It just was a matter of time that I’d come back this great show. My first attempt at watching it in 2015 was such a different era for technology. Mr. Robot almost seemed like an answer to the kookiness of The Matrix by plopping the hero into a real-ish world with the technology depicted right and the bad guy’s logo looking like the sideways “E” of Dell computers and called “Evil” no less¹. The trouble is, I don’t remember finishing its full four seasons. At some point this show was going to become new to me (though, after all these years it feels new). This time around, I was astounded by well it holds up; especially in light of what technology has become in 2026 versus ten years ago.

The hacker groups are named appropriately sinister (FSociety, Dark Army), and the episode titles have a ton of cool in-references². Watching all this again, yes the tech is dated, but it’s perhaps more surprising how relevant many of the references still are. The show’s creators attention to detail and obsession with displaying real things is something I’ve not seen in any other show before or since. That has always seemed to me like a love letter to technology. The accuracy is deliberate too. Per Wikipedia,

[Creator Sam] Esmail hired Kor Adana (former network security analyst and forensics manager for Toyota Motor Sales), Michael Bazzell (security consultant and former FBI Cyber Crimes Task Force agent and investigator) and James Plouffe (lead solutions architect at MobileIron) as his advisors to oversee the technical accuracy of the show.

As far as the hacking scenarios, yes, they’re outlandish and downright impossible in some cases, but Esmail’s efforts to make the technology as real as possible makes it all work in a weird way. In other cases, I would call them very plausible and even clever.

Needless to say, I’m not going to do some sort of stupid plot synopsis here.You should watch the show on whatever “Evil Corp.” service it’s available on right now. For how subversive and filled with the hacker ethos this show is, it genuinely surprising that it’s streaming on Amazon Prime and not outlawed.

There are, of course, cheeseball moments in a show so filled with melodrama. In one case, when Elliot is under pressure to bust a guy out of prison, he says to his compatriot (who hammered out an exploit too quickly), “Since when did you become a script kiddie?” I found myself chuckling a second time at his saying such a cornball thing. It’s a reminder that, yes, these actors are not tech people. All the more reason to respect the effort here. And part of this melodrama is the use of an unreliable narrator and, well, an unreliable fourth wall. This is all a bit disorienting and downright icky at times, but it generally adds to the experience. Rami Malek is amazing as an awkward, bug-eyed dude with tech skills that border on a superpower. He is the perfect casting choice.

Nostalgia overload is in just about everything. The show itself is a piece of history for a certain heyday of tech (2016-ish), but within the show we go back further in time and see the Mr Robot store³. Inside the store is every late 1980s, early 1990’s technology reference you can imagine. From peeling the labels off those damn AOL floppies to re-use them to the great ad posters of the era. There’s so much to see, you have to pause to take a look. With Mr. Robot working on these two levels, it almost completely subverts the machinations of the characters.

The final result is an enjoyable four seasons and 45 episodes. It’s also a great show for a weekend binge.

1. Heck, the in-world language converts “E-Corp” into “Evil Corp,” and everyone is just in on it and considers this name common knowledge. ↩︎
2. First season episodes are titled with common video file extensions. Look out for episode 7 (eps1.6_v1ew-s0urce.flv), named after the now-defunct Flash platform. ↩︎
3. Its frontage is even the title card of an episode. ↩︎