At least as handily as the moon landings were debunked.
Well they did pass the Turning Test after the first year.
But the telling feature of the old robots is that they are mechanical - synthetic flesh over a metal endoskeleton like the Terminator. The new ones are printed biological bodies - artificial humans like the Replicants from Blade Runner or the “meatbag” Cylons from BSG.
Ah. That logic makes sense. Thanks.
Which we saw during the dance training flashback.:smack:
The Turing Test came later.
Welcome to Westworld! Where nothing can posibli go wrong.
Er…“possibly”. Hmmm…that’s the first thing to ever go wrong.
I noticed, in the closeup of Maeve’s programming screen, that her patience, empathy and loyalty scores are all very low. No surprises there.
I wonder if Dolores, having been stabbed by Logan and “dying,” might just be having an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge very-brief flashback to past narrative(s).
That was a chillingly powerful final scene with Ford, Bernard and Clementine as Ford reasserts control, ending with the gun flash in the background as Ford walks away. Brrr.
Intriguing - thanks!
It might’ve been a bit more fun than that: Neanderthal - Wikipedia
I think he wants to remain in control of WW, pulling all the strings and telling his stories, for as long as possible. He ultimately might want to download his consciousness into a host and thus become immortal.
I could buy that.
Got your T-shirt yet?: http://rlv.zcache.com/training_for_the_robot_uprising_t_shirt-r8623f1ed3f2e40f7ada86f74f855bbbd_k2glg_324.jpg
The actress who plays Dolores makes a very personal announcement: http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/29/entertainment/evan-rachel-wood-rape-rolling-stone-letter/index.html
The actor who plays Teddy meets his celebrity crush: http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/28/entertainment/james-marsden-helen-mirren-ellen-degeneres-video/index.html
Timeline! Just a clarification and not a refutation since some are going round and round.
MY THEORY
It is one timeline. It is all the Dolores, present day, timeline and she is reliving the last time she went off script and as she does so, she almost literally relives them, similarly to how Maeve does in flashbacks that seem real. In terms of when those flashbacks are happening:
35+ years ago - Meetings with Arnold looking for sentience
~35 years - Uprising prior to park opening or in its infancy. Arnold’s death. Town slaughter.
~30 year ago - Logan and William come to the park for bachelor party/to save it. Logan speaks vaguely of a death of a partner from a few years ago although little is known about him. Some shit is going to go down and Dolores is going to get a re-set. My guess is Logan isn’t long for this world, but that isn’t what makes William the MiB. It’s when he returns to the park and Dolores no longer has any memory of him or that special something he sensed.
~ a year ago - MiB kills Maeve and her child, discovering the “maze” is the something more to bring Dolores back to him.
Current Day - MiB and Teddy and following Dolores’s trail as she relives things.
Why doesn’t Dolores recognize the MiB? Well, besides the memory wipe, is there a thing such as aging an android would understand, in terms of changes? They do not age and never see that effect on a body. Her idea of William, if she is remembering, would be of him as a young man since she still looks the same way.
Why did the MiB rape Dolores? Did he? I’ve been saying since day one he didn’t. We assumed it. Even if he did, I find it fascinating that William does NOT love Dolores. He loves what she represents; his ability to no longer be the pushed around bookworm, but the hero. He is going to SAVE the damsel and he is seriously peeved that is taken from him. His wife and daughter see that darkness in him. He’s not the nice guy like outsiders perceive.
Who is Wyatt and who is controlling this? I think Ford is pulling the strings and even the Maeve revolt is part of his final storyline. He knows he’s growing older and wants to keep Delos from doing…whatever their plans are. He wants to watch his world burn. Wyatt, in my mind is Peter Abernathy, and maybe Dolores. Peter was the leader of a cult in previous versions and is now given new life by smuggling out data for Charlotte.
I think that’s enough crazy speculation for me!
Yeah, I linked that. But after watching it again and thinking about it I believe it may have been purposeful misdirection. For instance, Dolores being brought in for malfunctioning by Stubbs in what is clearly the present, directly after the scene in which she is shown malfunctioning with William. We’re clearly meant to believe the scenes are in the same timeline but this may have been a deliberate attempt to mislead. I think there is a hell of a lot of this in the show, some of it a little unfair to the viewer.
I now believe that William is the MIB despite my earlier doubts.
OK, here’s my new theory:
Creating all those hosts must require massive amounts of raw materials. Hydrocarbons from petroleum make up the chemical feedstocks in our world, but are undoubtedly long depleted by the time the show takes place. Besides, for manufacturing biological things, it is more efficient to use biomass as the raw material. But the park is obviously very remote, and doesn’t seem to have the arable land that could be used to support that level of biomass with current crop practices. The pattern that keeps appearing to Dolores and that the MiB found plowed into the furrows of Maev’s field when she had a daughter is obviously an experimental new, more efficient planting pattern for growing corn and other crops. Arnold must have planted a test bed somewhere in the park, and the Delos (obviously a stand-in for Monsanto) board, which wants to exploit the new crop techniques for feeding humans or possibly destroy it as potential competition for their GMOs, sent the MiB to find it. But Ford wants to control the farming technology himself, which is why he’s programmed all the hosts to tell any humans who come looking for Arnold’s crops that “the maize is not for you.”
Why not? Movies and shows do this all the time. It seems much more common than using CGI.
Taking it a step further, I realized that even with sufficient biomass, you would still need some fossil fuels to manufacture anything on that scale. If oil is depleted, they may have turned to less efficient sources like coal. That huge earth mover we saw is used in real life to dig up coal seams, so that wouldn’t be a problem. Except that coal mining is extremely dirty and unsightly, and you’d want to hide it from the guests, so a return to underground mining. You also would not want to store enormous ugly piles of coal where guests would see them, so you’d need a shaft with two large underground chambers, one in which the coal is extracted, and one in which it is stored–what Arnold referred to as a “bicameral mine.”
I think that perhaps this is the epitome of a shaggy dog story. Well done. 
golf clap
But…
Bolding mine. If we see another Bernard, it probably won’t be that host. I still wouldn’t put it past Ford to create another one, though. Hubris is Ford’s defining characteristic, and I can totally see him having made a whole parade of Bernards after each one turned on him, saying “this one will be different” each time.
I was originally thinking it plausible that Bernard removed his restrictions and control hooks with Maeve’s help. After all, they were in Behavior when Maeve showed Bernard that he was a host. Bernard even mentioned that he looked through his own code. It’s not an enormous intuitive leap that he could have decided what he wanted to change and then had Maeve run the update for him, like Maeve did with the friendly tech.
But on further reflection, it seems that if Bernard could override Ford’s control, he simply would have killed him instead of playing along. If he had wanted to fake his death and move to stealth mode, he wouldn’t have announced his awakening to Ford by demanding the memory dive. I just hope that we’re going to get more of Jeffrey Wright as cloud Arnold.
:: head smack ::
That’s my opinion, too. Ford isn’t out to take over the known universe with his robots; what he wants is to go on having fun doing exactly as he pleases, with no interference.
These violent delights have violent ends.
Does it bother you that Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi have been played by different actors?
I think it’s clear that either William=MiB OR that the showrunners want us to at least consider that possibility. There’s too many parallels between them for it to be unintentional. Whichever answer it is, the reason is clear: it’s to keep it ambiguous for the reveal.
Using a CGI’d young Ed Harris for William removes all ambiguity. You can look at it like a camera cut to cover a bag magic trick if you want, but that seems silly to me. Consider: how many novels have had reveals where the bad guy turns out to be one of the supposed protagonists all along? Thousands. And there’s no disguising needed on the page, you just write it. But when you make a film of that novel, you’ve got a problem. Either the bad guy wears a mask/cloak/disguise when they are on screen (which is a big giveaway of the twist to a perceptive audience) or you use creative casting to hide their identity until the reveal. Plenty of movies/TV shows have done this before.
I’m not convinced that his motives are so simple. I think there’s more to what ho is doing than just that. I don’t think we can always take what he says to the board at face value.
That said, I don’t have a clear idea of what the “something more” actually is, yet.
I think you just invalidated one of the main “cons” about the MIB=William theory. That is to say, the control room that hasn’t changed in 30 years. (William and MiB are in the same timeline. - Album on Imgur)
Dolores wandered off in the present right after she is attacked (or whatever) by MIB. That coincides with when she was attacked by and then killed Rebus, the milk-guzzling bandit 30 years ago. The Rebus attack triggered her wandering off to meet William while the MiB run-in sent her wandering the same path she took 30 years ago. When Stubs sees Dolores wandered out of her loop, it’s in the present.
I feel like that would be a very different tone. Right now, Westworld is more psychological. I’m not really interested in seeing turn into a Terminator man v machines future war.
Possibly when she saw what appeared to be herself floating in the river when tending to the wounded Confederado, she was actually in the present flashing back to where she “died” after Logan stabbed her.
A rather compelling synopsis of the timeline from Uproxx.