Back in 2015, there was a scrappy new show that began making waves in the world of TV, Mr. Robot. The Sam Esmail-helmed show would go on to be nominated for plenty of awards and spawn several more seasons.
The series has officially concluded, but it will be a show we’ll be thinking about for some time. Here are some of our favorite quotes from its inaugural season.
“Hello, Friend.” - Elliot
These words first spoken by Elliot (Rami Malek) set the stage for everything that is to come, in the pilot, and the entire season. While Elliot may have a lot to say in his head to the audience, he barely speaks after the first scene in Ron’s Coffee Shop. Some may have easily dismissed the narration as a device too heavily leaned upon.
Though the first several episodes would use it a lot, it became a tool that was crucial to cutting through the noise in Elliot’s life. It would also prove to be unreliable as we discovered that Elliot suffers from a personality disorder, causing us to wonder just how much of what Elliot perceives actually occurs.
“I Don’t Give A Sh*t About Money.” - Elliot
The first scene after Elliot gives a monologue about the state of corruption the world is in, we watch as Elliot begins a conversation with the owner of his favorite coffee shop, Rohit. Slowly, it’s revealed that Rohit has the strongest wifi around because he’s also trafficking child porn on the internet, a dark fact of which Elliot is aware. Rohit is angered at first but soon realizes Elliot has the upper hand. He tells Elliot he’s willing to offer him money to call off the cops, to which Elliot responds that he doesn’t care about the money, and walks away as the cops come in and arrest Rohit.
This line completely subverts what would have been the setup for a hacker-procedural show; tune in every Monday night to watch Elliot hack a criminal and reap the rewards. Instead, we see that Elliot is so much more complex than that, and the show has a lot more on its mind than simply watching hackers exhibit god-like powers.
“F*** Society.” - Elliot
There are plenty of reasons that Elliot is upset with the state of the world, but perhaps the most significant one is the nature of the capitalistic society in which Elliot resides. Not only does he believe that the top 1% of the 1% are the people that control the world, but we as a society have numbed ourselves to this fact and refuse to do anything about it.
To a certain degree, Elliot even acknowledges his own participation in it. But these aren’t ideas he’ll tell his therapist when she asks him about it; they are ideas he’ll keep to himself until he comes into contact with F-society itself.
“Are You A One Or A Zero?” - Mr. Robot
Elliot is the perfect revolutionary just waiting to be recruited. He is angry at his situation but doesn’t seem to know what to do to get retribution or even the scales. Luckily for him, he stumbles into F-society and its mysterious leader, Mr. Robot. He lays before Elliot a master plan to make the 1% pay for what they’ve done and redistributed the wealth that they’ve acquired.
Elliot isn’t totally on board from minute one, so Mr. Robot asks, “Are you a one or a zero?” In other words, “Are you going to be a revolutionary or are you just going to sit back in ignorance and drink your Starbucks like everyone else?”
“Give A Man A Gun And He Can Rob A Bank… Give A Man A Bank And He Can Rob The World.” - Tyrell Wellick
A prevalent theme running throughout the course of Mr. Robot is how those with the most money are those that remain in power. Much of season one focuses on trying to execute hacker-vigilante justice via F-society, but as Elliot and his friends come to discover, it’s much easier said than done.
Tyrell Wellick isn’t part of the 1% just yet, but he’s well on his way, rising through the ranks of E(vil) Corp in the first season. He may have started as a lowly tech, but he knows where the real power lies, and he’s not afraid to do whatever it takes to get there.
“Not Once Have I Come Across An Animated Singing Virus.” - Romero
One way that Mr. Robot set itself apart from other shows and movies about computer hackers was its dedication to making the hacking look realistic. During one scene, while Elliot’s new cohorts are waiting for him to come down from drug withdrawal, they are watching the 1995 movie Hackers, one of many films that worked to make hacking seem sleek and cool without doing too much to make it realistic.
Romero, one of the cohorts, notes as they watch a particularly goofy sequence featuring the titular hackers trying to stop a virus that the scene is beyond the pale. Most people still probably won’t understand what’s happening on F-society’s computers, but it was reassuring to know that the makers of the show knew that its viewers were smart and could be treated as such.
“True Courage Is About Being Honest With Yourself, Especially When It’s Difficult.” - Mr. Robot
We don’t realize it right off the bat, but eventually, we start to see that Elliot’s perceptions of the world aren’t always what they seem. Elliot wants to see the world for what it really is, but his own perceptions color things for us such that we can’t always trust him.
It’s hard to watch the world around you constantly feed you lies about consumerism, but it’s even more difficult to realize that we lie to ourselves sometimes. Elliot is one of the more courageous individuals in the show, but honesty is not always his strong suit.
“I have an idea that will change the world.” - Angela Moss
Another common theme in Mr. Robot is revolutionary ideas and how difficult they are to see through. Angela begins the season trying to stick it to the man in her own way, only to wind up working for E(vil) Corp and buying into their culture. F-society’s plan to redistribute the world’s wealth is a game-changer, to say the least, but in following seasons we come to see that the plan is not thought through nearly well enough.
In the world of Mr. Robot, world-changing ideas, even with seemingly best-laid plans, aren’t enough. We are left then to wonder how do we fix world-sized problems?
“Every Hacker Has Her Fixation.” - Whiterose
In many previous depictions of hackers throughout film and TV, they have often been portrayed as smart, quirky individuals with maybe a little bit of social disconnect. Mr. Robot went an entirely different route, portraying its hackers as troubled individuals with preoccupations often tied to some form of paranoia.
For all the capacity that their brains exhibit, they also come with idiosyncrasies that often make it difficult to form and maintain relationships, as Elliot describes in the first episode. Whiterose highlights this in her meeting with Elliot, noting that time is her fixation.
“You Want To Talk About Reality? We Haven’t Lived In Anything Close To It Since The Turn Of The Century.” - Mr. Robot
By the end of the first season of Mr. Robot, we’ve learned that not everything that we see happening to Elliot is necessarily the way it really happened. He has a conversation with Mr. Robot, supposedly in an empty Times Square, who mostly monologues to Elliot about what constitutes as reality. It can feel a bit hammy at times, but it does cause us to wonder what world we’re living in, the beliefs we choose to cling to, the ideas that define us, and just how much all of that is influenced by the most powerful people in the world.
Elliot is an unreliable narrator, but when it comes to narrating our own stories, we, too, create our own realities in which we sometimes are not reliable narrators either.
