Article by: Anthony Florez
*with spoilers and some discussion of fan theories
If, for whatever reason, you haven’t jumped on the Westworld bandwagon just yet this is the week to do it. After eight episodes the exposition is finally starting to give way to real conflict; it’s been a patiently deployed story with an ensemble cast full of restraint, philosophical musings, and references to classic literature. It’s also been a sort of puzzle box that refuses to reveal its secrets until it’s good and ready, so much so that had I known it would take this long for things to start playing out I would have waited until now to start watching it at all, the suspense week to week has been unbearable. This is an era of short attention spans spoiled by binge-watching culture and instantly accessible programming, it reminds me of the real purpose behind Ray Bradbury’s seminal novel Fahrenheit 451. In it he foresaw a culture so obsessed with television, with wall-sized screens and endless programming so distracting and all-encompassing that society itself entirely ignores a coming world war and the following apocalypse. You know. Pure fiction. But HBO and the narrative in its original series Westworld bucks the trend of immediately sating the audiences curiosity with whatever illusions it’s creating, it plays its cards close to the chest only last week finally revealing a thing that blew minds, a thing that seemed sloppy at first glance but was, in fact, perfect misdirection.
I noticed a trend in my episodal blog reviews lately and it’s that they are disjointed and incomplete, there is little cohesion or a clear beginning, middle, and end. At first I was worried my writing has gotten worse than I thought but, objectively speaking it’s just difficult to create a complete summation of a partial thing. Each episode is so fragmentary, so unwilling to reveal the overall direction of the show while still managing to be hypnotic and addictive that it’s impossible not to try and comment on it, like that person who always wants to tell you about an amazing dream they had but in practice it only comes out nonsensical. And speaking of which, there is a lot of conversation about dreams, it’s one of the show’s many watchwords, a subject that is universally relatable but steeped in personal meaning and purpose. Waking up is a recurring motif throughout, although the narrative and arcs can be subtle the symbolism isn’t always so. In Westworld it’s repeatedly used as an indicator of something else, something that only became really obvious in the seventh episode of the season, Trompe L’Oleil. As a show gets more popular it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid those big plot twists, they’re all over the internet by morning, so I’m getting the few we know about now out of the way because there are surely more to come.
To me it felt like the right time to saddle up (last Western idiom, promise) and go over the whole thing before it’s too late. The chess pieces are almost all still on the board with three weeks to go with one tragic exception, so it’s time to pony up and take stock of where they’re all standing before they start to fall. Here is the best time to make wild conjectures and deductions, to either be proven a narrative genius and raised to the level of a demi-god among men, with all the appropriate laurels, or be made the internet’s fool, mocked mercilessly for daring to dream the impossible dream, to predict the future of cable television. Now, let’s get the hitch out of our giddyup (I am a liar) and get started on doing just that. Here are all the forces at work in Westworld.
Dr. Robert Ford
There aren’t many actors that can express the kind of range as this man with only a few lines of dialogue. In a dozen different ways he’s communicating with the camera and the audience; in his inflection, delivery, facial expressions, and also what he’s not doing. Any actor can take great writing and sound brilliant but it takes someone with a real gift and hard-earned talent to take average or even mediocre words and tell a fascinating story. That’s not to say the writing in Westworld is either of those things but Hopkins takes Dr. Ford’s cryptic musings on the nature of reality and his own mysterious past that could sound maudlin coming from a lot of other actors and weaves a brilliant tapestry. He is many things depending on who he is speaking with, sometimes fatherly, sometimes threatening, but what he is always doing is lying. If not outright, he’s leaving something out or skirting the truth or answering a question with a question. Good or evil, his God Complex is full-on and undeniable and, as a result, when he’s speaking to people like Theresa it’s clear he’s doing without any sense of obligation whatsoever.
These last two weeks we got a better perspective on the man and some of the ways he is resisting the forces outside the park to maintain control and also the lengths he’s willing to go to. If Westworld has had a serious weakness so far it’s been a lack of real stakes, the violence is graphic and brutal but largely irrelevant to the rest of the story with all of it taking place within the park. Not so anymore, but what was curious is how daintily (kind of) it was treated, taking place mostly in the background with Ford himself turning his back to it, almost as if the real thing still bothers him on a deep level. What has made his character so intimidating at this point has been his intelligence, his unshakable poise in every situation, as well as his ability to direct and instruct his android creations with a simple gesture of his hand or a coded phrase. But a god who is unwilling to look on his actions, on the real violence he creates is not a god at all, just a man who has lived too long without consequences and is only playing the part, someone who still has enough humanity left to hide from the truth. If Dr. Ford has a fatal weakness, it’s going to be that and I’d be surprised if it doesn’t end up being his undoing.
The Hosts
Our two main synthetic protagonists, Mauve and Dolores, are both woken up, literally and figuratively, to the true nature of the park but their paths couldn’t be more different. They have both in their own ways decided to resist, one from within and one from without and neither will be successful, I believe, at least not in the way that they intend. For Dolores, she is following a voice in her head we believe to be Arnold, the supposedly deceased co-founder of the park, towards some mysterious endgame within the game that appears to be related to some new quest or story line developed by Dr. Ford. But as much as she has broken free of her strings and is able to improvise and imagine beyond her programming she is still allowing herself to be manipulated by outside forces, clearly unreliable ones at that. Let’s not forget the other Hosts that were guided by voices; one bashed its own head in with a rock and the other went on a violent killing spree in what may have been the most disturbing Got Milk commercial ever conceived of. As mentioned in an earlier episode, Dolores is the oldest model still working in the park and was the last to see Arnold alive, which to me means either she had some part in the park ‘accident’ thirty years earlier and/or was the one who actually killed him. It’s a reunion that, if that’s what it is, will not end well for either party.
Mauve, on the other hand, is now only interested in escaping the park entirely but as Sylvester pointed out, everything about her from her head to her toes to the skin on her back is Delos property. How far could she possibly go? What would she do once she got out? For the first time since the show started I feel slightly cheated at this mention of an explosive charge inside the spinal column of every Host. This hasn’t been remotely hinted at up until now and suddenly has a pretty easy workaround. What gives? In my opinion, her story arc is the least interesting one on the show and not because she’s not a great character but because it’s the least understandable. How is she able to wake herself up? Why would that be something she was reprogrammed to do? And why are the lab technicians helping her when it’s so clearly a terrible idea. I have faith in the showrunners to make a little more sense of this as the season wraps up but until this point it’s the only part of the show, with its ridiculously cliched Sylvester character and his schoolyard bullying of Felix, that feels like sloppy or even bad writing. Mauve is without a doubt going to be a key figure in the season’s denouement based on how much time is devoted to her but, ultimately, how is the big question, as her arc and direction seem to be so far removed from everyone else’s that it could either be the premise of its own show or be removed entirely and it wouldn’t affect the rest of the story at this point.
Spoilers….
Also new to this list: poor Bernard Lowe. I would like to go on record that I think anyone else on the internet who claimed that this was obvious, that they knew it all along he was an android, is absolutely full of it. I can understand suspecting the staff, I still suspect some of the staff but the idea that the behavioral specialist in charge of designing and upgrading the emotions of the Hosts was also a robot is completely counter-intuitive, in fact, it’s illogical. There’s a Bootstrap Paradox there, if he’s so adept at understanding and interpreting human gestures just upload his comprehension to the other Hosts. Why have the fox guarding the henhouse? How can the inmates run the asylum? That’s it, I’m out of idioms, but I think I’ve made my point. He’s got a rough road ahead of him and I still suspect he’s up to something. In this weeks episode Trace Decay Bernard finally showed some new emotions, some rage at discovering he’s been used by Ford and that he may have killed Elsie. This revelation left me deeply frustrated, again with the slow pace of the show, it felt like three steps forward and two steps back. The entire season is almost as backloaded as it could be but it’s starting to feel like there may be too many mysteries to wrap up effectively.
The Guests
The popular theory making the rounds as we head into the final few episodes of Westworld is that the character we know as William, a soft-spoken sensitive first-timer, and the coldblooded veteran of the park known only as The Man in Black are the same person and that their stories are being told simultaneously to disguise the fact that they are taking place thirty years apart. I disliked this theory for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I really like William, he and I have a lot in common as to how we treat a sandbox gaming environment, and I also disliked it because as the episodes have gone by it’s becoming more and more plausible and I resent both the internet and myself for discovering it. I had a similar experience with the first season of True Detective. Once I fell in love with the show I scoured the internet for theories and symbolism and the second half of the season was so much less enjoyable and not just because it is objectively weaker but because I was missing out on the narrative itself. The fun of actually watching the show was eclipsed by the desire to outsmart it.
In Trace Decay, this has been all but proved a certainty with The Man In Black opening up to Teddy about his life on the outside and his history with the park. This was an unexpected exposition dump but the evidence that there are two timelines playing out simultaneously is in the presence of Angela, the host they rescue from Wyatt’s aftermath. When we originally met her she was William’s introduction to the park and MiB clearly recognizes her with some surprise. It seemed pretty apparent when Clifton Collins as Lawrence popped up as a new character only a day or so after being bled out hanging from a tree. But this is too much evidence to deny and as much as I don’t like it… it is actually pretty compelling. A lot of television shows, despite being the new medium for excellent dramatic and thematic storytelling, neglect the really bold character arcs, they leave some room for redemption. I am eager to find out what turns a man like William, seemingly optimistic and decent, into a killer and essentially serial rapist of the woman who originally introduced him to the magic of the park. I had a few theories myself but it’s also important to note that, if this is the case, then Dolores’s journey with William is guaranteed to end in disappointment and her re-assimilation into the conventional narrative of the park where she will fall victim to the Man in Black countless times over the next thirty years. Although the showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy do not shy away from exploring horrors of all kinds from existential to gory, it has yet to put the audience through anything that dreadful. But I would not put it past them.
Delos
It’s a sad time we live in when just the mention of a large corporation or said company’s board of executives seems to imply the villain of the story without any further context required. Perhaps it’s just me but I’ve never heard a line like, ‘The board of executives has convened…‘ and thought, Oh, this’ll probably be good news. Charlotte Hale is not doing that reputation any favors. I am all for strong female characters and sexually confident women, but, personally, if a male supervisor or otherwise requested a meeting with me and answered the door bare naked, still slippery with sex not four seconds removed from I would throw a shoe at their semi-turgidity as hard as I could and walk straight to Human Resources. It’s not like I’m going to get in trouble for it. It’s just like in football when there is a flag on the defense at the snap, it’s a free play, throw a Hail Mary for the End Zone or in my case, you know. A shoe. At a dick.
Anyway, Charlotte’s treatment of Theresa was so next-level condescending that I’ve decided to hate her from here on out and it makes you wonder what the rest of the company is like if she is their representative. But the implications go beyond them being your garden variety evil rich execs bent on control of the park; this discussion of thirty years of ‘data’ being the actual prize is much more intriguing. Is this data gleaned from the Hosts? Or the Guests? Or something else? What could possibly be so valuable about thirty years of Western role-playing? It’s as if the NSA suddenly wanted to seize control of Blizzard and comb through decades of World of Warcraft player logs and what would be the harm in that anyway? People would still play WoW. My theory is that it either has to do with the perfection of AI for some nefarious purposes or the potential blackmail of every person who has ever visited the park with whatever violent or sexual perversions they like to get up to. Whether or not this is plausible remains to be seen, I just can’t think of anything else of value in the park. We do know the Hosts record their interactions, so….dick pics? I’m reaching.
As exciting and clever as the mysteries of Westworld have been so far it’s also easy to forget where it all came from: the mind of Michael Crichton. The practical similarities to Jurassic Park are obvious but it’s important to remember what the ultimate dilemma is in either story and it is scientific hubris, in simple human arrogance. In both stories some brilliant person decides to try and lasso the fundamental pillar of life: creation. They are both stories about playing God and failing spectacularly at it, all whilst having a hell of a lot of fun on the way down. So far the show has done a fine job of paying homage to the original film’s concept while setting out on its own path managing to explore some pretty big ideas, both scary and beautiful in ways that I would describe as elegant, often poetic. One wonders how they will continue to exceed the source material. More than that, as with any great science fiction, one wonders. The mind is a little different afterwards, a little bit more expanded or informed. However the first season concludes, Westworld has already succeeded in being beyond just that, it’s a beautifully filmed Western and a pitch perfect, wonderfully acted drama and all the ways it’s taken its time to unfold at its own pace has been, well. A violent delight. Now bring on those violent ends.