Mr. Foster Wallace continues:

"And if these villains <in David Lynch's movies> are, at their worst moments, riveting for both the camera and the audience, it's not because Lynch is "endorsing" or "romanticizing" evil but because he is diagnosing it - diagnosing it without the comfortable carapace of disapproval and with open acknowledgment of the fact that one reason why evil is so powerful is that it's hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from."

and:

"Evil for Lynch thus moves and shifts, pervades...is in everything all the time...not "lurking below" or "lying in wait" or "hovering on the horizon"...evil is here right now, and so are light, love, redemption etc."

Just think of this in the context of Elliot, he has saved people and saved pets but in that same season, he let an entire jail full of prisoners go free to serve his own larger purposes.

We love Elliot's heart so much that we forget that he plunged millions of people into hunger and poverty in the service of his revolution (if you look at season 2 again, you will see Esmail intentionally shows us snippets of people's lives after the hack throughout - most memorably the turkey sandwich maker who has to sell his store).

Think about it in the context of Elliot's Dissociative Identity Disorder, when Elliot Dissociates it is because he needs Mr. Robot to do something that he is so uncomfortable seeing himself doing that he has to dissociate from it.

At the beginning of the famous "Word Up Wednesday" episode, the theme song distances Mr. Robot from the world where good characters are always good and bad characters are always bad. I would suggest that this is because Esmail believes that suggesting people are entirely good or bad is a political and hegemonic act. Even the most odious characters on Mr. Robot have empathetic human moments (Phillip Price's birthday, for instance).

I believe that this element of Mr. Robot, the desire to keep all the characters complex and unknowable and capable of both great good and terrible evil, is the element that turns the most people off about Season 2 (not the so-called 'twists' and not the move away from fsociety vs. E-Corp). It is also the most obviously Lynchian element of Mr. Robot.

As Wallace puts it (in the context of David Lynch movies like Lost Highway):

"I like to have my own fundamental difference from sadists and fascists and voyeurs and psychos and bad people unambiguously confirmed and assured by these movies. I like to judge, I like to be allowed to root for justice to be done without the slight squirming suspicion (so prevalent and depressing in real moral life) that justice probably wouldn't be all that keen on certain parts of my character either.

Just this week, I felt horrified yesterday by what Donald J. Trump said on that bus but I was also was trying to suppress my own certainty that I had participated in many of those same kinds of "bro" conversations in years past.

* I have been intensely lonely and socially insecure, just like Elliot Alderson

* I have done many really good things, just like Elliot Alderson

* I have done some terrible things, just like Elliot Alderson.

We love conventional narratives, to some extent, because we can use them to put ourselves in the position of the hero.

I even find myself believing that the hero is acting as I would act in similar situations.

When someone on television saves the damsel in distress, it reaffirms my conviction that I would save the damsel in distress.

I want to escape to "TV land (from reality)" because there is real dissonance between how I see myself (as the hero of every story) and how I exist in the world (often irrelevant and rarely the hero of any story).

A conventional narrative is a kind of reality distortion field in which my cognitive dissonance can be relieved temporarily (where my itches can be scratched). And, after I take my televised medicine, I try to carry that simple map out into the world, I am fundamentally good and totally alien from whatever evil exists in the world. When I watch Whale Wars, I feel like I helped fight the overfishing of Whales (and take offense when anyone disagrees with the cause of fighting the fishing of Whales).