[Spoilers S2E12]The Signal and the Noise

Just today I started reading Elliot’s journal, Red Wheelbarrow. And while I’m only a few pages in I’m already overwhelmed by the volume of plot-related “clues” it contains.

There are so many I wonder whether they’re really clues at all. Within the first 20 pages of the journal . . .

• Elliot directly alleges that Mr. Robot is the Devil and that he’s afraid of the church group

• Elliot says he feels like he’s “living out a simulated existence controlled by Matrix-esque robot overlords.”

• Mr. Robot draws iconography of Ouroboros and Elliot labors to understand its meaning. Many possible interpretations flow from the symbolism: Eternal Return, the quest for immortality, transmutation, Yin & Yan, etc.

• Elliot makes an offhand reference to poet Arthur Rimbaud who philosophized that a poet must make himself a “seer” through a “rational disordering of all the senses. [so as to experience] every form of love, of suffering, of madness.” And by enduring this unspeakable torture of becoming the “great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed he becomes the great learned one”

There’s more, of course. And that’s even before we include all the other possible clues within the show itself. Following any one of these threads leads to a somewhat unique interpretation of the show: It's a Christian allegory; it's a Matrixy-reboot; it's a Nietzscheian discourse on fate; etc

And while it may be possible to construct a unifying Theory of Everything that incorporates all of these various elements into a cohesive narrative, that possibility grows increasingly unlikely with each additional “clue” that leads to it’s own cohesive narrative.

That's why so many theories end up as Rube Goldberg contraptions. We just keep adding theory on top of theory to make sense of all the different threads until the whole thing comes crashing down in a giant heap of implausibility.

I’m beginning to wonder how many of these references are really just chaff thrown in the air to disguise the true intent of the show. In fact, I wonder if there’s any other way the writers could have provided so many “clues” without completely giving the game away.

Probably the biggest clue of all is that so few of us can agree on what the show really means. That's because most of the “clues” we rely on are red herrings.

Our job, then, is not to sweat every detail, but to separate the signal from the noise. If only I knew how.

The truth is out there.