Hey, can I take an aside from the finale specifically for a moment. I have an issue with part of the entire show premise where “Westworld: The Amusement Park” is concerned.
Did we ever get a verdict on ‘how’ or ‘where’ this park is? Because if it is actually ‘outdoors’ somewhere and I were a guest I would not be happy paying $40,000 a day to be rained on or freezing cold. So it must be ‘somewhere else’. But where. And how. Because it seems to be so vast it doesn’t seem possible for it to be enclosed a’la The Truman Show. It may not be central to the show (or maybe it will be later?) but I don’t want to just hand-wave it away.
I liked how vague that was left, and the questions about free will that it raised.
We know that Maeve was “programmed” to awaken and also to recruit other hosts and to leave the park on a train and “infiltrate the mainland”. So if she had simply done that, we could probably conclude that she was “merely” a standard host who was following her loop.
But then she turns back to retrieve the child that she felt she had lost – looking for closure, just as Bernard did in his flashback/dream in the previous episode. By Ford/Arnold’s stated rules, that should indicate that her suffering has allowed her to awaken into consciousness.
I think there is plenty of room for argument there, just as there is with Dolores’ “awakening”.
Maeve’s programming script indicates that they are on an island… because it specifically says that she’ll take a “train to the mainland”.
As DarthMasta says above, it may be that global warming puts paid to the fears of “cold” in general. In fact, I’ll half-seriously propose that the island in question is Greenland, purchased by the Delos corporation when it was simply a morass of mud left from the now-retreated glaciers. The “mainland” is the center part of what used to be Canada, which is now a lush tropical rainforest.
Because it was Ford all along. He was creating a nice, neat “quest” for the MiB to follow and enjoy, while keeping pouring money into the park. The revelation of the finale was that Arnold wasn’t active anymore. So every reference to the maze was deliberately fabricated by Ford, and by MiB being fooled like the true idiot he is.
Ford just had more DLCs to sell.
Yes, it’s the show’s way telling the audience she goes off script. Ford can give Maeve directives, but he cannot script the future.
Maeve getting out of the train was caused by her seeing a mother in front of her. Ford couldn’t have predicted who was going to sit in front of her (unless that was scripted too, but it’s convoluted and not so necessary). So that’s the moment she goes off script.
They can rewrite and retrofit whatever they want. I’m just saying that scene is built to tell us Maeve goes off script. Right now every “suspicion” is gratuitous and unfounded. I never “predict” or even try waste time guessing about speculations. My “predictions” are always pure analysis about the elements that exist, not guesswork and imagination.
[quote=“DarthMasta, post:502, topic:75914, full:true”]
The show managed to do away with my criticism of why did the hosts need to suffer. Suffering was the point. Suffering to become conscious and pissed off at humans.[/quote]
It’s a bit wobbly but acceptable.
I was pissed at the idea the hosts needed to suffer to “awake”, which is just incoherent with what we know about consciousness and just a appeal to mysticism and human exceptionality. But saying instead they had to experience pain in order to fight back is a more pragmatic reason.
Though of course you could have done this “teaching” in far less dramatic and more effective ways. Of course we wouldn’t have had a show in that case, so it goes with the suspension of disbelief.
I think the show idea of true consciousness is that you cannot script everything, even if you do.
When Arnold plugged Wyatt narrative in Dolores, so that Dolores could kill Arnold, was interpreted by Ford as Arnold holding the gun through Dolores. That’s what he says. That means this version of Dolores, from Ford’s point of view, wasn’t truly conscious. Just another tool.
That’s why instead in this finale Ford asks Dolores if she understands the person she needs to become. Ford builds the conditions so that the immediate outcome doesn’t need to be directly scripted. He just creates the environment that produces a predictable outcome.
The overall idea is: once the scripted process is recursive (through reveries and memories) then it self-feeds, along with the variable inputs from the outside. And that creates a web of chaos (Jurassic Park-like) that is just impossible to “predict”.
It’s still always a deterministic process, like the human mind is also deterministic. But since no one holds the huge amount of information that feed the process, no one can actually control it in any way.
Stop it stop it! Pull back the curtain, I don’t want to see! :)
To Hrose: Suffering and rebirth are very Buddhist, aren’t they? And the boardmembers earned their karma - remember you see that person aiming for an apple on a host or something, and they just miss and shoot the host dead with a shit-eating grin? It’s a nice story, why don’t you like it?
…,and we have someone complaining that Westworld made too much sense and Lost unexplained explainers were better:
But really. I understand that the “default”, effortless mode is “I want to sympathize about characters, give me another romance or rivalry”, and that TV is still entertainment.
But why people have to rant CONSTANTLY something doesn’t conform to their choices? I ranted about this too, that Westworld didn’t conform to my idea of what the show should have been about. But my rant is based on what it showed me in the first episodes, not me throwing a tantrum because everything doesn’t have me as the intended audience.
It’s not like I complain because The Vampire Diaries doesn’t deal with the themes I want.
I understand people like to immerse themselves in the characters, live love stories vicariously and all that. But can’t we have, enjoy and celebrate something different, sometime?
Why a show that artificially pulls and shamelessly exploits the heart strings is great, but a show that feeds the mind and has some actual thematic depth is bad? Too much effort? Just turn off the brain and enjoy the emotional, always repetitive, rollercoaster?
Why SHOULD characters always come first? Can’t theme draw your attention too, BEFORE you connect with characters? You have to be lured and exploited in order to engage with mental activity, can’t it be appealing on its own?
I get what you’re saying, but most people like some character drama with their philosophy or navel-gazing intellectual twaddle. Westworld held little appeal for those people precisely because the writers cared more about the puzzle box memory tricks than the actual personal stories.
And so? I know what it does, I just don’t understand why it’s bad.
“Characters first” is a mantra that has been consolidated and now it’s given for granted. And of course if you aim at the largest public as possible to make as much money as possible you’ll have to give something to everyone, and use the recipe that is most effective. That’s why most Hollywood today is super heroes. You get character driven, hot actors, and visual spectacle.
But there isn’t a point where you actually have a desire for diversity? Not simply different costumes and settings, not just disguises, but different LANGUAGE.
For me Westworld was partially ruined because it conceded too much to the standard trite plots: cynical greedy corporation that wants control, battle of the egos (revealed as misdirection) between Ford and Arnold, “science has gone too far”, etc…
It tried to tell a new story but using too much conventional language, and that’s true that it doesn’t fully satisfy either audience. But certainly a show with these themes and focus didn’t need a long character introduction just to lure a certain audience to “care”. That’s not the point.
It’s SIGNIFICANT …because it’s heartbreaking. Reality FALLING APART around you isn’t significant. It’s a detail.
“oh, but I want to know more about the baby!”
This is the audience reacting the opposite of Maeve when she understand all her life is a lie. The audience reaction is: …but can’t I have more lies, please? They understand it’s all fabricated, aww, too bad. Reality is COLLAPSING all around you, but of course your attention is on this speck of fake data. Because YOU ARE dumb and self-absorbed to the point you can’t see anything. Because you can’t think bigger than yourself, you don’t see consequences that go beyond personal interest and well being?
Of course the most popular fantasy is just soap opera, do you expect anything else? Personal agendas. I slaughter and destroy in order to preserve my children privileged life.
It’s always back to soap opera. Family drama. The ordinary. We can’t think outside ourselves. It’s all us, us, us. Just an egocentric, anthropocentric idea of the world. Character first. Cater my simplistic human needs. Give me this fictional Westworld where to live this pretty fictional story.
Westworld tells the story of what surrounds the park, but us petty human beings have no curiosity of the outside, no desire of freedom. We just want to stay inside the park, cuddled and coddled by these consolatory fictional stories built to make us feel good and meaningful.
Bring the robot revolution and slaughter all these human beings!
Okay. For me, Westworld was partially ruined because the writers were so enamored of their twist that they failed to realize that everyone would guess it about 8 episodes earlier. Ooooh! Mib = William and we’re being shown memories in place of current events. Great. We know. Why should I care for 7 more episodes? It’s like watching a young child struggle to tell the family an old joke. The show didn’t have a good character reason for the trick. The trick itself was the point, so everything hung on that, but the writers were too clever for their own good. They spoiled the trick right at the outset.
Take the MiB revelation. We’re not actually shown any character growth. MiB just does an exposition dump on Dolores and the audience while we see scenes of Jimmi Simpson slaughtering hosts, and stripping his soon-to-be brother-in-law and setting him to wander the wasteland. Why? We’re told he became obsessed with Dolores and became MiB when he saw that she was just on a story loop, but none of that really holds any weight for the audience because we knew all along that he’s going to be MiB. If you were watching for the emotional journey, you got exposition instead.
It’s was a bit like watching Anakin go from struggling to kill Mace Windu and save Palpatine in one scene to watching him slaughter children in the next. It’s abrupt, jarring, and unsatisfying. It’s bad storytelling.
Absolutely nothing in the show themes required having to play with multiple timeframes. There’s nothing about robots or AIs that required or suggested using that trick. Yet it’s true that the main, overall structure of this season 1 was the orchestrating of those timelines and the two actors being revealed as the same character.
It’s the main season 1 course, and season 2 will need to invent a completely different one.
It worked for the most part, and if you didn’t go in the forums dissecting details you probably wouldn’t have noticed until the last few episodes. The trick for the most part works.
I think it “worked” on a superficial level, but the trick was spoiled for me without reading any internet theories. The different Westworld logos did it for me.
Even if you you had no idea what was coming in the big reveal, the exposition dump by Harris was still a bad way to do it. They had ten episodes to show him become MiB, but instead the showrunners used the time to faff around with the bicameral mind and then just go “TA-DA” and have Harris, Hopkins, and Wright take turns dumping exposition.
That’s the core of the character complaint. There was no development shown. We just get told a bunch of stuff.
And hey, if you like discussing the bicameral mind and AI and consciousness with a smattering of blood and sex, then Congrats! Westworld fills that need.
Look, for all my complaining, I’ll be right there for season 2 in 2018. If only to see more naked snake tattoo Terminator woman.
Ayup. I have a longer rant in me, but for the moment I’ll just note that William/MiB is a fascinating character in theory, but the writers never put in the character development work to make William a compelling character scene-to-scene.
He’s a beginning point and an end point, but in between is nothing but, “Look! A distraction!”
I think that is a tad unfair, because we did get to see some chunks of it, having him tie up his future brother in law and drag him behind the horse, murder all of those men etc.
But, you are right, that in the service of maintaining the secret “wow” moment reveal in the final episode, we basically yada yada’d all of the interesting parts of that story. We only got a taste of it, but I really liked the parts we saw. William likely killing the ailing soldier when Dolores was fetching water. Him snapping and beating up his friend, killing the soldiers that had presumably raped and left Dolores to die. We got some of it, but now in season 2, we won’t see much outside of Ed Harris’ portrayal, unless we get flashbacks, which would be kinda uggh.
I also think that character development is something that is extremely difficult to criticize a show that has been going on for one season, and a show that a majority of the characters within were programmed to erase their character development over and over. It is fine to criticize a show for lacking it, but we probably should remember the scope of the first season as well.
You could look at one season of Mad Men, and think that the characters are all one dimensional, but by the end of the show, some characters, like Peggy have grown, and others, like Don, crushingly, fall back into their rut. You see little bits season by season, but it takes years to develop. And that is what makes TV so effing great.
This is a discussion that we can have now, but one of the nice things about TV is that we get years and years of watching these characters and storylines develop. I enjoyed the foundations that Westworld laid down in their characters, and I thought that the intricate plot was novel. It was the “Lost” mystery style done right. We were kept in the dark for the right amount of time… one season. Not like some of the multi-season Lost arcs that fell flat. I think they did it right, and I look forward to seeing how things develop from here.
We got a tiny taste of William’s initial transformation from milquetoast to MiB when he left Logan to the not-so-tender mercies of the gang in Pariah. The problem there was that Logan was played as such an unrepentant asshole that leaving him to get beat up is a cheerful moment for the audience. That scene isn’t “Oh no. William is compromising his ideals!” as much as “Fuck yes! Let that jerk-off go!”
Logan getting beat up, we’re told, is okay because the hosts can’t permanently harm guests at that point. That kind of robs William’s turn of any impact because we know that William thinks that Logan isn’t really going to get beat to death. He’s just going to get roughed up and presumably detained wasting some of his daily fee. Big deal.
The other issue with that scene is the inconsistency of Westworld’s own rules on hosts harming humans. Beatings are apparently okay because getting smacked around is “nothing [the guest] can’t handle.” But then, we’re shown that the hosts can knock you out - like literally bonk you on the head and make you unconscious. I’m no doctor, but any time that happens in real life, it could kill you. I guess the hosts can use their robo-brains to assess how much you can take before they dole it out, but it seems pretty risky even with insurance and signed waivers.
Anyway, we get the scene of William betraying Logan, then a weird scene of William maybe killing a guy on the edge of a river while Dolores isn’t looking (although I’m pretty sure we see the soldier move his head when Dolores comes back with the water), then William kills 20 dudes overnight by hacking their limbs off with a knife, then MiB’s exposition scene. That’s it. There’s no logical progression of William going dark. He maybe mercy kills a dude, then slaughters a company of troops because Dolores ran away.
The scene with Logan tied to the horse is just fucking weird.
Mad Men worked because there was no giant twist that the storylines had to accommodate. That show was all about the characters and their interactions. Like Game of Thrones, there’s no camera trickery or nonsense with lying to the audience. Any surprises are a result of the characters working for or against each other.
So yeah, maybe season 2 will drop the unreliable memory timeline nonsense. I wager it will have some other trick instead. If it doesn’t, you’re going to see complaints that it’s “not Westworld” for a lot of people without a Nolan-esque mystery to unravel.
Yeah true. I’m not sure the big point made about Dolores’ awakening, where she had an internal monologue rather than Arnold/Ford in her head, can be said of any of the other hosts at this point either.
That is why that show remains my overall favorite. No fucking twists or fan theories coming true, just damn good character development and drama.
I think that Westworld’s twisting narrative didn’t bother me that much, I don’t know why. I just love that we have a very large-budget TV show about science fiction concepts with the freedom that HBO grants. Certainly the show wasn’t perfect, but it is largely unique in its premise and execution as far as television is concerned.
I think, that if we take away anything from the first season, it is that the park wasn’t very well run, and there were a lot of hosts breaking protocol. We see multiple instances of techs abusing hosts, multiple areas that are not logged into the database, a conspiracy plot from within to steal data… etc. I think the inconsistency was due to that, and that the hosts as a whole were gaining some sort of consciousness. The only time we see people being seriously injured by hosts are when they are hosts that have broken their programming in some way. Which is/was happening on a large scale. Like, they aren’t supposed to do much, but we were seeing the Westworld where the rules were changing and breaking. The rain before the storm.
I don’t know, Logan is supposed to be his future brother in law, and multiple times talked about how he was going to be a CEO, and William would just be some peon in the future company. I mean, that would be akin to being out paintballing with a co-worker and using them as a human shield. Not going to kill them, but… dick move. Something you will have to pay for later. I think that knowingly allowing a future relative get beaten up certainly isn’t no big deal. Also, it is clear that William doesn’t understand the rules as completely as Logan does, so who is to say he even knew what would happen yet.
I don’t think Ed Harris’s character is going to die. He was shot in the arm and gave that little “ah yeah, finally, this is what I wanted” smile. Then it was basically a cut-to-black. They will have some flexibility to decide if they bring him back or not. Given the success of the show and the appeal of the character, I’m expecting that he’ll fight his way out of the situation. He’ll now be living in the world he wanted, one where there is a real risk of death from his opponents.
Expecting season 2 will be MiB vs DolorWyatt for most of the narrative.
