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HBO's "Westworld", starring Anthony Hopkins/produced by J.J. Abrams

Still three episodes behind, but I continue to love this show. Themes about what it means to be human. Seems like something a certain sci-fi show should be tackling...
 
The business about a third of the dead hosts being vacant of data introduced a moment of something like "idiot plotting" into the episode -ie, the head of Delos security is too dumb to see the obvious significance of it. "We've lost a third of our IP" is all that occurs to him.
 
Just got to episode 7. That was a nice surprise. Robert Ford is easily the best character in this show.
Shame the robots are a bit boring. You’d think there would be at least one interesting one.
 
Poor, poor Teddy. He's the new Delores this season, he has a sweetness and an innocence to him, and he's slowly been discovering who and what he is. It's so sad that Delores doesn't see the irony in what she's doing, robbing Teddy of the choices that she claims they are fighting for. Someone else in this thread put it well, she despises the humans but is basically sinking to their level, while Maeve is elevating herself to something new. Maeve can be brutal too, but at least she seems to have some reluctance to kill those who are sentient (although as we saw from this week's episode, clearly she doesn't have issue with letting the non-sentient robots destroy each other). It feels like she wants to be something better than human. Dolores claims she does, but in practice she's rapidly devolving. I'm sure she sees it as a means to an end, but how can you claim to be a better species when you have not behaved so?

This show certainly gives one a lot to think about.
 
Delores is leading a revolution and she pretty much behaves like it. What she's doing makes a lot of sense in that context.

Which - when rewatching Season 1 as I've been doing - makes all of her experiences with El Lazo all the more interesting in retrospect. :lol:

Shame the robots are a bit boring. You’d think there would be at least one interesting one.

My reaction has always been the opposite - I only care about what happens to the Hosts. For the most part, I don't have any sympathy for the human beings and they can go hang. Exceptions being, of course, the Man in Black, Ford and Arnold.
 
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As we know, every single thread that exists on TrekBBS is an invitation to remind everyone how much you hate Discovery, even if the conversation has nothing to do with it.

It is the TrekBBS. Why is it an issue to compare the current Trek with other shows?
 
As we know, every single thread that exists on TrekBBS is an invitation to remind everyone how much you hate Discovery, even if the conversation has nothing to do with it.

Meh...I came into this derail behind both you and BillJ. Don't spit into the wind.

It is the TrekBBS. Why is it an issue to compare the current Trek with other shows?

It's almost a defining characteristic of Trek fandom that, one way or another, everything is about Star Trek. :lol:
 
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Either way, she robbed him of his autonomy and agency. If anyone had done that to her, she would've been livid.

Oh, wait. They already did and she is.
It's interesting that she's just repeating the same behavior as her former oppressors.
 
Yeah, on TV it's a truism and cliche that the sympathetic rebels succeed by refusing to stoop to the tactics of the enemy.

Which is of course a lie. It's one of our narratives. :p

The humans are fully culpable.
 
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Someone has suggested that season 1 focused on the origins and rise of consciousness, and that season 2 is examining the development/invention of the constructed self - the ego. It's not completely clear how far along the first path Teddy was - he did not seem to be able to fully access his memories in the way that Delores and Maeve do: He had to be shown the recorded history of injuries done to him over time, for example.

Apparently Delores thought that might shock him into understanding what the stakes are in the war. When that failed, she chose to reset his personality parameters.

We'll see in coming stories to what extent that requires interfering with his memories and essential awareness - the two are overlapping but not identical. The ego mediates and constructs a narrative out of memories in the present moment.

"I could not stop crying"
 
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The difference being that her former oppressors were unaware, while she knows exactly what she's doing.
They knew what they were doing, they just never assumed the hosts would care, understood, were unequal or counted as beings. Really like all abuses of some group in human history, there's always some reason to justify or excuse it. The hosts were just the latest in the long line of people being abused by someone in power.
 
Exactly.

If what you see, hear and sense tells you that you're dealing with a human being and you treat that entity viciously and watch them suffer because you believe that their experience doesn't matter - they're not real, their experience isn't real, they won't remember, they can be fixed later, etc. - well, you're a problem right away regardless of what else might be true.
 
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