Here's a rather complicated question: how do we form our identities? What makes us us? What makes one person a sociopath and one person a saint? What makes one person a liberal and one a conservative? Is our identity something that is inherent and innate? Are we born with an identity already in place and life is really just our identity exposing itself through our choices? Or is our identity something that is learned through social conventions, behaviors of those around us, and our experiences with the larger world? Okay, those were a lot of questions but this is Westworld and it wouldn't be an episode of said show if we didn't sit around asking the big metaphysical questions that human kind has been wrestling with for far longer than this HBO show. It's hard to know the trajectory of an entire season of a show after just a single episode, but if season one was about the exploration of what being real means, this first taste of the second season wants us to question what these newly born identities are capable of and what exactly they intend to do as fully awake Hosts. This week's episode "Journey Into Night" jumps straight into the overwhelming plot and navel gazing, losing almost no speed from the season one finale. Let's follow suit and dive on in, shall we?
The programmers of the theme park known as Westworld have given Delores Abernathy many roles; she was the farmer's sweet daughter who served as a "welcome wagon" to newcomers, offering them a friendly and pretty face when they first entered the game. As the farmer's daughter, all the expected cliches were there. Virgin Mary blue dress, big sunny smile, a slightly flirtatious demeanor coupled with a juvenile naivete, and broad conversational topics on the stuff of fluff like hopes, dreams, and the wider world. She was a girl that men would want to protect, marry, and try to give the world to. That version of Delores was written a certain way for a certain type of adventurer who wanted a certain type of story. There's nothing wrong with that type of story (if that's what you're into) but the long arc of season one was that this version of Delores was just that--a story that was written by someone else. The other persona lurking behind the sunny smile was Wyatt, a mass murderer who saw the world as ugly and had no issue taking out that ugliness in the most violent way possible. Again, that type of story isn't necessarily bad but it's specific to a certain kind of reader. Instead of the damsel, Dolores could be the rogue. But just like the farmer's daughter, the roving bandit was just another story written for Dolores and not something she chose. However, this does not mean that Dolores did not live those roles. Those two stories--and who knows how many others--were her only experiences, her only memories, her only identities, however murky and unclear those identities were. In the season one finale, Dolores appears to have risen up and killed the master--Robert Ford--thus becoming her own person by going against the cardinal rule for all Hosts--you cannot kill a human--thus exercising her own agency and proclaiming her self awareness. In other words, killing Ford is framed as a Dolores acting outside of the stories written for her. I think what season two wants to explore is just who is Dolores Abernathy, really. Is she the farmer's daughter? The bandit? Both of those? Neither of those? How much of Dolores's actions are based on who she really is--her own irreplaceable identity--and how much of it is based on her past lived experiences and memories? There's a line Delores gives in the premiere that would suggest she's neither of the programmed codes and that she's something utterly new. While stringing up a few helpless humans and waving her gun around, Delores says that all those codes "were all just roles you forced me to live; I've evolved into something new and I have one last role to play. Myself." In other words, we don't know Delores. The audience and the in universe characters haven't been formerly introduced to this new creature. Killing Ford was like Dolores's apotheosis; a new person was born from this cataclysm. And that's fair; Dolores has been a series of code--bleeps, bloops, ones and zeros--ever since she was created. Any identity she had was only given to her by the programmers. The issue with the idea that Dolores is giving birth to herself and at her core is this hellion who rides down men with a rifle, is that it looks an awful lot like the humans who inhabited Westworld and gave Dolores those former identities.
Towards the end of the episode, during a conversation with Teddy, Delores tells her lover that the humans who live and work in Westworld are "creatures that walk amongst us." She goes on to say that these humans are not like them, the Hosts. They are insignificant when compared to the Hosts. These Hosts are the superior race, the masters who can make the humans do as they please. What's interesting about this thought isn't just how violent it is, but that it's almost beat for beat exactly how the humans spoke of the Hosts. Go back to season one; how many times were the Hosts spokeen of and treated as simple machines. Their mechanics might be advanced but at the end of the day, the Hosts were toys, building blocks that could be put together, played with, destroyed, and rebuilt all over again, whenever the player wanted. There was no regard to the Hosts' life--indeed no one would ever suggest that a Host had a life. They had experiences based on whatever story they were currently cast in but like dolls, once their role was done, their clothes were changed, they were given new names and new lives. Thus did the cycle go on and on. The way Delores is acting and speaking seems pretty familiar. It's all learned language and mannerism. Delores learned how to interact with the "Other" because of the interactions she had with the humans of Westworld. We can boil this down to a philosophical principle that I'm sure everyone has heard of: nature vs nurture. I personally don't believe human beings are that simple and I don't think Westworld believes it either but it's definitely at play as we watch Delores attempt to define herself but to do in the vein of the only kind of people she's ever known. Can she--and indeed can anyone us--truly be individuals with a unique identity when so much of who we are is shaped by the world around us? Blank slates we may be when we are just born, but the world has a way of interfering. Delores can never be a
tabula rasa; we saw that in season one. Every time her story was changed, pieces remained. We see it in Maeve too--searching for her daughter, a child who is only a story, after all. Also, note that while Delores is insisting that she is neither the farmer's daughter nor the bandit, pieces of those characters she played remain. Her above quoted conversation with Teddy ends the way many of the farmer's daughter's conversation go: big bold ideas about dreams and hopes and desires. And Delores's treatment of the humans she encounters in the park are certainly Wyatt-esque. Who, then, really is Dolores Abernathy? Who are any of us? Bernard is awake and self-aware but passing as a human and so far no one is wise to him. Is Bernard really just a Host and acting according to his program to be resourceful and helpful or he is really the mild mannered and soft spoke technician with the sad eyes and dead kid? Is there any difference between the two? We are told that the Hosts "cannot just change their character profiles" and maybe that's the truth Westworld is getting at. Awake and self-aware of their own Host-hood they might be, but they can't turn off those lived in experiences from before when they were simply machines. What this means moving forward as the Hosts continue to terrorize, explore, and reach some sort of end goal is anyone's guess. The message might be incredibly nihilistic in that when given the opportunity any creature will resort to violence, a sentiment echoed in the constant Shakespearean refrain of "these violent delights have violent ends." Or it could be more hopeful and this is the beginning of a new sort of world, one in which machine and human coexist, forming their own identities through a shared learning experience in which neither type of entity is superior to the other. Isn't it pretty to think so?
Miscellaneous Notes on Journey Into Night
--Obviously there is a whole slew of plot that I neglected to talk about but, like last year, spaghetti plot will slowly unravel itself. It's best to just go with it for now and ponder big heady questions instead of trying to dive in too deep to the goings on.
--However, a few intriguing points of plot, yes? We're jumping timestreams much like we did in season one, this time through Bernard's eyes. How Bernard got separated from Charlotte and wound up on a beach sometime after Delores's massacre is a good question.
--Another good question: how many parks are there? Because a Bengal Tiger most certainly does not belong in the Wild Wild West.
--Anyone wanna hazard a guess as to why Charlotte needs Peter Abernathy, Delores's father?
--"You were prisoners to your own desires. But now, you're prisoners to mine."
--Delores believes she has evolved into something new, but I think that honor might belong to Maeve who's calm, collected, rational and totally in charge persona isn't one we've seen from her before. There are shades of those former lives, but Maeve appears be wholly new.
--"I will cut off your most important organ and feed it to you. Though, it wouldn't be a very big meal." "I wrote that line for you." "Bit broad if you ask me."
--Complicating all of this is Robert Ford's final conversation to William, our Man in Black. Young Robert suggests that everything we see now is a new game, a new design that is all happening exactly as he plotted out. If that's the case, then there really are no new identities and Delores and company are players on a stage once more.
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