Mr. Robot

Yesterday, I finally got around to watching the pilot of a new series.  It’s called Mr. Robot, and the central character, Elliot, is a rather tortured looking network security expert by day, cyber vigilante at night.  The very first scene is set in a coffee shop he likes to hang out in.  Elliot meets the owner of the chain, and proceeds to confront him with the fact that he has hacked him and discovered the vast amount for child pornography that this man is distributing through a site that he runs through the coffee shops gigabit Internet connections.  He threatens to turn the man in, and he responds by pleading with him and asking what he can do to prevent this.  “Nothing” is his reply and as the Elliot walks out the door the police pull up and rush in to arrest the owner.

From there,  it goes into Elliot’s life and his discovery of a vast conspiracy.  Yet, the plot is not really what I want to talk about here.  What impresses me about the show as much as anything is that it is apparent that at least one person involved in its production is very much of a tech.  There’s a sequence where the main server of a company that his firm represents is attached by a massive Denial of Service attack , and the representation of the process of dealing with this threat is one of the most accurate I have ever seen in a television or movie.  Instead of there being some sort of weird virtual 3-D world he has to jack into and wander around in, or lots of busy music and things flying all over the place, the work is done through a classic command line interface.  It’s not sexy, it’s not flashy, but it’s honest and accurate.  I appreciate that.

The show also has a serious film noir style it also seems quite relevant in a time of groups like anonymous.   I’d say check it out!