HBO's Westworld

Maeve is still my absolute favorite, god I hope she gets some kind of closure this season though I bet her daughter's not going to remember her, triggering her further descent into brutality.

They didn't show what happened to Felix so crossing fingers that he got out or is still alive.

I doubt Ford's truly out of the game, even with his child Host version being killed off especially because of how the episode ended with the Delos staff being confused at the existence of a sea.

So that Chinese soldier implies that Westworld is in China or in the official boundaries of China right?? Or it could be Taiwan but I highly doubt it.

My assumption is it's an artificial island in the South China Sea.

Teddy has fully embraced his position as murder boyfriend and finally gets to know stuff, it'll be interesting to see how he grapples with his programmed morals and what Dolores is doing.

Despite all of William's talk of the narratives playing out to their logical conclusion, the long plotting of Ford as seen with El Lazo for William's game and the discussion of Maeve's narrative from the first season finale makes me think that they're still dancing partially in his palm.

Father Delos is not quite as much of an asshole as I expected and the pieces are coming together as to how the park formed.

We got glorious Maeve and Dolores interaction for the briefest of minutes, their confrontation has pretty much already locked in an interesting dynamic.

I'm kind of shocked that James Delos seems to be older than I expected (the shots I saw of him I assumed was the 'present' time) so I would actually assume he's probably dead by the time of the series proper. If we go off of Actor ages... Huh, actually...

James Delos (Peter Mullan) is 58, Young!William (Jimmi Simpson) is 42. William (Ed Harris) is 67 which would put James Delos at... 83? Which is just over the age of Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Though, while I suspect that Ed Harris is age appropriate, I would suspect that Jimmi Simpson isn't and they're aiming the character age a bit younger with his character. Dolors would be around 30 in this equation and that puts a 12 year difference on her and William when they kind of read as the same age. That would put the age difference between Delos and William too close so... Oh boy. Math!

edited 6th May '18 5:37:26 PM by InkDagger

Felix is back, thank god I missed him and his unbelievable trust in Maeve.

Hoo boy, that India park. Lots of colonialism and orientalism to unpack there, especially with most of the hosts implied to be Indian from what was shown in the episode. Christ, I hope the other three parks don't have this much inherent imperialist fantasy baked into their premise.

Sizemore only making Isabella because she dumped him is hilariously pathetic and so is his meltdown at seeing Maeve and Hector just hold hands. It's perfect karma that the bad writer has to suffer his characters making their own decisions.

so the Ghost Nation is presumably well-intentioned because they want to save the guests but they're framing them as evil Native Americans because the characters don't know better and what I'm saying is that the writers are walking a very thin line here with this plot thread because there are so many ways this can go wrong.

Woooo Samurais vs. Cowboys next episode

Episode 3 spoilers:

I think the choice of incredibly racist and colonialist narratives is part of the point. At least from Ford's perspective. He wanted the hosts to suffer to become sentient after all. It's just that as we see with Maeve, love is perfectly capable of doing it as well—which is a surprising narrative choice in such a grimdark series. Either way, this is a series about a slave uprising that apparently has gone dramatically wrong since Dolores has gone way off to the Dark Side.

edited 8th May '18 7:00:24 AM by CharlesPhipps

Eh it's just that since most of the focus is on Westworld, there isn't time to delve into the ethics of colonial India or presumably the Mighty Whitey stuff that happens with guests in Shogun World so the parks are brushed over with the same kind of paint even though there's most likely varying difference in what guests do in each park because of the setting even if it does boil down to the same suffering for the hosts.

Also it seems that the park uprisings seem to be happening parallel to each other, is this because of Dolores or is there an equivalent of her in each park?

Or does she even know about the other parks?

Not sure how I feel about Felix right now. I understood him the first time around but... what's his motivation now? Because, literally, your place of work and home is the sight of a massacre and I don't know what you're getting from this now...

Presumably, the other parks will get detail as the seasons go on. I believe the show runners said that they have a 5 or 6 season plan for the series. I would imagine Westworld will lose focus for the other parks as we continue.

To be clear, it seems that the Wyatt personality and the Dolores personality are not in harmony right now. I really hope they do more with that because, well, as much as I understand Dolores' position, she's going way off the deep end and we're going to his audience apathy quickly at this rate.

I feel a bit confused on who I'm supposed to cheer for at this point. Charolette, Stubs and the other employees? They want to kill all the sentient hosts and presumably just fix the park back to its normal abusive state. Dolores? She wants to murder every human out there regardless of their morality. She's also sided with the Confederados (big no-no) but then murdered them all when they were her allies and its not played for heroics (breaking one of the many Super Villain rules; don't kill your allies). Maeve? I guess she has noble goals and is easily the most interesting character so far but she also falls into a similar apathy of humans that Dolores does. Its understandable, but it feels like her daughter is the only thing keeping her from becoming another Wyatt. Should I cheer for Bernard? I don't know what his motive is except 'survive' right now.

I think Dolores is now a Full-Circle Revolution and He Who Fights Monsters character.

She's become the Woman in Black.

My guess is that Armistice was coercing Felix and Sylvester, hence her new upgrades and Sylvester having the grenade shoved into his mouth.

There's a parallel between Peter and Maeve's daughter as the tenuous link to morality for Dolores and Maeve and their arcs seem predicated on how they'll react upon reuniting, Peter's malfunctioning seems to have hardened Dolores and we'll have to wait and see what happens with Maeve.

Actually, regarding the other parks, now I really want a Pirate World mainly so we can have robot pirates fighting robot samurai fighting robot cowboys.

Ford was a huge FOR HONOR fan as a kid.

x3

That's how I feel but I keep getting the impression every so often that Dolores is still supposed to be that light in the darkness we're cheering on and... I don't feel that way. Not right now. She was last season when going through everything but then she became Wyatt.

There's also the Spoiled by the Format method.

Dolores and company will never leave the park since if they have material for five or six seasons as well as other parks, it's all doomed.

To be fair, I thought we'd never see the mainland in the series and we did one episode in.

Does the park suddenly feel smaller to everyone else too? After this episode with a guest running from a tiger INTO the off-grid section of the park, everything just suddenly feels small I guess? Big but... not the mythic big that Logan built up in Season 1 with "No one knows what's at the edge of the park".

Then again, I guess that was in the early operating days of the park and they might have actually shrunk parks of West World and installed actual boundries so the five other parks could be built. (Maybe this is what Dolores witnessed via William at the end of that episode? One of the new parks being built?)

I guess my biggest worry that we haven't alievated yet is that the future parks aren't going to have as much depth. Westworld has so much history and lore to it at this point with that being the birth place of Arnold-Ford, Dolores, and everything. What is going to be the history of the other parks to build up that same level of lore and philosophy?

Speaking of that, its also a big difference from last season is we're getting a lot more actions and a lot less dialogue and musings on philosophy. Not that its exactly bad and I want to be clear, I'm not shitting on the season, its just different and something I hope we get back to as we open up other parks. I think part of the appeal to Season 1 is the operations and loops and how everything fits together. Like my feelings on Jurassic World; The park is more facinating when I'm watching all the rides and operations than when everyone is running and screaming from the same thing.

Maybe what's going down in The Raj actually isn't related to what's happening in Westworld? Timeline wise, the revolution started at night and I'm surprised that our mystery guests got as far as they did without getting killed while the Westworld Hosts seem to be playing "Why Don't You Just Shoot Them?" in their revolution. I feel there's more story potential if the other parks haven't gone off line and each has a different reaction to what's happening. The Raj is more subtle and manipulative about their revolution (Maybe we can adapt the Hindu concept of Karma into their section?). Westworld is all out warfare. Maybe Shogun World is significantly more peaceful in their reaction to the revelation/uprising and take Maeve's route of "Well, we know its constructed but its our way of life and that makes the emotions real to us". Maybe another park had the guests all aware of the other parks and they murdered all the Hosts thinking they'd get murdered but none of the hosts had actually solved their mazes?

I could also see one park becoming an all out dead zone where everything is destroyed. Everyone is dead. I'd envision something like Miranda from Serenity. You could build up a lot of myth and mystery with a location like that and getting into 'What the hell happened?' and we just barely grasp and answer.

Sorry. I'm totally rambling at this point. I apologize.

I can't decide whether the mention of the Klondike means they literally built a recreation of the Wild West all the way to Alaska or they just shrunk the scale and programmed all the Hosts not to notice the geographical discrepancy.

To be fair, they have full control of what the hosts understand so it might be less "don't recognize the discrepancy" and more "That location is just over there and that 's all we've ever known" because they don't have the real world to compare it to.

So William spearheaded a project to keep Delos alive via host technology and ultimately became disillusioned with the results due to all the break downs the Delos host had in addition to how miserable his own life had gotten, ultimately not even caring to terminate the last host for Delos after it became hostile and ultimately killed everyone observing him

Bernard and a returning Elsie stumble upon it and eventually kill it, but it appears there was another human they were trying to convert to a host too...could that be Ford?

edited 14th May '18 4:38:22 AM by Zarius

Oh hey Chinese people actually exist in Westworld, even though them being railroad workers is historically accurate I was kinda internally sighing at that being basically the only thing they're doing. Nailing people to become part of the train tracks was really creepy.

Elsie's back and rightfully pissed at everything that's happened to her. It must've been a wild rollercoaster insider her when Bernard just dumped everything on her.

I kinda thought terminating everything with fire was overkill but I guess Delos is stupidly rich enough they could just keep throwing money to recreate everything and hey it came in handy when they needed to put down James for good.

The several iterations of the Delos loop with William and the slow buildup to Bernard and Elsie discovering what's left was definitely the standout plot of this episode.

The Man in Black's one good deed not making up for everything is definitely true but it was interesting to see him actually take down the Confederados in favor of saving Lawrence's family.

So can Ford just take over any host he wants, is he like a virus in the network or what

Ah so like father, like daughter it seems with William.

Re: Chinese

Well, Westworld is a horrible place of racism, violence, rape, and misogyny.

Would it be a good thing to show it was progressive?

I feel like it's touching on the disconnect between Jurassic Park as the place people want to go vs. the fact it's meant to be a terrible idea.

edited 14th May '18 2:15:41 PM by CharlesPhipps

Yeah, I probably reacted too quickly, it's just that it's presented as a setpiece with little focus on what they're doing besides "shit's fucked", like why are they nailing people to the tracks? Is it because they ran out of wood and are going for whatever's the approximate size? Is it because they're specifically going after the guests? Who knows

It's definitely in-character for the Man in Black to not give a shit about any of that, so hopefully a future episode expands on them and they aren't just a one-note setpiece to be written off the moment they go off-camera.

On another note, I thought Wright's hoarse whispering was full of Narm and I couldn't take any of his scenes seriously despite how well-directed the flashback scenes were because of how it was intercut with present scenes and I was so distracted by his whispering (I guess he was concerned if anyone was still in the facility and didn't want to alert them to their presence??)

edited 14th May '18 3:38:16 PM by Nouct

I would also argue that Bernard is herrifically traumatized at this point.

As for the railroad workers, its arguably symbolic of what actually happened during railroad construction. So many died making those tracks that their bodies might as well have held the rails together.

I'd also argue that there's probably some 'Great Wall of China' point to be made here but I'm way too tired to think harder on it.

I also called it on the girl being his daughter. Aw. She lost her grandfather, father, mother, and boyfriend/fiancé/husband to this park. That makes me sad.

Odd that Logan is killed off in an off handed comment. I don't want to call bullshit, but I feel we're not done hearing from him since its otherwise strange in include Logan so much in the first 2 episodes just to drop him.

My dad actually figured out that she was his daughter ahead of time and did a pretty triumphant victory shout when that was revealed because I said that was really unlikely.

Linking the Chrys Watches recap mainly because of this golden line: "there was a working bathroom in there and you let me shit in a bucket"

Something I was a bit confused at in this episode. Delos says how he invested into the Host technology for immortality. But i'm confused to what exactly that meant in regards to his continued existance. Was the implication that Delos' brain waves his living consciousness which was inserted into a machine, or a copy of his mind that just couldn't properly function in theory. Because the latter isn't immortality. The real Delos experiences death, then his mind goes to wherever, while something that's a copy of him takes his place. Which legacy wise, is immortality to others, but for the person themselves, the original, they're still dead. The former essentially implies soul transfer, which raises aloooooot of questions.

edited 14th May '18 11:39:05 PM by Emperordaein

Real life Transhumanists often argue about brain uploading.

Even though, yes, it's not them. Just a copy of them.

I even made fun of it in my second Agent G book.

There are ways to do upload with full continuity of consciousness, but if Delos had been put through a Moravec translation, he would not be asking if he recovered from his health issues.