Westworld - premieres Sunday (show spoilers as airs)

I thought we saw someone (I thought Lee Sizemore, the annoying head of narrative) shutting down breakers just before that scene.

And regarding the new narrative that Ford showed the board; it seemed to be basically a play that they observed. Isn’t the point of the park that the guests get involved in the story? (Although that makes the park sound like an immersive theater experience, like Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding.

I get a 404 error from that link.

Some tantalizing hints from the creators as to what to expect in the second season.

I actually thought SW was for Sengoku World, as in it was going to be Japan during Sengoku Jidai which the era most people think of when they think of the exciting samurai happenings. But it could easily be Samurai World as well.

I think you are better educated than most amusement park guests ;).

When in doubt as to what marketing intends, assume the lowest common denominator :D.

Isn’t this true for all of us? Humans are sentient but still beholden to our own evolutionary programming, as evidenced by a wide range of strong instincts and compulsions.

Oh gawd … this could so easily spiral into a GD “does free will exist?” thread!

Or Shogun World.

Here’s a cool page showing the protocol for the collection, and repair of damaged hosts.

It’s interesting that the techs are assigned the same hosts every time, so they become familiar with them.

The apparent death of Ford does raise the possibility that the host being created in the basement lab was one of him …

Yes I know that in interviews we’ve been told that the host being created there has no specific plot significance and was more of broader symbolic value … but showrunners have been known to lie.

No true Scotsman would argue about Free Will.

Aye laddie. Will be not free. He be enslaved to the idea of Dolores, even as he became the MiB.

Appropriately, the last music played was Radiohead’s ‘Exit Music (For a Film)’

someone please explain Wyatt to me -

Before the park opened, one of the partners (Arnold) realized that it shouldn’t be opened, and thus arranged for one of the early hosts, Dolores, to reach a very early and incomplete state of self-awareness, and to shoot all the other hosts, plus Arnold, then Teddy (who was programmed to assist her in the massacre) ending with herself.

35 years later, Ford has come to realize what Arnold was doing, and starts building in a “Wyatt” narrative built around a character that massacres an entire town, comparable to Arnold’s earlier failed attempt at self-destruction. He guides Dolores toward a repetition, and this time she achieves a more workable level of self-awareness and she shoots Ford and, we are to assume apparently, is about to massacre all the human guests as well.

Wyatt = Dolores

More specifically, Wyatt is a fictional character created by Ford to flesh out Teddy’s backstory in Ford’s new narrative. Wyatt’s supposed actions were actually based on a historical massacre of hosts before the park opened (which included the “murder” of at least one human, Ford’s former partner Arnold) by Dolores under the direction of Arnold himself (so Arnold’s murder was actually an elaborate suicide).

I’ve loved all the Radiohead music they’ve used, but Exit Music was perfectly chosen, with appropriate lyrics, which include the following:

I don’t quite understand what Arnold’s idea was. If employees were killed that might keep the park from opening, but hosts can be repaired. And Arnold knew that Ford wanted the park opened. And I know Delos apparently wasn’t there from the beginning, but I would have assumed that some outside investors must have put in money upfront and it wasn’t just Arnold and Ford spending their money to make the park. If there’s something I missed please let me know.

The Dolores personality is not able to kill. Wyatt is a personality that was planted within her that is happy with killing. Ford says that she knows what she has to become to be sentient, but what she has to become is someone else.

Ford’s plan puts the hosts onto conflict with humanity from the start. Any human killed is a result of Ford’s plans (or maybe Arnold’s plan). Maybe the hosts could have come up with a better plan.

Well, the MiB claimed credit for saving the park (“thanks to me”), so I gather Ford fixed the hosts and opened the park after Arnold was killed but couldn’t keep it open (“they’re hemorrhaging money”) without a sizable Delos investment, which William arranged after his own visit and eventually came to personally own and control.

But how did Arnold and Ford originally start up the park? They needed to have money to get the land, do whatever terraforming necessary, build at least the one town we see in the flashbacks from the start of the park, build the labs, build the robots, pay the lab techs, and other assorted costs. And I think it was a few years before the park opened where they were just working on the hosts and presumably no income was coming in. I can’t even begin to estimate how much money that all would have cost, but I would think it would be much more than Arnold and Ford had, unless one or both of them were Bill Gates rich already, or they got an unusually good loan.