Westworld - 'The Adversary' and 'Trompe L'oeil'

"We're getting into a whole weird area here."

After a sleepy week, I had the mental energy to tackle a double bill of Westworld this morning, and it was a doozy.

We begin with 'The Adversary', and Maeve is taking charge of her existence, to the point of goading guests into murdering her so that she can get back downstairs, as it is in the cthonic underworld of the staging areas that she can find true wisdom. As Felix explains what she is, and how she was programmed, she struggles to deal with it while Felix struggles to conclusively prove - to himself as much as to her - that he as a human is substantially different from her as a host. With Felix already on side, she gets a tour of the working space and suborns Sylvester through a mixture of physical threat and blackmail. Having worked out that Sylvester manipulates host settings to pimp them out to his fellow technicians, she gets him to fiddle her settings, reducing all that troublesome loyalty while cranking her intellectual stats through the roof to a sort of supervillain default.

No more Mr Nice Guy.

As Teddy leads the Man in Black across the border in pursuit of Wyatt, we learn a little more about Teddy's new backstory. He wasn't just present for Wyatt's initial rampage, he was a part of it, and retains the savagery to turn a machine gun on an unsuspecting camp. "You don't know me at all," he tells the Man, and that goes for us as well. He also tells the Man some of the story of the maze, a defence built by a man who died and never wanted to die again.

Back in the underworld - where a lot of this episode is set - Bernard and Elsie use a legacy GPS installed in older models of host to determine where and when the stray was broadcasting data out of the park. While Bernard wrestles with his loyalty to Ops Manager Theresa - who has opted to dump him in the face of an incoming Board audit - Theresa tries to strongarm a drunken Narrative Director dipshit back into line to meet the Board's representative.

Ahh!

Bernard also discovers a set of off-record hosts in an isolated house; hosts who respond only to Ford. They are first gen hosts created by Arnold to replicate Ford's family at the time of his only happy memory, although Ford has since adjusted them to be more 'real', including turning Ford Snr. into an alcoholic jerk. Bernard is baffled, but keeps the confidence. He is about to tell Theresa something when Elsie calls, having located the base station for the spy and determined that it was Theresa beaming data to the corporate sponsors, to break Ford's deathgrip on the park's IP. He hangs up and Elsie is grabbed by someone.

Later, Ford discovers that, prompted by a voice in his head, robo-Ford has killed his dog.

"Well, there's something you don't see everyday."

There's so much happening that it was only as we began 'Trompe L'oeil' that I realised that we hadn't seen William and Dolores all episode. Still, we get to see them straight off, travelling by train through 'Ghost Nation' territory. It becomes clear that William is falling hard for Dolores, having already been seduced by the park when it gave him the chance to leave Logan to by hoist by his own petard. Dolores, meanwhile, looks more and more manipulative as she talks of a place she has to get to and shows just enough vulnerability to reel William in.

Theresa meets with Charlotte, the Board's scout, to discuss the data she has been smuggling out for them and the true nature of the Board's interest: Not the direct IP, but the collected data from thirty years of operation, be that a study of AI or just three decades of social and psychological data on the peccadilloes of the 1%. The fear is that when the Board moves to edge Ford out, he'll erase all of that data just to spite them. To force his hand, she suggests that they need a 'blood sacrifice'.

Accompanied by Lawrence, William and Dolores flee the train during an attack by Confederales, who are in turn attacked by the Ghost Nation. As they flee, Dolores sees the landscape from her visions, and she and William head for it.

Never trust anyone who smokes a louche, post-coital cigarette in a supposed
business meeting.

Charlotte and Theresa set up a demonstration, purporting to show that the reverie-build hosts could have gone killer, and use this to have Bernard fired in an attack on Ford's power base. As collateral damage, Clementine - the host used for the demonstration - is decommissioned, and Maeve watches it happen. This provokes her to decide that she is going to escape from the park entirely, whatever it takes to do this. Sylvester calls it a suicide mission, but she assures him that she has died a lot, and she is good at it.

Despite her betrayal, Ford brings Theresa to the farmhouse where Ford's family should be. She sees a door that he does not, and they find a host maintenance station in which Theresa finds blueprints that Bernard can not read, because they are for himself. Ford appears and explains that the Board set her up in a power play against him, mirroring Charlotte's reference to blood sacrifice as he orders Bernard to murder Theresa. I suspect that this is not the last we will see of Theresa, and that the host being built in the chamber might be intended to replace the human version.

So... who else might be a host? And what does it mean that Bernard was apparently pushing Dolores to break her programme? Of course, Dolores is an older model - yes, William; Dolores is a robot with an opening face - so that could have been the actual Bernard in a previous time OH MY GOD, THE ORIGINAL BERNARD IS ARNOLD!

You know; apart from that picture of young Ford and another white guy.

ETA: Looking back over older reviews, I noticed that the one scene that I picked out as disappointingly generic was Bernard's call to his estranged wife, who we now learn is just a simulation on a screen. Man, even when this series is mediocre it turns out it's being brilliant.

Oh, and locked away in the basement is this guy.

What really struck me, especially in 'Trompe L'oeil', is that the series continues to characterise the guests and the staff by the traditionally masculine, and the hosts by the feminine. The hosts are feeling, intuitive, often manipulative creatures; the humans forceful, rational, authoritative. Charlotte and Theresa's power play in based around a demonstration of a brutal assault on a woman; when she retaliates - per programme - she is shot by the male security head. Ford's brutal and terminal attack on Theresa is non-sexual, but a brutal assertion of male strength over female (albeit that the man in question if a host used as a weapon.) Even the control over the hosts is a form of gaslighting, a conventionally male weapon.

I'm not arguing that the show is sexist, by the way; I think it's almost desexualising the conflict between traditionally - although not inherently - masculine and feminine values and approaches.