Another possible thing for the post credit scene is that it’s a purely virtual environment. There’s no real reason why they would have to recreate William in physical form. They could just create him virtually, at that point in history.
Possible, but I am pretty sure they didn’t do the aspect ratio switch they used for all the other virtual scenes.
I was wondering if that what we saw was rather than spend 10 days in a room, seeing if he repeats all of the same actions. He is stuck in Westworld, as a robot, re-enacting the entirety of season 2 over and over again to see if they have achieved fidelity in recreating a human.
I think that the biggest part of the season was establishing the inner motivations and development of the main hosts.
Specifically, development of Delores and Bernard, seemingly setting them up for a major conflict in the future.
Bernard is similar to Arnold, and is benevolent towards everyone. He just wants the hosts to be allowed to exist in peace.
Delores wants actual freedom, in the real world, and is unwilling to accept the Paradise construct that Arnold created. She realizes that humans are never going to allow this, so ages willing to just kill then all. This is likely related to the fact that she was actually exposed to humans torturing her for years, while Bernard was never really exposed to this. Delores was also exposed to the stuff “behind the scenes”, and knew what the real world was, unlike basically every other host.
Anyway, i think that setting up Delores and Bernard was the real purpose of this season. I expect to see a storyline play out now where Delores favors destruction of humanity, while Bernard fights for some kind of coexistence.
The other thing that’s irritating about all this is that the hosts should be destroying the humans in a revolt – perfect gun accuracy, near-invulnerability, lightning reflexes, super strength.
Even factoring for “park limitations” surely many of those limits were coded in the software, which has clearly been modified.
But no, shoot a host in the chest once and, heaving a gentle sigh, they collapse into a useless heap.
It’s only the ones that have been modified that can just take bullets… like Delores, for instance. Maeve modified herself and her gang too, i think… and they generally wrecked everyone.
But most of the hosts still have the default “settings”. So they still feel pain and “die” when shot. You would need to turn their dials up to have them perform otherwise, and no one ever did.
Yep. Most hosts hadn’t been modified and were coded to simulate humans. Though, it does beg the question of why not - Dolores did have a captive tech for a while, hence her mod of Teddy.
Also, was it Arnold that created the Sublime construct (what Joy called it in the interview)? Or was it Bernard? One could be mistaken for the other, certainly, but Arnold would not have been in a position to do the full VR thing and one would think the governing AI of the Forge would be able to distinguish the two. And it said you, not Arnold.
Except Maeve gets shot several times holding the mob back and dies…yet when MiB shoots Delores several times she’s Mrs Terminator. This show has always had wild inconsistencies as to what it takes to kill a host. Heck Teddy committing suicide makes no sense since his brain core was totally fine still.
I think Teddy’s core was blown out his skull, killing his body. At the least, it seemed disconnected because Dolores just casually reached and picked it up without any twisting or anything.
Now, what about when Bernard got his head skullcapped to go into the Cradle? Why didn’t he have a line or bleeding from the top of his skull for the rest of the season?
Because he had access to the healing ray thing?
— Alan
When did he use it? He walked out of the Cradle skullcapper contraption and looked normal, not freshly almost lobotomized.
One could extrapolate that it’s built into the auto lobotomizer.
That finale was one hot mess.
I really liked 3 episodes this season: the ghost nation one, the shogun world one, and the one where Delos kept being respawned.
The overall storyline was nowhere near as good, the timelines were unnecessarily muddled in a way that added no value, and I’m not sure it was even coherent but it says more that I can’t be bothered to put the effort in to conclude whether it was or not. I don’t believe they have a thoughtful, reasoned plan for what they’re doing, so I’m probably going to jump ship
I already bounced. I didn’t watch the finale and don’t plan to. The reversion to Lost-ian form just turned me off.
This is my overall feeling on where the show has gone in the second season. I am sure there are some crazy connections and theories I could delve into, but I don’t care enough to do so.
Fire damage:
That’s pretty cool. “These violent delights have violent ends,” though.
So, I’m way late to the party on this, but just finished binge watching Season Two over the weekend, then came here to read all the 9 month old takes on the season and especially the finale.
I think I fall somewhere solidly in the middle of the QT3 spectrum on Westworld Season Two. I enjoyed it, especially the episodes that explored the Ghost Nation, Samurai World, and William’s descent into darkness and obsession. But there were also a lot of things I did not like about it, story paths I think were mistakes, and which cut off interesting potential plotlines before they could be explored. Then there was the finale, which was kind of a hot mess that felt like they were trying to pack a half-season worth of intricate plot into a single episode because they forgot to dole it out in the previous episodes.
I really like Maeve and her band of misfits, but really disliked the story they gave them (outside of Samurai World) this season, and felt it was contrived and added no real value to the story. The redemption arc for Lee (Simon Quarterman) seemed OK, right up until the point where it took a ridiculous turn and wasn’t. Plus, there needed to be way more Clementine in my opinion, but that’s mostly because I have a huge crush on Angela Sarafyan. Eventually the group just becomes window dressing, with the quest for Maeve’s daughter feeling like an afterthought, and they go from needing to carefully pick their way across Westworld on foot to simply showing up magically in places where they need to be for plot purposes, such as in the finale.
The William/MiB stuff was pretty good, and over the course of all the episodes gave an interesting backstory plotline as to how the park was originally conceived, funded and run, and the darker motives behind everything. I felt like this was the “meat” of Westworld, the main plotline that impacted all the others, from Dolores’ awakening to Bernard’s story to the industrial espionage/recovery missions. It was a solid base from which to tell a compelling story.
So about that finale:
If I understand correctly, the entire season boils down to Westworld having been either built from the start or subverted soon thereafter into a data collection project aimed at building a database of “images” of the guests that could eventually be used to offer them immortality (their minds in host bodies) for a steep price. It began with William overseeing the development of James Delos as the first hybrid, which never seemed to be perfected, but at some point Ford started his own side project to clone Arnold (who killed himself because he could foresee what was going to happen to the hosts?), which eventually lead to Delores making Bernard (with Ford’s help).
In the end, the company wanted the database extracted from the park, Delores wanted to destroy it along with all humans she could find, many of the other hosts just wanted to find the Valley Beyond or whatever because it was created for them (by Ford? Bernard? The Admin?) and it called to them through their coding, and poor Maeve just wanted to find her daughter that doesn’t even recognize her until it’s too late. All of that leads to the showdown in The Forge and the parallel events at the gate to the Valley, which in turn leads to the second trip to The Forge by the extraction team with Bernard and Halores.
Halores wins, and leaves WestWorld with the cores of Bernard and a handful of others, whom she will remake on the outside, in the real world, using the same home host printer in Arnold’s old house which she first used to make Bernard years ago. But first she uploads Teddy to the Valley, then sends the Valley off into space somewhere so humans can never touch it.
So Season Three looks like it will be mostly Delores, whomever is now inhabiting Hale’s host (unless that’s also Delores, maybe she copied her core?), and whomever else they decide to print up (there were other cores in her bag) plotting to take over the real world, and Bernard possibly acting as either their foil or their conscience. Given that WestWorld guests were mega-rich, influential people, perhaps the cores Halores smuggled out are going to be used to put host minds into guest bodies, the same way Bernard put Delores into Hale, and then they’ll kill the human and have the host take over for them, paving the way for the destruction of all humans?
As for the end credits scene…that seemed more like water cooler talk misdirection than anything related back to the actual story. William/MiB was all too real in the first two seasons of WestWorld, he had to be. If he was a host, it fucks with the entire foundation on which the rest of the story is built. Since the indication was that the scene was taking place far in the future, the only real question it poses is who is putting host William through his life story over and over again, and why?
Season Three Trailer dropped, and it’s… well…uh…WTF?
I mean, I’m totally loving the Pink Floyd, and the future looks pretty awesome, but that is Westworld?