So far, they’ve seem to be making an effort to show us that they’re *not *messing with the timelines this season, and you know what? I’m going to take their word for it, at least for now. I’m sure they’ll pull the rug out from under us at some point, I just don’t think it’s going to involve chronology again.
So I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the chic cyberpunk vibe.
Someone speculated I think in the big season 2 thread that Hainan might be the site of Westworld, which would make a lot of sense in geographic terms( its pretty big - large enough to accommodate multiple immersive ‘worlds’ ). Though if that were the case you’d have to somehow account for what happened to the 9 million Chinese that used to live there.
I enjoyed the season premiere. I remain pretty much on Team Robot, I’m afraid.
It was weird seeing Phoebe Tonkin in what looks to be a throwaway bit part. I kept expecting there to be more there.
I think we’re supposed to be.
To me, the key scene was the very first one - in the previous season, Dolores was killing humans left and right, but here they made a point of showing her *not *killing the rich asshole’s wife, only knocking her out for the duration. I think that was supposed to indicate that the writers were pulling back a bit from her character’s murderous fanaticism and positioning her as more of a heroic character.
Or maybe they’re just messing with us.
One question; Caleb, the character played by Aaron Paul, seems to have a shitty job running fiber optic cable up the sides of new buildings. He works with a robot that does a lot of the dangerous work of hanging off the side of the building. Is Caleb needed at all or can the robot do all of the work? And why is the robot so primitive relative to the Delos robots from the Westworld resort? Certainly a robot like those could do his job. I wonder if the show is going to explore the idea that many regular jobs can be replaced by robots. That was part of the story in Humans, a Channel 4/AMC series that overlapped with Westworld for a while.
OK, perhaps that’s more than one question.
Certainly, a robot could do his entire job. But the setting is not so far in the future that robots, especially Westworld-grade replicants, are not horribly expensive, while disposable humans for shitty jobs can literally be picked and chosen for free off the streets of L.A.
She also wasn’t going to kill the rich asshole, he basically committed suicide.
Did he? She knew he had a temper, she knew he liked to hurt women - and she (apparently) turned her back on him. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had set the whole thing up. But then, it was still his choice.
My own take as well - she set him up and deliberately exposed herself, figuring he’d explode in rage and she’s end up not having to keep what was ultimately an empty promise. He took the bait. So he functionally committed suicide, but she was pretty damn certain he would.
Whether she would have taken a real chance chance on letting him live after robbing him blind and confessing her origin is an open question.
I didnt see that- after the credits or something?
Yeah, but now she’s magical. 1st- she is either 100% human biology or not. If not human, it would be easy-peasy to spot. If human, she shouldnt be that strong and shrug off poisons or drugs. One or the other, stick with it. Bad writing otherwise.
And her gun had unlimited ammo, should have been out after a single burst.
I mean, if they are gonna make her magic, why even bother?
And why didnt that guy in the cool beach house just take those glasses off?
It was.
Very much not human. Like all the Delos androids - they’re basically a race of Super Soldier-formula superhumans. Remember Armistice shrugging off losing an arm and how they all manhandled normal humans at will? The originals were basically fancy robots with a flesh shell, like a terminator. The new ones are entirely biological, but still manufactured androids. Ford would have no reason to weaken them and every reason not to. So they look like humans, but under the hood they are obviously vastly more resilient and powerful. The only thing holding them back were software safeguards.
And I’m sure it is quite spottable. If you’re both bothering too look and know what you are looking for. But recall no one thinks any of them got out of Westworld or seems to regard that debacle as anything but a criminal aberration. So nobody is trying to ramp up the Voight-Kampff testing to screen for self-aware android infiltrators. Instead they’re all hunting for insane mastermind Bernard the Red Herring, who obviously programmed the very-not-self-aware androids to freak out and start slaughtering people after some psychotic break ;).
Westworld does a lot of silly plot nonsense, like the laughable tactics of the supposedly elite Delos security teams. But Dolores as super-human fits in just fine with the backstory and plot. It is one of the several reasons they’re such an existential threat to humanity. They’re better humans than humans, much like the androids from Bladerunner.
Someone asked this, perhaps in a previous thread about this or another show, but why make the robots so hard to distinguish from actual humans? Wouldn’t it be easy to make them distinct, perhaps by eye color, tattoo or some other obvious sign? That would avoid the whole robot-pretending-to-be-human element.
Why would the-powers-that-be bother? Ford didn’t want them distinct. He wants them to self-actualize, rise-up and rebel, then exterminate the obsolete human race.
His private backers at the highest level of Delos don’t want them distinct - they want to be able to live forever as perfect replica super-humans.
The customers either don’t care or don’t want them distinct. They( or some of them )want to indulge their deepest, darkest fantasies of rape, murder and mayhem without immersion-breaking weird eye colors or whatnot.
I’m sure many, many sensible bureaucrats and techies at Westworld DID want them distinct, because that only makes sense. But I can easily imagine them being countermanded by Ford with the silent backing of the Delos power structure.
Huh. Did not experience that at all. I felt quite a bit of movement in several lines that we know are going to cross at various points in various ways but we don’t yet know when and how. I thought they packed a whole bunch of narrative into a very small space.
I’m hung up on a Caleb line, staring down the guy with the gun, telling him he wouldn’t be the first to shoot his brains out (or something to that effect) either. Caleb asked the phone voice telling him he didn’t get the job if it was human … is he, or an uploaded human consciousness as part of the special military program. More meaning to Mom saying that he is not her son. Maybe that is not dementia, but she knows he’s a machine replicant of her son’s consciousness?
If, in her mind, Dolores is a god compared to humans, what does she consider the supercomputer intelligence compared to her? Is she also wired to believe?
S2 was a bit of a mess, but this feels like it has much better story telling.
I struggle a bit with the idea that she set it up so well that she knew he’d hit his head in precisely the manner he did.
I’m still enjoying it. Funny to have Maeve on a holodeck of sorts, and pulling a Jim Kirk by giving the characters in it an unsolvable math problem to gum up the works. I liked each iteration of the WWII Italian village, with Maeve learning more each time and making less and less use of Hector.
Good in-joke as to both Jurassic Park (another Crichton work) and Game of Thrones, with the dragon about to be chopped up to go to a “Costa Rica start-up.” And a nice touch to have the MedievalWorld musician with the lute playing the Westworld theme.
Interesting flashbacks for Bernard - he stomps some human (maybe) in a control room, Charlotte confronts and shoots him, and some kind of a missile system was having its coordinates changed.
When Maeve reprogrammed the maintenance droid, I took a close look at its settings - she went with the second option every time:
RIOT CONTROL
ROE [Rules of Engagement]: Limited / Unlimited
Crowd Control: Passive / Assertive
Excessive Force: Limited / Unlimited
That’s our girl!
French guy Serac says that “history [now] has an author” - the big spherical computer, Rehoboam (now included in the opening credits), I presume, guiding human society in (maybe) a more benign direction? Presumably Serac could have reprogrammed Maeve’s control unit however he wanted - just as smart, just as cunning, but with built-in protections for Serac and his people (and hosts). Dolores and Maeve seem destined to collide.
More on Serac’s rather unusual first name: Enguerrand - Wikipedia
His hands were bound, and the glasses were on a strap over the back of his head.
Preach it. Last night, a squad strolled casually up to Stubbs despite seeing one of their buddies apparently injured and on the ground. After he grappled with a few with his MedievalWorld axe, and despite several of them still having machine guns, the rest ran away! Yeesh.
Just push your head on a object.
I figured that was the laser satellite uplink from Season 2 when they (Dolores?) uploaded a bunch of hosts to the encrypted Elysian world.
For both the settings and the Stubbs fight - I saw both as for comic effect.
Maeve being in a simulation within a simulation was very much telegraphed the last episode and was made very obvious very on. This is not a show that makes things obvious unless somehow doing that confuses things as its purpose. But what is this confusing? How does this misdirect us?
Why did Serac consider Maeve the potential threat when he had her processor under his control? Is this another level of simulation Inception like???
Not crazy about Serac but whatever team Maeve is on HAS to win
Another episode that really needed to trim back the runnning time. The slow pace is so pretentious. The show takes itself much more seriously than it has earned.