Perhaps then a shame for the AIs to experience humanity only as its most entitled.
I don’t remember where it was, but I read an interview with a producer who said that it takes place in the 21st century. If that’s true, how have we eradicated all disease?
So, Maeve’s escape programming instructions said “infiltrate mainland”, does this mean the location for Westworld is an island?
I don’t recall saying it wasn’t? There’s not a vast number of people about today who could spend $10k on a weekend away, and even fewer of them who’d want to spend that weekend killing or banging robots in a Wild West/Sengoku/Medieval (I’m guessing, but it seems logical) setting.
Part of the fun of the show is the meta, but it seems I’m clearly not cool enough to contribute to that discussion here.
I recall one of the techs saying something about not being able to afford to visit themselves, so I would guess at least out of the range of low-level professional people.
Different screen.
I agree that the cost comment was meant to signal that the park was a 1%'er experience. Classic dystopian set up - see The Time Macine, Brave New World, Elysium, Snowpiercer, etc - the weirdest set ups have a chance to work if they can provide insightful commentary on our class structure and how it affects everyone all the time.
Martini how are you not cool enough? The “meta” bits were just jostled by the storytelling approach. We were thinking this was William’s, or perhaps William’s and Dolores’ story, but it is the Hosts’ story. Consciousness is the “secret power” the underclass learns it has which can be marshaled to overthrow the elites.
The fact that consciousness is hard to learn about and grasp by the underclass equates it to freedom. And the fact that it emerges based on accumulated suffering and being doomed to live a small, awful reincarnated pattern is richly aligned with the Big Questions we humans have been focused on since we were able to focus.
Also: how Planet of the Apes-y is this?
Except…he wasn’t a kind idealist. That was the lie he was telling himself all along, just like when his daughter told him his wife was terrified of him. That stunned him, for there to be this other picture of their life together. Logan was not the bad guy in all of this in that he was the most correct about the park. It shows what you truly are. William wanted to be the grand hero who discovered the humanity of this poor damsel. He wanted to awaken her and save her and show how he was so much better than Logan. Bullshit. Dolores was never about her own agency to him. She was only important in how she made him feel and her taking that hero narrative from him, in his mind, made him furious. I have spoken to so many women online who see an abusive ex in William. He was able to torture Dolores so easily because she was a means to an end. What was great is what was said upthread; the maze and the story was not for or about him. I can forgive all his crazy for that small smile when he gets shot for real. Yep, here’s your real now, William. Good luck with that!
Or what **Tamerlane **said.
HelenTroy, I see William/MiB as potentially a lot more interesting than that. Unfortunately in this case because the story is not about him, developing the complexities of the character is given no effort (a story can have the secondary characters still having their natures more fully explored).
Fully … ehem … fleshed out characters are complex, not White Hat or Black Hat. Again, to the Walter White comparison - it worked so well because he was a mess of conflicting motivations and self-delusions and would not have if he was pure pork pie Black Hat.
He was and is a kind idealist just as much and concurrent with being a competitive violent bad ass. I suspect that most people who accomplish significant things are similar and like him in their real world channel their bad-assery to pro-social ends and in a socially acceptable manner with fairly rare flashes of their darker sides showing, sometimes scaring those near them. The William who started off with Logan never would have become the accomplished tycoon and philanthropist that was the MiB in the outside world.
Dolores with a consciousness and free will, who he knew, is his life’s true love. The hurt and anger he felt as a consequence of that love being torn from him by Logan was a breaking point. Seeing her reset and believing that he had been fooled all along resigned him to the (false) belief that his life’s true love never loved him, was not capable of it, that Logan had been right and that he had essentially fallen in love with an interactive inflatable doll. So he went through some of the classic grief stages with buried anger staying with him into his long-term acceptance stage (mostly released in a fantasy world upon robots that he is sure are unable to actually feel anything) … except that the truly sentient self-aware conscious Dolores that he had thought was his true life’s love and whose loss he grieved now really exists … and now sees him as pitiful.
It’s a tragedy narrative and all of William’s loops in it end up with him ultimately experiencing loss or rejection.
Showing more of that unfold rather than having MiB exposit most of it and showing the before and after of it only would have been wonderful … but the show is not for him.
Very interesting - thanks!
Well, sometimes, obviously, the hosts malfunction. They don’t have hardwired Asimovian Three Laws. Their “Good Samaritan reflexes” can be altered by a skilled programmer. We saw armed, black-clad security guards in the very first episode, when they went to the lower depths of the Mesa and found Dr. Ford talking to the old cowboy robot.
That sounds about right.
Exactly. Human beings can be so conditioned by rigorous training, mistreatment or strong emotion (love or fear, in particular) that they really can act only one way in any given situation. But they’re still sentient.
That would’ve been sweeeeeet.
Didn’t we see Bernard impassively strangling her from behind?
Elevators, like the USS Enterprise, move at the speed of plot.
I would not put it past Ford to have some hosts impersonating board members, and Dolores and the oncoming host army just shooting them.
:: head explodes ::
Yes, but we didn’t see her die. It’s also potentially significant that the uber-violent Ghost Nation only tackled Stubbs, rather than axing or arrowing him.
The theory is that potentially from seeing something in the code or data she found, she discovered that Bernard was a host. She could’ve also seen one of his backdoor commands and maybe even made him forget. Bernard’s memory (in which we saw the slightly more protracted “strangling”) we also know is not really trustworthy.
It could go either way and likely is one of those things contingent on contract negotiations for season 2 (more likely, IMO, than the “dead Ford was a host, depending on if they can give Hopkins enough to come back for season 2” theory). There are people we’ve seen die…I guess really just Theresa and Ford? Oh, and Arnold. They’ve already done the surprise Bernard = Arnold thing, so I think another surprise resurrection by host would derail any dramatic impact of the human deaths even we can really never be sure they’re actually human, or that they can “come back” somehow, or it was really a clone that died instead. That’s The Young and the Restless territory, there. But I think we can certainly be suspicious if we don’t actually see the killing, or the body.
A co-worker just showed me on his iPhone what Siri’s response is if you ask her about the WestWorld finale.
“It doesn’t look like anything to me.”
Further complicated by Teddy remembering being one of the killers both in civilian garb and in cavalry uniform.
Hadn’t thought of that - a good insight.
Still seems foolish to me to use Arnold’s exact appearance like that. Even the most reclusive scientist could be Googled (or its equivalent) in WW’s time, I would think. Sooner or later someone would probably wonder why Bernard looks just like Ford’s early-career partner and ask some unwelcome questions.
Another thought: William dropped his fiancee’s picture, and Dolores’s father found it 30 years later, still in excellent shape. Photo paper in WW’s time must be pretty damn rugged.
So what? Everyone knows Arnold died. Is it a big shock that you can make an artificial face look like a particular person? It shouldn’t be. And if someone tells Bernard, he is programmed not to notice it unless he’s at the point of waking up, which apparently happens regularly and he just gets mindwiped.
I suspect it is an open secret at WestWorld. Everyone who care enough to know who Arnold was (the techs didn’t) knows that Bernard is his copy. Only Bernard doesn’t know, and we saw things from his perspective.
That crossed my mind; but can we say with certainty when Abernathy found the photograph? How long ago it was?
The other element is that William dropped that photo way out on the frontier, but Abernathy said he found it out by his cattle pen. How did it get there? I suspect maybe Ford had Bernard plant it, as he did the gun that Dolores found.
I’m curious if next season will describe more about how the self-powdering smart bullets work. Did Ford put real bullets in all of the guns for the party? Or some of the guns?
That’s what made me think that Ford was replaced with an android, otherwise the bullet from Dolores would have just powdered against the back of his head if he were human.
I would be willing to bet we never really get those kinds of details in-show. It seems WW (as is common for Abrams and Nolan, apparently) is doing a lot of online “alternate reality game” marketing stuff. That’s the discoverwestworld and delos websites, and I think the best glimpses of these technical details might have to come from there. Unless somehow it directly drives the story, it usually seems awkward when a character explains these little details. So instead we get it through the sidechannels of the websites and other non-show materials.
Like the diagram of how hosts are delivered to Livestock after they die, and now the security footage with the timestamp (the year is 2052). There are a bunch of emails, too, some from the security team where they mention various systems or whatever, and in one of them they mention “bullet velocity protocols are operating normally” or some such. So that’s still not 100% clear how it works, but I think it does tell us that rather than something like the bullet shattering instead of penetrating, it’s some kind of software restriction or ruleset that restricts the muzzle velocity somehow…and that it can potentially be overridden or malfunction somehow as well.
Pretty sure Abernathy found the photograph in the “present”, since his malfunction is witnessed by Ford and Bernard in the new facility. It seemed to be related to the reveries update. Abernathy wasn’t set up as Dolores’ father while Arnold was alive.
I, too, had wondered how the picture made it all the way from the buried town (Escalante?) to the Abernathy farm. I suppose it could blow around a lot in thirty years, but it’s still a leap. It’s also a leap that Ford found it and planted it at the farm in the hopes that Abernathy would discover it. I’d call it a small plot hole, or a strain on disbelief at least.
Have to fanwank a bit, but maybe since William lost the photo on his first visit, he makes a ritual out taking the same photo with him on subsequent visits, dropping them in random places. On a fairly recent cycle, he visited the farm, dropped it there, did something to Dolores to “get reacquainted” (it remains unclear what) that, combined with her “father” finding the photo, set her on her current path to the center.