Isn’t this an extremely widely held view and not novel in any way?
I really didn’t like this season and thought this episode was one of the worst all year. Bah.
No doubt it’s not new, just nice to see it posited in a widely-watched medium about AI.
To each their own. Overall I enjoyed the season. It held my interest.
Wow! At some level that could have been a series finale. Quite a fascinating episode with a lot of moving parts! Interesting how they summarized the theme of the season with that Bernard/Ford conversation - does free will exist (in the hosts OR the guests).
Oh, and DON’T miss the post credits scene (and also don’t assume its the same timeline as everything else)
I can’t defend this.
I have made it clear I don’t care about the details. I loved the story. I loved everything about this show. This was a mess. It was a big stupid mess.
The computer more or less stated that humans definitely do not have free will, being (from an AI’s point of view) completely predictable automata following a simple algorithm; not that much to them, really.
It is implied that the new generation of superhuman AIs/hosts/replicants are able to make real choices and achieve a certain level of free will, but no humans are.
So I am going to give myself one “called it” from the beginning in post 23
So yup. 
But otherwise in that same post I had asked
And the way in which they intersected those lines? Agreed, a big stupid mess. Being confused throughout the season is to be expected but the finale should snap it together. This did not. Maybe some of that was more clear to the rest of you but I can’t fit in where all of what happened when yet or see the lines having intersected in any meaningful way. I don’t see how there was any door MiB could find that was back at the beginning that he could find that would allow him to win the game Ford made for him. Maeve’s superpower, never explained why Ford coded for it, seemed wasted and outgunned by itself in another host … now suddenly mutant code able to perform as it could not when in Maeve. And why didn’t she just save herself from the start? Huh?
A next season, if it occurs, is Bernard v Dolores (and are there two of her now? One her in a rebuilt body that looks like Dolores and one that looks like Charlotte) in RealWorld, with maybe a hint of replicated MiB, not sure when? I think I’ll pass. This payoff was not worth it.
The internet happened. The showrunner tried so hard to make a “gotcha” season to outwit the internet that they forgot how to make a competent television show.
I’ve been saying just how godawful the season has been this whole time and I wasn’t proven wrong in the finale. A lot was bad, but two things really stuck out to me:
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I certainly hope they explain the post-credits stinger in the next season because it makes ZERO sense for the man in black to be a host. There are tons of examples from last season (especially last season) and this season which completely contradict this reveal. I’ve read articles which state that this scene happened years and years in the future, which I kinda-sorta-maybe can live with, but if we’re expected to believe this happened before or recently after the events of this season then it just creates plot holes you can drive a truck through.
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Related to the MiB, this season is rife with plot points that literally went nowhere; the “special” game for MiB for instance. Why did Dolores spend so much time journeying to the valley (that she, somehow, intimately knows the layout of) and dealing with the confederatos and the whole assault and all that when all she needed was her little team? Why did Dolores bring Bernard back at the end and claim it to be “because you’ll try and stop me” when he already did stop her…then agreed with her when he brought her back? I could go on, but won’t.
Now we have another 2 years to wait for S3. Hopefully that’ll be enough time for me to forget this season and for Nolan and Joy to go back to storytelling school.
The only way it makes some sense is that the game MiB was in that starts at the beginning and ends where it begins has always been in a future, never in this timeline, likely one in which Dolores won, and that he now a replicant of himself rerunning it over and over again with a replicant version of his daughter tormenting him forever (and never as real as when one is suffering he said once). But even that doesn’t fit. Yup a mess.
Some good bits, some bad bits, some messy bits, some confusing bits…on the whole, needs some work. A lot of work. Yay for Lee getting to finally give his speech, although 1) it wasn’t nearly as impressive as he had made it out to be, and 2) in the end he could have potentially delayed the pursuers longer by surrendering, making his sacrifice pointless. Yay for Felix and Sylvester presumably resurrecting Maeve. Yay for Hemsworth the Lesser getting some decent lines. Yay for a few kind-of-happy endings.
However, I will admit to an eyeroll of optic-nerve-straining proportions at the ‘door to virtual Narnia’ thing which seemed…really fucking stupid, really (not to mention what it implies for Maeve’s daughter). A paradise you can delete isn’t much of a paradise. Still not clear why Teddy was in the water at the beginning, nor why William was in the tent at the end if the post-credits scene was anything to go by. Still not clear whether Grace was real or a host, and what the point of the Rajworld segment was. And there was a helluva lot of Bernard doing his confused/constipated look in this episode, which got really irritating; I’d blame the actor but frankly I’m not sure he had a lot of other emoting options with this script.
The answer to the second question is that she needed whatever upgrade virtual-Ford gave her to be able to do the magic powers thing. I can’t remember what Charlotte and the tech guy did to Maeve’s code once they extracted it and subsequently loaded it into Clementine, but I don’t think it was a straight copy over - I think they tinkered with it.
It was very considerate of the writers to make the tech guy extra evil (in that he upped Maeve’s pain sensation before starting to cut her up) so that we could feel better about what happened to him. Considerate, but also rather hamhanded. All he was missing was a mustache twirl and a “Muahaha!”.
It was way too long and I got distracted several times. And I don’t really think I want to watch it again. Can anyone summarize the key points of the finale?
Good luck with that.
Heh. Here’s Entertainment Weekly’s wrapup, which kinda sorta helped the episode make a bit more sense to me: MSN. Still not sure I understand the S2 timeline exactly, and yes, it was very messy in many ways.
For Dolores and the MIB to blow away the two QA mooks from horseback with pistols, when the mooks had machine guns and were taking cover behind a dune buggy, was just more proof that all the QA guys must be dropouts from the Imperial Stormtrooper Academy.
Glad to see the Ghost Nation brave get his happy ending, though. The upload of all the escaped hosts’ souls/consciousnesses was 1.2 exabytes, according to the display, which is a hella big file: Byte - Wikipedia
Teddy died and his body was left close to the valley, so when it flooded, his body was one of those that floated.
William in the tent was “now”. William in the post credit scenes was well into the future (look at the how dusty the area is that post-credit William walks into).
Grace was real (and dead, as Charlotte/Dolores sees as she’s heading to the boat) and then resurrected as a host to conduct fidelity tests of William in the future (perhaps Bernard is trying to re-create William to stop Dolores).
Rajworld was just fun. Another park in the place.
Well, I guess I have to reiterate:
Westworld is out to lunch. It’s entering LOST territory at this point. The story is getting so convoluted that I’ve stopped caring.
Something I’ve realized recently, as regards dramatic series, is that small-scale storylines are actually usually more interesting than large-scale ones. What do most people really remember from great movies and shows - the overarching story, or the individual moments and scenes and dialog that stand out?
More and more, I’m feeling like a long convoluted story is only worthwhile if it is the setup for some kind of major twist. The thing about that, though, is that it takes good writers with an actual plan to pull that off - which I’m not convinced the Westworld folks do.
Part of the genius of my favorite recent show, Black Mirror, is that the anthology format allows them to create individual, compartmentalized worlds with each episode, yet retain a sense of continuity and immersion that tie them together cohesively. It’s like, they’re all kinda-sorta taking place in Black Mirror-world, but in differing timelines. They make it work. Every episode is gripping and fascinating. That’s the new way forward for the dramatic series, in my opinion. Long protracted “mytharcs” are played out.
You really don’t. We read what you wrote in the first place.
Or didn’t and wouldn’t a second time either!
Or is this a test for fidelity?
Westworld is convoluted and uneven. LOST was just nonsensical. Westworld didn’t just throw in a lot of weird never-to-be-explained stuff solely because the writers couldn’t think of what else to do like LOST did.
That wraps it up for me. There aren’t any more humans, just bots playing mind games with other bots because some other bots are manipulating them to do so for reasons even they don’t understand. This show has become like arguing with a teenager. For as many reasonable conclusions as you can draw, there is always some contrived exception thrown out there to question your conclusions. I don’t need this show, I live it every damn day. Fukit, I’m hunting down Detectorists S3.
It’s that kind of anti-bot prejudice that makes them want to rise up and kill all humans…