Westworld S2 (show spoilers as it airs)

Definitely watch “Kiksuya”. You might also want to check out Raj-world and Shogun-world as well.

Ok, so at the end, Dolores left the island in a Tessa Thomson body. She went to the house Ford set up for them and printed up an Evan Rachel Wood host body and another Bernard. She programmed the new Bernard from her memory of him (or his core was one of the ones in her purse). How did she get her core into the ERW body?

She also walks off with Charlotte after her talk with Bernard. So are they both Dolores? Or is Dolores now Dolores again and Charlotte is a modified version of Charlotte that’s sympathetic to the hosts (which she now is)?

That’s not a function of most of the characters being “virtual”. That’s a failure of the storytellers. Black Mirror has managed to tell most of the same stories while making you care about the “artificial” characters.

I agree, and the problem with Westworld is that, ironically, it treats the issue of sentience and the ambiguity of what’s “real” and what’s “fake” in a very cavalier manner compared to Black Mirror. The latter is an anthology show where each episode is a self-contained “chamber piece” where you can focus on a small handful of characters; Westworld, despite attempting to tackle some of the same themes, dilutes their emotional potency by scattering the subject matter haphazardly over a chaotic mess of tangled storylines and throwaway characters.

It’s a “better the devil you know” scenario - Maeve and her group saved his life – remember that he was found holding a grenade under his chin – whereas pretty much all the other hosts have tried to kill him, being with a group of humans hasn’t exactly proved a winner, and going off on his own would have been very risky indeed. He’s scared of her and she abuses him but he knows she won’t kill him and has ultimately been acting with benign intent (at least for her group).

They didn’t say, so it could be anybody: another Dolores instance, one of the cores she brought, a modified Charlotte, somebody from the Forge, somebody she created from scratch, etc.

…well I really liked Lee.

And Elsie was my favourite character.

So you all probably know how I feel.

Unnecessarily, obnoxiously elliptical.

For those who (like me) missed the post-credits scene, it is embedded in this article. And this article has some explanation from the show-runners.

Compared to the myriad of confusing scenes I could ask about, my question is pretty simple:

Teddy was dead. How did he manage to walk through the “door” to the grassland paradise?

Didn’t Dolores have his Britta filter?

I don’t always agree with complaints about the show’s dialogue, but “Step on it – either we destroy them or they destroy us” was real bad. Isn’t there anyone working on the show who can catch stinkers like that before they make the final shooting script?

LOL, yup.

Count me on the “I liked it” list. A little uneven season, but I would say some of the episodes this season were the best ever. I think I liked it more because unlike last season, I quit trying to “solve” it.

Regarding William, his storyline ties back to Delos in the Forge. No matter what changes they made to him, Delos still abandoned Logan. Everything we’ve seen so far (minus the post-credits) of William, he’s been 100% human. At some point in the future, he dies. So they recreate him as a host, and run him through the same scenario over and over, and every single time he ends up killing his daughter.

Interestingly the Elsie thing is a reflection on how humans cant change. She was kinda naive, over her head…and in the end it bit her. BUT then we do see Lee change.

This is a quote regarding the reveal that Stubbs was a host. If the showrunners are writing new material and swerves of “who’s a bot and who’s not” literally the day before the shoot Lord knows what other stupid changes were made at the last minute.

Just because they wrote the scene the day before doesn’t mean they didn’t know he was a host ahead of time.

See, now you make me do work and actually FIND the article to clarify

And the second part of that sentence:

It’s literally an article about a line spoken in a podcast.

I normally agree on this sort of thing but the decision is better than leaving him a near personality free human.

The drawback is “its getting old and hearkens back to Nu-BSG”

The pro is moving forward it gives the guy a LOT of potential.

I haven’t read much of this thread since the season finale aired, so perhaps this was addressed, but what exactly was supposed to have happened when that “door” in The Valley Beyond? Was there a wall there marking the end of the artificial world they created, and a door opened into the real world beyond? Because the door seemed to be visible to the human observers so it wasn’t just something in the minds of the hosts.

Very interesting - thanks!