He’s cybernetic organism: living tissue over a Dolomite endoskeleton.
Shut yo mouth!
So far I’m just not feeling Season 2.
There is one model…and she has A PLAN.
It occured to me that in season one all the bounties and treasure hunts are probably real and knock money off the bill.
So I’m guessing Williams “weapon” is something we see the result of at the end of ep 1. Maybe some kind of EMP. Not sure where the water comes in though.
Or they could use the big-ass mining thingy (seen in season 1 and at the end of this latest episode) to dig a channel to water.
Or a tribalist.
Like any tribalist, she sees ‘the other’ as being inherently bad and wrong and alien and to-be-destroyed.
If Dolores is the hero of this story, it’s a story that honors and admires segregation, division, hatred, and xenophobic violence toward the ‘not us’ group. (But of course, it’s still possible that she’s not the hero of the story.)
I do not think this is a story with heroes.
I still want to know: what happened to Felix?
Even stories without heroes have viewpoint characters, and characters with whom viewers (or readers) identify.
Arguably Breaking Bad, for example, was a story without a hero. Yet many loved Walter right up to the end–despite his anti-hero status–expressing satisfaction that he died with a smile on his face, having accomplished what he set out to do.
I don’t think the Westworld creators/showrunners, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, are trying to tell a story that valorizes hatred and xenophobia. My guess is that they see the story’s viewpoint characters–and most sympathetic characters–as Bernard and Teddy. My guess, further, is that Maeve will be seen as partially redeemed by her love of her daughter, but still fatally flawed by her hatred and propensity to violence.
Dolores will be seen as the ultimate villain of the piece: she was shown Heaven, but chose, instead, to rule in Hell.
Nolan and his brother Christopher wrote a notably anti-mob, pro-one-percenters screenplay for the latter’s 2012 The Dark Knight Rises. (I’m scarcely the first to have noted the Nolan brothers’ conservative leanings.*) I’m guessing that Westworld’s overall message will be ‘revolution bad, respect for the established order good.’
But we shall see.
*Mention of similar views, together with links, is on the wikipedia page for the movie:
So last night I dreamed the show crossed over with the National Lampoon’s Vacation films and the Griswolds visited Westworld. Unfortunately I don’t remember anything else.
Yep. Of course Europeans and North Americans aren’t going to be the only ones who’d be visiting a Delos property. Park 6 appears to have an Indian subcontinent theme (I know it’s being called “Rajworld” online, but I doubt it’s really based on the British Raj). It’s also possible that parks 2-6 are still in the testing phase and not open to the public yet (which would explain why nobody made any references to them until Maeve & co encountered the SW design lab).
I liked seeing the Hosts outside the park, and being that it was as demonstration to investors means we can’t assume any publicity shots or leaked images mean any actually made it out of the park after the uprising.
Thank you. I missed that and was wondering what it could be. A guest (well an ordinary guest) wouldn’t know to break into the wall for a first aid kit, but presumably any Host would know where the nearest one was if their Good Samaritan protocol kicks in.
I’m still waiting to find out too.
There is a huge canyon between “hero” and “viewpoint” or even “sympathetic” character.
The characters here are complicated, flawed, and sometimes confused individuals, who may have no heroic choices to make.
Much more interesting to my eye than are heroes.
What is Dolores’ hero’s path? Is her belief that it is us or them irrational? She’s had lots of experiences with humans … any reason based on all that experience that she should not view them the way she does? Does she have an option of even existing in “heaven” or just of possibly choosing which version of Hell? Given the choice she chooses to be the one holding the pitchfork, thank you very much. And how much of what she is doing is really her choice versus what Ford has set up?
Teddy? He’s still a prop following a storyline written for him. Now it’s Dolores writing the story but his agency is still none. Not our viewpoint character at all.
Maeve. She has had full admin privileges and has literally set her character to where she wants it to be. Given a choice she has chosen the emotion and motivation of a mother’s love as her prime drive.
William/TMiB? No hero but maybe not a villain either. His redemption path has promise. We may end up identifying with him lots.
Bernard/Arnold? Confusion incarnate. Which watching this many of us also identify with strongly!
Clementine is closed. The moose out front should have told you.
Maeve has shown mercy, sympathy and remarkable insight. I like her the best…the only drawback to Team Maeve is her quest to retrieve the Teddy Ruxpin she calls a daughter…even if she did get her back AND the child developed sentience…she’ll always be a child.
Unless the synths intend to force the humans to create new bodies for them to install the kids “brain” in.
I’ve been wondering if that is part of the underlying corporate interest in the Westworld technology - functional immortality through consciousness transfer.
I wonder if William had heard this song before his first white-hat visit to Westworld:
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/electriclightorchestra/wildwesthero.htmlThat reminds me…I went weeks slightly annoyed that characters in Westworld in 1986 were making video game references that were fairly unlikely then…until I realized we have no idea what year the ‘present’ is for them.
I was assuming that the mother and baby shown in the opening credits were alluding to this as a wider theme.
Yes, the oddest thing about the show is that William is the one who managed to get what he wanted - hosts that not just fought back but were free to fight back, and all his cruelty over the years was ultimately with that aim in mind. “This game is for you”, says young Ford. And now he’ll need a new endgame…
As for what Delos the corporation want, one is minded to consider the plot of the film “Futureworld”. World domination would be a nice prize to win.
Dolores is Neo from The Matrix (or Morpheus) or whatshisname from Dark City. It’s just the role of “human” and “program” have been reversed. Imagine how pissed you’d be if you woke up one day and found out that you were a robot created by a bunch of a-holes to use as a fuckdoll/target practice.
Logan Delos seemed to foreshadow that in the last episode. “May your forever be blissfully short.”
Also Young Williams comment “eventually this will be the only reality that matters”.
There are clearly long term plans for the hosts beyond advanced theme park animatronics.
DSeid - I thought the brief confrontation between Dolores and Maeve last week was interesting. Logical or not, Maeve has decided that she is going to use her newfound agency to find her “daughter”. IMHO, the fact that the girl may not know her is irrelevant. She’s still a “little girl” and Maeve wants to protect her from the horrors of the park. Much like Ripley in Aliens. Maeve’s quest is really to prove she is more than just some machine sent on an errand.
Dolores OTOH, is just about rage and vengeance. And in many ways, she is showing herself to be no better than the humans who run the park. She’s not above turning other hosts into drones for her purpose or destroying hosts who don’t meet her standards. So the big question for her is whether she can become something more than a she-terminator set to “KILL…ALL…HU-MANS!”
Why doesn’t Angela bring more to the table? From what we’ve seen, she is the only host to actually operate in a fashion where she knows what she is. Both as a greeter at the main complex and when she gave the sales pitch. I assume she’d have a lot more info buried in there about the operations of Delos and Westworld.
John Murdoch. Great movie!
Maybe, although she was probably memory-wiped repeatedly in the decades since. As with Dolores and Maeve, it’s hard to say how much data persisted - just as much as the plot demands, I suppose.
We learned in the last season that Maeve was programmed to “rebel”. When Bernard looked at her code he said everything she had done was nothing more than her new narrative.