My Miss Robot. Charles Mudede
Let it be known that spoilers are indeed in this post, which concerns the penultimate episode of the second season of Mr. Robot, a TV show about a team of hackers who start a revolution by frying the computers of a bank owned by E Corp. The star of season two’s eleventh episode (“eps2.9pyth0n-pt1.p7z”), which aired last night, made its first appearance in this season’s third episode (“k3rnel_pan1c.ksd”). It’s Alexa, a voice-controlled speaker/robot made by Amazon and, in this show, owned by the world-weary but still young FBI agent Dominique DiPierro (Grace Gummer). In “k3rnel_pan1c.ksd,” a depressed Dom asked: “When will the world end?” And Alexa responded: “Unless a future technology goes very wrong indeed, Earth is most likely to be destroyed in several billion years’ time.” What Alexa didn’t say is that the thing that will destroy our one and only world in that very distant time is our one and only sun, the source of life’s energy.
In last night’s episode, which featured the return of the first season’s top baddie, Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallström), another gorgeous performance by BD Wong (he plays Whiterose, the leader of the Chinese crew of hackers called Dark Army), a strange and partially silenced conversation between the head of E Corp, Philip Price (Michael Cristofer), and the current Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew (James Lloyd Reynolds), and provided no answers to the TV show’s ever-increasing complexity, the lonely FBI agent asked Alexa: “Do you have a boyfriend?” The robot answered: “I’m not the dating kind.” (Strangely enough, I asked my Alexa the very same question, and she gave the exact same answer.)
The FBI agent also asked Alexa: “Are you happy?” And it replied: “I’m happy when I’m helping you.” (Again, my Alexa give me the exact same answer to that question.) The hypnagogic FBI agent then asked Alexa the ultimate question: “Do you love me?” The speaker/robot: “That’s not the kind of thing I am capable of.” (And, yes, my Alexa’s answer to this question was no different.)
It’s also interesting to note that the return of Alexa to Mr. Robot happened on the exact same day that Amazon unveiled a new version of its speaker/robot. It is much smaller than the standard version, and will cost a lot less (only fifty bones). Clearly, the corporation wants to put one of these things in every home.
According to this TV show, the corporation that dominates downtown Seattle…
Charles Mudede
…will survive the revolution.
