![]() Last week’s revelation was confirmation that - for now - fantasy is part of the storytelling franchise of the show. I’m resolved to be more disciplined, even though I’d like to think last week’s episode confirmed my reading: The sequence in which Elliot dropped his blinders and allowed us to see his prison reality was scored with “Play the Game” by the late Jack Nitzsche, a piece of the Oscar-winning movie adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Since then, I’ve convinced myself I need to do less of this kind of analysis, or at least present such speculations differently within the context of a recap I worry I’m flooding readers with ideas that may or may not be helpful as they struggle with a show that is, frankly, daunting and confusing. In my recap of the premiere, I insisted that Esmail was alluding to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with certain lines, background detail, and other motifs. ![]() The scene of revelation confirmed many speculations about specific elements of Elliot’s hallucination - like strict, nameless mom = strict, nameless security guard - and seemed to validate some risky readings and guesswork. He was indeed in jail and he indeed had been living out a fantasy of freedom to cope with his experience. Last week, Elliot removed the wool over his eyes and ours and presented cleanly what we saw fuzzily. It was “going meta” run amuck - and one more incredibly ironic sign post pointing at the truth staring us in the face, that most if not all of Elliot’s experienced reality was “going meta run amuck.” (In another time, another place, we need to explore Elliot as embodiment and critique of “That’s So Meta!” pop culture.)īut it wasn’t. Robot” sitcom spoof with special guest star ALF it is subsequently explained as an expression of Elliot’s coping mechanisms for traumatic experience, detachment, and fantasy. Robot’s most celebrated metafictional stunt of the season, an unhinged “Mr. We see now that this flashback sequence was an elaborate allegory for the very thing we suspected Elliot of doing in the present. This, in a pivotal sequence in which Elliot dressed up as his dad and donned a Monopoly mask and slipped into an altered state. (You’d think Leon would have had an opinion about that.) There was the horror flick parody of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a classic of surrealist dream narrative. ![]() His new friend Leon (Joey Bada$$) spent most of the season recapping his experience of watching all of Seinfeld, including the series finale, although he weirdly didn’t mention the show’s infamous, polarizing punchline ending, in which a judge sent Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer to jail for a year. In his cell-like room, Elliot kept a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection, a story in which the narrator with a guilty conscience seeks redemption - new life - by helping the inmates at a prison, including a fair number of wrongly or unfairly convicted people. Would Elliot sprint toward greater authenticity and honesty or sink deeper into his kingdom of bulls-?Įxplicit references to other cultural texts also encouraged us to consider that Elliot had been sent to The Big House and was trying to escape it, at least in his own mind. His capacity for self-deception was as deep and dangerous as his pain. Elliot, agent of cynical realism and speaker of brutal truths, was a profound hypocrite, as most badly broken mad men of American pop culture tend to be these days. The revelation - more like clarification - was actually the secondary detonation of another shocker, a true stunner for most: It turned out that Elliot had completely forgotten that his fsociety compatriot Darlene (Carly Chaikin) was also his sister. So it wasn’t so surprising when, in the eighth episode, the show’s misfit and certifiably mental hero Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) realized that he’d been hallucinating this wish-fulfillment revolutionary rogue and ragged father figure, and in the form of his dead dad, no less. Robot (Christian Slater), the elusive leader of an anarchist hacker collective known as fsociety. For most of season 1, creator Sam Esmail provoked us to entertain the notion that there was something suspiciously unreal about Mr.
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