Warning: This piece contains minor spoilers for this week's episode of Mr. Robot

Has our hero left the grid for good? In two hours of Mr. Robot’s glorious return, Elliot Alderson touches only one computer. Technically, that brief interaction takes place within the timeline of season one.

The screenshot-able coding and tech accuracy that the show became known for last year only surfaces twice (and fittingly, Darlene provides the other moment). Instead of action, the second season’s two-part premiere, titled “unm4sk,” is much more interested in the state of our hackers and the hacked.

Within the story, it has now been roughly one month since the S1 finale and the unanswered questions that came with it—what happened to Tyrell? How does Whiterose know Phillip Price? Wait, is there a gun in the popcorn machine at fsociety HQ?—and Mr. Robot's latest installment satisfies some lingering curiosities while potentially building greater season-long mysteries. We learn that Tyrell Wellick, while still missing, has been identified as the ringleader in the E-Corp data encryption scheme. In a well-done bit of digital sleight of hand, Barack Obama utters his name in an address to the nation (which, if you're wondering, is a tweaked version of his real speech denouncing North Korea's Sony-related hacks). Krista still sees Elliot for regular therapy sessions despite where they left things in S1. Angela still works at E-Corp despite the promise of her lawsuit.

And perhaps least surprising of all, Elliot hasn’t done away entirely with his damaging alter-ego. He’s working on it, though. As a way to control his condition, Elliot adopts an extremely rigid daily cycle that he documents relentlessly in a (Chekhov’s?) notebook. Now living at home with his mother in order to obtain structure and avoid the digital realm entirely, he eats three meals a day with his pal Leon (comic relief is the sure sign of a good drama, and Leon's nihilist reading of Seinfeld is great), watches some hoops at the local park, does chores, sleeps, and repeats.

Like Krista, Angela, Joanna Wellick, and the nation at large, at face Elliot seems fine. He believes this new routine can help control his condition, but it’s not long before Mr. Robot sits beside Elliot in this self-imposed cell. Their interactions get crazier in this private setting, but by continuing to document everything, Elliot always leaves feeling in charge. It’s only later we learn this likely isn’t the case, which means some very messy (and more public) interactions between these two are sure to come.

In the show’s Decoded special, creator Sam Esmail hinted at a much “darker” S2. So far, the appropriate bricks have been laid, with our heroes all clearly struggling beneath the veneer. The visuals capturing the show’s three main characters—arguably Elliot, Angela, and Darlene—beautifully illustrate this. Darlene hijacks the connected home of an E-Corp attorney and suddenly it appears to be a post-apocalyptic warzone fitting of the fsociety hack’s aftermath. During her most important scene of the episode, she addresses a crowd of fsociety recruits from on high while flanked by a flag to her right. It’s beautifully authoritarian, likely speaking to the state of fsociety with Elliot offline (and some original core members MIA).

Meanwhile, Angela appears in an almost entirely lily white office space vaguely reminiscent of The Architect’s digs in The Matrix. She looks like a porcelain doll or one of those Children of the Corn-types in closeups. Her apartment embodies a telescreen room à la 1984 (and she only furthers the image by embracing positive affirmation tapes in the early morning). She has come to fully embrace the E-Corp machine, which seems to be shaping her into an effective cog. (In perhaps the most vicious IRL pwning since Elliot v. Bill Harper at Steel Mountain, Angela ensures there will be no more regular meetings with her E-Corp suit attorney.)

Elliot is largely shown in his mother’s home, a set that’s lit like a prison to emphasize its timelessness, disconnectivity, and utter despair. Video Editor Jennifer Hahn points out that this echoes a lot of director Tom Hooper’s work (Damn United, King's Speech), depicting a character sitting in the corner of the screen. It makes Elliot appear claustrophobic, suffocating as he's on the wrong side of a sea of negative space.

The only time within the premiere that Elliot looks to enter a world of full color is at the basketball courts, where new neighbor Ray proposes a partnership for his business, which needs a computer guy. Technology clearly puts Elliot’s life into full Technicolor, but he’s unwilling to embrace all of the shades right now. Throughout the two-part premiere, however, Mr. Robot gradually starts appearing more and more outside of Elliot’s room. S2 will clearly follow suit.

Peter Kramer/USA Network

Peter Kramer/USA Network)

Peter Kramer/USA Network

Michael Parmelee/USA Network

Robot society, not f'd

Beyond the main plotlines, everything we loved about Mr. Robot seems to be back in S2. Within this first episode, the show continues its amazing run of prescience. Last season had references to Ashley Madison , social engineering aplenty, and a Bernie Sanders ethos about the one percent well before much of that stuff came into the mainstream consciousness. With “unm4sk,” the writers' room needed to put some of this to paper last fall—a crypto ransomware attack, the rise of dictator-ish leaders, laughable security within the connected home, government agency hacks—and real-world news has only added realism and relevance since.

Since S1 of Mr. Robot, F-scale champ Donald Trump sealed the Republican nomination, Maryland hospitals paid the hackers, OPM was hacked, and the feds admitted IoT security can become a weapon. As NPR TV Critic Eric Deggans told us ahead of the premiere, the show continues to “give viewers the feeling everything is grounded in reality… Because they get the details right, the average viewer—and 80 percent of the viewers may not know the computer stuff—can watch it and it feels right. And when the show has to do something that’s unrealistic, this makes it that much easier to buy it.”

Mr. Robot's last season also did well to deflate the serial-drama trope of a "monster of the week." When someone like Fernando Vera would show up, television history has conditioned us for what to expect. On most shows, Elliot dispatches this bad guy and the character (and subsequent impact) is done. Thankfully, Mr. Robot proved to be more clever and complex with people like Vera, Shayla, or Cisco.

So in addition to seeing characters like Gideon and Joanna Wellick dealing with the E-Corp fallout in S2, the FBI has now taken an interest in the hack, E-Corp’s top brass begins to get more active, and we get neighborhood folks like Ray and Leon. If the prior 10 episodes indicate anything, none of these new faces will be window dressing (and that likely goes for the mysterious Brock, who dramatically arrived at nearly the last moment of this two-parter).

Familiar faces alumni continue showing up all over the series. Joining Gideon Goddard (aka President Walker), attorney Antara Nayar (aka Chief of Staff Linda Vasquez), and an E-Corp security detail man (aka an FBI security man), E-Corp lawyer Susan Jacobs may be familiar as Claire Underwood’s colleague/opponent at a water non-profit. House of Cards alumni continue showing up all over the series. Joining Gideon Goddard (aka President Walker), attorney Antara Nayar (aka Chief of Staff Linda Vasquez), and an E-Corp security detail man (aka an FBI security man), E-Corp lawyer Susan Jacobs may be familiar as Claire Underwood’s colleague/opponent at a water non-profit. The cross pollination between the casts feels interesting if only because the two shows may rely on fourth-wall-breaking narration more than anything else on television. HoC's Frank Underwood wants to be the viewer’s pal and over time proves to be unreliable as his actions reveal him to be a monster. Elliot, on the other hand, doesn’t want to deceive us. Instead, he has tragically deceived himself and gradually reveals an unreliable nature because of his mental condition, as opposed to intentional malice.

As if to simply remind us the show could still be really, really good should it want to become a caper-of-the-week affair (like much of its USA rerun brethren), the main setpiece of “unm4sk” unfurls brilliantly. Fsociety fights on against E-Corp by turning the home of its prized attorney into a new HQ; it orchestrates a crypto-ransomware attack to see how high it can make the company jump; and then—like Elliot taking down Ron’s Coffee way back when to prove a point—fsociety has poor, overmatched Scott Knowles light $5M on fire.

Like everything else on the show, it’s complex, kinetic, and accurate. In fact, Andre McGregor, director of cybersecurity at Tanium and an FBI consultant for the show on S2, told Ars on this week's podcast that the crypto-ransomware wasn’t even the team's original idea. McGregor started pen-testing the hacks written into the script’s early drafts to gauge their feasibility and grab screenshots, then suddenly everyone realized it was time to pivot.

“We were going in a different direction, but as we started to peel back the onion—what systems do we need to compromise, how would this spread and move laterally around the systems?—we ran into a hiccup where we couldn’t get into this system easily,” McGregor said. “Sam said, ‘Well if we can’t do it, we can’t do it. We’re not going to try and make it work, pretend that it works, or use art magic to do it. We’re going to have to rewrite everything.”

It’s one anecdote, but it should provide viewers with loads of comfort. Just as Mr. Robot works against many tired TV tropes, it’s battling some precedents as well. The show’s first season surprised fans and critics, coming from left field to win Golden Globes and possibly Emmys against the final stages of prestige dramas like Downton Abbey. That’s reminiscent of something like Homeland, which outdid shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad in its debut season. However, that show infamously veered a bit off the rails in S2 and beyond.

Sam Esmail has also opted to take on more creative control this go-round by directing all 12 episodes. That tactic happens all of the time in British television—which may partially explain why it takes forever for four to six episodes of Luther or Sherlock to show up—but for US TV the results have been mixed. S2 of True Detective may end up getting the show canceled, while S2 of Fargo drew near universal praise. But Esmail has never shied away from the fact that Mr. Robot started out as a film script and that he intends to translate his original story into this new format. More direct impact in the week-to-week may only strengthen that idea.

So although “unm4sk” conditions viewers to ignore appearance and dig deeper, it feels safe to take things at face value with Mr. Robot at large. The S2 premiere has stoked the fire on old characters and plotlines while introducing new ones. It has maintained the show’s standout aesthetic and attention to detail. And best of all, in the middle of a summer lacking in GoT-type experiences or Rogue One release dates, Mr. Robot’s premiere assured us there will still be something fun to look forward to each Wednesday. Hello (again), friend.

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Decrypted is Ars Technica's weekly podcast for season 2 of Mr. Robot. Listen or subscribe however you please above, and let us know what you think—thoughts, questions, criticisms, or your favorite Angela burn—through the comments section, on iTunes, or via e-mail.