Sumith Prasad
Created by Tony Basgallop, Amazon Prime Video’s thriller series ‘The Consultant’ follows Regus Patoff, a mysterious consultant who takes control of CompWare, a video game publishing company after the murder of its founder Sang-woo. Ever since his arrival, Patoff astounds his employees with his quirkiness, reformations, and brutality. Several of his actions make creative liaison Elaine and senior coder Craig wonder about his ambiguous past. As the series progresses, Elaine and Craig try their best to learn more about him, which leads them to question whether he is even a human being. If the viewers are curious to know more about the same, here’s what we can share! SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Reality of Regus Patoff
After Regus Patoff assumes Sang’s office, he displays several puzzling characteristics. Patoff cannot climb a staircase like a typical human being. Since he doesn’t have any revealed disabilities, Elaine and Craig wonder why he avoids the stairs. The consultant also doesn’t sleep or return to his apparent home. He always spends his nights awake at the office, all by himself. Craig later learns that the only place he visits regularly is an isolated toilet on top of a hill. When Patoff calls Elaine to ask her to come to the office, he repeats the same sentence as he was commanded to do so.
Patoff also lacks the ability to comprehend an enormous amount of data, at least right away. When Elaine brings him the data collected by testing ‘Mr. Sang’s Jungle Odyssey,’ he doesn’t even understand the basic concepts, which is unusual for a consultant who has raised the turnovers of every company he has worked for. If all these factors are connected, it is safe to assume that Patoff is more of a robot than a human being. Thus, the show offers enough clues to theorize that Patoff is a man-made machine even before Craig’s meeting with Frank Florez, the jeweler Milani asks him to meet to know more about the consultant.
Florez was a typical jeweler until a group of doctors started to give him orders to make peculiar objects with gold, all bought by cheques signed by “Regus Patoff.” The jeweler eventually realized that he had been gradually making the parts of a human skeleton. He received 206 orders from the mysterious doctors, a number that aligns with the average number of bones in an adult human being. When Craig tells Florez about his boss Patoff, the jeweler gets curious about the height and weight of the consultant, indicating that he doubts whether the skeleton he made was used to create the new arrival at CompWare.
Florez’s suspicion is proved right when Craig comes to know that his fiancée Patti is locked up by Patoff in CompWare’s record room. After sending Elaine to rescue her, Craig confronts the consultant, who stands on a panel of glass. He makes use of a lesson he learned while developing ‘Mr. Sang’s Jungle Odyssey’ and hits the panel with a hammer, assuming that Patoff weighs around the weight of Florez’s golden skeleton. Craig succeeds in breaking the glass, which makes the consultant fall to the ground floor, severing a toe. Craig later dissects the toe and finds out that the bone inside is made up of gold, which makes it evident that Patoff is a robot made with Florez’s golden skeleton.
Patoff might have been made as a tool to reform sinking corporate establishments and bring them back to financial glory. Since he doesn’t ask for a single dime from his clients, he must have been conceived by an individual or group who wanted him to be a crusader of capitalism. He not only increases the turnover of a company but also changes its culture to make sure that it will continue to function according to capitalist norms so that financial stability will remain even in the future. In CompWare’s case, Patoff eliminates the culture of prioritizing the employees’ rights and needs by instilling competitiveness.
By the time Patoff leaves the company, Elaine is ready to become the new authoritarian figure who has proven her capability by unleashing a wild elephant on the streets of Los Angeles for promoting their product. This transformation is significant while theorizing that the consultant is a robot. The changes Patoff brings to satisfy capitalist notions can be described as “inhumane” or “heartless.” Bentley Little, the author of the eponymous source novel of the series, and creator Tony Basgallop use Patoff, a robot, as a representative of human corporate moguls, who build and develop their empires over human suffering and the elimination of human consideration.
‘The Consultant’ becomes a hard-hitting satire when it shows that the same human moguls are as human as Patoff, a robot. The lack of differences between them makes the show a commentary on modern-day’s capitalist culture, which is promoted and advocated by humans who lack humane qualities.
Read More: What is Regus Patoff’s Real Name? Who Does He Work For in The Consultant?
