It's honestly pretty hard for most shows to truly surprise me. And I don't particularly enjoy big moments orchestrated simply to shock you (looking at you Game of Thrones!).

But Mr. Robot is SO. GOD. DAMN. GOOD. at defying expectations. It's so interesting.

I mean, last season, the Mr. Robot reveal was thing big thing, but the show acknowledged that it was a big thing in its own meta way. It was never meant to be this shocking thing because the clues were laid out very deliberately so that even if you saw the reveal coming, the payoff was still really great. And in the middle of all this, they drop this huge reveal that NO ONE was expecting, which was about Darlene and Elliot. Brilliant.

And this season, the prison element in the first few episodes was so obvious to a lot of viewers. Visually, I knew almost immediately that something was off, and the basketball scenes really cemented the idea of this all happening in the prison. So they telegraph all this happening and then leaves your jaw on the floor with the Leon/Dark Army reveal. And then later on in the season, the show teases and teases and teases the Tyrell stuff to the point where you convince yourself it's all a fakeout and then SURPRISE! But the biggest oh trout moment for me was the reveal of the FBI investigation. Holy trout. I found that entire sequence to be utterly masterful television. Like, so smurfing spectacular. All along we had this idea in our head about the FBI and it was all wrong!! My god.

I did find all the stuff in the beginning of the season to be unnecessarily slow. I wanted to trust the show, and I understand WHY it was so slow and methodical because I think it was meant to counter the mile-a-minute aspect of the end of the season. But seriously, it was so smurfing slow.

I'm not sure if the end of the season redeemed the first several episodes of the season. But I still feel like Mr. Robot is doing things that no other show is doing. And the high points of this show are really smurfing high.