Well, heck, assuming the “bullets” in Westworld are little more than low-powered beebees (i.e. they can break low-grade glass, but don’t hit hard enough to more than sting a person), the damage we see inflicted on hosts is likely by design, i.e. they come preloaded with blood-squibs in the limbs, torso and head, and if a shot lands anywhere near one of these areas, the guest gets a nice gruesome display, though his shot was essentially harmless. When a host takes a head or torso “shot”, it doesn’t really “die” from the damage, it just switches itself off. The repair work consists mostly of removing the hosts’s fake-blood-stained clothing, replacing the squibs and reclosing the seals, really just an advanced version of putting one of those “Smash Up Derby” cars back together.
When the guests start using knives, though, is when more serious repair work is needed.
I thought Episode 2 did a wonderful job of bringing out the horror of the hosts’ perspective. Thandie Newton’s character awakes from a “nightmare” about her family (and potentially her) being slaughtered, and wakes up on a table naked being sliced open by strangely dressed men, then escapes into an alien landscape only to discover more strangely dressed men callously dumping and hosing down the dead bodies of her friends and neighbors. If the hosts are becoming sentient that’s a helluva trauma.
True enough. This show is confusing - we can see the hosts being manufactured and emerging from the “milk” like Vitruvians with skeletal/muscular systems in place - so I can buy the dermis, epidermis and hair are added after to customize the host’s appearance, but if a guest really indulges a vivisection fantasy, they’re going to find nonhuman internal structures fairly quickly…
Anyway, fine, the hosts are genetically engineered and brainwashed humans, or at least they may as well be for the purposes of this show.
Well, if those printers had a micrometer resolution (some very high-end real-life 3D printers are approaching this) so they could print interlocking structures the size of individual human cells, then at that point I guess you could “print” a pretty near approximation of a human being.
Of course, we don’t see this during the show (or in it’s opening theme) because it would be too glacial - what we get is downright macro in comparison, printing entire tendons in one shot and such. Maybe the “milk” bath is to remove all the temporary bindings between the ~30 trillion interlocking cell-like machines that collectively form the host’s skeletomuscular system. That one malfunctioning host did seem pretty milk-obsessed.
Anyway, if the mechanics of if don’t actually matter and we can just operate on the assumption that the hosts are genetically-engineered subhumans, so be it. It’ll probably go the route of the hosts behaving and bleeding exactly like humans when the drama calls for it, and robots when the drama calls for that, and the audience just plays along for the spectacle of it.
Right now I’m leaning towards the phrase “These violent delights have violent ends” is some sort of virus trigger that makes the robots recall their previous memories, possibly put in there on purpose by Anthony Hopkins for some reason or another.
I’ll fan-wank this one based on current state-of-the-art tissue and organ engineering:
Right now, it’s possible to take a living organism and “decellularize” it, leaving behind a scaffold of extracellular matrix proteins. That extracellular matrix isn’t just a web of inert gelatin. The decellularized matrix contains enough information, in the form of tissue specific proteins including growth factors or collagen variants, to tell a cell where it is and how it’s supposed to behave. If you seed the decellularized organ with stem cells, they’ll migrate to the proper positions and differentiate into the right cell types to produce a functioning organ. In medicine, this could potentially allow transplants without any risk of rejection: decellularize a donor organ, seed with the patient’s stem cells, and implant it in the patient. (More on decellularization/seeding of human hearts: http://www.nature.com/news/tissue-engineering-how-to-build-a-heart-1.13327)
Decellularized organs end up white and translucent, not too terribly different from the half-printed hosts we see in Westworld. The 3d printing step would be laying down mineral and protein extracellular matrix, while the milk bath seeds it with living cells (… genetically engineered to EXPLODE when hit by fake bullets?) That gives them “real” flesh and bones, which is oh so critical for the more discerning murder/fuck tourists. It also explains how the hosts could get a MRSA infection.
I’ll let someone else fanwank an explanation of how the hosts can have programmable brains that nonetheless look like normal squishy human brains.
I bet Bernard’s dead kid is an implanted memory and the whole thing with the wife having a hard time reaching him is a tactic for keeping him in the park. The female executive knows and is using him as a fucktoy and it will all be so maudlin and overwrought when he finds out the truth.
I agree. I can easily imagine a scenario where the future UN or, a future Hillary Clinton bans the use of these robots outside specific parks or locations. Add some Disney style intellectual property rights & patents and these beings may still be very limited in their numbers. I don’t think it’s too much a suspension of disbelief.
