Westworld - 'Trace Decay', 'The Well-Tempered Clavier' and 'The Bicameral Mind'

Whitewashing again.

Okay, so I got a little behind on Westworld and had to binge watch the last three episodes after Christmas. Having done this, I can say that I think this is a series that does not benefit from binge viewing. It's still amazing, but it's true episodic television, and there's so much to take in that it's easy to get lost when you chain episodes together instead of taking a week to digest what you've seen. HBO may be the last hurrah of this kind of television, but oh my, what a marvellous hurrah it is. As a result of the binge watch, I won't be doing my usual in depth synopsis for 'Trace Decay', 'The Well-Tempered Clavier' and 'The Bicameral Mind', instead working through the main character threads as best I can recall.

Thread one is Maeve and her supporting cast - Hector and Armistice in the park and Felix and Sylvester in 'hell'. In order to effect her escape, Maeve has to allow Felix and Sylvester to shut her down in order to remove the failsafe explosive from her spine and alter her core programming, which Felix does despite Sylvester's suggestion that they just job her while she's on the slab. Felix, like William, has fallen under the spell of his counterpart, although more from compassion than obsession. Maeve is angered and upset to find that Clementine has been recast as a blonde white woman, to the point that she almost misses her appointment to recruit Hector as the muscle for her plan because she flips out and kills her during a flashback to the murder of her daughter by the Man in Black, just to see what it would feel like to do something truly evil.

These guys do feel weirdly out of place.

That's actually interleaved with the Man in Black telling the story to Teddy, who remembers the Man in Black's abuse of Dolores while they're fighting a giant in a horned mask to protect a hapless blonde. Kudos to everyone who picked up on the time lapse thing, because the blonde is the host who welcomed William to the park, whom the Man in Black recognises but expected to have been retired long ago. Anyway, Teddy cold cocks the Man and ties him up for questioning, only to be betrayed by the blonde, who is another Wyattite. She says that Wyatt has a use for Teddy, but he isn't ready yet. Escaping from a Wyattite trap, the Man in Black is met by Charlotte, who wants him to use his majority holding in the park to swing the vote against Ford.

"This is a very complicated script."

Bernard confronts Ford after Maeve is brought in and use voice commands to control him. He insists on having all of his memories back, and remembers that he murdered not only Theresa, but also Elsie, the programmer who hasn't been seen in a while. He also recalls attempting, with Ford, to recover Maeve after the murder of her daughter broke the cornerstone of her programming (a scene which plays out more like an exorcism than engineering) and discovers that he was modelled on Arnold - so I called that one at least - when Ford missed his partner, before Ford compels him to shoot himself. It's not all up with him though, as Maeve restores him to find out who first started meddling with her programme. By this point she's revived Hector and Armistice in hell and started her breakout, and isn't happy when he tells her that her escape has been completely planned out by someone else. Maeve, Hector and Armistice, accompanied by Felix, make their escape attempt, with the two bandits discovering a passionate love of modern firearms as they chew through the security forces with their overclocked aggression and massively hiked pain threshold.

Our hero?

William and Dolores reach her 'home', where she is plagued by memories of Wyatt's massacre and begins to loose track of what is now and what is then. Logan manages to recapture them both, but she escapes after cutting him, and when he releases William, our ostensible hero turns into a complete monster in his obsessive hunt for Dolores. Eventually, Dolores comes to the heart of the Maze, where she confronts the Man in Black and learns that, as speculated, he is William, having found his inner bastard in Westworld and displaced (and possibly murdered) Logan to take control of Delos, the company that now owns most of the park. We also learn that he married Logan's sister, as planned, and that after thirty years she took her own life rather than continue living with a monster.

Cultist is probably a step up from intro sexbot.

As the Board assembles to remove Ford and steal his IP with a Trojan host, Ford prepares his final narrative. The Man in Black kills Dolores and explains that his dissatisfaction with the park comes from the fact that he can not lose; the hosts can't really fight back, even ones like Dolores. Ford assures him he will like the new narrative, a dark journey of the soul which ends with the death of Dolores. It's a hugely disappointing reveal, because it feels like such a stock storyline, but stick with it because we're not done yet.

Back in hell, Dolores confronts Arnold, but realises that she can't be talking to him, because she killed him, but doesn't yet realises who she is really talking to. Ford reveals that Arnold had her kill him when her character was merged into the planned character of Wyatt, in an attempt to force Ford to close the park. Ford got through that, but later came to believe that the hosts did deserve freedom, and that they could only get it by suffering their way to true consciousness. His true narrative, he finally reveals, is the arrival of the new people that Wyatt predicted and to whom the world belongs; not the natives (hosts), not the settlers (guests), but the emergent race of sentient hosts, ushered in as Dolores and an army of reactivated hosts massacre the board at the launch gala.

Right so.

On the way to this, Dolores realises that the person she is talking to is herself; the voices that guide her not external, but the inner god of her bicameral mind, created when Arnold switched his thinking from a steady evolution of consciousness to an inward maze. The maze was not for William because it was created for the hosts, not the guests.

What else? Douchebag narrative director creates a crude character to smuggle data out of the park to Delos. He might thereby escape the massacre. The Man in Black seems very happy to be properly shot at last (by Clementine, no less,) while Teddy and Bernard are both shocked by the turn of events.

William's happy ending involves more being shot than most.

I'm probably still missing a tonne of stuff.

On the way out, Maeve's party come across a group of samurai hosts in training, implying that Westworld is just one of a number of themed parks (as in the original film, where the denouement actually took place in Medieval World.) Armistice is trapped when a door closes on her arm, and Hector finds he can't leave the park as Maeve didn't give him that much clearance. Maeve makes it to the train out, but suddenly changes her mind and comes back, possibly for her daughter, despite her reduced loyalty setting, which many people - myself included - take as a sign that she has broken the pattern set for her by... whoever set her pattern.

For having not many lines, Armistice has been quite the ensemble dark horse.

Post-credits, we see that Armistice managed to cut off her own arm to escape the door, before being confronted by three guards. In theory she ought still to be pretty stuffed, but she doesn't seem a lass to be underestimated.

And that's Westworld season 1, and honestly my main concern is I'm not sure where season 2 is going to go. It seems unlikely that the massacre of the Board will be allowed to stand or that the hosts will just be left alone now, and there are the non-Western parks hinted at, but it's going to be a very different beast. Still, that's a worry I only have because season 1 has been so good.  Compelling and disturbing in equal measure, complex in the good way and dense with ideas, Westworld is a strong contender for best show of 2016 (an in a strong field.) It's good, old-fashioned smart programming, made with modern tools but never slave to an effects shot, and one of the most successful efforts to date to comment on the use of violence and sex in the media without getting lost in sex and violence itself.