting.

Trying to summarize four seasons of Mr. Robot without spoiling anything is not particularly easy. At its core, the show follows Elliot Alderson, a cybersecurity engineer working for Allsafe, a company responsible for protecting large corporations from cyberattacks. Elliot is extremely talented with computers, but socially isolated, deeply distrustful of the world around him and struggling with his own mental health. Outside work, he uses his skills to investigate people, usually convincing himself that he is helping someone in the process.

His life changes when he is approached by a mysterious hacker known as Mr. Robot and introduced to fsociety, a hacktivist group planning an attack against E Corp, one of the largest corporations in the world. From there, what begins as a story about hackers trying to take down a corporation gradually becomes something much larger. The show explores the consequences of their actions, the people and organizations operating behind them, and Elliot’s increasingly complicated relationship with himself and the people around him.

That is about as far as I can go without ruining things.

Across its four seasons, Mr. Robot moves between psychological thriller, hacker drama, corporate conspiracy and social commentary. It touches on alienation, morality, power, resentment, identity, capitalism, loneliness and the consequences of believing that complex systems can be fixed with one sufficiently clever action.

There are also plenty of references to other media scattered throughout the show. Fight Club is probably the most obvious influence, but there are shades of The Matrix, cyberpunk in general and plenty of visual and narrative homages for anyone paying attention.

There is a lot to talk about there, but what really touched me was the respect the show has for hacking and engineering.

Hacking in movies and television is usually terrible. Someone opens a flashy application, starts hitting random keys at approximately 300 words per minute, some progress bars appear on screen and, fifteen seconds later:

I’m in.

Sometimes two people even attack the same keyboard.

Mr. Robot takes a very different approach. And I don’t just mean “hey, they used Kali Linux” grounded.

The tools are certainly there. You see Linux, Nmap, Metasploit, Tor, shell commands, scripts, Raspberry Pis and plenty of other recognizable technology. The terminology is also surprisingly good. Characters talk about pwning machines, rootkits, exploits and script kiddies without the dialogue sounding like someone copied a glossary of hacker terms five minutes before filming.

But that is not what makes the hacking feel authentic. What makes it authentic is everything around the tools: reconnaissance, planning, looking for the weakest point in a system, understanding the infrastructure, finding credentials, social engineering, physical access, operational mistakes, paranoia and compartmentalization.

The hacking feels like a process rather than a spell. Anyone can put a terminal on screen and type nmap. Understanding why someone is scanning the network in the first place is considerably harder. That is one of the things I like the most about Elliot. His fascination is not simply with computers, but with systems and how they can be broken. Corporate systems, financial systems, security systems, buildings, social structures and even people.

A hacker does not necessarily look at a machine and think:

How can I break into this computer?

The more interesting question is:

How does this entire thing work, and where are the assumptions?

That mentality appears constantly throughout Mr. Robot. The characters rarely succeed because they happen to possess some magical exploit capable of defeating everything. They succeed because they understand enough pieces of a system to find a way around whatever is supposedly protecting it. Sometimes that means software. Sometimes hardware. Sometimes networking. And sometimes it just means convincing someone to open a door.

No, watching Mr. Robot will not turn you into a hacker. You will not learn how to use a Raspberry Pi to remotely control a datacenter, compromise random bank accounts or take over the FBI from your living room. Thankfully, the show never really tries to become a hacking tutorial either. Instead, it shows, with surprising elegance, how different technologies and weaknesses can be chained together.

The Steel Mountain operation is a good example. Instead of magically attacking a secure facility from the Internet, the characters need physical access, reconnaissance and social engineering. Once inside, a Raspberry Pi can be placed on the internal network and used as a foothold. The Raspberry Pi itself is not particularly interesting. It is just a small Linux computer.

What is interesting is that once you can put a device behind the perimeter, the entire security model changes. You are no longer attacking the organization from outside. You already have hardware sitting somewhere the organization considers trusted.

The femtocell attack later in the show follows the same philosophy. Rather than attacking every endpoint directly, the characters manipulate part of the infrastructure around those endpoints. It is a considerably more complicated scenario, but fundamentally it follows the same idea: if attacking the target directly is difficult, find another part of the system that gives you leverage over it. It’s essentially a man-in-the-middle attack, albeit quite a bit more complex than the usual example.

That is what Mr. Robot gets right so often.

USB devices become attack vectors. Metadata can expose someone. Wireless access can be extended. Messages can be spoofed. Credentials matter. Logs matter. Physical location matters. And passwords written somewhere stupid can still defeat security systems worth millions of dollars.

Because, of course they can. The social engineering is equally important because the show understands that sometimes the vulnerability is not inside the computer. It is sitting in front of it.

Companies can spend enormous amounts of money on firewalls, endpoint protection, access controls and monitoring, but all of those controls still exist inside organizations operated by humans.

Humans want to be helpful. Humans trust authority. Humans don’t want to look stupid. Humans reuse passwords. Humans plug things into computers. Humans hold doors open for strangers. In the end, humans are flawed and can be manipulated, which makes them usually the most vulnerable part of any system they are part of.

The characters exploit this repeatedly, not through some magical ability to control people, but by researching their targets, understanding the environment and constructing believable situations around what they already know. In many cases, the conversation with another person is simply another stage of reconnaissance.

Even the little details help sell all of this. Commands shown on screen generally make sense. The software is recognizable. Terminal output looks like terminal output. The characters use terminology that someone familiar with the subject would actually recognize. Even someone being called a script kiddie as an insult feels natural.

None of that was strictly necessary. Most viewers would probably never know whether a command on screen worked or whether the terminal was displaying random nonsense generated by the props department. But someone cared. And once the show establishes that credibility, it becomes much easier to accept the occasions when reality is simplified for television.

Because not everything in Mr. Robot is realistic. Some attacks happen much faster than they reasonably would. Some vulnerabilities appear at conveniently useful moments. Some systems are easier to compromise than their real-world equivalents probably would be.

But it is still television. There is a massive difference between simplifying something you understand and simply not understanding it. Mr. Robot usually does the former.

Still, reducing the show to “the one that gets hacking right” would be unfair. The hacking may have been what initially fascinated me, but there is much more holding the show together.

The characters are one of its strongest points. Darlene is capable, impulsive and stubborn; Dom is methodical, lonely and increasingly trapped between duty and survival; Whiterose is a fascinating villain precisely because of how calm and deliberate she is; and Phillip Price is almost proudly mercenary, fully aware of the kind of world he operates in. Even secondary characters rarely feel like simple pieces moving Elliot’s story forward. Most of them have their own motivations, flaws and ideas about power and control.

And Elliot, of course, is at the center of all of it. He is intelligent, observant and capable of understanding systems most people do not even notice, while often struggling to understand himself and the people around him. He looks around him and sees broken systems everywhere: corporations abusing power, people being exploited, institutions failing and technology being used against the people who depend on it. His instinct is almost an engineer’s instinct. The system is broken. Therefore, fix the system.

But society is not software. You cannot identify the buggy component, replace it, restart the service and expect everything to behave correctly afterwards. Actions have second-order effects. People react. Power reorganizes itself. Removing something bad does not automatically replace it with something better. Sometimes destroying the old system is considerably easier than deciding what should take its place.

That is where Mr. Robot becomes much more interesting than a show about hackers. Control is a recurring idea throughout the series. Who controls the systems? Who controls the money? Who controls the information? Who controls the infrastructure? And perhaps more importantly, how much control do we actually have over ourselves?

Hacking fits surprisingly well into that theme because hacking is, in a way, about changing the expected relationship between someone and a system. Someone designed the system to behave one way, and the hacker discovers a way to make it behave differently.

But Mr. Robot is far more interested in what happens afterwards. What happens when you finally gain control? What happens when you destroy the thing you hated? What happens when the consequences become larger than the original problem? And what happens when your identity has been built around fighting something that is no longer there? Those are considerably harder questions than finding an open port.

Mr. Robot remains one of my favorite television shows. It is a great psychological thriller, an interesting criticism of power and modern society, and one of the few mainstream productions I have watched where computers feel like computers rather than magical plot devices.

The hacking is not perfect, but it does not need to be. What matters is that the show respects the subject enough to understand it before simplifying it. Its characters gather information, probe systems, exploit trust, make mistakes and improvise when plans go wrong. Technology exists inside physical infrastructure, and that infrastructure is operated by people.

Most importantly, the show understands that hacking is not really about typing commands into a terminal. It is about understanding systems. And systems are rarely just computers.

Perhaps that is also why Elliot is such an interesting protagonist. He understands systems extremely well, but spends most of the series trying to understand himself, other people, morality and the world around him.

Those systems are considerably harder to debug. And no amount of sudo is going to fix them.