I want to begin my final The Mr. Robot Paradox by thanking everyone who has joined me here for the many months of Mr. Robot theorizing. I also want to give a shoutout to fans of this column from Instagram who followed me and engaged in the ongoing speculation about the time travel riddles and mysteries of the series. And lastly, I want to thank the Mr. Robot cast members who liked, commented on, or reposted my Instagram posts. Having all of these connections has been such great fun as we’ve speculated (and commiserated at times) over what it all means and what was coming next.
I concluded my last month’s column with this statement:
In the final analysis, Mr. Robot was not about time travel. But, for me, the paradox of Mr. Robot is that it was all about time travel.
For this month’s column, I want to elaborate on that idea. Now that we’ve seen the completion of the Mr. Robot story arc, we can take a fresh look at how time travel was woven into the series.
Mr. Robot writer and director, Sam Esmail, sustained an unrelenting focus on time travel themes, tropes and popular culture references from the very first episode through to the last. He took things even further by constructing a central plot that intersected directly with current quantum mechanics and the theoretical science that could potentially make time travel a reality.
So, allow me to present my case that Mr. Robot was really about time travel. I’ll start with a familiar compelling argument…
Back to the Future
The most frequent popular culture reference in Mr. Robot was the Back to the Future franchise. I could write an entire column devoted to the numerous references to the BTTF trilogy. The references to Back to the Future took many forms: allusions, direct references, indirect references, thematic references, musical and visual references. Looking at all of these nods to BTTF in Mr. Robot, one thing we can conclude is that time travel is relevant. The creator of this art form wants you to stop and consider time travel and alternate timelines at every turn.
Delusional Time Travel in Mr. Robot
Mr. Robot was a story about a guy with a complicated mental illness. That’s the understanding viewers accepted upon the story’s conclusion. But let’s consider this…. The series presented us with an array of familiar time travel scenarios that occurred within the confines of Elliot’s dissociative disorder. Elliot’s alter self—the Elliot we all came to know—placed host Elliot in a time loop. Host Elliot enjoyed the comforts of a stable life, a good job, nice parents, and a fiancé with whom he planned to spend his life. It was a monotonous life, but one free of conflict and worry. Later, we saw alter Elliot trying to eliminate himself—host Elliot—in a classic attempt at carrying out the grandfather paradox. Throughout the series, Elliot imposed all manner of time alterations and distortions upon himself. There are simply too many instances to count when Elliot stopped time, jumped time, repeated time, and lost time. There are just as many occurrences when Elliot created some form of alternate reality or other timeline for an aspect of his consciousness to occupy.
Time Travel Science in Mr. Robot
The character of Whiterose was the lightning rod for time travel science in Mr. Robot. For Whiterose, time manipulation was clearly an obsession. But this wasn’t some untethered and deranged wish or dream. Whiterose was completely and gloriously out of her mind, but she was also unfathomably wealthy and powerful. When rich meets crazy, incredible things can happen. Like purchasing a nuclear power plant and bringing physicists, scientists and tremendous labor resources together on a secret project to build a Very Large Hadron Collider to rival CERN. And to leverage, bribe, and arm-twist world governments to annex the Congo to transport the project there for its full realization and manifestation.
What was being planned and built by Whiterose was essentially a time machine. Instead of utilizing a more fanciful and fictional technological device as a flux capacitor, Mr. Robot leaned heavily on actual cutting-edge quantum physics. In the tradition of futurists, the show’s writers stood firmly on current science, then added exponential amounts of energy and funding to the equation that could eventually prove time travel possible beyond a conceptual level. These scientific and theoretical pursuits were happening outside of Elliot Alderson’s mind in what we came to understand was the real real world, not the delusional world of Elliot’s fabrication.
With all of the ongoing dissociative drama and misrepresentation of reality in Mr. Robot, it’s important to remember that an admittedly “mad-scientist type” visionary, with nearly unlimited power and money, was taking real science to the edge.
Mr. Robot: Closing Arguments
Here’s my theory. All time travel starts with a paradox. Mr. Robot is a perfect example of a paradox. To quote Merriam-Webster online, “The ancient Greeks were well aware that a paradox can take us outside our usual way of thinking. They combined the prefix para-(“beyond” or “outside of”) with the verb dokein (“to think”), forming paradoxos, an adjective meaning “contrary to expectation.”
Mr. Robot certainly took us—and television itself—outside of the usual way of thinking through its groundbreaking narrative construction. A disassociated Elliot, with an alter not ready to relinquish control, had to place his host self in another timeline. Much like Clarence placed George Bailey in an alternate timeline in It’s A Wonderful Life. George was put into this alternate version of reality—where he had never existed—so that he would understand how important he was to the people and community he loved. A similar comparison can be made with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, when the ghosts placed Scrooge in his past, and then future, and in so doing provided him the lessons that led him to embrace a newfound love for humanity.
On its surface, the completed story narrative of Mr. Robot left us all with the clear understanding that this was a story about a guy with Dissociative Identify Disorder. My theory is that this was the MacGuffin of Mr. Robot. Sam Esmail is notorious, you could almost say psycho or spellbound to pay homage to great film directors, and I think in his frenzy to do that, he put mental illness out there as the story narrative, when in fact Mr. Robot was about time travel from beginning to end.
In the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the concept of a MacGuffin played an important—and ultimately not important—role in the construction of his story narratives. As defined in Wikipedia, “In fiction, a MacGuffin is an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself.”
Within the construction of the Mr. Robot storyline, it could be argued that the series-long preoccupation with Elliot’s mental health was nothing more than a MacGuffin. The expectation and promise of Elliot’s well-being served to propel the plot as the story unfolded, and nearly every major character was motivated or impacted in some way by the issue of Elliot’s mental stability. If we take a literal analysis of the Mr. Robot story reality—beyond anything that occurred in the mind of Elliot Alderson—we know that Whiterose was herself mentally ill. Like any true MacGuffin, the mental illness was ultimately unimportant. This isn’t to say that the representation of mental illness had no value from a societal viewing perspective. Shining light on this condition within a popular fictional television story is to be applauded and acknowledged as a progressive and inclusionary achievement. But, the time machine of Mr. Robot was the most consequential element of the entire series. The machine was the reason for the flow of money to the top 1% of the top 1%. The machine was the fuel for all of the socioeconomic inequities that so primally enraged and motivated Elliot Alderson. The “time machine” of Mr. Robot was the plot.
The incredibly innovative and ingenious thing Sam Esmail did was turn the MacGuffin inside out. He made us care about it, and he created characters in support of the MacGuffin. Imagine if Hitchcock had built an elaborate personage around the seagulls, pigeons and other winged creatures in The Birds. We might have become so sympathetic to their cause as to forget the Oedipus Complex family configurations at the true heart of the story. In the end, the birds in The Birds were just…birds. But, in Sam Esmail’s world of Mr. Robot, he transformed his MacGuffin into a multitude of personalities that drew you in, that you invested heavily in, and ultimately came to care about almost in betrayal of the central plot. But, like the lifecycle of any MacGuffin, no matter how elaborate, no matter how appealing, no matter the loss, it must collapse into nothingness in the end. By definition, the MacGuffin and everything associated with it must eventually come to an abrupt end. Dom was literally left up in the air on her way to Budapest. Tyrell was on the ground, staring into a mysterious blue light. We caught a glimpse of Irving’s continuation story, but again a closed book that we’ll never finish reading.
In the final analysis, Mr. Robot will always be considered innovative storytelling. No one can disagree about that. But, there’s likely to be much disagreement around what that innovation actually was. My conclusion is that Mr. Robot was a story about time travel that redefined the MacGuffin.
If all time travel starts with a paradox, it only seems fitting that Mr. Robot ends with one. It was a story about time travel that was about—and not about—mental illness. And that, my friend, is a paradox.
Before signing off, let’s revisit Elliot’s dream future…one more time.
https://vimeo.com/184941365
David La France
Latest posts by David La France (see all)
- The Mr. Robot Paradox: Series Retrospective – Goodbye, Friend… - February 25, 2020
- The Mr. Robot Paradox: Season 4 (Episodes 12-13 / Series Finale) - January 28, 2020
- The Mr. Robot Paradox: Season 4 (Episodes 8-11) - December 27, 2019