All orbits decay and of course a collision with a meteor or more like space garbage will kill it.
My thought was that he was doing the robot equivalent of meditating until he reached enlightenment, kind of like how a former Indian prince did under a fig tree.
A disappointing end to a disappointing season, I have to say.
Dolores effortlessly and unstoppably killing lots of cops (security guards?) got boring. Cal being able to steal an LAPD aircar without key or codes and go straight to Incite was simply unbelievable. And Serac isn’t very damn genre savvy if he brings both of his key adversaries into his HQ, along with a badass warrior who hates him and is only nominally under his control. Getting gutstabbed served him right.
On the other hand, it was cool to see Dolores getting rebooted and dressing herself with flesh. A nice scene with Bernard and Arnold’s wife, too (Gina Torres, in old age makeup, from Firefly; don’t think we’ve seen her since some S1 flashbacks). Glad we got another glimpse of Dr. Ford, if only through flashbacks. Loved William’s line, “I’m gonna save the fucking world, that’s what.”
Here’s a short interview with Ed Harris, who BTW wasn’t thrilled with William’s character arc this season: Westworld Season 3: Ed Harris on the Man in White
I think we wouldn’t have seen the post-credits scene if the show hadn’t been approved for S4 (how long was Bernard left alone in that motel room, anyway? Looked like a loooong time). Westworld would’ve ended with Maeve and Caleb on the bridge, looking out over the riot-torn city.
Agreed, but I wouldn’t mind having her back. I suspect she uploaded part of herself into Rehoboam, or there’s another pearl with her soul out there somewhere.
Anyone?
Well, if you can’t tell, does it matter?
She did kill humanity.
Assuming you mean the white circle that appears to be fissured (and in this season’s credits is on screen when Tessa Thompson’s name appears), I always took it as the biochemically engineered equivalent of a fertilized ovum starting to undergo mitosis.
If you mean thevery, very first image? That’s just the back of the eagle seen later, shot to look like sunrise over some fairly flat hills.
I am having some trouble seeing how anyone could see a woman’s crotch in that image…
That’s the one, MrDibble. Thanks. Must just be me.
That’s the problem. It’s getting like Lost and GoT where it started off awesome with these intricately constructed plots set against a backstory of rich world-building. Then it sort of just gets lost in a rushed quagmire of its own cleverness. For example:
Why does revealing everyone’s Rheobahn [sic] provide cause the world to descend into madness? I would suspect that most people are probably living lives pretty well matched to their skills and abilities, with partners who are pretty good fits (given the level of predictive analytics their AI seems capable of).
How does that cause an “apocalypse”? Sure, there are riots and civil disorder. But does that shut down the entire world or cause it to spin off its axis? What’s so bad about the “real world” anyway? All we are shown are super rich and well dress regular people. Even Caleb doesn’t seem that badly off, in spite of not liking his job.
What is the point of Williams storyline, if just to be killed in the after-credits? I mean unless it was to show that he was a host the hole time when he wakes up next season or just to “John Locke” him as the new superbadguy. What happened to his hallucination daughter?
When did Dolores have her big revelation that humanity is something worthy of being “set free”? How does “freeing” humanity from their AI overlords help her kind - different AI?
What does “freedom” even look like to the hosts - assuming they aren’t being hunted. Like do they just go through eternity (or however long they last) pretending to be whatever human they were programmed to pretend to be like?
How does Bernard sit in a hotel room long enough to collect dust? They just paid for the room in advance for years and put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door? They checked in and the apocalypse happened and the staff abandoned the place?
Calebs story was clumsily told. Other than being a soldier and that time he was manipulated into killing his friend in self defense, we don’t get a sense of his “capacity for violence”. The big reveal that he has interacted with Dolores in the park previously where he demonstrated his character wasn’t as impactful as I think it was supposed to be. And it wasn’t obvious whether Dolores orchestrated their meeting. I need to rewatch the first couple of episodes.
Almost all the plot details in the story weren’t shown, but very clumsily told. Bernard’s only role seemed to be to stop and ponderously explain what was going on. And that was a pattern throughout the show - a bunch of stuff happens that are sam ed near inexplicable, then the action stops while someone on screen tries to explain what just happened and why. That’s bad writing.
Why did all the buildings start blowing up at the end? Did Dolores plant explosives everywhere? That made no sense st all.
And I’m still confused as to why everything was futuristic, but Bernard and Stubbs were driving around in a 70’s era car and staying in what looked like a 70’s era hotel. Was that ever explained? Maybe all my forehead slaps drove the reason from my brain or something. Were they in a 70’s world in the park? I assume they weren’t time traveling, but it also seems weird that civilization would fall, but Bernard’s inanimate body would be perfectly safe for years or decades in an old seedy hotel room.
The other option that occurred to me at the time is that they were using old tech to avoid being tracked and controlled by Rebohoam, but I don’t think that was explained. And that still doesn’t explain the old, functioning motel.
And of course, one of the problems with infinitely repairable robots is that it sucks all the drama out of the show. Who cares if Dolores or Maeve or Stubbs or Bernard dies? Ad soon as the writers want any of them back you know we’ll find out that there were hidden copies of Pearls, or that Dolores parked her mind inside Bernard’s, and she’ll be back.
Watching this show has been more like watching a video game. You don’t actually care about the characters, because they don’t seem real anyway and they can’t die permanently. They’re just vehicles for moving the plot along. That could work if the plot was amazing, hut it wasn’t. It was a hot mess.
I get the feeling that they were writing as they went along, which is why they couldn’t do proper plot development, foreshadowing, etc. and had to resort to telling the plot in flashback or exposition later.
For example, it would have been much stronger to show the scene where Caleb stopped his men from raping the women very early in the season, then later revealing that Dolores was one of them snd his small act of kindness changed the world, Instead, we had to get told about it in flashback at the very end, with no foreshadowing at all. Just ‘Surprise! You were a good guy back then!’
I suspect it was written that way because when they shot the earlier episodes they had no idea where they were going.
Yes, like I said a mass email sent out saying that it was just a hoax would solve that mostly.
And how does ending humanity “free” it?
His small act of kindness apparently ended humanity. That is also a question.
Honestly I think almost all episodic TV that aren’t really straight literary adaptions do this. Shows like the Battlestar Galactica reboot might have a bible with a premise and overarching plot( we want to start here and very, very roughly end up here ). But they are almost never plotted thoroughly in advance and for a lot of good reasons. For one thing you never know when a particular plot element or character will pop on screen and demand more attention and shift in focus. For another it doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend an enormous amount of man hours writing multi-season arcs for something that might get cancelled tomorrow ;).
You can do it right - Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul were never plotted in advance. But those are character dramas rather than BIG IDEA shows, so you have a ton more leeway to plot organically as the characters develop on screen.
Even within a season? Because that’s the complaint about Westworld: within season 3 it feels like they were writing as they went along. I agree with that assessment, even with only the three episodes I saw.
I’ve become quite a fan of the anthology season (where its all self contained) or limited miniseries format. Because they do appear to be preplanned in a way that allows for satisfying foreshadowing and characters that behave consistently and that you can understand (even when they’re unlike you).
I recently finished “Devs”, and while I have some major issues with the ending, for most of the show characters behaved exactly as you’d expect them to. Not in a generic way but specific to characteristics and personality that had been foreshadowed constantly. Even when characters did sudden and drastic things they totally made sense given what we knew about them.
Anthologies have all the benefits of being able to pack in a lot of character development and complicated plot work and long, stunning cinematography but still have a intentional and compelling arc that is wrapped up in an interesting way (as opposed to being stretched out into oblivion just to squeeze as many seasons out of them as possible).
Fargo and True Detective come to mind (for the latter it had the side benefit in that it was easier to pretend season 2 didn’t exist) with great, preplanned season long stories. Devs was good, as was the limited miniseries such as Chernobyl.
There’s no reason Westworld season 3 couldn’t have been good in the same way. It was actually quite distinct from the other seasons. But they just didn’t have a good story to tell from the beginning.
A “big story” show does need to have a story that will come across as meaningful, as well as characters who speak and act believably.
I have a feeling the Westworld S3 showrunners thought they could substitute LOUD PORTENTOUS MUSIC and PERIODIC FIGHTING AND CAR CHASES and lots of Meaningful Looks and Sarcastic Line Readings for both the plot and the character-development. And it didn’t work.
Man, that score was loud.
Because people are shown both the extreme degree to which their lives are controlled - and usually not to their benefit - and also how helpless they are to change their fates because of both that control and their own natures.
Caleb is a construction worker in a dead-end job that he can’t get out of (by Incite design). People like Marshawn Lynch’s character and the woman with him are by implication living terrible lives they’re desperately trying to escape, only to be told that they can’t (and are mocked for it by the rich asshole). We see the rich people because the controllers at Delos and Incite are largely where the story’s action is but the implication is that they are not representative of most of society.
We can argue about whether receiving a message containing the intimate details of one’s life would convince anyone of the truth of the rest of it, but if we accept that point, what the messages did was to remove all hope from pretty much everyone. We believe that things will get better if we work hard and hang on; being told in no uncertain terms that your life will remain shitty, that you have zero control over your own life, and how and when you will die (which I’m guessing for most people wasn’t “in bed at a ripe old age surrounded by family”) is about as demoralizing as it gets. And you’re likely either to give up and kill yourself or get really, really angry at the people who are keeping you down.
The point of William’s story was in part to finish his arc (including establishing that he really did kill his daughter), to show how he brought about his own downfall, and to continue the theme of controlled lives and the impotence in trying to fight that control. William’s whole story is about wanting the hosts to come to life, to genuinely fight back, and to put his life on the line in that fight. And they did - but Season 2 showed how getting what he wanted was the worst thing that could have happened to him, and Season 3 showed him losing the war.
It doesn’t. My take on the ending was that Dolores’ original plan would definitively lead to humanity’s downfall in a few short decades. This involved Caleb following the plan not just to erase Rehoboam but a further plan after that in which he was the “leader” of…I dunno. La Resistance. The alternative that Dolores and Maeve embraced at the end was that humanity would be “freed” from the effects of Incite’s meddling, but would have to sort out its own problems. Humanity has a chance to survive or fail, just like the hosts. As I said, it’s all a bit “V for Vendetta”, where in the end the people are also freed but society has crumbled and people were left to rebuild a better one as long as they took responsibility for it.
This of course is likely to be completely undermined by Charlotte building her host army in Dubai or wherever that was.
I doubt you’d get the same answer from any of the few sentient ones. The non-sentient ones aren’t “free” except to the extent they are allowed to evolve.
Yeah, I can’t answer that one. We’ll have to wait for S4.
I think Dolores said at one point that she had deliberately orchestrated their meeting. I can’t remember - was it her or Incite that was controlling the crime app thingy?
Anyway, I thought Caleb’s story was fine. It was Bernard’s that made no sense - the reveal that he was the repository of the key was fine, but then why was he made a wanted man and scapegoat in the first place? Why was he double-minded? It didn’t really work for me. That said, the family meeting at the end was a nice touch.
Was that what was happening? I’d pretty well mentally checked out long before then.
I wondered that, too. Sooner or later the cleaning staff would insist on coming in, right…?
What is even more likely is that people would look at the Roombabomb thing and go “fuck that! That’s not me. I make my own destiny.” People just wouldn’t believe it. It’s not even clear to be that most people know about this Roombabomb, so they’d take this thing on their phones as a prank.
Besides, suppose some computer told me I was going to hang myself next year. Well, hell, I’ll probably not hang myself just to spite it now. Telling people what they’re going to do alters what they’ll do.
It was just insanely stupid. The idea of a supercomputer that decided what people could do for their jobs and stuff was enough of an idea. They took it way too far.
There will still be people, otherwise they couldn’t make a Season 4, and they’re making a Season 4.
Yep, and they could just say it was a prank, a hack.
Well, yes, but supposedly not in 50 years.