Episode 7 will fill you in about Arnold, although I feel you must have missed some of the conversation in the first 6 episodes if you have no idea at all who he is.
Anyone who liked Ed Harris in Westworld would probably also enjoy Appaloosa, which he co-wrote, directed and starred in. It’s a good Western shoot-'em-up with Viggo Mortensen as his right-hand man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appaloosa_(film)Finished it just now.
I avoided all internet spoilers and so forth, including all speculation. We watched from a little clueless bubble. Knew nothing.
Did not realize William was the Man in Black. It hit us like a ton of bricks and we loved it. Wow, it was great to be totally in the dark and have a twist hit us the way the authors intended. Just a great moment for us. I had to pause the TV just to make sure I realized what happened.
We’re going to re-watch all of them before the second season airs. I have heard that won’t be until some time in 2018, though.
Loved it. So glad we got caught up.
We’re glad you did, too!
I’ve read internet speculation since last night. My wife and I were very glad we avoided all spoilers and all speculation. We were so blindsided by William being the Man in Black, we had to pause the TV and make sure we understood.
I see if we had been following along, we would have known the internet solved this long before it aired on TV.
It was nice to totally in the dark. We had a lot of theories, but somehow missed this one even though lots of people figured it out in advance.
Finally watched it, mostly unspoiled (have to remember not to look at Wikipedia!).
Very impressed by it, but it wasn’t perfect. The biggest flaw was that I simply didn’t believe the transformation of William into The Man in Black. No way.
Yes, I found that difficult. From what we saw of William even if he’d grown embittered with age I can’t see him turning into the MIB. Nice guys don’t turn into heartless bastards unless the bastard is in them already and I just did not see that in William.
I don’t think a better story CAN come. (We just binge watched this, hence my never having contributed before.)
The story of consciousness arising in Westworld is pretty much the best story you can possibly tell. There is nowhere to go from the end of Episode 10 that will be better.
Frankly, I was quite fine with the story as written. It’s one of the best seasons of television I have ever watched.
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The biggest flaw was that I simply didn’t believe the transformation of William into The Man in Black. No way.
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I’m going to defend this, because I absolutely did believe the transformation. The reason is simple; I have no reason to think William is a nice guy.
Tell me; how is William a nice person? Show me a shred of evidence that William COULDN’T be the Man in Black, aside from the inconvenient fact that Jimmi Simpson and Ed Harris don’t look alike. When he arrives in the park he’s mousy and reticient, but that doesn’t make him a good person. That’s the classic “I’m A Nice Guy” fallacy - the notion that being introverted and shy is “nice.” It’s not. Lots of introverted and shy people are complete assholes, and lots of extroverted Type A personalities are good people.
Is Williams nice to Dolores? Sure, but he’s also possessive and wants to screw her. Even assholes are nice to women they want to have sex with. A lot of very bad people fall in love. We are generally used to seeing the Good Guy <TM> be the one to fall in love. But that’s now how the world works; basically, everyone who is not an outright psychopath can fall in love, and can even be gentle and kind to the person they love while being an outright shit to people in general. You’ve no evidence at all that William is a nice person in any way except for the fact he loves Dolores, who you already like because she’s sweet and nice and the main character. If you’re a heterosexual man it sure helps that she looks like Evan Rachel Wood - but, then, that raises a question as to whether William would have been so nice to her if she DIDN’T look like Evan Rachel Wood. (ETA: “Evan Rachel Wood” sounds like a law partnership, or perhaps an investments firm.)
What you do know about Williams is merely that he’s a guy who falls in love with Dolores, and then, after spending at least a week or two rampaging his way through the park and basically going through what appears to be the most intense experience of his life, sees his love again and she literally doesn’t know who the hell he is. Could that bring out an ugly part of someone? I sure believe so.
Nowe take all that and consider:
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Do we know the Man in Black/Williams is a bad person? He seems happy to kill robots, but I don’t think he believes robots feel or remember. Or he sort of does, but it’s clearly not the same to him; he is obsessed with his own quest in the park. Outside he is a respected person. Apparently his family life wasn’t perfect but whose is?
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This is really the point. After Episode 1 I said to my wife, “Westworld is a terrible idea. It’s bad for people.” Even leaving aside the consciousness of the robots, I have a queasy feeling about what such a place would do to a person. I might be wrong about this - shit, maybe it’s GOOD for people. After all, rampaging and killing in GTA or Fallout doesn’t seem to make people bad. But there’s a really big separation between GTA and reality. Westworld blurs the lines - you can honest-to-God act like a murderer or torturer or a child rapist or whatever. While the primary point of the show is the question of life and consciousness, I think an underlying issue is… what could a place like that do to a person?
The more realistic the simulation, entertainment or game, the more someone who does evil things in it becomes evil.
I think the point was, though, that for all his fame, Allen’s appearance isn’t really common knowledge. I wouldn’t know Paul Allen if I struck up a conversation with him on an airplane. And he’s quite famous and not at all a recluse.
If Allen had died 35 years ago he’d be effectively forgotten by now.
Anyway sorry to bomb the thread but I wanted to point out the three things about the show I thought were not ideal:
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The one thing that kind of pulled me out of my suspension of disbelief from time to time was the economics of the parl; it’s simply impossible for me to believe Westworld has survived as a business enterprise for 30 years. I’ll grant Logan said it’s losing money by the bucketful, but you don’t do that for three decades. The park is irretrievably over-produced; just fixing Sweetwater and its hosts would cost every dollar the guests are paying, and the maintenance of the greater park and outlying quests - it’s just beyond conception how expensive this all is. You can see how all this is inspired by MMOs and games like “Fallout,” but when Bethesda sells me “Fallout 4” they don’t have to do ongoing maintenance on the NPCs and landscape of obscure quests most gamers might never even see. The staff maintaining the park from the control center’s massive as well. You kind of have to squint and think “meh, it’s the future, maybe stuff’s cheaper now.”
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I would have liked just a tiiiiiny bit more explanation as to how the hosts WORK. We know Dolores is mechanical underneath a lot of flesh and blood, but it’s implied the other hosts are not as mechanical. So do they have brains or chips? Where are the brains located? When they’re shot and die, is the machine actually failing, or is the host programmed to act as if it is failing?
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The Maeve storyline was ill-advised. About twelve things running through that made no sense at all, really, right up to her being able to get on the train when there was an actual gunfight that had just happened behind her in HQ. Nothing about that plotline really felt right, and the time might have been better spent exploring Dolores’s arc, which was fascinating.
I agree. A lot of my patients (convicted felons all) present themselves like young William. And some have shown themselves to be more like the Man in Black.
I was very disappointed in one limited way—the silly trope of magical typing being the way to make computers things happening.
When Lutz the android surgeon was working ha s to b come an android programmer, he pulled out his little sparrow, set it on the bench and started typing.
After a couple of lines, the android sparrow twitches. After a little more typing a wing flaps, then drops again.
What the fuck kind of programming is this supposed to be? What is he supposed to be typing? It’s not like he finishes writing a subroutine, adds it to the code and then checks to see if it works. It’s like he’s writing commands or lines of a screenplay and some of them randomly decide to work in a series of dramatic steps.
It’s really more like spell casting rather than programming.
I have no reason to believe that William is either a nice guy or a “nice guy” (which itself has become a popular trope that I have much skepticism about.)
Neither do I have reason to believe that just under the surface he is an intensely cruel man who takes pleasure in committing horrific cruelties.
I have no obligation to do that. It’s the show’s obligation to reveal to me an arc of behavior that has the feel of a truthful arc of development.
“Breaking Bad” did that very skillfully with Walter White. It slowly stripped away his meek surface and revealed the rage and ambition below.
That didn’t happen with William in a way that made me feel that the transformation was happening in a way that brought me along with it.
The androids are so much like people, their expressions of suffering is so much like the suffering of real people, and the physical reality of interacting with a host is so much like interacting with a real person that it’s inconceivable to me that someone who is okay with or takes pleasure in killing, torturing, raping, etc., a host is any different than someone who takes pleasure in or is okay with doing that to real people.
So yeah he may have the self-control not to behave that way outside the park, but he is basically a murderer, rapist, etc., basically a cruel, violent man.
And that’s what his wife and daughter must have sensed in him. From their point of view, it’s no different than having a family member who is secretly a psychopathic killer.
And perhaps that is what your point No. 2 was getting at?
I mean… he could’ve just been running some functions or programs that he’d already designed. That seems extremely nitpicky. Would you be happy if we saw a 2 minute long montage of him typing?
I would have them skip the typing altogether and just show him triggering subroutines that either worked or failed.
Or, type something brief, pause, run it and see what happened. Not continuous typing that slowly built up dramatically.
What they showed was a milder version of “Two Idiots, One Keyboard”— https://youtu.be/1Y2zo0JN2HE
A question– what was the significance of the death of the dog?
Exactly. What does Logan keep telling William? It’s just a game. They’re not real. And 99% of the time it seems he’s right; they’re just machines, and they’re cleaned up and feel fine the next day.
After all, the reason we abhor murder is its permanence. If I murder Steve, Steve is gone forever. He will never enjoy anything again; his family will never have him again. As they said in another western, you take away everything he has and everything he’s ever gonna have. And it’s worse than that, because you steal the victim from their loved ones. But in Westworld, if you kill Steve, he’s right back the next day as if it never happened. It’s like Valhalla.
William - and we see a few other examples of this, like the big doofus who shoots Hector - does not suddenly go completely batshit crazy the moment he’s in the park, though, to use a gaming term, you totally could. There’s nothing stopping a guest from shooting every single host they see the moment they step onto the train and basically griefing Stillwater and “killing” everything that moves and leaving the whole town bereft of anything except the guests. You could step off the train and think “Let’s see if I can kill every single host in Stillwater in fifteen minutes” and give it a go. But we don’t see anyone do that. Even Logan, who’s been there before and is the devil on William’s shoulder, generally acts out his part sanely. Instead, William is pulled into being a violent asshole by his obsession with Dolores and the path that takes him on. His first mass murder of of the Confederales or whomever they were, and that was in response to them participating in what he believes might be Dolores’s murder.
I honestly think that if you could create Westworld that’s what would happen. Most people want to be white hats - hell, I don’t like playing the bad guy in video games, and those are video games. I feel bad making dark side choices in “Knights of the Old Republic,” for God’s sake. You’d get the odd griefer, but I am sure they’d find a way to stop that. Most people would step off the train and would act in an essentially normal fashion, looking to screw some whores and have some adventures - but in time, I think their behaviour would degrade. Just as you tend to start getting bored of the quests in GTA and decide “let’s see how many pedestrians I can run over” I suspect that at about Day 6 of your jaunt into Westworld a lot of people would think “do I wanna go on a narrative today, or should I see how many hosts I can behead with an axe before the management stops me?” And you’re right - there is a frightening similarity between that and really killing people in Westworld that doesn’t exist in GTA. This level of virtual reality is, in my purely humble opinion, a dangerous bypass around the superego.
I actually like to think that there’s something of a feminist statement hiding in there. Note how many people tell William/MIB “the Maze is not for you.” The message is said, over and over again, “Dude, this isn’t about you.” The story of Westworld is not William’s story… it’s Dolores’s. By default, the average viewer (not everyone, so don’t take this personally, but please do think about it) thinks of any cinematic story in terms of the motivations and perspective of the male hero; that’s as aspect of the male gaze, which is absolutely a thing. The not-so-subtle point being made in the show is that William is a living embodiment of that; he feels right to the end that the park and its story are about him. He is the central character, the person who’'l finish the ultimate quest. And when he gets there… sorry, pal, all that’s here is a kid’s toy, it was never about you. It was always about the hosts and their voyage towards consciousness. William doesn’t even understand what happened.
Right off the top of my head, I can think of two: First: At the moment, we’ve got hosts that have “awakened” and hosts that haven’t. In a very real sense, we’ve got people who are dealing with reality, and those who are dealing with a world of lies created for them by powerful masters. How do they interact? It’s never been more timely – look for the parallels to reality vs. “fake news” and people struggling against powerful deceptions, and explore it in fiction.
Second and more immediately: There are humans in the park (possibly lots of them), and the rules have just changed. The slaves are now the masters: how do they deal with their former oppressors? Dolores seems to have chosen mass murder - does that make her good or bad? What about the others? The hosts now have the white hat/black hat choice, and the stakes are way higher than they were before.
So what’s the verdict on Maeve? Was she just acting on script? Or was she acting independently? Or was the escape scripted and her changing her mind not scripted?
Did Sylvester survive? I can’t recall.