Re: TV: Give Me That Remote!
I didn't have that visceral reaction (except for the chick in the smart house -- just throw the breaker, dummy), but my impression is they are deliberately mixing realism and surrealism to underscore that Elliot has lost control of his mental software. Mr. Robot is at heart an exploration of what "I" is. What do we mean when we think of our "self"? Gilbert Ryle wrote a
highly influential essay about this 70 years ago and philosophy has been grappling with it ever since. In what ways are the impression of cognition that you have right now reading this "you"? Think of yourself reading this sentence. Who are "you" -- the reader, the impression of reading, the reflection on reading -- what's going on when you reflect upon "yourself"? Is there an actual hierarchy of mind in the substrate or is this a mental concoction, and what does it mean to be "mental," anyway?
On the naive level (let's call it the Fight Club level, in honor of Handyman

) Elliott's mind has split and is at war with itself. He's a garden variety schizophrenic, probably because daddy dropped him out of the window when he was a kid. Elliott is the Narrator and Christian Slater is Tyler Durden. The show can work at this level but it becomes frustrating because it seems to be spooling out a lot of unnecessary or irrelevant interactions and thoughts. Get to the fight scenes already.
I propose Elliott's mind is like the
OSI Model except the levels have become self-aware. Typically cognizance only lives at the Application Layer, and everything below that just chugs along doing all the mechanical functions required to support the highest level: consciousness. To cite Fight Club again, Tyler and the Narrator are simply different applications competing for system resources.
Conversely, in Mr. Robot, at least all the Host Layers are "alive" and have will. And it's not a simple hierarchy either -- they seem to be confusing themselves and each other because their interactions are no longer autonomic -- they require deliberate "will" to dial each other up. Elliott, sitting at the table listening to his buddy run on about Seinfeld, is running system tests trying to put the layers back in their "normal" state -- under control. But as Mr. Robot (Slater) says, "control is an illusion" (for Elliott anyway). Why "Mr. Robot," anyway? It seems like a harkening back to Ryle's "ghost in the machine" -- the "robot" (the machine) has woken up and Elliott (the fictitious little man at the "controls" that we imagine our true "self" to be -- directing the machine to interact in the physical world) not only has no control over it (it does things that surprise him, which shouldn't happen), but he even has to deal with it directly in the persona of an annoying hack actor who hasn't had a good role since Pump Up the Volume.
To extend the analogy, the whole international financial system is like a mind, with we individuals who comprise it at a lower layer unconsciously humming along, doing the things we are supposed to in order for the "real" actors at the top layer to accomplish their goals. The goal of "freeing" the people from their servitude is similar to the lower layers of Elliott's consciousness having become unstuck.