This season-end wrap-up is pretty rife with spoilers; you only have a few paragraphs to go before the spoiling begins.

Mr. Robot, USA Network's critically acclaimed drama in the mold of William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy, wrapped up this past week. A dystopian fiction set in the present day, the series' final episode was due to run a week earlier but was postponed as it showed some graphic gun violence on the same day the real-life murder of two journalists was live-tweeted. The show is the story of Elliot (played to a tee by Rami Malek), a disaffected but talented hacker, and his plan to take down Evil Corp, the world's worst business.

Elliot is seemingly recruited to this mission by actor Christian Slater's character—the pseudonymous Mr. Robot—into "fsociety," a small hacker collective that operates from a fallow amusement arcade on Coney Island. By day, Elliot works at an Internet security firm, fighting off the assaults of his kind in defense of—yes, you guessed it—Evil Corp. Did we mention that Evil Corp was responsible for an environmental disaster that killed not just his father but also his best friend Angela's mother?

But Elliot is very obviously an untrustworthy narrator right from the off. He speaks directly to the audience, acknowledging our presence as the manifestation of his mental illness. When we reviewed the pilot episode back in June, my colleague Sam came away underwhelmed, wondering if the show had any heart. Well, heart it certainly found.

Spoilers ahead

The storytelling moves at a fair clip. Other shows might string out the Evil Corp takedown over several seasons, but Mr. Robot dispatches it in 10 episodes, with several other plot lines that come and go throughout. fsociety's plan involves corrupting all of Evil Corp's financial records, thus bringing down the modern banking and finance system, but its success comes at great cost to an increasingly dissociated Elliot, whose mind turns out to be in far greater trouble than we realized.

Those of us who suspected that Mr. Robot was a figment of Elliot's imagination—to complete the "boy, this show sure resembles Fight Club" hypothesis—were correct. Slater is Elliot's brain using the form of his dead father to compartmentalize his actions from the rest of his mind—and us. Elliot, not Mr. Robot, is fsociety's leader, even if he can't remember what he's done. A twist that took more people by surprise happened in eps1.7_wh1ter0se.m4v (don't you just love the episode names?) revealing that Darleen (another fsociety hacker) to be Elliot's sister, a fact that his mind had blocked out.

Uncharitable sorts might accuse the show of taking the aforementioned Palahniuk novel, then adding a subplot that blends American Psycho and Macbeth for flavor (though we admit, we were charmed by the Lady Macbeth-ian effort of Scandinavian actress Stephanie Corneliussen). It's certainly been influenced by these works, but the show's creator is on the record saying he had been telegraphing the twist right from the beginning. After rewatching some of the earlier episodes, we certainly noticed a few more glaring bits of foreshadowing. For example, in the pilot episode (which, like the other episodes, has a cheeky, release-group-seeming official name, "eps1.0_hellofriend.mov"), when he finds a note on the server telling him to leave the exploit in place, the dialogue is ambiguous. Does he say "this note is for me" or "this note is from me"? We watched it a couple of times and couldn't tell.

The show's focus on the characters as they break down and experience their delusions—and the performances from Malek and his castmates—makes for compelling TV. Halfway through the season, things take a dark turn with the murder of Elliot's girlfriend/dealer, and hIs grasp on reality becomes weaker as a result. Similarly, Tyrell Wallick's sanity also runs off the rails after he strangles his boss's wife at an office party. Authentic though the tech subculture is on the screen, it's really just window dressing for a solid study of madness in the modern age—and that's what gives us hope for a successful second season.

If we have one bone to pick with the show's finale, it was a scene near the end. Elliott is following his hack unfold on the Internet, the screen flicking between different technology sites (io9, Wired, etc.) cataloging the chaos. Where was Ars? You can't tell me a hacker like Elliot wouldn't be a daily reader. Get that right in season two, Mr. Robot.