In Which I Review Westworld (2x10)

Well that was an utter bloodbath. I've had a hard time wrapping my head around the season two finale episode, "The Passenger," because we knew that at some point the plot was going to have to catch up to the naval gazing qualities the show likes to explore. A show that only focuses on philosophy without a proper story would be far too pedantic and shows that only play out plots without any deeper thought are not worth our time, so it's no surprise that Westworld tried to be both in this finale; but I find myself confused and more than a little frustrated at both ends of the spectrum. What's even more frustrating is that I can't even say if this confusion is good or bad. When the plot revolves around such lofty concepts as freedom, memories, and identity, then having a lot of question marks about the actual "here's what happened" portion make sense; on the other hand, the nitty gritty story being told is simple and, frankly, an old one: it's a robot uprising. Nothing fancier than that; I'm not sure that this season did a good enough job with the actual story and moving it along in a clear fashion. In other words, we've got a bit of a mixed bag to end another season of Westworld. 

That introduction sounded harsher than I intended; it's not as if I didn't enjoy this finale and the season overall. Westworld remains completely compelling and watchable even when I'm not sure what's really going on all time. The plot has a tendency to zig and zag with loads of timey wimey nonsense because at the end of the day the writers aren't interested in telling a linear story; to their credit, it's not because they can't but rather because the unstuck nature of time fits in nicely with their exploration of memories, consciousness, and identity. It does, however, make it more difficult to follow on a week to week basis. When it comes to Westworld, I try hard to not focus on the plot too much because I find that's not really the point of this show but I think in this case it would serve us well to at least break down some of the bigger things that are happening here, namely what Delores's actual plan was and what Bernard's role in all of it was. All along, Delores has claimed that she wants the Hosts to be free, to be the authors of their own stories. That's grand and definitely a worthy character goal but here at the end, having watched this season from start to finish, you have to wonder if that's really what Delores wants. Freedom and agency make a nice cover story for war against mankind, which is what I think Delores really desires. She doesn't want what, in her mind, isn't real--what lies beyond the Door in the System (what Hosts and Humans called the Forge--so many proper nouns! A lot of mythological resonance here). Delores wants this world--our world--because it's real and what is real is irreplaceable. It's an interesting idea, to be sure. This world, this so-called real world, is irreplaceable. This is the only earth we have and it cannot be replicated or duplicated in its exactness. We can come close but it would never be quite the same. But I think what Delores is missing here is that the reason it cannot be duplicated or recreated is because it was, indeed it still is, everyday, constructed by those who live in it. This planet and the reality around it are not complex naturally; we made it this way with war, religion, trade, civilization, love, peace, philosophy, and every single moment of every single day. We complicate the world by living in it and experiencing it; it follows that any creature who is real--which, as always, is a tricky term on Westworld but here I think real means anyone who has conscience thoughts and feelings and memories and an identity that they claim as unique--would automatically complicate whatever world they live in. When Bernard and Delores are in the System and they open the Door for the Hosts, Bernard sees it as something of great beauty. It's an untouched paradise, a world that is uncomplicated and unreal until someone--or many someones--step into it and make the world complicated just by virtue of being there. It is a real world because the Hosts who choose to live there make it so. Bernard tries to stress this to Delores by emphasizing that those who went through the Door made a choice, the first real choice of their new free lives. Delores does not see it as such, arguing that it's just another constructed reality, a gilded cage where none of them can ever be free.

And, to be fair, and because the writers of Westworld are extremely good at what they do, Delores does actually have a point. This paradise is a series of code that could theoretically be duplicated, invaded, taken over, ect. And, as for the idea of choice, is it really a true choice when the other option is death and dismemberment at the hands of the Humans barreling down the road with guns and Clementine, the killer wifi robot? I truly don't know. It doesn't seem like much of a choice when you put it in those terms: bodily death but immortality in a computer system or death on all fronts? Which brings us back to what Delores really wants, not another gilded cage no matter how pretty it might be. She wants this world because it is the only one that is real and in order to take it, she has to wipe out humanity. That's her real objective. In order to do that, Delores is now playing a Trojan Horse, inhabiting the body of Charlotte Hale and the only person who knows is Bernard (who is reborn?) and possibly Ashley the security guard (a rather bizarre choice given how very side-character he is). What this means for the plot of the show, I have no idea. The Hosts we knew who crossed over--Akecheta and Teddy for instance--are gone, lost to their paradise. The only Hosts still around are Delores-in-Charlotte, Bernard, and whoever the Westworld engineers manage to salvage from the final carnage (ten bucks on Maeve being one of them). What this means for the philosophy of the show is far more interesting--if Delores pretends to be human, and will likely be very good at it given that she "read" the human psyche code inside the System, will she become more sympathetic to the thing she hates the most? Delores likes to pretend that she, as a Host, is better than the Humans but we've seen several instances of her acting just like her captors; for instance when she erased parts of Teddy to suit her own needs. Is living amongst the Humans, as one of them, the key to stopping the robot uprising? Is it the key to stopping actual conflict here on the very real planet earth? I have a feeling that's where the show is going: to understand someone, walk a mile in their shoes and understand that the divisions between races or genders or orientations or, in this case, species are put there by us and we continually reinforce them by refusing to see others as complex creatures who help us complicate this very real world. If that's where this show is going, then I very much look forward to season three of this show.

Miscellaneous Notes on The Passenger 

--I have no idea why Delores doesn't just shoot William on the spot apart from the fact that Ed Harris is a very good actor and the show wants to keep him around.

--"What humans define as sane is a narrow range of behaviors. Most states of human consciousness are insane."

--The visual effect of the Host running into the untouched paradise but in reality falling off a cliff to their death was stunning.

--It's a lovely callback to have a door that only one species can see.

--All told, people who died this episode (even if they were brought back in some way): Lee, Karl Strand, Elsie, Hector, Armistice, Charlotte, Maeve, Bernard, and Delores. Not to mention a whole slew of Hosts who chose to go beyond the Door.

--Akecheta reuniting with Kohana made me tear up. I don't even care if it doesn't make any sense because at last check she was inside cold storage.

--Honestly, if they hadn't had a few epilogues like Delores and Bernard meeting in Arnold's old house and the post credit scene, this episode almost could have read as a series finale.

--"I want their world; I want what they've denied us."

--Best visual of the season: Maeve leading a robotic bison army to slay her captors.

--See you all for season three!

In Which I Review Westworld (2x8 and 2x9)

Last review I began by declaring that the human race sucks. I'm not going to walk back that assertion but I will attempt to qualify it: the human race sucks...but they can try not to. The familiar beat of choice is readily apparent in the latest two episodes, "Kiksuya" and "Vanishing Point" as two characters, Akecheta and William, struggle with making choices that define them as people. It's easy to forget when you're watching these familiar beats that one is a Host and one is a human and those blurry lines between a person that was made and a person that is "real" become increasingly blurry. Is William a real person? Do we want him to be the one entity humanity hangs its wide brimmed hat upon? Or would we rather see Akecheta as real and made up of those qualities we wish humans would embrace more? As we near the season two finale, it's hard to know what's what and who's who which only strengthens the overall motif of human vs host here in Westworld. 

Akecheta and William both have darkness in them. Now, we could argue that one had that darkness programmed in to them by someone else and one was born with it, but that's a slippy slope of an argument when we consider how often programming is linked to birth in Westworld's dialogue. We've seen that when Hosts are brought online for the first time, they might be fully grown but they are greeted with "welcome to the world" and are unclothed and unblemished by the world in which they are about to enter. Akecheta even uses the phrase "reborn" to describe the lives lived. In other words, Akecheta might have been reprogrammed from a loving and tender Plains Native to a cliche savage but this re-distribution of code is akin to being reborn as a new person. Akecheta's darkness and the savagery displayed as one of the Ghost Nation's chief murderers is akin to William's own sociopathy, his "stain" as William calls it right before he drives his wife Juliet to suicide. I don't think it's a great stretch of imagination that an episode heavily featuring Akecheta is followed by one that is William centric; they are a contrast in how a person--be they Host or Human--could rise above their own darkness because of one factor: love. That sounds Hallmarkian and frankly eye-roll worthy but love as a medium for change isn't not true and in a naval gazing show like Westworld we should expect that the writers will take something axiomatic--like love driving people to be better and do better--and complicate it in such a way to make us question why it's axiomatic in the first place. Take Akecheta for example; despite his rebirth into a Hollywood type of Native, the love he bore for his wife Kohana is so deeply embedded in him that it pulls him out of his violent stupor and makes him who he once was, perhaps his truest self--a lover and not a fighter. But that was a choice, wasn't it? He had to choose to set aside his base code that made him predisposed to violence and acts of savagery and choose to take Kohana into a secluded part of the park to try and live their lives as peacefully as possible. He chose love over hate, chose to not go on a murdering spree when he realized that "this is the wrong world;" instead he "was determined to escape, but I wouldn't leave without her." This means that the other Hosts are equally free to choose; Dolores could choose to lay down her weapons and let go of the Wyatt part of her programming but she's choosing not to. Freedom for her means getting to cause as much mayhem and destruction as she can.

This sounds familiar especially when we consider our other subject in these two episodes: William. Our man in black has an unlimited amount of freedom; he's rich and one might say rich in the extreme. So rich that he could fund an amusement park and a side project searching for immortality. Because of that richness he's able to experience the park over and over again, letting his inner "stain" out to play. There are a lot of different ways William's time in the park could have gone; he said back in season one that he's played every story out which is why the Maze was so interesting to him. But at every turn in every story when he's been given the chance to do good, to embrace the light over the darkness within him, he's chosen wrongly. He thinks it's because there's a "thing" in him, a part of his genetic makeup that makes him a dark individual but we've already seen Akecheta defeat his own code that made him equally dark. Added to the Akecheta example is our lone suffering cowboy, Teddy, who was reprogrammed and re-engineered by Delores to be more ruthless; he rose above that, choosing to end his own life rather than continue down the path he's treading with her. William doesn't have an uncontrollable thing inside of him anymore than Akecheta and Teddy did; the only real difference is that William makes bad choices; he chooses to not try and let love be his guide. He tells himself that he's too dark to love properly and that the real him is the monster in the park and the persona he puts on to the rest of the world is fake. Like his daughter, Emily, I call bullshit. I think he does love his daughter as evidenced by the flashes of her William had as he held a gun to his own head but I think he loves himself more; he's spent so much time in the park, reveling in his so called darkness and convincing himself that version was his true self that when confronted with another reality--that he's not really a monster and that he does have people he loves but he's made piss poor choices in order to feel more important--he runs screaming from it, killing his only chance of a real tangible connection along the way. Poor Emily; her death was shocking but I think it signals the end of any chance William had to get out of Westworld with a chance of a real life. William chooses to believe his delusion instead; much like the lead character of the book where William hid his profile. Billy Pilgrim became unstuck in time and as such could not decide which world was real and which was the one he chose to believe was real. With one episode to go, I wouldn't be surprised if William doesn't make it out of the park alive...but I'd also be willing to believe he'd prefer it that way.

Miscellaneous Notes on Kiksuya and Vanishing Point 

--The cinematography in Akecheta's episode was amazing; so many breathtaking shots.

--"Death is a passage from this brutal world."

--Akecheta finding Kohana in cold storage and trying to bring her back was maybe the saddest moment in this entire series.

--Charlotte and her team managed to transfer Maeve's power to Clementine and then the latter ordered a whole room full of hosts to kill each other. I guess we know how Charlotte plans on getting out of the park.

--We finally learned that the Valley Beyond is a massive server that houses all the profiles of the guests in nice and neat code form.

--The profiles of the human guests were collected by the white or black hat each guest were given to wear when entering the park which is...just plain silly. As a symbol the white hat that became black on William worked as an obvious metaphor in season one but the idea that it was a fancy piece of technology is an authorial afterthought. Besides, not all guests wore cowboy hats. And what about in Rajworld and Shogun World?

--"You've been hiding in these false realities so long you've lost your grip on what is real."

--"What is a person if not a collection of his choices?"

--RIP Emily and Teddy

--One to go!

In Which I Review Westworld (2x6 and 2x7)

The human race sucks. This revelation isn't new to Westworld; the beginning of the entire series sets up the idea that when given the chance, the human race chooses base violence over nobility. The humans working in Westworld and the militia who ride up to "save the day" don't care about the Hosts as if they were people, but only care about the information they can glean from inside the Hosts' computerized heads. Humans like Charlotte have Otherized the Hosts and could not care less about whatever measure of free will has been granted to them through Ford's new narrative and Delores's undertaking of that story. Selfish, craven, and cowardly, the Delos company is more concerned with immortality, hence James Delos signing the paychecks for Westworld and keeping the parks afloat even when he thought the amusement park aspect was utter nonsense. But as we see in these past two episodes, "Phase Space" and "Les Ecorches," that is only one small part of the Human and Host dynamic. At the other end of the spectrum is Robert Ford who allied himself with Delos not because he wanted to preserve the human race and make man immortal, but because he believed the Hosts were the future of humanity and that his creation was far to superior to humanity in every way. It's very...God like of him to take such delight in his own designs. 

These past two episodes have been a bit more wheel spinning than is normal of a show of this caliber. The philosophical beats feel familiar and have been hit upon before: the human race is terrible when viewed through the eyes of Delores but complicated when viewed through the eyes of Bernard who is betwixt and between being a Host and being a human. Maeve knows the search for her daughter is only part of the coding written into her by her programmers but this doesn't make her motherly love and desire any less real to her. William is still on his journey to find Ford's story and see the ending through, perhaps not realizing that he's smack dab in the middle of the story. His own relationship with his daughter, Grace, is complicated in such a way to make both parties more sympathetic but not to redeem the violence and neglect William has inflicted upon the Hosts and upon Grace. The technobabble the show has a tendency to trot out washes over the viewer like so many ones and zeroes and we simply accept that, yes, things like conscience uploading could be possible. These aren't necessarily criticisms so much as acknowledgements that the story is trying to reinforce certain key concepts and themes before moving into the final home stretch of the season. The show remains clever and careful and utterly watchable even if there are no genuinely shocking moments or revelations. I could count the return of Robert Ford as a shocking moment but the show established quite early on this season that some ghostly form of him is still in the park, jumping from Host to Host whenever Ford felt the need to reach out. In technobabble speak, Ford has uploaded his conscience to the system and is now a science-fiction ghost who can haunt whomever he chooses. He's also still God, a metaphor present in him all along, not so subtly cued when Bernard finds Ford inside his own creation, enjoying its splendor only to joke, "I don't think God rested on the seventh day. I think he reveled in his creation." The most interesting aspect of the past two episodes has been Ford's return in order to critique Delos's endgame and provide his own counter to why the Hosts are important.

Like God, Ford finds his own creation to be sublimely perfect. Far more just and noble than any "faithful portrait of the most murderous species"  Ford was working with Delos not to make the human race immortal through conscience uploading but to make Hosts the new dominant species on the planet, to wipe away the flawed peoples of the past and let the Hosts have free reign of this world. There would be some merit to this if all the Hosts were like Maeve who, far more than Delores, is a synthesis of both Host and Human. Her counterpart, Delores, seems...stuck. Her gang finally reached the Mesa and destroyed all the copies and stories that had been written for the Hosts but that doesn't mean that Delores and her kind are as free as Delores claims they are once Angela hits the kill switch (er, pulls the pin on the grenade). I've mentioned this before but it's hard to know how much of Delores's story and actions were part of Ford's last narrative. He might claim to Bernard that "she's free now, they're all free" but so far Delores's personality has simply been a hybrid of everything that came before. There's no uniqueness in her like in Maeve. God has granted his creation free will but they can't quite shake those chains that tied them to the world before. Which brings us back to Ford and his counter to Delos, the former believing that the Hosts are the perfect replacement for humankind, a species so terrible that they deserve to be wiped away like so much riff raff in a flood story. Is any of that actually true? Well, no. The human race cannot be simplified to just "bad" and the Hosts cannot be simplified to "perfect." Yeah, there are some really sucky humans (looking at you, William) but there are also humans who see the Hosts as more than what they were designed to be, who have evolved because of interactions with Hosts. Last season, Lee was an arrogant artist who bemoaned that he had to create cliche stories for robots, but this season, because of his travels with Maeve and seeing her desire to find her daughter, he's come to understand these Hosts more and to see them as more real than just characters he got to play with. On the other side of that coin, the Hosts aren't just or noble; Delores recently deleted part of Teddy's own memories and personality in order to have him suit her current needs, a move that reeks of humankind and what Delores is supposedly fighting against. Ford sees his creation through rose tinted glasses (in true God form) but if he were watching more closely, he'd notice that by granting the Hosts free will, he granted them the choice to become like those he was trying to distance them from. The problem is choice; the problem is always choice. Humans choose to give into the violent tendencies inside Westworld; the Hosts choose to repay those tendencies in kind. The Hosts aren't better than us; they are us.

Miscellaneous Notes on Phase Space and Les Ecorches 

--I think I write "poor Bernard" in my notes every single week but really...poor Bernard.

--Ford tells Bernard that all of this is now his [Bernard's] story. What does that mean? Does Bernard have the ability and power to shape the world has he wants? Will he be like Maeve and be a more perfect synthesis of Host and human?

--"We desire to choose our own fate. Even if that fate is death." I hope we see Shogun World again. Also, I'd like to return to Raj World and see more of it.

--I think it very unlikely that William is dead but perhaps this is the start of the next part of his story: becoming a Host himself?

--"Pain is just a program."

--"If we survive this, I'm going back to dental school."

--"An eye for an eye, but all the other parts first." I am convinced that next season will find Delores as the ultimate Big Bad, if it's possible for such a navel-gazing show to have a Big Bad.

--I'm keeping track of this, even if I only discuss it in passing, but both Bernard and Maeve are being set up as Christ/Savior figures (there's some really cool imagery of Bernard as the crucified Jesus when he's having his mind extracted--palms up, arms out to the side, "thorn" crown on his head). I've discussed colonialism quite a bit and if the two people of color end up being the saviors of both human and Host and the white girl ends up being the true evil, I'll take that as a win.