With our narrator Elliot incapacitated – in one way or another – for nearly all of season two, Mr Robot has had to rely on other characters to actually drive the plot forwards. Not many shows would be willing to let their main character take such a backseat, especially not so early in the show’s lifetime – and it has certainly drawn the ire of some fans.
But Mr Robot has never been known for doing the expected thing. Sidelining Elliot has allowed him to deal with the fact that he and Mr Robot are the same person, something he didn’t have time to process in season one. In the meantime, Mr Robot has other characters to rely on, and in episode eight it took the risk of stripping away everything it’s known for. No voiceover, no narrative trickery, no Elliot or Mr Robot at all, and it was great. That’s thanks to the characters who have been doing all the heavy lifting in season two: the women.
It would have been so easy for a show about hacking that centres on the relationship between two male characters (well, one, but you know what we mean) to have no women in it whatsoever. They could wheel out the old True Detective defence: “But it’s about two guys, and besides, women don’t even work in this industry!” The women could have been relegated to love interest status. But not on Mr Robot.
Fsociety is currently two girls and a guy (plus some peripherals), the FBI is on their tail in the shape of another tough woman and former will-they-won’t-they fodder Angela Moss is now the iciest badass on TV. And once you add Joanna “Lady Macbeth” Wellick and Whiterose into the mix, you’ve got one of the best collections of female characters on TV right now.
The role of women in the show was a slow-burner. In season one they were on the sidelines, with Elliot even becoming embroiled in a rape-revenge storyline in a failed attempt to save his girlfriend. But in season two, creator Sam Esmail set out to fix that. Angela in particular has been a highlight of season two, becoming a mantra-reciting corporate stooge in the belly of the beast, whose end goal is worryingly ambiguous, both for us and for her. She even managed to break the heart of the undercover FBI agent keeping tabs on her.
Speaking of the FBI, Agent Dominique DiPierro is possibly the best new female character of the year. It would have been easy to make her a gruff dude, but Mr Robot made her a lollypop addict with social anxiety, and Grace Gummer is a delight in the role. Joanna Wellick, meanwhile, is having witnesses killed while cooing over her baby, and Darlene – the only one who had been short-changed up to this point – took the lead in episode eight, committing murder in her desperation to keep fsociety up and running in her brother’s absence. This was all his idea, after all, and now Darlene is picking up the pieces, in between bouts of crying in a bathroom and taking a baseball bat to her boyfriend. And as for Whiterose – frankly, we have no idea what’s going on there, but more BD Wong as the ambiguously gendered (and moralled) Chinese minister/head of the Dark Army can only be a good thing.
Elliot is on his way back to the world of Mr Robot, and it’s a far richer world than the one he left behind now that the female characters have been allowed to escape from his shadow and grow in surprising ways. We hope Elliot and Mr Robot are ready to share the limelight, because this isn’t a two-horse show any more – and it’s all the better for it.
