Mr Robot or Mr Woebot? Why the hacker drama might need a restart

It's still one of the best shows on TV, but as the third season starts there's a sense it's lost some of the initial complexity and purpose

• Warning: contains spoilers - do not read unless you are up to date

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.