Don’t I remember hearing the sound of the “bullets” actually hitting and bouncing off of a guest?
Also…are we thinking that a guest’s visit is only for the day. Some of the guests had been there multiple times…I wonder how they keep them from seeing a host that died the last time they visited??
I had guessed it was like Disneyworld, where the actual theme park area is only open a certain amount of the day and closed at night, and there are nice hotels on the outskirts that the guests can go back to at night if they stay for multiple days. And at Disneyworld some people might go see the same Aladdin musical day after day, while at Westworld some people might go see the same saloon robbery day after day. Except for the saloon robbery you could get involved and change the outcome each day, and I’m guessing they don’t like you doing that in the Aladdin musical.
And dicks. Don’t forget the dicks. There is a producer or two at HBO determined to show us penises at the drop of a hat. I think showing male genitalia passes for “edgy” among some HBO types.
So is management totally cool with their hosts being gutted like a fish. That seems like it could be rather costly for the park if they didn’t have a “Don’t cut up our hosts” rule.
I can fanwank costs surrounding damage done by fake bullets. It’s a little harder to do when you have one of the guests taking a real blade to their hosts.
I’m curious as to why the hosts would interact with each other when there are no guests present. What’s the point? You’d think that they’d just go to “sleep” until they were cued.
The world would seem a little less real if the hosts were just sitting there waiting to turn on. If they interact on their own, it seems like a living, breathing world - esp if you don’t interrupt the narrative subroutine. Also, you can insert yourself into the middle of a storyline. It’s probably similar to the reasons why RPGs have AI NPCs interact with each other while you are playing the game.
Trust me, they don’t.
Stupid restraining order…
Yeah, I hear you. Both times I tried, they were not cool about it at all.
I was wondering why we seem them go through the trouble of creating robot horses – why not just use real horses? There’s your answer.
Considering that the hosts are put together by a form of 3d printing, it actually wouldn’t be that hard to fix them.
Open up damaged host, remove any damaged organs, print new ones. Use 3d printer to seal wound. Re-activate host, and Smokey the Bartender is ready to water another drink.
Since they seem to be making new hosts, horses and whatever on an ongoing basis, I can’t imagine that fixing them up wouldn’t be part of the budget.
It’d probably be easier still to just replace them with identical copies and toss the damaged ones into a vat to be melted down for recycling, but that’d undercut the “robots are gradually starting to realize the Groundhog Day nature of their existence” premise that I gather is going to be a major driver for this show.
I imagine the inner workings of the robots are kept but the skin is easily replaceable.
I have to say, one thing I think they have done well is create a bit of an “uncanny valley” effect with the hosts. Especially during the diagnostics scenes. Basically making them act just slightly “off”.
Echoing **ISiddiqui **- Realism and continuity, I suppose. They create all these quasi-scripted routines for all the hosts so their interactions seem more natural to the guests. I suppose Doloris and her father could just as easily marched past each other like automatons if no one else was around, just making sure they were in the right position if a guest came around. But I think they want the hosts acting like normal humans as much as possible all the time, even if no one is looking.
But here’s a question. How much is “repair” vs “replace”? Can a guest damage one beyond repair? Do they have extra Dolores’s or Teddy’s? When they say Dolores was the first one, do they just mean her program and the bodies are disposable? But then why do they put the malfunctioning ones in storage?
I feel like this is a reoccurring theme in “Bad Robot” productions (Lost, Star Trek, Force Awakens). Cool stories with lots of mysterious moving parts that tend to not hold up to scrutiny.
Naw, they just download the old host’s memories from the last save point into the new host. Better yet, all the hosts are networked and constantly streaming their inputs back to the data center. That way the controlling AI can oversee the entire operation without much human intervention.
I always thought Foundation would make a good Star Wars-esque trilogy; it’s the right kind of epic. Studios would (or do) probably poo-poo it as not exciting enough.
That’s my primary rationale for Ed Harris being a guest. I find it highly unlikely that even a super-bot would be allowed to be unstoppable by guests.
I think it’s worth noting, in in Star Trek, whenever they leave the holodeck running, the characters inside continue to interact with each other even when theirs nobody inside it.
As long as the program is running.
But you see that in the premiere too: the repeated scenes of Dolores saying goodbye to her father every morning.
I was actually thinking after watching the premiere that this would probably be better in some sort of VR environment rather than building real life robots. How much fun would it really be to pretend to be a gunfighter if you know that your opponents literally can’t hurt you in any way and that you’re guaranteed to win every single time? More of a challenge if your character can be hurt or destroyed if you’re not fast enough or a good enough shot. Being constantly in god mode would get pretty old, I bet. Although I guess it would appeal to sick fuckers who just want to terrorize and rape people like Ed Harris’ character apparently does.
I’m not sure we’re given any indication that the reboot is every day. Ed Harris is certainly still wandering the wilderness at the end of the episode. And I’d think some of the storylines would take multiple days.