It's easy to be cynical about yet another hacker drama. Hollywood has burned us before with the overhyped and improbable BlackHat, the cliched and boring CSI: Cyber, and the WTF? Scorpion. Given so many cyberflops, the bar was admittedly low for USA Network's new hacker drama Mr. Robot to succeed. And yet it does despite a few missteps, a convoluted plot that mashes together several headlines of the last few years, and a spotty supporting cast of hackers who so far show no evidence of hacking skills.
The primary reason for its success is Rami Malek, who provides a spot-on performance as Elliot Alderson, a high-functioning, seemingly Asperger-addled vigilante hacker. By day, Elliot spends his days toiling as a computer security whiz protecting the corporate clients of his cybersecurity firm employer, Allsafe; by night he exposes child-porn perps and cheating boyfriends. Elliot believes every problem can be solved with a hack, and he almost makes you believe it too.
But that's the side story, not the main event. The latter kicks in after Allsafe's biggest client, the conglomerate E-Corp, is struck by what appears to be a massive DDoS attack (distributed denial-of-service), and Elliot is called in to investigate—only to find that he's the target of the perpetrators as much as E-Corp is.
The mysterious culprits, who go by the name Fsociety, use the DDoS as a calling card to lure Elliot into helping them take down E-Corp—or, as Elliot refers to the corporate giant, Evil Corp—first by convincing him to plant false evidence to implicate E-Corp's own CTO in the hack, and then to initiate "the single biggest event of wealth redistribution in history." Fsociety plans to launch a socialist revolution by erasing all of E-Corp's data, thereby eliminating all record of debt and freeing the masses from oppressive capitalism. Or something like that. The details are a little murky.
The Marvel comic-like plot would seem overdrawn in the hands of a less skilled actor and writers. But Elliot's conflicted and complex nature, and Malek's highly compelling portrayal of him, pulls you in. Which leads us to the show's main draw—it actually gets hackers and hacking.
Mr. Robot understands the powerful psychological lure that hacking has for people who feel disconnected from, and excessively smarter than, the world around them. It also understands how such intelligence doesn't necessarily translate into emotional stability or maturity. Elliot may have the skills to take down a powerful corporation, but at his core he's just a boy pining for a girl; just a son mourning his dead dad. Elliot is Ponyboy for the digital age, a kid forced into early adulthood through tragedy (his father died of leukemia when Elliot was eight, possibly due to a toxic leak caused by his negligent employer). He's a complicated person with mixed motivations and hidden levels of character still to be revealed. It's a credit to Malek's portrayal that you want to stick around to see them unveiled.
And now, with a new episode airing tonight on the USA Network, we thought it was time to give Mr. Robot a fact-check. No show is perfect—but exactly how accurate is the promising drama?
Hacking as coping mechanism.
Hackers gonna hack. There are many types of hackers, and many motivations for hacking. But one of the things Mr. Robot really nails is the portrayal of a certain type of hacker who hacks to make sense of the world and connect to it. While Elliot displays some of the symptoms of someone suffering from Asperger's—avoids eye contact, doesn't like to be touched—there are hints that these peculiarities are more the result of nurture than nature, coping mechanisms developed after his father's death to deal with a cruel mother and a crueler world. "Never show them my source code," he says in voiceover. For Elliot, life is The Matrix, and he's always on alert to prevent anyone from finding the bug in his code that could be used to exploit him. But these are just surface coping mechanisms; hacking is his primary mechanism for controlling a world that he feels powerless to control and for making connections in a world in which he feels disconnected. "What do normal people do when they get sad? They reach out to friends or family," he says as he huddles in his apartment crying. "That's not an option [for me]."
Like many hackers, Elliot isn't interested in the rules of polite discourse: "I'm OK with it being awkward between us," he says, slamming a coworker who wants to bro-chill with him. His way of connecting with people, both ones he wants to embrace and ones he rejects, is to hack them. That's how he gets to know them—eschewing the small talk. He may not have outward social skills, but he excels at others. In one voiceover about his therapist, he notes with irony that "she's bad at reading people"; like any good social engineer, however, Elliot himself excels at the craft. Then again, he may not be the most reliable narrator—his method of reading people involves hacking them to uncover their secrets.
Hacking as a vehicle for social justice.
It would be easy to condemn Elliot for his breaches of etiquette and digital barriers—he regularly invades the privacy of his best friend and his therapist, then is outraged when another hacker picks the lock on his apartment door and invades his own privacy. His values might seem skewed, but like another TV character, Dexter, Elliot has his own moral code. There's a sense of righteousness to his hacking that lends it, if not forgiveness, then a modicum of understanding. When we first meet him, he's exposing the owner of a child porn site. And the breaches of his best friend and therapist—the closest person he has to a mother—are ostensibly done out of concern for their welfare, however misguided and presumptuous. Most hackers don't see their activity as criminal, particularly when it involves righting a perceived wrong.
It's this impulse for justice that apparently fueled the hacker behind the recent breach of Hacking Team, the maker of surveillance tools sold to repressive governments. It's also an impulse toward superheroism and a greater good that fuels Elliot; it's the bug in his code that Fsociety exploits to recruit him to their cause. Prior to meeting them, Elliot's vigilantism is focused primarily on damsels in distress—saving seemingly helpless women from the feckless men in their lives. But his motive for joining the cause against E-Corp becomes very clear once he learns that the company was possibly complicit in the deaths of his father and his best friend Angela's mother.
Creator Sam Esmail, who is Egyptian, has said in interviews that the show was inspired in part by the Arab Spring and the revolutionary spirit of his 20-something tech-savvy Egyptian cousins caught up in the uprising. "These are young people who are tech-savvy, who use technology to their advantage to channel the anger against the status quo and try and make a change to better their lives. That is something that’s beautiful and fascinating to me, and that’s what I really, really want the show to be about," Esmail said. "It’s set in the world of technology, because I think that is a tool that young people can use to bring about change."
Intelligence in one area doesn't translate to others.
The show also understands the dysfunction that can result from super intelligence. Elliot is smart when it comes to computers and hacking, but his control in that area leads him to believe he can similarly control others. To deal with his loneliness, for example, he self-medicates with morphine. But to outsmart the addiction trap, he has rules for drug-taking that give him the illusion of control—to cut the power of the morphine, he takes suboxone, a drug for treating opiate addictions. It's the hacker mentality that simple logic can be applied to any problem.
Hacking Lingo
Mr. Robot doesn't just get hackers right, it also gets hacking right. The team behind the show is clearly interested in technical authenticity and have made an effort to get the lingo, the tone, and the on-screen code right. In the pilot episode's opening scene, Elliot tells the kiddie-porn purveyor that although the guy used the Tor network to anonymize his online activity and encrypt his traffic, the exit nodes in Tor bleed plaintext unless the sender encrypts the data end-to-end—he who controls the exit nodes controls the traffic. There are also references to Gnome, Linux, rootkits and .DAT files.
This kind of geek name-dropping can be trite if not backed by other bonafides, but the show delivers. Esmail has said he was adamant that the show wouldn't use green screens—a blank green screen used in production that gets filled in afterward (usually with nonsensical code) by the post-production team—or show implausible hacks (e.g., the ridiculous BlackHat scene when Chris Hemsworth's character hacks the NSA). We see the fruits of his insistence when the Allsafe staffers try to halt the DDoS attack and when Elliot types commands into a terminal window. Mr. Robot also isn't afraid to drop references that only a hacker or security pro would get. When E-Corp is struck with the DDoS attack, Elliot exclaims, "Is this a R.U.D.Y. attack? This is awesome!" It turns out the attack, rather than a botnet assault involving massive traffic—the source of most DDoS takedowns—is driven by a persistent rootkit/worm that was implanted by Fsociety on E-Corp's servers. There's even a nice scene when Elliot fears the Feds might knock on his door and in a manic fit to destroy his hacking evidence drills holes through his hard drives and fries his memory chip in the microwave. (Of course, going back to the whole relative-intelligence thing, he doesn't even think to flush his drugs down the toilet.)
A Paint-By-Numbers Ensemble Cast
All of this said, the show has a number of missteps, including the random assortment of silent supporting players in the Fsociety hacker collective led by Mr. Robot (Christian Slater). They include the requisite overweight geek with glasses and unruly hair, an African-American who seems more of a bodyguard than a digital wizard, a female hacker with attitude who has the ability to pick locks but so far no discernible digital skills, and a mousy young Muslim woman whose sole purpose has been to serve as foil for the show's worst line—Mr. Robot tells Elliot that the woman, who wears a hijab, might look harmless but "she's got some 'Allah akhbar' in her." We're told that the hack of E-Corp by Fsociety was uber sophisticated, but there's no sign yet that this troop is capable of such a feat. The characters in Fsociety are going to have to earn their hacking stripes in future episodes or risk undoing the goodwill Elliot's character has garnered from the audience.
IRL: The Ultimate Security
Mr. Robot tells Elliot that the members of his collective never communicate online, just IRL (in real life). They want to avoid the mistakes made by another hacker collective known as the Omegas (a clear reference to the Anonymous offshoot known as LulzSec) that were undone by their mouthiness online and their trust in a leader who turned out to be working for the Feds. "Our encryption is the real world," Mr. Robot says by way of explaining their reason for leaving no digital trail. But this makes little sense in light of the fact that Elliot is regularly followed by men in black from E-Corp—who could easily track him to the abandoned amusement park arcade where the collective hangs out.
US Cyber Command's Role
After Elliot helps foil the DDoS attack, E-Corp visits Allsafe's office to learn what he uncovered, and brings the FBI and US Cyber Command with them. The FBI makes perfect sense—but US Cyber Command? Either there's a plot point yet to be revealed connecting E-Corp to the military, or the writers misunderstand what US Cyber Command does: defend military networks (along with the NSA) and provide cyber support to military operations in the field. Even if it turns out there's a connection between E-Corp and the military, it would make more sense to involve the NSA—the infinitely more skilled technical arm of the military—than US Cyber Command.
Busting Cybercrime On Faith
When Elliot confronts the child-porn perp in the coffeeshop and lets him know he's turned over evidence of his crime to the Feds, it's like he's blown a dog whistle: On cue, several cop cars race to the curb outside, sirens blaring and lights flashing. Aside from the fact that this noisy entrance gives the perpetrator warning and a chance to flee, destroy evidence, or encrypt his computer, this isn't generally how cybercrime busts occur. Since forensic evidence can only lead investigators to a computer and an IP address at best, they generally want to catch the perpetrator in the act online, sitting at his keyboard while logged into his anonymous account—usually after an undercover Fed or snitch has lured him online at a coordinated time.
Clemency For Hackers
Likewise, there's a disconnect around Elliot's reason for seeking therapy. It isn't revealed in the first episodes—though it's clear he's not there by choice. The character bio on the show's web site says he was arrested for financial hacking and has been attending court-ordered therapy for nearly a year. Elliot isn't a minor, however, so unless later episodes explain why he's getting court-ordered therapy instead of serving time, that's going to be a plausibility issue. Courts and prosecutors don't coddle hackers with therapy, they throw the book at them.
All of these missteps are forgiven, however, whenever Malek is onscreen—which thankfully is nearly always. His performance, and his interactions with Slater as Mr. Robot, and with nearly anyone else for that matter, really make the show. For this reason, Mr. Robot remains one of the most promising debuts of the summer.
