The show still has plenty of ambition, as indicated by the aforementioned 17-minute opening sequence, which felt as though it had been written with “Too Many Cooks” on repeat. At first, the scene recalled some of season one’s audaciousness: Think of the brilliant dream sequence where Elliot and Angela ate fish in an office-restaurant hybrid, server lights blinking in the background. But where that earlier scene knew when to pull back, when to let moments linger just long enough, Wednesday’s sequence seemed to luxuriate in its own weirdness past the point of narrative or artistic usefulness.

It played up the horror of Darlene’s mom sticking a lit cigarette in her arm before punching her unconscious to a raucous laugh track, of Angela pausing to smile at the camera for her sitcom intro before continuing to sob next to her mom’s casket, of Elliot’s dad coughing up blood into his hand. And it all went on for 17 minutes. It was later revealed that Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) had taken over Elliot’s consciousness in order to protect him from the violent beating he was receiving at the hands of Ray’s (Craig Robinson) goons.

Such formal and tonal experimentation can be hard to come by on TV, especially on basic cable (though the likes of FX are changing that), so on some level Esmail and USA deserve credit for breaking with formula so imaginatively. But the scene also distills the kinds of excesses Mr. Robot has been especially prone to this season. Last year, the show displayed a knack for teasing out new mysteries and subplots while putting old ones to rest, all while pursuing its main thread: F Society’s attempt to take down E Corp. This year has been filled with so many apparent digressions (the Seventh Seal-esque chess match, countless Philosophy 101 soliloquies about the nature of reality and truth, Joanna Wellick’s romantic life, Whiterose’s sartorial interests), that it’s often unclear what kind of a story Mr. Robot wants to tell anymore. Rather than resolving some mysteries from season one (where is Tyrell?) the show is simply offering answers to questions few people were asking (“Who exactly thought of the name ‘Mr. Robot’?”)

It doesn’t help that for much of season two, characters were so scattered that their storylines rarely intersected in meaningful ways. Only recently have a few converged: Angela and Darlene are now working to hack the FBI in order to hide their involvement in the downfalls of AllSafe and E Corp. Elliot is helping out as best as he can when he’s not engaged in various existential and ontological struggles. The FBI Agent Dom DiPierro (Grace Gummer) is digging around in Angela’s business. When characters do meet, their dialogue often borders on overwritten (See: Any Mr. Robot screed) or just plain goofy (“Control is about as real as a one-legged unicorn taking a leak at the end of a double rainbow.”)