I should point out that South Africa is 24 Hrs behind the US in getting the episodes, so I haven’t watched Ep 3 yet, my speculation was based entirely on Ep 2. So I might revise it after I see the episode (Or not).
I am considering jumping on board after this third episode, but I have yet to see a single one yet. I’ve not read the thread, obviously.
What are your thoughts right now? Is it worth “watching it as it airs”? I can catch up in 3 days, obviously, and I just finished Luke Cage and have a gap in my tv viewing.
Thoughts on the show at this early point?
It’s interesting, but it’s also the sort of show that might be better watched in a binge session.
Another good episode. I admit I’m hooked.
It just hit me that the player-piano roll looks a lot like a gene-sequencing diagram.
And hey, that was Gina Torres (Firefly) as Bernard’s ex-wife!
Is “Arnold” the Ed Harris character? Might’ve been him, judging by the old picture Ford showed Bernard.
Nice CGI age-regression of Anthony Hopkins to show the young Ford at work in his (relatively primitive) early robotics lab. I noticed the lab personnel had the old-style WW logo, as shown at the top of the escalator of the arrival center in the last episode, on their lab coats.
I like the deepening romance between Teddy and Dolores.
Teddy says Wyatt was “my sergeant,” but in the flashback scene on the street with all the dead soldiers around, they’re both wearing sergeant’s stripes.
How stupid was the sheriff to be carrying a lit lantern while they were trying to sneak up on Wyatt’s cultists?
Did Dolores kill a guest in the barn, or was that another host?
That’s a recurring theme in Isaac Asimov’s robot tales. Depending on public opinion and the politics and laws of the day, robots are sometimes quite restricted in their terrestrial operations in Asimov’s future.
Well, if it was a guest, I gather about a billion alarms would have gone off. The rules of this place remain confusing - only some of the hosts are allowed to touch weapons (i.e. only one in that group of campers was able to use the axe), but Dolores can hold a gun but not fire it, until she can hold a gun and fire it…
As for the ambush, are there squibs buried in the ground to look like bullet hits, or are there actual projectiles being fired? Of course, meta-speaking, it’s the former for the safety of the actors who are shooting the TV series WestWorld, but if within the fictional setting it’s the latter, how do these not pose significant injury risks to the guests?
Dolores killed a host. It was the host that Ford was interviewing at the beginning of the episode (the mustache gives it away).
I’m intrigued by this new storyline - some sort of death cult that Ford wants to introduce for no real reason. Even most of the guests think it’s a bit too much. Sad to say, but the jerky guy’s Indian assault storyline may have been more fun for the guests.
The Arnold story is interesting as well… but I dunno if Ed Harris is Arnold or not. It does seem like Bernard is getting close to Arnold level in his interest in consciousness - and Ford is VERY strong in his desire to make sure they are remembered to be robots and not thought as human.
Ah, got it. Thanks.
I think it was clear that Dolores was NOT following the rules with regards to weapons. The rules aren’t confusing, they are just being broken. Were the cultists supposed to be guests? the bullets weren’t hurting them either.
Had to reply to this comment…just so you know it was not in vain;)
Long days and pleasant nights, stranger…
A couple of things near the end of Ep. 3 that confused me (I may have to go back and re-watch):
- Dolores finds the gun she had hidden in her dresser, but suddenly it’s gone. I thought maybe she had hidden it on her person, but we find it later in the barn. Didn’t it just seem to disappear from her when she found it, though? When did she hide it?
- She apparently doesn’t have permission to fire a gun, although she can hold one. That she’s able to kill the other host in the barn shows that either she’s consciously or unconsciously overriding her safety code, or someone else is.
- When she comes out of the barn and is confronted by the guy on the porch - it seemed like he shot her, and she clutched her belly and had a bleeding wound. Then the scene replayed those few seconds again, and she was unharmed by the bullet. What the hell happened there? Were we seeing the same event play out over two instances? Did she imagine/dream one of them? Did I see it wrong?
She was playing out a previous memory, I think. Using the memory to make a better choice this time.
She’d walked up on the house before, in a previous “life”, and been shot dead by the evil bandits. So when she suddenly flashed on what had happened, she was able to act differently. She turned and ran before she could be shot in the same way again.
I only watched out of one eye last night during the football game -
Who were those masked men? Teddy didn’t seem to have any luck killing them, so Guests? I thought it was his old backstory outfit at first glance, but that didn’t make sense, either. I’ll watch and pay attention tonight, that whole sequence from the bald guy trapped in the crevice to the masked gang sorta whooshed on by me.
Yeah, she’s ‘evolving’ by using her reveries.
Exactly, which also can explain the disappearing/reappearing gun. It is actually there, but when she is performing in her loop she isn’t seeing it, just like she couldn’t perceive the image in the photo her “father” was showing her in episode 1. She’s starting to break out of her programming loop, despite telling her handler she wouldn’t.
But who buried the gun and programmed her into digging it up, what (male) voice was in her head telling her to shoot the rapey host last night - I think that is still a mystery at this point.
Oh and re: the gun in the barn - I thought that wasn’t necessarily the one in the dresser, but rather the host’s own gun she took from him as he was dragging her about. Could be wrong about that though.
I agree that the gun in the barn was from the host who intended to rape her. After she pulled it out, he checked his holster, presumably finding it empty.
He briefly moves his hand near his right hip, as if to check for his own gun, but it’s not made clear if she finds it in the haystack of has taken it from his holster. I don’t see a moment where she could have taken it from him, anyway, and she clearly has memories of being thrown into that haystack before. The memory/reality mix gets a tad jumbled. In one memory she is shot in the lower abdomen while she is holding the pistol, so she’s had the gun before and it didn’t work out, but this time she bolts…
A show like this could get very Groundhog Day or Edge of Tomorrow - we’ll see a lot of actions that end up not “counting” until we finally distill the “real” (in this case, “current”) sequence of events. Heck, the Man in Black’s visit to Dolores, or at least the one we’ve seen, could have taken place years ago. What can be trusted in this series to be “current” ? The scenes with the park staff? Have we seen any of the staff interacting directly with a guest (offhand I can only recall two staffers briefly watching Ed Harris, with one of them wondering what he was up to - did those two have any other scenes)? So Ford gave Teddy a backstory involving a deranged sergeant Teddy served with in the army, and later we see Teddy describe some of those details to a guest - could those scenes be months or even years apart?
There’s a lot potential for timeline trickery in a show like this, with all the repetition built into its premise and many immortal characters. If the audience gets invested in a storyline, it wouldn’t shock me if that storyline is abruptly revealed to have taken place long ago. Heck, what if the relatively shy guest, William (Jimmi Simpson), turns out to be the Man in Black, at the beginning of his 30 year addiction to the park?
…regarding this: (Speculation only in the spoiler tag, no actual spoilers, but probably best to spoil it anyway.)
There is pretty intense speculation that what you suggest is correct. Some people have pointed out differences in logo designs, the obvious choice of the “white hat”, etc. And this is exactly the sort of thing Nolan has done with Person of Interest. My pick is that the Man in Black isn’t a bad guy, he is the good guy, and that yes, he is William. He didn’t rape Delores. He just did something to make her remember.
But he just ran into current broken Dolores, that couldn’t have happened so long ago.
Fair enough. I can see the challenge in trying to preserve plot twists these days. It had just occurred to me that (do we need to spoiler speculation?):
…we have a number of plotlines going involving the staff and among the guests, but not much intersection between any of them, the only common elements being the hosts who are effectively immortal and perpetually amnesiac, so they could look the same for events taking place decades apart and operate with little or no (well, little and gradually getting less little, hence the plot) memory of earlier events. We’ve yet to see Ford and Lowe interact directly with a guest, or for guests to interact with each other (unless they arrived together, like William and Logan).