Westworld - 'Journey into Night' and 'Reunion'

The MadMaxWorld rebrand was never quite as successful.

Also returning to our screens and this blog is last year's surprise smash, Westworld.

'Journey into Night' opens in the immediate aftermath of the massacre at the Delos executive launch party. Or does it! That's right, we're back in the land of unexpected time shifts, and while it seems at first that Bernard has woken on a beach not long after the shootings, it soon becomes apparent that more time than that has passed.

The episode evolves along, I think, three timelines:

1. Back when, Arnold talks to Delores and admits that he is afraid of what she might become.

2. The immediate aftermath.

3. Some time later.

Creepy McNoface. Creepy. Has no face. It was pretty much all in the name,
wasn't it.

In the immediate aftermath, Bernard hooks up with corporate ice queen Charlotte and a group of other executives to escape the park via the nearest outpost. The other executives are caught in an ambush, but Bernard holds Charlotte back and she leads him to a double-secret outpost belonging to the corporate espionage wing of Delos, which runs its own hosts to infiltrate the park, as well as Creepy McNoface, a skinless host with basically no sense of personal space(1). Bernard sets one of the hosts to send a query through the hosts' private wifi network to look for Delores' daddy, who is the one host Delos want to recover before they will evacuate the surviving humans. He also takes the chance to check his own systems, which are in catastrophic freefall, with symptoms including time slippage, prosopagnosia(2) and cognitive dissonance; symptoms not dissimilar to those caused by binge watching Westworld.

A few hours later, in daylight, the Man in Black, William, wakes, injured but alive. He survives an attack by rogue hosts and then changes into his park costume, intent on going hunting. He quickly runs into the child version of Ford, who tells him that there is a new game for him; having reached the centre of the maze, he needs to get out. This game is for him, and it will find him. William shoots the boy robot and rides out.

'And hell - and also Teddy - followed with her.'

Around the same time, Dolores, Teddy and blonde host(3), are embarking on a roaring rampage of revenge, including hanging several Delos executives. Teddy is having doubts, but basically can't not support Dolores, because he isn't quite free yet. It seems that there are free hosts, and freeish hosts, as well as a few still largely on the rails. The other one who is confirmed free is Maeve, who dresses up human and picks up lounge lizard writer Lee to help her find her daughter within the redesigned park, as well as her former cohort Hector.

And then, later on, Bernard wakes on a beach, apparently okay, and is picked up by the Least Hemsworth and a gang of Delos security mooks. He is taken to their camp, where an operation to retake control of the park is in action. A dead tiger is found, an escapee from 'one of the other parks'. A return to the site of the gala confirms that this is some time after, as the bodies are no longer fresh. They track the locators in the hosts to a lake that shouldn't be a lake, and find them dead in their hundreds. Bernard says that he killed them all.

Portrait of an obsession.

Naturally, with that cliffhanger, 'Reunion' never mentions this timeline. At all. Its timelines are:

1. Back when.

2. Not long after the past sections of Season 1.

3. Just after 'Journey into Night'.

This time, the back when focuses on the initial marketing push to Logan Delos, which basically involves putting him in a room full of hosts and challenging him to 'find the host', then letting him have a host orgy. Perhaps because he knows that this is where it will end, Arnold insists that Dolores isn't ready, sending Angela instead. Dolores, meanwhile, is introduced to the city, which seems splendid to her, although Arnold assures her that after a while it doesn't look like anything.

Later, William sells his father in law on continuing to back the park, having recognised that harvesting data from the park's guests is a marketing tool worth any price. Some time after, at a retirement party for the Delos patriarch, William taunts a piano playing Dolores, who also encounters Logan, who is now a hopeless and overlooked junkie. Later still, William shows Dolores something he is building in the park; something just for him; a weapon. All of this, Dolores remembers, and sets out to exploit. She tails an executive she let run into the maintenance centre, recruits a technician, and then follows a reactivated Confederale to their camp. She and hers kill the other Confederales, then have them reactivated to follow her.

Philosophical debate!

Briefly she runs across Maeve, who has no interest in what she's selling and sets off on her own quest after a bit of an eyeballing match. At least we can confirm that they are running on the same timeline.

Elsewhere, the Man in Black rescues Lawrence from his habitual assailants and takes him to try and recruit an army led by Giancarlo Esposito, only for them to all kill themselves after Esposito tells him 'this game is for you, William,' but explains that he has to play alone.

So, Dolores has gone from innocent, to weapon, to murderer, to revolutionary, and now to some sort of master vampire and irony-free zone, forcibly converting hosts to follow her in the cause of freedom. She's the only one with a master plan, unless you count William's intention to burn the whole place to the ground, and her ambition may tell against her. We've yet to see any more of the other parks, including tiger-having Park 6, so I'm looking forward to that.

"Well, you're even creepier now."

Two episodes in, and Westworld has not yet succumbed to difficult second album syndrome, although at present it is remarkably short on sympathetic characters. Dolores has slipped from self-actualising heroine to complete monster, and most of the humans are scum. Bernard may be a mass murderer, so that really just leaves Maeve, who is a killer and a mastermind, but substantially less dead, passive and/or evil than most screen mums, so there's that.

(1) Although it occurs to me that it is possible that Creepy knows that Bernard isn't human, and thus has no compunctions about getting all up in his face.

(2) An inability to recognise or discriminate faces, which means that just about everything we see in this section is at best equivocal.

(3) Angela, apparently, although I don't think her name has been said on screen.