I wonder if the photograph/Abernathy deal was kind of a victim of the midseason production delay that was reported…supposedly they stopped production to refocus some of the scripts and cut some plotlines or things that turned out to be confusing? Westworld Is Having Some Serious Problems, Get The Details | Cinemablend
I think it’s logical given what we know of the reveries, memory issues, and “triggers” for the malfunctioning hosts to assume that Abernathy had either seen that photograph (or the woman in it) before. We never find out if that’s the case, so I wonder if it was a thread that got cut.
I’m also a little confused by the “violent delights” phrase and how it served to trigger the hosts that it did. Obviously we know that Arnold said it before Dolores shot him. So one thought is that being “reminded” of that event by hearing the phrase again is what triggered Dolores, and other hosts potentially susceptible to that phrase might have also been there for the event (even if “dead” still recording what’s going on around them…). But Maeve wasn’t there for the Arnold event, and neither was Abernathy as far as I can tell. I guess since the whole thing was orchestrated by Ford the idea might have been to trigger Dolores’ memory and then change Maeve’s code to be responsive to the phrase as well, but Abernathy’s breakdown, utterance of the phrase, and then Dolores’ repeating of it to Maeve just seems like a Rube Goldberg sort of way to go about it with a million possible points of failure.
Okay, in light of revelations that the first season had to undergo revisions and was dragged out over a long period, I’d be okay with ignoring all its plot holes and viewing it like, say, the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation - lots of bugs to work out, lots of things that make no sense, but with the promise of better stories to come.
Dude, I can relate. I feel like I am getting all deep and shit, riffing on how this storyline relates to some other dystopian futures and what it says about Humanity, and I get crickets.
It’s because there’s no “like” button or anything similar here. I appreciated your posts, it I very rarely post just to say that I agree with someone unless it’s a really outstanding post or I think it will contribute to the thread. Anyway, consider them all “liked.”
WordMan’s posts, on the other hand, don’t look like anything to me.
They basically said they enjoyed the speculation and that folks thought through the plots and timeline layers online, just not that they became headlines. It was also discussed that Jimmi Simpson, who played William/Billy/Young MiB won’t be coming back. Other than that, they didn’t discuss S2.
Well said. The only thing I’d point out is that his S1 story culminates in the last moment of the show in his smiling realization that the thing he truly wanted - for the hosts to become sentient - has come to pass, and done so ironically at the moment he had given up all hope.
In a strange way Ford and the MiB are opposite sides of the same coin; they both tormented the hosts to provoke consciousness, but as Ford went from seeing the hosts as mindless playthings to entities becoming sentient beings, the MiB went from believing that they could be sentient beings to seeing them as mindless playthings.
Perhaps not even sentient (those in the woods all came from cold storage, right?) but just able to fight back and able to harm guests. I don’t think he saw Dolores shoot Ford.
To take that reflection of Ford a bt further … Ford appears to have committed suicide by Dolores (think suicide by cop). I think that William/MiB would like nothing better than to have Dolores kill him as an act of her own volition. He was not taunting when he was telling her to do it; he was hoping she could and would. He has bit of self-loathing.
But that doesn’t really make sense to me. The reason the hosts don’t kill isn’t because they aren’t sentient, but because they are programmed not to. And MiB didn’t seem particularly interested in sentience, after Logan cut open Dolores. (Again, I’m not sure why that had such a profound impact on him. I could guess–it’s not necessarily implausible–but I’d rather be shown.) What he said he wanted was a challenge–a host that would fight back.
But he owns the fucking company! He could order them to build a special section with killbots for him to fight if he wanted to. That’s why he’s such an idiot. He never grasps that the robots are props that can be controlled, that their narratives are man-made. He thinks Ford and Arnold really are some sort of gods, whose narratives are simply given. It never occurs to him that he can tell them to change the narrative if he isn’t satisfied with it. He could even tell them to pursue true sentience if that’s what he wants. But instead he bought an entire company so he could play video games in his freetime without ever getting involved in the development. Who does that?
First of all, I ain’t so sure MiB could just tell Ford what kind of robot he wants and Ford would scurry off to do it, owner or not.
But really, it seems to me he really respected Arnold’s process and vision. He didn’t want a robot programmed to fight back. He wanted to see real sentience come into being. As Gyrate just said, he wants them to want to fight back.
Right. I think he thinks that even if they were programmed to be able to kill, they’d still be following a script and acting in predictable ways. He’s played the games and narratives enough to be able to figure out the routines quickly (like an experienced video game player can, although trial and error in the latest Tom Clancy game doesn’t have permanent consequences…). I think he wants an adversary that has as much stake in the game as he does, that is really interested in self-preservation or at least eliminating him as a threat, as that’s really when they get challenging. If that’s the case, it’s probably not too smart of an idea unless he really does have a death wish, given how he kept getting caught and tied up (and would be D-E-A-D if they could/wanted to kill him) lately in the Wyatt journey…
It’s certainly possible that he wants them to want to fight back, but there’s not much evidence of that. And why was he smiling at the end? There is no reason for him to think that it’s anything but a programmed uprising.
And why does he think that fighting back is the key to sentience? That was Ford’s idea, apparently. Why does MiB think so? Because he thinks he saw Maev grieving? And we’ve not only seen that they can fight back without being sentient, they can also want to fight back and find themselves unable.
At this point in the story, I shouldn’t be so unclear about what William/MiB thought and desired and why he thought and desired it. I can speculate and fan-wank, but I can’t make it clear. And I don’t think it’s because it is intended to be obscure. I think its because so much of his transformation was simply told to us without being shown, or was shown in a very brief way, and that a lot of it just doesn’t make much sense.
William fell in love with the first machine consciousness, and was betrayed by the Park, watching Dolores get reset. He bought the Park and went through multiple loops to see if he could find the conscious her, even while he treated the Dolores robot as the object of his betrayal. And was encouraged to do so by knowing that suffering is a factor in acquiring consciousness.
He wants them conscious because it was with a conscious Dolores that William grew a spine and found himself. As the MiB, he is looking for consciousness in the Hosts - could be wanting to shoot back; could be falling in love - because that is the only way the Humans who interact with them can find their authentic selves. Unfortunately this quest has broken William.
I thought he stated quite a few times why he wanted them to fight back. If they couldn’t, the game was fixed, and it was no different than the outside.
He was smiling at the end because all of the hosts were coming at the board members (non hosts) with weapons…which as far as he knows is against their programming. Actually I think the smile appeared after Clementine fired at the board members, without being provoked.
When he was in the park the first time…he felt he really connected with Dolores…she saw that she was different. I was under the impression that he had trying for the next 30 years to get her (or any other host) to start acting like Dolores did in their first narrative together.
He finally saw it in Maeve when she lost her daughter.
I like your point about his motivation being that it was interacting with a conscious host that made him find himself originally. It feels right, but I’m not sure it is there in the story. Did he find himself with Dolores and grow a spine, or did he just break down? Even before he snapped, it looked more like he was going crazy to me than finding himself. I thought the idea that he would find himself in the park was always a fool’s errand, which is one reason the whole story seemed pointless and William seemed like an unsympathetic idiot. But if I was supposed to see that he really did find himself and then went mad trying to get that feeling back, that makes a little more narrative sense to me.
That part about the game outside the park being fixed seems important, but I’m not sure I understand it. Maybe I need to rewatch it. Was it in the last episode?
ETA: As frustrating and disappointing as I found the ending, I can’t say the story hasn’t been thought provoking, and even mind-blowing at times. I don’t want to people to think I’m just thread-shitting with negative comments about a show no one made me watch.
