I thought that huge earth moving machine thing we saw a few episodes back was uncovering the town since it was going to be used in Ford’s new narrative. Ford was watching it when Theresa came to meet him before they had the discussion about Theresa coming to the park when she was a child and we see Ford control the hosts waiting on them by waving his finger.
The big earth moving machine is a real thing. (It was shown in episode 4.)
Given what Ford was saying, probably the latter:
[QUOTE=Robert Ford]
We destroyed and subjugated our world. And when we eventually ran out of creatures to dominate, we built this beautiful place.
[/QUOTE]
How do you excavate a town that’s been buried, without damaging the buildings? That Bagger 23 machine would level everything is seems.
Up until now, I wasn’t convinced that William = MiB, but after this episode I am. My prediction on how this plays out:
Logan said that his family’s company was thinking of investing in Westworld and that he and William are there not only as a bachelor party style vacation but to check out the park. When there vacation is over (which Logan may or may not survive), William goes back to the outside world and marries Logan’s sister, gets control of the company, and invests in the park (becoming a board member). He comes back to the park each year for the next 30 years until his wife kills herself and he fully becomes the MiB. Ultimately, he’s trying to “find” Delores again.
Dolores gets reprogrammed and William comes back over and over hoping to break her out of her loop, but can never successfully get her to break free, like she did 30 years ago. He takes her to that barn over and over to get “reacquainted”, but can’t get through to her. He’s hoping the maze is the secret to this deeper level.
Is this speculation about Logan not surviving something new? What is the evidence for it?
I was under the impression that the crisis in the park 30 years ago was the death of Arnold.
Maybe not though. Logan is aware of rumors of Arnold’s death which presumably happens before the place is open to the public. Logan dying as a guest from a prominent family would be big news.
I was under the impression it was some sort of wider “critical system error”. Unless the death of Arnold at Dolores’s hands is what they are talking about.
Here’s a question:
Greeter Angela, seemed pretty self-aware of her role as a “host”. Although I suppose if they can program them to be Olde West prostitutes, they can program them to be slutty robot concierges.
Yeah, I used to think that Logan’s death, by possibly Dolores, was the 30 years ago critical system error, but now I feel that it may be Arnold’s death that is the system error and that they’ve covered that up so that the entire park wouldn’t have been shut down.
I think she’s alone, but she’s basically recreating what happened with William and Logan. We saw with Maeve that sometimes when the hosts remember they end up doing the same thing (slashing the throat). So she really did wander off again, which is why security mentioned it.
It had to be something big, because why did they abandoned so many old levels of the park? I’m thinking it will be covered in Season 2.
She musta made fun of his tiny hands.
The three critical points that I keep returning to are:
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the original conflict between Arnold and Robert, where Arnold wants the hosts to be sentient, and Robert wants them to be puppets he can control completely. This somehow results in the death of Arnold, possibly due to the machinations of Robert.
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Dolores’ first encounter with William 30 years ago, where he senses some sort of sentience still within Dolores.
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MiB (aka William) encounters Maeve and her daughter, kills them, but senses that Maeve also has that spark of sentience.
This leads to the present timeline, with MiB somehow seeking the source of sentience, or how to awaken the hosts. Or at least some of them. For what reason? Damfino. Meanwhile, Robert is playing God all over the place. As usual.
Anyway, that’s my take on this tangled web.
That’s good!
My biggest problem right now (besides the unlikelihood of this all making sense at the end) is that William/MiB is a complete idiot.
We know that he’s right about Dolores and Maev, but he’s acting without any real justification whatsoever. He’s been told over and over again that the park is designed to suck people in by playing to their fantasies and desires. Dolores was made to be the love interest for someone like William, and I think he’d have fallen for her just as hard and be just as convinced that she’s conscious if she’d never gone off script. So she makes occasional vague statements or reactions that seem to indicate slightly more awareness of her host-status than the other bots (but less than that shown by the greeter-host when he first arrived). So what? It’s nothing that couldn’t be part of her script. Siri drops hints that she’s a self-aware robot when I ask her about herself, but she’s not; those are just jokes and easter eggs written by humans for her to say.
But William “knows.” He can tell that her love is real. He can tell that Maev was really grieving when he killed her kid. Yeah, right. I saw exactly the same emotions that he did on my screen, but I don’t think that means the pixels in my iPad are sentient. Hosts are just a more sophisticated display mechanism.
Rationally ‘knowing’ that they are merely computers with programming and also being confused as to their own sentience or reality is not mutually exclusive. In fact, it’s the core question at the heart of the show - what is sentience?
It’s a *boring *core question. I want to see tension and drama and robots-gone-wild mayhem. I couldn’t care less about the navel-gazing deeeeeep philosophy on the nature of consciousness.
Fantastic episode. I kind of want Bernard to be alive; perhaps he got a guest-safe gun and coded himself as a guest so he couldn’t be killed by it. I like the idea that Bernard has finally outsmarted Ford. But a fakeout would still be cheesy, and the show looks poised to shift from Bernard into “cloud Arnold”, which is a better narrative turn than Bernard’s death being faked.
William is looking like he’s the MiB, but there’s some oddness to it. He starts carrying himself like the MiB after he slaughters the camp. But in the final scene, Dolores breathes “William?” when she exits the lab, and is then unnerved to see the MiB instead. So the MiB is either not William, or Dolores was immersed in a fond memory of William only to be jarred back into the present by seeing him as the MiB. Or perhaps she doesn’t know that William is the MiB, which is supported by him noting that she doesn’t remember him in 101.
A few episodes ago, the MiB tells Teddy about the world outside Westworld. He makes it sound more like a utopia of sorts, or at least a post-scarcity society. Something about everyone getting everything they need (“a fat teat for everyone to suckle from” or something). I take Ford’s statement more as an acknowledgement that there are no more threats to human primacy, not that all animals are extinct.
I think the crisis was a combination of Arnold’s death and a bloody host revolt. Remember how Ford tells Dolores how she tried to “destroy this place.” Not to mention the bodies strewn about the abandoned lab under the church. I think Dolores and/or other hosts got violent in the lab, probably as a consequence of Arnold’s experiments, then Ford or Delos had the town buried to cover it up. That, or the burial was actually Arnold’s doing and that’s why Ford has excavated it.
But come on! Would it not bother any of the MiB=William people that young Anthony Hopkins is actually Anthony Hopkins with computer youthening but young MiB is a completely different actor? It would be like a magic act that uses camera cuts.
I get the feeling that you’re kidding, but younger Anthony Hopkins only appears in brief moments, whereas William has tons of screen time. Something tells me that multiple scenes of CGI-youthened anybody would look strange, unconvincing, and offputting. Also, I’m pretty sure that kid-Ford isn’t a CGI’d Anthony Hopkins.