‘Mr. Robot’ hacks into millennials’ minds

I have spent the past few nights binge watching the USA show “Mr. Robot.” I will not give any spoilers because after reading this blog you should immediately watch the pilot episode. Trust me, you will be on the edge of your seat the entire time.

The show is based on the idea that the cyber world is de-humanizing everyone. Everyone in the world can be defined by their social media profile, their email password and their Google search history. Big corporations, politicians, the stock market – they are all the enemy.

Picture this: Dexter Morgan (from Showtime’s “Dexter”) and Tyler Durden (from Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club”) have a baby. Now, imagine that the baby was raised by Zero Cool from the movie “Hackers.” Elliot Alderson from “Mr. Robot” is that baby.

The show centers around a big-eyed, morphine-addicted, paranoid man named Elliot Alderson, played by Rami Malek. Elliot’s favorite hobby is to hack into other people’s lives. Like Morgan and Durden, he breaks the fourth wall and talks to the audience and claims that the audience is his creation. He hacks into people’s personal lives and then stores their information on a disc and hides them away into his CD collection. As seen in the pilot episode, he is a cyber-vigilante; even though he is a criminal he still abides by his own moral code.

The big bad of the show is E-Corp aka Evil Corp. This company is based off of variety of real companies such as Enron, Dell and Bank of America (but primarily Enron hence the logo). Elliot works for a cyber security company called Allsafe, possibly referencing AllState, and Evil Corp is their number one client. Further down the road, Elliot becomes involved with fsociety which is led by Mr. Robot, played by Christian Slater. Fsociety is an anonymous group of hacktivists who are trying to infiltrate Evil Corp’s servers to clear everyone in the world from debt. The group’s mascot sports a mask similar to real-life hacktivists Anonymous.

Personally, I went through this show in about four days because it was unique and different than what has been on TV and Netflix as of late. The end game of fsociety is almost identical to the goal of Project Mayhem in “Fight Club” – to erase the world of all debt. “Mr. Robot” is a modern, cyber approach to this idea of anarchy and the show explains it in a way that millennials can understand. If this doesn’t get through to them, I don’t know what will.

I do like that even the creator, Sam Esmail, has established all of these fake brands based off of real brands to show the reality of the issues at hand. Of course the Enron logo hit home so I googled the hell out of it. Esmail told Gizmodo, “that the ‘E’ in Evil Corp is ‘totally the Enron logo….It’s not like they’re going to sue us for it.” Clever Esmail, very clever.

To check out all the brands they use in “Mr. Robot,” click here!