Alan Smithee - yeah, that is why I am noodling in that direction. It makes narrative sense.
I don’t find you to be thread-shitting at all. The show is presenting knotty stuff.
Consider this: if this “working narrative” of William finding himself bears out, then he “became conscious” / authentically Himself due to interacting with a conscious AI. So he sees machine consciousness as a way to “wake people up” in the soft world they live in, but he does so without considering the consequences, or thinking they are worth it.
To make the contrast I think they are trying to make - Ford (if he’s really dead) died by the action of a sentient Dolores; Arnold just killed himself using a clockwork mechanism to pull the trigger for him. MiB would be fine dieing as did Ford but not as did Arnold.
In terms of “finding himself” - I think what he stated was that along the way he discovered he was good at it, not that he enjoyed it. And with his discovered true love gone/never having been real (to his perception), doing what you are good at is what you keep doing. In the park in more violent ways, and more appropriately for the greater good in the real world. Being good at the game was fine but in neither beating the game or “winning” in the world give him what he was looking for. The real world was not satisfying and his family’s love turns out to have been an illusion as much as he thought Dolores’s was. Maybe satisfaction and meaning is to be found in Arnold’s hidden deeper level of the game? Having lost his love the something that seems real ever since. His initial time with Dolores was more real to him than life had been before and had been since. Getting shot is at least real.
I agree…I don’t see anything as thread shitting here. I like the discussions, and people trying to poke holes in things because it makes me go back and re-watch and pick up some more info.
For example a few days ago we discussed where the employees lived, and also if they could afford to go in the park. On re-watch I picked up the nerdy tech guy that wanted to take Ford’s spot asked Bernard’s lover how long she was there for, and she said something like “We just got rotated in”. Also when Elsie and Stubbs were in the elevator in one of the first episodes, Elsie told him to use his employee discount in the park.
Also regarding MIB owning the park…I don’t think he actually “owns” it…the way he said it was “I own this place…well, majority shareholder”
And I don’t see him telling…or asking Ford to change the narrative…he wants the Hosts to do it on their own, and Ford seems to like screwing with him. He knew what the center of the maze was the whole time, and appear to enjoy when MIB found what it was.
I’m starting to see Ford as manipulating the whole place since the “event”. Arnold doesn’t want the park to open, so the “event” takes place. Ford covers it up, but Arnold has proven that the host would show free will. Ford keeps a close eye on Dolores, and never removes the Wyatt code, and keeps the reveries Arnold created as well. Once Ford sees that the board is getting ready to bump him out, he activates the reveries, probably planted the picture for Dolores’ father to find. At the end of Ep 1 the Abernathy says the “Violent delights” to Dolores, which unlocks the Arnold code. Beginning of Ep 2 Dolores says the phrase to Maeve. So now two are awakened…One with the Wyatt code, and one without. Ford sees his time is ending, so he allows Arnold’s original plan to now take place. Awaken the hosts, and let them destroy the place. (i.e. instead of taking his toys with him. He will be dead, and his toys will destroy what the board took from him)
It’s easy to make that assumption, that in a show with identical robot versions of real people, that Ford could easily fake his death in the finale.
But if the whole point of what Ford was doing was show that a host could break he programming and choose to kill a humanof her own volition, then it undercuts that message to use a host duplicate. Her being able to kill a host version of Ford is meaningless. The Maeve sequences taught us that hosts can tell the difference, too. I think Ford needs to be truly dead for the story to make any sense.
I think we are supposed to understand MIB couldn’t get Ford to change things even if he tried. The show demonstrated clearly that the board has been trying to control Ford for some time and can’t do it. Ford always outmaneuvers them, so whatever MIB wants or has wanted to do with the park doesn’t really matter. There is dialogue in which Ford mentions the board’s previous attempts to test Ford and get more control of the park, and Ford says something indicating he has always been able to get through it despite the board’s efforts.
There’s an interesting aside in one of Jonathan Nolan’s interviews. He is asked whether Ford will be coming back. No is the reply but then he adds ‘at least not in that form’. He also confirms that Ford was definitely shot dead by Dolores, that was not an android.
I’m trying to remember how many hosts became conscious… just Meave and Dolores?
Was every host capable of evolving subject to enough tweaks and experiences or was it something planted into a select few in the beginning?
What’s the whole thing about creating Bernard as a new Arnold…the story of his son etc.? If Ford needed the help couldn’t he create anything he wanted to? If he needed to start something that would evolve into a new Arnold wouldn’t that have taken alot of time?
When Maeve asked Bernard how many there were like her he replied there were a handful over the years. My guess is that they were all capable of moving towards sentience but of those that actually did all but a handful went mad and had to be rebuilt. As to Arnold I think Ford genuinely missed his old partner but wanted to retain control over him so he didn’t allow him to fully achieve sentience until his hand was forced by events. As he told Theresa before she died he didn’t allow Bernard and the others to see things that could hurt them.
Ford himself had changed from viewing the robots as machines to caring for them and believing that they were the future, not humanity.
The most annoying part of the MiB/William reveal is that 35 years ago, Ed Harris was in The Right Stuff. He’s pretty darn recognizable (and balding!) in that movie compared to how he looks today.
Ford described Arnold as a recluse who avoided interacting with humans, preferring to spend his time with the hosts. 35 years ago. So it’s unlikely anyone other than Ford (and Dolores) knows what he looks like.
For comparison, I personally had no idea what Paul Allen looked like (or could even remember his name*) until crafting this post right now. All I knew was that Bill Gates had a partner when he founded Microsoft.
Imagine if Paul Allen consciously avoided the spotlight, and even human contact in general, and then died in 1982. How recognizable would he be now?
*I had to google “Bill Gates partner” to find his name.
Since Arnold died 35 years ago, that’s what his host appearance matches. If you’re thinking “Paul Allen is super famous, I totally recognize him” (like if maybe you’re a Seattle sports fan), here he is 34 years ago with Bill Gates.
I bet if you created a Paul Allen host that looked like that – maybe updating his hair and beard to make it a little more contemporary – he could be inserted into a position of authority at Microsoft right now and nobody would even notice.
I think a couple are on the edge - Teddy’s been having memory flashbacks, for instance. Maybe the two who helped Maeve escape, since one was in the post-credits.
Plenty of hosts went conscious, but like Ford said they mostly went crazy when it happened. Dolores’ dad and the guy that was shooting up a salon while drinking milk both went conscious/crazy.
Ford, again. He directed Maeve to escape, causing a distraction for him to move the old hosts out of cold storage. This also neatly thwarted Hale’s plan to use Abernathy to smuggle out code.
Paul Allen owns a couple of sports teams (Seattle Seahawks; Portland Trailblazers), created the Experience Music Project / museum in Seattle (the one with the “funnel of guitars” sculpture hung from the ceiling) and is a huge guitar / Hendrix nut, having bought his Woodstock Strat. He has a yacht with a multi-million dollar studio in it that, when needed, opens out to the Promenade Deck* to be the stage for a band performance.
I would love to be that unknown
*I have no idea if it opens to the Promenade deck, but if you have a multi-million dollar studio that opens out on your yacht, why not the Promenade deck?
I get the basic point and agree with it - but not using Allen as an example. Better would be someone like Briton Haddon who was the driving force behind Time Magazine alongside Henry Luce, but got edged out and died, and Luce re-cast the history of the magazine so that Haddon was all but forgotten. Or Bill Finger, who up until recently was not recognized as the co-creator of Batman along with Bob Kane.
I’m 6 episodes in(watching 6 right now) and I have avoided reading the thread. I have had the following theories, most of which I assume are wrong. I have read nothing about the show or others’ theories:
Everyone running the park except Anthony Hopkins are robots
There is no “earth” out there. Westworld is all that is left of the planet and Hopkins is trying to ensure humanity continues. In the form of identical-to-human robots. Like Cylons.
Arnold? No idea. Just no idea who that is, if he existed(or exists).
