For many fans Mr Robot’s main attraction was the fact it wasn’t like anything else out there. In its first season it took the unreliable narrator trope and flipped it; made other characterisations of mental health look hackneyed and used some pretty weird camera angles to great effect. Elliot Alderson’s mission to exact revenge against E Corp, while battling his own inner demons – and Christian Slater – was riveting. But is it beginning to lose its appeal?

At the start of the third season the cliffhanger ending concluded in a predictable and – narratively speaking – tidy manner: Elliot is alive, and so is Mr Robot. The new arc revolves around Elliot recognising his plot with fsociety to bring down the world economy backfired and committing to undoing or at least diminishing the impact of his handiwork. Angela Moss is inching ever closer to the dark side, the FBI are as incompetent as ever (except for Grace Gummer’s Dominique DiPierro) and the Dark Army are an omnipotent threat who seem happy to sit back and let things play out. It’s a sea change from the start of the second series when its refusal to conform or neatly explain almost anything was held up by supporters as a badge of honour.

Mr Robot’s creator Sam Esmail doesn’t care what the show’s detractors say, or at least isn’t going to be swayed by them. “I can only go by how I feel and I much prefer season two to season one,” he told the Guardian recently, when asked about criticism of the show being too predictable. “I appreciate and understand the criticism, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a flaw in the show.” He added that Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is his favourite film of the year so far. (This season’s rapid cuts are a definite nod to Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream.)

Gloria Reuben as Krista Gordon, Rami Malek as Elliot Alderson. Photograph: USA Network/Peter Kramer/USA Network

That might and probably should worry Mr Robot fans because if Esmail goes the Aronofsky route the argument that the show is all style and little substance could begin to ring true. There’s a violent death early in the third season, which leads to an autopsy that is wantonly and almost comically graphic. The scene has a video nasty feel that, coupled with a rare instance of truly hammy dialogue, grates badly and poses the question: where are we going here? If it’s a Haneke-style bit of audience manipulation then that’s hardly new, but perhaps there’s a much larger unseen purpose that Mr Robot would be proud of. We can only hope, because the alternative is that heading into its third season – there might not be much here at all.

The show’s early curb appeal – that it eschewed convention – could be fading too. In season one and part of season two, the unreliable narrator trope was stretched and reshaped until it was too knotty to decipher. But in season three as Elliot sits in his psychiatrist’s office, the “who can the audience trust” trick is starting to wear a little thin. If that setup is how the show will operate for the remainder, the viewer doesn’t need that fragile balance to be sketched out every week. Last season’s big reveal – Elliot was in a mental institution while outwardly projecting he was still operating in the outside world – is a trick that can only really be used once. Even then it was a bit too cliched for many fans to be comfortable going along with.

In its second season the show that felt impossible to pin down started to conform to narrative convention. There are bright sparks such as Bobby Cannavale’s burger-loving operative who looks set to bring a New Yorker no-nonsense approach, which might add a bit of levity. Angela Moss’s apparent move to the dark side of the force is intriguing but has felt glacial. As Elliot continues to fight Mr Robot it feels as if that is a battle that needs to be won, lost or at least resolved once and for all. As Esmail said to the Guardian, the show is tuned in to the real world – from its depiction of geopolitics to lurches against globalisation. The show’s website rams the point home with real-life articles that could be Mr Robot plot points. But under all of that there’s a simple question that needs to be answered: who is Elliot Alderson and what does he want?

Mr Robot airs on Wednesdays at 10pm ET on the USA Network in the US; and is streaming on Amazon Prime in the UK