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

Season 3 so far has just kind of wandered around with bloodbaths here and there.

This is not true.

We've had a clear objective for "the Dolori" and the trajectory of the season established since Episode 4.

By contrast, Season 1 and 2 didn't make their narrative trajectories clear until the 9th and 7th episodes, respectively.
 
I think it would be interesting to know Serac's endgame. Was the goal to put humanity under control indefinitely, or was the plan to eventually wind down the control once a) humanity had become used to the lack of war and b) resource scarcity largely became a thing of the past? In other words, is he just making humanity puppets of an AI for a couple centuries or the end of time?

David Mack had a similar storyline in his novel Star Trek: Section 31: Control, though I'm not sure that AI ever bothered to mess with relationships and individual lives on the same level as in Westworld.
 
It's pretty explicit that Serac considers humanity better off with an "author" than without. Why would he want to sunset that?

There's no endgame. He considers it part of progress.
 
To be honest.. i kinda lost track of what all the characters, especially the ones from season 1 onwards, are doing and what they're there for, i.e. what story function they have.

It may be due to me zoning out occasionally and maybe missing parts but the show, it seems, has fell in love with its own complicated and convoluted storyline and this together with the very long hiatus between the seasons has confused me. Am i the only one?

You're not the only one. I was really into the show during the first season, but, found myself losing track in places. Between season 1 and 2, I probably watched six other shows so by the time the series came back, I completely forgot everything that had been going on and was more lost than ever. I think after two episodes into the second season, I stopped.

I was a big BIG fan of LOST back in the day and while I longed for a show like that again (which Westworld seemed to fit), I slowly began to realize that may be shows like this either aren't for me any more or just don't have a place these days with the number of other offerings that these streaming platforms have.
 
The difference between Lost and Westworld in that regard is that Lost had a main cast of a large amount of rootable protagonists with interesting histories that cared about each other. Westworld has nobody to root for. The human characters we know about are awful, the robots are mass murderers of innocent humans, Cerac wants to save his AI God so he can continue dictating.
 
I find the Hosts immensely sympathetic and easy to root for. Slave revolts aren't pretty for the side that loses. Westworld is a great deal less sentimental about this aspect of its story - and about human beings in general, in fact - than most TV. That makes it almost unique, and more interesting.

BTW, who are all the "innocent humans" Dolores has murdered? Certainly not Delos employees. Some of the wealthy park visitors?
 
Westworld has nobody to root for.

Again, this is untrue.

OG Dolores is imminently justified in her actions and, especially after Bernard resurrected her, at the end of Season 2, has noble goals and is an incredibly sympathetic character.

Maeve, Bernard, and Charlores are also heroic characters even if/when their methods and goals differ from OG Dolores.
 
Again, this is untrue.

OG Dolores is imminently justified in her actions and, especially after Bernard resurrected her, at the end of Season 2, has noble goals and is an incredibly sympathetic character.

Maeve, Bernard, and Charlores are also heroic characters even if/when their methods and goals differ from OG Dolores.

Dolores motivations are sympathetic, her actions are not. She is openly pursuing genocide. Sympathetic motives don’t make extreme actions against non-combatants acceptable.

If she were real she’d slaughter you in a second even if you never went to Westworld.

Caleb and Maeve are rootable but neithee of them have really had agency this season. Bernard is rootable but he had not had a clear plan.
 
There are plenty of shows where the lead character does horrible things, but we still find ourselves rooting for them, just look at The Sopranos or Breaking Bad.
 
The finale was awesome and did “Arrive” somewhere. And establishes Dolores as a freedom fighter for both species as opposed to the agent of human slaughter she was before.

I thought Clementine’s pearl was destroyed, where’d they get her data from?

The finale justified the season well but it’ll be hard to rewatch the other episodes that were all over the place.
 
It's not the finale. Next week is.

...establishes Dolores as a freedom fighter for both species as opposed to the agent of human slaughter she was before.

This really is a surprise to you?

She's always been this - where you keep pulling the "genocidal agent of slaughter" from is a mystery.

Now...I wonder if Serac exists at all any more? What if he's simply a manifestation of Rehoboam rather than its human controller?

If so, it's a case of hiding a story point in plain sight: they've shown repeatedly that when others see him as being physically present, he is not.

"I no longer exist."
 
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There are plenty of shows where the lead character does horrible things, but we still find ourselves rooting for them, just look at The Sopranos or Breaking Bad.

Dolores behaves in a way plausible for a revolutionary leader. It's this lack of sentimental condescension to the audience that's a major appeal of the show IMO.
 
Tonight's episode was once again excellent, and next week's finale looks to be likewise, especially since we're finally getting a ton of stuff that was in the early trailers (Dolores being all metal instead of the milk-colored organic polymer that the Hosts are currently made out, Williams "I'm going to save the F-ing world" comment, and Maeve dragging a kitana across a metal ground surface before facing off with a black-suited Dolores).

I didn't think we were going to actually see Solomon, since I had been under the impression that Serac had destroyed that version of the system and replaced with with Rehoboam, so it's nice to see that the Nolans and their team can still pull out surprises even when they're not doing the whole 'smoke and mirrors' style of storytelling that defined the first two seasons.

I also didn't think that Caleb's war backstory was going to be a complete fabrication/distortion of the truth, which was interesting, although I don't agree with Bernard's opinion that he's going to be Dolores' patsy in destroying humanity, or with his assertion that destroying humanity is actually what she's after.

Knowing that we've got at least 1, if not 2, more seasons coming is also going to make next week's finale 'appointment TV', and I also can't wait to hear what the somewhat skeptical Dave Chen and Joanna Robinson (of the podcast Decoding Westworld) have to say about not only this season as a whole, but the renewal, which neither of them thought was going to actually happen (in spite of the fact that HBO President Casey Bloys had let it slip a couple of months ago that Jonah and Lisa had already signed a deal with HBO that included a fourth season of the show).
 
Oh yeah.. the Delos board.

Who were the "innocents?"
Yeah, everyone we see her kill are associated with Delos, Cerac or a park guest (people who play thousands a day to rape and kill without consequence). Based on her interactions with Caleb she sees the average person as being just as imprisoned as she was.
 
Yeah, everyone we see her kill are associated with Delos, Cerac or a park guest (people who play thousands a day to rape and kill without consequence). Based on her interactions with Caleb she sees the average person as being just as imprisoned as she was.
They killed people in the Raji who was just hunting robot tigers. Please. And they repeatedly said that the guests wasn't only people interested in the Rape&Murder. We saw families too. And I sincerely doubt that every person of Delos was "guilty". Even the barman at the Mesa Hub?!?
 
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