I agree. However, an intimate exploration such as that has to be done slowly. That’s perhaps why the pilot was a bit underwhelming for a couple of folk. Less is more. Produced by different hands the hosts could have been mass murdering humans by the end of episode 1.
That, I found strange. If the guns launch actual projectiles, then either the hosts are super delicate or have preloaded exploding squibs. Either way, if the projectiles can’t pierce clothing or human skin, would they shatter windows, punch holes in wooden doors?
Ultimately, if there are projectiles of some kind flying around, sooner or later a guest is going to get hit in the eye and now you’ve got a lawsuit on your hands.
And if the saloon robbery (with villain speech!) is a regular element, why aren’t the guests throwing in random elements, either to stop the robbers or to help them? We see two guests cowering when one of the hosts goes all milkman-psycho, why didn’t they just shoot him?
Shooting him wouldn’t have done any good, since if I’m remembering correctly he’d already been shot and the milk was coming out of the bullet holes. And since he’s already malfunctioning, I as a visitor wouldn’t be sure that he’d still be working well enough not to hurt me on purpose.
Also, even on a good day when every host is working perfectly, I can imagine a lot of visitors who cower in the corner when the saloon robbery goes on, because although it’s theatrical it would still feel real to a certain extent. So definitely on a bad day when things aren’t working right I understand why some would avoid the action and wait for staff to come fix things.
I do wonder about the guns and how they work. I also wonder about how else the visitors are protected. Like I can imagine at least some men wanting to get a bar fight going, are the hosts prevented from punching visitors, or only punching them very weakly? Or can the hosts break chairs over each others’ backs but miss hitting the visitors?
Westworld actually has a 5-6 year story roadmap:
So, I think they’ll be fine in terms of story arcs :D.
Otherwise know as A #6 Dance in Old West parlance.
Hmm. The plotline’s bound to leak if they already know, more or less, how the series is going to end in five or six years.
The guests did end up “killing” the saloon robber and his sharpshooting sidekick. But the saloon girl shooting the bad guy in the back of the head - and blowing his face off - was something I need to watch again. Were they both hosts? Obviously he was, but face squib vs real shot to the head (and a dainty Derringer probably wouldn’t relieve him of his face, anyway). Host on host killing?
Looks like it’s going to be a big question - the who/why/how of the killing of hosts vs not killing/injuring of guests. I hope they can manage or explain it, or it’s going to be inconsistent and distracting.
Battlestar Galactica did it in 4 (5 if you count the 1 season of Caprica).
“Robots go crazy” by itself is not a particularly interesting storyline. “The birth of self-aware AI and its impact on humanity is a much longer and more interesting storyline”.
I mean imagine if the pirates from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride came to life and said they didn’t want to be pirates anymore. That has much greater implications than Disney having to buy a bunch of new animatronic pirates.
Unfortunately it’s also a storyline that’s been done before, often very badly. For a recent example, check out the film Vice with Bruce Willis. Same basic premise as Westworld. Horrible film.
IIRC, in the original film, the guns had sensors to prevent their firing at living things. That’s still not particularly safe as bullets can ricochet or shoot through things.
In the pilot, when James Marsden shoots at Ed Harris, it gives the appearance of a gun firing, but without actually damaging him. Plus he doesn’t fire when Harris places the gun against his head. Presumably since even a blank would kill someone at that range.
It also doesn’t explain what prevents a Newcomer accidently (or on purpose) grabbing another Newcomer or living park employee in character and raping or murdering them with something other than a trick firearm. Ed’s knife looked pretty darn sharp.
What, like Game of Thrones’s has? 
Related, the park employees seem to be constantly and closely monitoring the activities. At the very least, they need to know where to pick up the scattered bodies of the hosts to whisk them away for repair. Somebody’s bound to wonder why anyone would scalp the Faro dealer.
Here’s another question I have – according to what we’ve seen, everything resets each day. James Marsden wakes up on the train; Dolores wakes up and goes into town, then goes painting if she doesn’t run into Marsden; etc. So are there no multi-day storylines? Does everything reset every morning for the guests?
On the other hand, I think the designer said something about re-scheduling the safe robbery and shoot-out, so apparently that doesn’t happen every day. Maybe some stories repeat every day but others are scheduled less frequently, or randomly?
What happens if more than one guest wants to “visit” Dolores in a particular night?
For that matter, what’s the point of “off-camera” interactions i.e. out of sight of the guests, like between Dolores and her father every morning?
In the film, if I remember correctly, the guns had a heat sensor or something and wouldn’t shoot if they were aimed at anything warm.
As for resetting every day and off-“camera” interactions, I assume that there is just a standard routine that hosts loop through unless they’re currently part of a specific storyline or event. Then they can look like they’re naturally going about their day when guests can bump into them, talk to them, proposition them, etc., and we’re told (I think I remembered some line) that the hosts can deviate some based on guest interactions – or we’re shown that when we see, I think, Dolores, or certainly the Madam (?) in the saloon, re-purposing some of the same dialog between her different days. Most of the “off-camera” stuff is probably there because technically there is no “off-camera” time. A guest could be out walking past the farm, or sneaking up to rob the place, or whatever at any time. Dolores does her thing out painting the river or whatever, and maybe someone rarely finds her but it’s a neat interaction if they do (or, she’s actually there to make sure kids or whatever don’t cross the river to the violent side, and the pleasant painting setup is just a way to make her part of the setting rather than a uniformed border guard). It’s probably easier to just have them run through some generic routine rather than shut down and try to detect when someone might be able to see them or is looking at them.
Yep. The routines are done so that if a guest randomly stumbles among them, it feels like an actual world, rather than robots waiting for them to come near (the push-pull between feeling like a ‘real’ world and also feeling not too real). Though there appear to be ‘storylines’ as well, such as the bandit coming a week earlier to engage in a massive shootout to cover for 200 hosts who were ‘back in the shop’.
It’s not important for me, while watching the show, that the showrunners have firm and absolute answers for every single one of these questions, btw… if they fudge things from time to time for storytelling expediency, that’s fine.
I do want to feel that they’ve at least THOUGHT about these kind of questions, however.
…Person of Interest did. They typically introduced arcs and then closed them off within 1 or 2 seasons. There was an over-arching story (see my spoilers earlier in the thread) that was touched upon in the very first episode, but I thought it was a “McGuffin”, when it was really the heart and soul of the series. POI started as a procedural with sci-fi elements and ended with me in tears over the re-birth of an artificial intelligence.
Going into the last season Nolan was given only 13 episodes: he kept asking the network “are we cancelled?” but they didn’t answer the question even as they were gearing up for production. So they decided to end it regardless: so the final season was a bit rushed and uneven, but the final episode was perfect: and ended on the note it needed to end on.
So I’m confident the answers are there. 
Wow I really enjoyed that. I am not sure how it will be as a series but so far this was some excellent science fiction. Maybe I am reading more into it than intended but it felt like it was tangling with interesting questions about morality, humanity and metaphysics. really really good ideas well presented.
I suspect it will eventually just becomes blood and boobs but I really liked this pilot. Also the scenery (which apparently is Utah) was just beautiful.
I wondered how a place like this could work day to day with the Groundhog day effect. Everyday the robots wake up and start the day like the day before. The thing is, if a robot is killed obviously there is blood spilled. Their clothes would be ruined. How is it they wake up the next with no blood on their clothes? Would they have to be changed every single day? Why this bothers me, I don’t know but this is what keeps me up. Ha.
Well, didn’t you notice how much nakedness there was? I gotta figure any bot that gets pulled in for repair is stripped and redressed as a matter of routine.
Frankly, I’d be skittish about going to such a place not because I’d fear injury, but because I’d figure the staff would have detailed recordings of everything I did. Unless the surrounding society is extremely casual about this sort of thing, I’d have to wonder what would happen if recordings of me indulging my inner sociopath got released.