Westworld - 'The Stray'

Apparently you can get a man with a gun(1).

There is something in the recursive nature of Westworld's storytelling that lends itself to intensely character-driven plot progression. After all, the essential action of each episode is made up of broadly similar stock scenes, just playing out slightly differently each time.

In addition to each day in the titular park playing out on the same basic script, but with different guests and the slowly evolving psyches of the hosts, but life behind the scenes is also cyclical. Run the park, shut down, maintenance, reboot. Chief engineer Bernard even has the same basic conversation with the Dolores host each night, analysing her responses to his questions while making her a form of surrogate for the son that he lost. This last is new information, and leads us to a fairly routine grieving, estranged parents call which is notable for being the first scene featuring someone outside the park, even on a screen.

It's all clean, but in many ways Ford's office is a room full of heads.

Ford warns Bernard against getting too attached to the hosts by telling a story about his former partner, Arnold, who wanted to make the hosts genuinely sentient. He tried to kickstart sentience by introducing a voice of god into their minds, but they kind of ended up crazy. Now, some of the glitching hosts appear to be talking to Arnold, as well as seeking revenge on those who wronged them in past iterations or roles. Arnold himself is dead, although perhaps not in an accident.

Meanwhile, engineer Elsie and security spod Stubbs head into the park in search of a 'stray', a host going for an off programme walkabout. They find his group, stuck in a loop because no-one else is cleared to use the axe and make a fire, and a shrine that the stray created featuring a pattern of dots which Stubbs identifies as the constellation Orion. When they find the stray, she realises that it is forming ideas and refusing the sleep command - as Maeve did - and finally bashes its own brains out.

In the park, Teddy has a new partner (see above). It turns out he's a bounty hunter when he's not wooing Dolores and getting murdered, although the latter two are by far his primary function. 'The Rancher's Daughter' is apparently a stock introductory scenario for the park; kill the gunslinger and rape his woman, because in case we hadn't noticed, just about every actual human involved in this park is party to an atrocity. Ford actually talks to him about this between 'lives', explaining that his role is not to protect Dolores, but to ensure she doesn't run away. Is it in response to this that he tries to teach her to use a gun, or because she hid one in her drawer and is having flashbacks of the Man in Black? Hard to say, but it turns out she can't shoot anyway. "Some hands aren't made to pull a trigger," he says, with more accuracy than he knows.

Ah; cultists. Just what every good western needs.

Ford's new storyline features Teddy, focusing his formerly vague guilt over a bad past on Wyatt, his former CO who went mad and decided that he was the sole rightful inheritor of the West. He has a cult and roams the hills, and Teddy and his partner join a posse going after them, only for the hosts involved to get slaughtered by the cult, with their masks and their knives and their weird roaring in the night. Clearly the new direction has some hardcore Heart of Darkness going on in it.

The Man in Black only appeared in flashbacks this week(2), but that motivated Delores to push Teddy to leave with her instead of delaying for his 'reckoning', and to try to learn to shoot. Finally, it moves her to actually shoot a guest who tries to rape her. For such a pivotal moment, this is somewhat lacking in tension. She can't shoot, then she can, but there's no substantive switch beyond a flashback to the Man in Black intending nothing visibly worse than the man she shoots. Still, it's preferable to our protagonist getting raped again. Oh, and William gets into a gunfight and is shot, the hit knocking him down with no lasting damage(3). He then insists he and Logan do a bounty sidequest, during which Dolores stumbles into their camp.

Perhaps the most haunting aspect of this episode is Ford's musing on the hosts as mere objects. Arnold wanted them to be conscious, he recalls, but would it really be kind to use conscious beings in the roles they demand of the hosts? But is it kind anyway to create and motivate beings to fulfill desires than can never be, to fight foes that they can never defeat for those foes' entertainment? The hosts are on some level living beings - Maeve was found to be glitching because she was infected with MRSA - so what do their many deaths actually represent? And what does the nature of the park say about its guests?

(1) Although in fact Westworld primarily seems to treat female guests the same way as male largely by offering them all men to shoot and women to screw.
(2) The obvious assumption is that he's Arnold, but if so he's clearly gone mad in his quest for real consciousness.
(3) The Man in Black, who has been hit a lot, is clearly pretty fucking hardcore.