Mr. Robot’s tech guru: “My job is to outsmart this hive of geniuses”

Mr. Robot staff writer and technical producer Kor Adana doesn’t sleep much (four and a half hours is realistic while in the midst of production). Part of that comes from sheer volume of work. Adana holds the high-profile role of coming up with the show’s famed hacks. He’s involved in everything from generating an idea and recruiting consultants through the feasibility testing and onscreen portrayal. The entire process can take three or four months for a mere three or four seconds on-screen. On top of that, Adana also works to clear various technical products appearing on the show, leads Mr. Robot‘s many Easter egg initiatives, and contributes to the overall narrative (including writing an episode this season).

But nerves about Mr. Robot’s reception week to week don’t quite help Adana relax either, and this latest episode created more stress than usual. One week after the show ended on a cliffhanger with a gigantic plot reveal, Mr. Robot‘s most recent hour never even addressed the situation. Perhaps even more remarkably, it marked the first episode where main character Elliot Alderson didn’t appear on-screen for a single second. As Adana tells Ars on this week’s Decrypted podcast:

“I had a lot of anxiety and I know the other writers in the room had a lot of anxiety because we weren’t sure how it was going to be received. The question was: did we do enough work early in S2 laying the groundwork for our supporting cast to carry an episode? We tested this out a bit. With the FBI hack [two weeks ago], Elliot coded it but the ones who executed it were the rest of fsociety plus Angela, so that was kind of a test and that worked—I felt that was well received. But I was still really stressed out about this, because we never have done anything like this. The closest we came was episode 7 of last season: you see a little bit of Elliot in the beginning, but it’s mostly an Angela/Colby storyline. Still, we never did it without Elliot completely.”

Adana says as recently as the S2 writers room convening, the thought of doing an Elliot-less hour still felt impossible. So this latest surprise speaks to how comfortable the Mr. Robot team has gotten with each other and its story. It’s also perhaps the most obvious sign of how much the show has evolved in its second season. “A criticism I’ve read is we didn’t spend enough time fleshing out others’ perspectives and that whole world, since S1 was so focused on Elliot’s perspective and Elliot’s journey. We took that to a new level in S2, but it’s a journey of isolation obviously,” Adana says. “This [episode] speaks to our goals of flushing out the world and expanding it in a way where we don’t need to be in Elliot’s head all the time and with his perspective all the time. The show still works.”

/r/MrRobot

Another big change to Mr. Robot S2 may not be evident to fans only watching. These days, Adana sees the online community that wants to engage with the show to be as vital to Mr. Robot as whatever Nielsen tracks. As such, the subreddits haven’t lost their minds—there are many more Easter eggs on the show now.

Kor Adana at the most recent Tribeca Film Festival.

Credit: Getty Images

“I did it a little bit in S1, but we’re going crazy with it in S2,” Adana says. “I am beyond impressed. It feels like my job is to outsmart this hive of geniuses out there who are analyzing every single website, bit of source code, and frame of our show.”

Adana says while many of the secrets woven into Mr. Robot‘s background have been discovered, not all of them have been uncovered through show coverage or at the Mr. Robot subreddit. (For instance: “There’s something from ‘kernel panic’ that hasn’t been solved yet, and I’m surprised.”) It takes Adana a fair bit of time to come up with an Easter egg idea, ensure it furthers understanding of the show, and coordinate with USA digital marketing to hide the necessary assets online. But the effort feels worth it, given it satisfies dual purposes.

“The notion of there being an E-Corp, a conglomerate in charge of 70 percent of the world’s debt, is a big pill to swallow. So the way I see it, anything we can do to ground the show in reality with all the other tools at our disposal, the better it is to sell this version of reality,” he says. “That’s why the Easter eggs are important. It introduces this sense of interactivity that people in the hacking and infosec community really long for. They can hit these addresses, walk through these hacks, find eggs in codes that lead them somewhere else. In a way they’re hacking the show, which is something that’s never really been done before.”

Beyond the narrative implications, the Easter eggs also satisfy the kind of TV Adana wanted growing up. As young as age 11 or 12, Adana says he knew writing and directing TV or film was his goal. But he was good with computers, and when push came to shove ahead of college, his father offered a healthy dose of reality: “You’re not going to film school, and you’re going to get a real degree so you can be self-sufficient. That’s it,” Adana recalls. Yet as he pushed forward with a career in cybersecurity/IT, Adana spent his free time writing scripts or attending seminars.

“I tried to distance myself from that world so much, I never would’ve guessed the one thing I was pushing away and really resenting would be the thing that really helped me breakout,“ he says. “Now I’m trying to contribute in a way to make the show I always wanted to see. I’ve always wanted a really compelling hacker show with characters I care about and empathize with, and with tech that’s realistic, and that I can kind of interact with. I love the notion that if I had nothing to do with the show at all and I was watching something with real IP addresses and urls, and went down that rabbit hole, I would find some new information that added to the story. I think that’s awesome; I love that idea.”

Adana says there was some pushback to implementing his strategy in S1; after all, his responsibilities already take up quite a bit of time. But fittingly enough, it was a redditor that inspired the writer to push harder this time around. In S1, Elliot gets the idea for the Steel Mountain climate control hack after sitting in his apartment with an old radiator. The unit seems perpetually broken, and the thing clanks and clanks until it dawns on the hacker that raising the temperature for an offsite storage site can destroy fsociety’s intended targets. According to Adana, the sequence apparently inspired something equally grandiose from a fan: