Democracy Is Not Doing Well In The Mr. Robot Season 3 Trailer

Democracy is not doing so well in the season 3 trailer for Mr. Robot. In fact, it looks like no one is doing well in the post-apocalyptic world we'll get to rejoin on October 11, when the show returns to USA. Things look darker than ever for our hacker anti-heroes.

Rather than the distorted voice of Mr. Robot himself, the trailer uses Leonard Cohen reading the lyrics of his song "Democracy" as the voiceover. The effect reminds us a lot of FX's promos for American Horror Story, which do a great job of using existing cultural references to scare the crap out of viewers.

The Cohen lyrics used here begin:

"It's coming from the sorrow in the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin'
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat."

The scenes show a New York City even more wrecked than it was in season 2. There are people living in tents on the sidewalks, wearing dust masks and living in the subway. That tells us little about whether phase 2 of Elliot's (Rami Malek) great plan to take down capitalism is happening or not.

Most of the main characters look like they're not having the time of their lives either. Angela's (Portia Doubleday) walking around with a hoodie and a mask, Dom (Grace Gummer) is pointing a gun in an office building, Darlene (Carly Chaikin) is crying, Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) is all sweaty, Tyrell (Martin Wallstrom) is chugging vodka straight from the bottle, and even Whiterose (BD Wong) herself looks rather unsettled in the back of a limo. Elliot's freaking out too, but what else is new?

The only person who seems calm and collected amid this chaos is a new character played by Bobby Cannavale. According to TVLine, he's a "laconic, no-nonsense used car salesman," which somewhat explains the cheesy mustache and '80s frames he's wearing.

If you were really into internet puzzles, you got to see the trailer about an hour before anyone else did on Friday afternoon. As with everything else on the USA show, creator Sam Esmail and his promo team rewarded people who like to dig below the surface of things by creating a puzzle that involved things like using Morse code and averaging numbers in Mr. Robot tweets (it's all explained in this Medium post). Thankfully, USA was willing to throw a bone to us passive viewers too.