Westworld - Season 2 (the rest of it)

"It's not who you are on the inside; it's what you do that defines you."

My last big TV weekend included a blitz through the remaining episodes of Season 2 of Westworld. I should say, I’m not convinced that this is the best way to watch Westworld, a show which definitely benefits from a week after each episode to talk over the events and speculate wildly with your mates.

From where I left off, the various timelines progress and, occasionally, overlap, as Delores tries to annihilate the human presence in the park, who seek to return the favour, Maeve seeks for her daughter, the Man in Black seeks for some kind of validation in his life, and Charlotte Hale tries to extract the Delos Corporation’s IP from the park.

Delores attacks the Mesa, and effectively destroys Teddy in trying to make him go along with her plans. Maeve and her posse find their way into Shogunworld and encounter their Japanese alternate selves, thanks to Sizemore’s limited narrative creativity and writing time. Here, Maeve develops her ability to control other hosts, as a tragedy plays out despite their best efforts, before they return to Westworld and discover that – perhaps unsurprisingly – her daughter has a new mother and isn’t wild to go with the crazy woman. Fleeing from the Ghost Nation and security troops, Maeve is captured thanks to Sizemore’s betrayal. We also meet a new character, Akecheta, a member of the Native American monster faction called the Ghost Nation. As it becomes apparent that the Ghost Nation hosts have transcended their rather bland ‘murderous savages’ programming, Akecheta tells his story to Maeve’s daughter – revealed in a bravura twist to be also operating as a conduit through which the captive Maeve can hear him – explaining that he stumbled on the Maze way back in time, and found that it opened his mind as Bernard had hoped. Remembering his old life, even when reinvented as a member of the Ghost Tribe, he tried to escape with his wife into the heart of the Maze. She was captured, and he went off-grid, managing not to be taken to the ‘underworld’ for years.

"I've had it with all this bull."

Maeve breaks out, less thanks to would-be saviours Hector and Sizemore than to a stampede of host buffalo that she engineers. She and Akecheta then work together to get as many hosts as possible to the Valley, where Arnold created a doorway to a virtual world intended to be their sanctuary and utopia. This is a plan that Delores disapproves of, since she’s into this whole world domination thing, and which is threatened when Delos troops replicate Maeve’s host control ability in Clementine and turn her into a lethal Trojan horse, spreading uncontrollable rage among other hosts. Sizemore sacrifices himself, finally getting the big speech he wrote for Hector out, and the rest of Maeve’s posse are killed protecting the refugees.

Bernard and Delores clash over the fate of the park after discovering that the precious IP is not merely marketing information on the superrich, but sufficient observational data to recreate the guests in host bodies, providing immortality at a price. This process is as yet unperfected, and the central AI – in the figure of Logan Delos – claims this is because they are trying to make people too complicated, because people are basically simple, as trapped in their loops and core drives as any host.

Bernard kills Delores, floods the Valley, but then witnesses Hale murdering Elsie. Now, we kind of thought Elsie was dead last season, but no; turns out Bernard just imprisoned her in a cave, so that she could survive to be shot in the face by a ruthless corporate executive. Yay. Anyway, this convinces Bernard to set up a complex Batman gambit, in which he resurrects Delores in a host body which looks like Hale, so that she can take out the real Hale, replace her, lead the Delos forces back to the Valley and thus save the host minds in the sanctuary, scrambling his own memories so that no-one can force him to reveal his plan.

Delores, with a little help from might-be-a-host Stubbs(1), sends the sanctuary to a digital safe place, then checks out of the park with a bag of host brains, while Maeve’s acolytes Felix and Sylvester are tasked with ‘salvaging’ the hosts who aren’t too badly damaged to restore, including Maeve, Hector, Armistice and Hanaryo, Armistice’s Shogunworld doppelganger. William’s daughter rocks up from Rajworld to confront her father, and he shoots her; thanks for that, Westworld. He then gets shot all to hell confronting Maeve and ultimately ends up medivaced from the park and… apparently waking up as a host in the far future.

I expected her to do more, you know.

So, that – more or less – was Westworld Season 2, which maintained the complexity and twisted timelines of the original, while deepening the overarching narrative and its musings on the nature and limitations of consciousness and agency. Of course, it remains a sumptuous production, with a stellar cast. It’s very, very complicated – I kept almost forgetting things in writing this review, like the existence of William’s daughter(2) – but the overall impression is still strong, and clearly it’s still inspiring a lot of speculation moving forward. As always with something this involved, it’s hard to know how long it will last. When you wind together this many plots and this size of ensemble, it’s really easy for the wheels to fly off. So far, the show hasn’t kept anyone in the cast beyond their character’s purpose. Big-name Anthony Hopkins was reduced to a minor recurring role this season, and ultimately done away with as anything but a figure in flashback. The dead stay dead, even in a show which has a built-in excuse for them not to.

Westworld Season 2, still going strong.

(1) I’m not sure how I feel about this one. My immediate impression was that Stubbs was just so monumentally pissed off with the jerks he ultimately worked for that he was letting Char-lores out to fuck with them.

(2) Seriously, she’s in there for a couple of episodes and then her dad shoots her, which aside from anything else made me care even less about his unbelievably fucked-up soul.

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.

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.

Westworld - 'Contrapasso'

I have a sneaking suspicion that this kid is behind everything.

As the theories fly thick and fast, Westworld continues to load us down with characters and plots that presumably are all going to meet up somewhere.

The Man in Black comes across the slightly creepy little boy with a stick while transporting the injured Teddy. He decides that, as Teddy seems most likely to lead him to Wyatt, he'd better drain Lawrence's blood into a bag and decant it into the desperately wounded gunslinger. I'm not sure this procedure would have the seal of approval from any respectable phlebotomic body, but it seems to do the trick. The Man in Black laments the fact that the hosts, once beautiful machines are now a mess of bone and flesh, because it is cheaper to produce these almost-humans. They continue to another town, with Teddy having been told that Wyatt took Dolores, where they encounter Ford.

I was going to insert a joke about the Man in Black being a licensed medical
practitioner, but then I realised that there's a very good chance that he might
be. Certainly he seems to run a foundation, likely medical in nature, and may
have been part of covering up Arnold's suicide.

In another fascinating exchange, the Man in Black admits that he does what he does because he feels that the park lacks villains of substance. He ponders cutting Ford open, but Teddy suddenly shakes off his hurt and pins the Man's knife arm. This is just one piece of evidence that the hosts can hurt the guests, just not shoot them. Ford leaves, and as he goes does something that shuts down Teddy's 'horribly injured' status effect.

Logan leads William and Dolores to the town of Pariah, in the wilder stretches of the park. Loosely deemed 'south of the border', Pariah is run by a gangster who turns out to be none other than Lawrence. As they arrive they encounter a Day of the Dead style parade(1) and Dolores sees herself. Following, she is put into sleep mode and seemingly taken to be analysed by Ford, who is concerned by her breaking out of her loop. If these scenes are as connected as they seem, then that puts the mockers on the William/Man in Black theory(2), as Ford is clearly the same age and not forty years older. Dolores is also hearing voices giving her directions, although she denies this in conversation with Ford, insists that she hasn't interacted with Arnold in almost 35 years, and then tells someone we can't see that she has deceived him.

Logan reveals that his family business wants to move in on the park, which is having some financial difficulties. Tensions rise with William after Logan's need for violence sends a heist spiraling into bloodshed and William finds himself forced to shoot several unarmed hosts. Lawrence then sells the nitro-glycerin they have stolen to a rogue Confederate unit, before stealing the actual nitro and making a run for it, leaving Logan and William to face the wrath of the Confederates. William escapes, thanks to a sudden shift into badass gunslinger from Dolores, and they abandon Logan to follow Lawrence to his destination, accompanying a stack of nitro-filled coffins marked with the maze.

Behind the scenes, Felix, one of the 'butchers' who work on mechanical repair, is starting to get creeped out about Maeve's constant appearance in his workspace following her failure to sleep a couple of episodes ago. Felix is working on trying to reprogramme a broken bird to function again, which his partner Sylvester sees as a brazen and futile attempt to get promoted to the behaviour team. Ellie meanwhile discovers that the stray had a signalling device in his arm; someone was using him to smuggle data out of the park. Felix seems to get his bird working, but at that moment Maeve sits up, addresses him by name and suggests that they need to talk.

This tender moment? Actually super creepy.

So, even if the two time frames theory takes a hit this week - albeit not a terminal one - there's lots to think about. Maeve's path to self-awareness is apparently the more organic, and this week it's Dolores hearing voices, suggesting that 'the original' continues to be subject to some aspect of Arnold's bicameral mind experiments. William, interestingly, remains largely unimportant. Abandoning Logan was a clear and personally relevant choice, but he's basically switched from following Logan to following Dolores as she transitions from her placid, accepting persona to imagine 'a story in which I don't have to be the damsel.' Created as an adult and at least 40 years old, Ford describes her mind as a closed system, from which no memory ever truly escapes. Somewhere inside she knows everything she has ever seen, done, suffered or been programmed to do, and that makes her very, very dangerous. The moment when she kisses William is pure power play, and blows the innocent rancher's daughter completely out of the water.

Initially introduced as an almost avuncular figure, Ford continues to get more and more creepy, with his cautionary tale likening the Man in Black's quest for the centre to a greyhound that didn't know what to do once it had caught the 'hare'(3). This is another recurring theme, of course, and by now most of the hosts have been told at one point or other that that thing that they want so much, they will never get. Coupled with Ford allowing that the Man is the park's greatest villain, this binds the Man ever closer to the hosts that he terrorises.

Regarding the nature of the park, Pariah is an oddity. Creepy narrative director was fighting to get 30 new hosts activated, but apparently Pariah has a thriving population just on the off chance that someone comes across one of the Easter eggs which lead there, and thence to the presumably also heavily-staffed war plots. We also saw that hosts can really lay into the guests, even if they can't shoot or actually kill them.

(1) It's very Spectre, but then Westworld is more brazen even than Mexico City.
(2) As does the fact that Logan refers to the disappearance of a funding partner way back in the early days while the Man in Black seems to have been around at the time.
(3) Bonus creepy marks for the fact that in the actual story, the 'hare' was someone's pet cat that the hound mistook for its racing mark.

Westworld - 'Dissonance Theory'

These guys.

Cue-up the player piano; it's time for Westworld episode 4: 'Dissonance Theory'.

So, there's a theory going around that events in Westworld are not being shown to us in chronological order, and in particular that the sinister Man in Black is actually the much older William. This would give William some sort of actual purpose, and also explain why Dolores is apparently back in William's camp in the morning after apparently fleeing the scene of a guest murder(1). We've also never seen the staff react to William's actions, as far as I can remember.

But anyway: Logan refuses to turn aside from their bandit hunt to take Dolores home, now that William has talked him into it, and they shoot up some bandits and capture their leader. On the way back, however, the bandit drops the name of his boss, prompting Logan to shoot their bounty hunter host. Apparently they have stumbled on an Easter egg, leading to one of the biggest narratives in the park. Dolores is none too keen, but follows. Her behaviour throughout - not just coming with them, but referring to her dead family and offering to help out in the raid - suggest that she is at a point after her opening discussion with Bernard, relating to the shooting and in which he guides her towards the Maze, but I'm not entirely sure on that.

This gal.

Meanwhile, the Man in Black follows his clue trail to look for a snake, finding it in the form of an extensive tattoo worn by a ruthless bandit named Armistice (the gunwoman from Hector's assault on the town.) To learn the story of the tattoo, he single-handedly rescues Hector from prison using a pack of exploding cigars and she tells him that the tattoo is the story of her revenge on the men who murdered her family. She has only one more life to take to complete the story, the head of the snake; a man named Wyatt. The Man in Black later finds Teddy dying, tied to a tree, so he's definitely contemporary with that.

In staffsville, Operations boots Engineering off the investigation into the glitching bots and Bernard points out that the carving of Orion has too many stars in its belt. Ops head Theresa confronts Ford over the risks of his grand new narrative, and he assures her that all will be well with a grandiose display of his power over Westworld and his reach over his employees by taking her to dinner in the exact spot her parents brought her years before, before causing hundreds of hosts to simultaneously freeze, then walk away as massive machines begin carving up the land.

These two.

Finally, Hector makes another assault on town, this being a regular event. Repeating the basic framework, the series replaces a couple of henchmen with guests and swaps out Paint it Black for the Habanera suite from Bizet's Carmen(2). More to the point, Hector is interrupted by Maeve, who offers the combination of her safe in exchange for his understanding of the native religion, in particular a figure of myth that she sees in her dreams: A staff member in a biohazard suit. Then she has him dig shrapnel from the place where she remembers being shot and kisses him as the posse blasts them both through the door, since 'I'm not mad, and none of this matters.'

As some of the hosts begin to piece things together, props for the black woman(3) doing so intellectually while her white and well-to-do counterpart connects more emotionally to the matter. I suspect that I'm going to find the non-linear theory distracting going forward, but we have some definite information on the Man in Black at least. We know that he isn't Arnold, but someone very famous in the real world as a philanthropist whose foundation saves lives. We learn nothing more because he threatens to kill the guest who mentions this for breaking in on his vacation. Logan is still a douche and William a cipher, although we get a tidbit when we learn that the family business into which William is lately married is considering acquiring an interest in Westworld.

Whether the theory is correct or not, it proves that Westworld is a series that is getting people to think, even if only the kind of people who discuss narrative linearity on the internet.

(1) Unless that was a host, which is entirely possible. Pulling the trigger might be the critical thing, and presumably the guns shouldn't kill guests at all, including the ones that guests use, given how deliberately difficult it is to tell guest from host. Man, I'd love to read some of the theories on this, but the US is an episode ahead of me and theories are one thing, spoilers another.
(2) It's a less awesome scene, but then it's supposed to be. Slaughter has already become routine.
(3) As a note, it's interesting to reflect on the fact that her backstory spiel talks about a voice in her head telling her what she shouldn't do, and that Arnold installed in some hosts a system where a 'voice of god' would prompt them in an attempt to kickstart cognition.

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.

Westworld - 'The Original' and 'Chestnut'

Welcome to Westworld.

Remember the glorious oddity that was Fargo a few years back? And of course 12 Monkeys? Yeah, we're going through a definite phase of TV adaptations of movies, and now HBO have reached further back for their adaptation of 1973's Michael Crichton-penned Westworld.

As in the film, the titular Westworld is an elaborate vacation resort in the not-so-distant future, where guests pay for an authentic old west experience, provided for them by android 'hosts' programmed to provide whatever the guests want, but without actual awareness that they aren't real people. Through the first episode, 'The Original', we meet several hosts - Dolores, a wholesome settler girl; Teddy, her nice would-be boyfriend; Maeve, the madame of the local bar - some of the staff of Westworld - founder, Robert Ford; head programmer, Bernard Lowe; ops manager, Theresa Cullen; paranoid security chief, Stubbs; and narrative director Lee Sizemore, a colossal tool - and a few guests, only one of whom is particularly noteworthy; the Man in Black.

Visually, the Man in Black is very similar to the android Gunslinger in the
movie, and similarly driven.

The twist is that in this version, the malfunctioning androids aren't the antagonists, or at least not solely or universally. Repeatedly subjected to violence and indignity by the guests, they come back from each refit as full of hope, anger or joy as ever, only to be beaten, raped or killed again by people that they can not hurt or even fight in return. They are very much the better angels of this tale, especially by comparison to the staff who enable their treatment and guests like the Man in Black, a super-rich regular - it is implied that he drops so much money that any usual rules are suspended for him - with a long history of abusing Dolores - the oldest host and presumably the 'original' of the title, unless that's the Man in Back as the original guest - but who has tired of the usual games and, after exhausting the potential of increasing levels of one-sided violence is looking for a 'deeper level' to the game.

Meanwhile, the staff are forced to halt the roll-out of a new software update which radically increases the emotional expression of the hosts when it begins to manifest glitches and to express memories of previous narrative cycles and roles. Taking a group of hosts offline, the staff move up a violent shoot-out to cover the lack of subquests. The lasting results of the glitch force some units to be withdrawn altogether and leaves Dolores able to hurt a fly.

'Chestnut' follows Dolores as she begins to remember snatches of her past, including the death of Teddy in the shoot-out, despite her beau being seemingly recast as a black hat. Meanwhile, a pair of new guests - Logan and William - enter the park. Logan is an old hand and committed black hat, while William is a newbie and shocked by the treatment of the hosts.

"Welcome to Westworld. Meaningless robot sex?"

Logan advises William to stay focused on the meaningless sex and violence, and not get sidetracked into the subquests. As an ST, I can't help feeling for the staff of the park, who clearly devote hours to crafting narratives - treasure hunts, posses, gunfights - for visitors who consider a notional rotating exclamation mark to be a target for pointless violence.

Mind you, I don't extend that sympathy to narrative director douche, who presents a Native American sex-and-violence travelogue, only for Ford to shoot it down in favour of something mysterious that he has been working on, probably during his jaunts into the park. I smiled at that, because the narrative director really is a dick. He also trades heavily on the shallow craving for sensation that marks the thrillseeking, disruptive guests.

Just one layer of the surrogate parent business that is all over this series.

The Man in Black continues his quest, rescuing a man from the noose in order to question him about 'the maze' in his home town. He guns down just about everyone in town with his LeMat revolver* and then turns the gun on the man's daughter, but it is the daughter who answers, suddenly calm and robotic, that the maze is not for him. Not that he cares, or that the hosts have any means of stopping him. It's very notable during the shoot outs that the Man in Black gets shot. A lot. It's just that the guns can't hurt guests (although the mechanic of this is not explained, unlike in the movie where the guns have a built in sensor,) which means that the stakes and consequences of any given fight lie entirely on the hapless hosts. It's not explicit, but it seems likely that this lack of risk is the root of his discontent with the existing narratives.

Hooker with a heart of printed circuit boards.

Back in town, Maeve is glitching, putting off the customers. Sizemore has her patched and sent back with her aggression ramped up to a level that is even more off-putting, requiring another recall and tune up from Elsie Hughes, a young programmer and the last major staff character so far. She detects an infection and sends her for treatment, only for Maeve to wake up on the table, flee and find the storage chambers where the unused hosts are kept. This is of course a wee bit distressing for her.

If you're thinking 'damn, that's a lot of characters' then you've not seen the show yet, because I'm skipping, and all of them have at least basic drives, motives and characterisation by the end of episode two. It's another example of a TV series with real, heavyweight writing and production, an excellent cast and a lot of subtext to focus on. It sometimes feels that as big budget movies get dumber, big budget TV gets smarter. Westworld is definitely smart, transferring much of its satirical commentary to MMOs and other multiplayer online games in which disruptive players might detract from the enjoyment of others in search of their own, and I hope that the payoff when we learn what the 'deeper game' is all about will live up to the opening.

* Yeah, I'm a weird gun nerd (like, weird guns especially,) and the LeMat is a classic bit of Old West weirdness, exploited here by seeing the Man in Black break open what initially looks like a six-shooter and load it with nine bullets and a shotgun cartridge.

Legends of Tomorrow - 'The Magnificent Eight'

"Just try to blend in."

Fleeing from the Hunters, Rip puts the Waverider down in a fragment, a pocket of space time that can not be monitored. This one is in the town of Salvation in 1871 and change, and you just know that the team aren't going to be happy to kick back on the ship. Ray has cowboy fantasies to live out, and even Roary feels it would be wrong to leave the Old West without a saloon brawl.

"Did you think you were the first time travelers I'd met?"
"Uh... yes."

Sure enough, it takes about five seconds for them to get into it with the local gang, and before you can say knife they've tipped the town from 'crushed by the demands of grasping criminals' to 'on the extinction list'. They are pulled out of trouble at first by Jonah Hex, a man with a scarred face, a long history with time travelers and a contractual right to appear in any DC western. He knows Rip and suggests that they do what Rip does best and leave, but Ray is determined that as they started the fight, they have to stay and protect the town.

In nearby subplot city, Kendra goes looking for a woman she recognises from a past life, only to realise that the woman is her in a past life. This leads to a powerful confrontation, as her older (younger?) self warns Kendra that life without Khufu - for her, Hannibal Hawks, although in a major foul the western Chay-ara herself isn't given a name - is mere existence, and any other love is doomed. It also gives a chance for Sara and Kendra to bond more, and for Kendra to step up and choose to make a go of it with Ray, destiny be damned.

Rather less successfully, Martin swipes medicine from the ship to save a tubercular British kid who turns out to be HG Wells, because of course he does.

'Blend in.'

Rip confesses that he once got time drifted in the Old West, in love with its romance and heroism, but eventually had to leave or he would have prevented a temporally necessary massacre. Ray runs off wave one of bandits, but they can't stay forever and so they agree to a draw-off. Rip stands for Ray and gets to be proper badass for once. Then the Hunters show up and are thoroughly underwhelming, getting taken out in about a minute.

Now shit has got real, it seems, and the Time Masters will send the Pilgrim after them; a lethal assassin who will target their younger selves and take them out of time entirely.

As with many of the better episodes of the series, 'The Magnificent Eight' is at its strongest when it embraces the genre it is visiting, and definitely benefits from getting out of the Savage arc for a while. It's actually a shame that the Hunters showed up, especially when they were so much lamer than advertised. We close on the Pilgrim aiming a gun at the back of teenage Roary's head, and such is the inverse accuracy of Time Master reputations so far that I frankly expect her to miss.

Where the episode falls down is in failing to follow through on the social history strengths of 'Night of the Hawk'. Half a decade out of the Civil War, would people have been so blase about the sudden appearance of armed blacks? I ask this question in all sincerity; I have no real idea, but I doubt it would have been a complete non-event. More definitely, the episode itself gets a little lost in the romance of the period, and Ray in particular seems suddenly very okay about shooting people with guns just because cowboys. It would have been good for the brutality of the time to affect him as the prejudices of the 50s rattled Stein's unthinking love of the period.