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

CaptainWacky said:
I really can't remember which characters in the season 4 trailer died in the previous season or which turned out to be robots. Or which are dead robots. I'm pretty sure Aaron Paul is the only actual living human character?
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Honestly, the whole idea with the concept that hosts can simply come back after having been killed or or heavily damaged I feel has robbed the show of some narrative tension. On paper, it sounds neat, but when you know they can keep coming back again and again, it lessens the impact.
 
The Hosts can't be resurrected any longer, though; that was the endgame of Season 2 and a consequence of Dolores' actions in Season 3.

And before somebody says "we see Dolores in the Season 4 trailer", we see Evan Rachel Wood, the actress, in the trailer, but don't yet know what character she's playing.
 
DigificWriter said:
The Hosts can't be resurrected any longer, though;
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Is that really the case though? This show has been inconsistent at best when it comes to the rules. They seem to do whatever they want to service the plot. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Season 4 saw Delores causing chaos outside the park and eventually meeting up with her other self. Given what's already happened, I wouldn't see that outside the realm of possibility at all for this show.
 
The show has been pretty consistent that the only way the host is permanently killed is to destroy their pearl or erase the data from it.

That particular Dolores is dead, so is Maeve’s boyfriend. But any host who’s pearl is intact or whose data has been protected can be revived.
 
Haven't seen anything past Season 1. Might get around to the rest someday.

Great cast/music/story from what I've watched so far.
 
CorporalCaptain said:
You think the reveal is that Caleb is practically a host. That's wrong. That's not the big reveal here. The big reveal here is that despite all of the pressures on him to be locked into a programmed existence, Caleb was able to act independently to perform a kind and loving act against substantial pressures not to.
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That was the secondary/reverse twist.

Caleb was introduced in 3x1 as an unknown quantity - a guy with no prospects or future who'd been used up by the system, but still rushed to help a wounded Dolores because he was a good bloke. And then the season fleshed out the ways in which the Evil LinkedIn society continued to abuse him and others like him, and that was... fine. The LinkedIn Society is programming lives much like the writers plotted out the hosts' loops. Okay, sure.

Then we got the big twist that things went even beyond that - that Caleb had literally been brainwashed to forget murders and bad stuff he'd done. He was basically a human host - and that was the lame and bad twist, because it took a season's worth of subtext and made it all skull-crushingly literal.

Then we got the second/reverse twist that, wait, Caleb's actually a decent guy, because before all that brainwashing, he kinda met Dolores and was decent to her! So mind-blowing and unexpected!

Except it wasn't, because he'd been introduced as a guy who randomly met Dolores and was decent to her. The show pulled a 360 on us.

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And that's just bad storytelling, IMO.
 
Yeah, it tries to present a status quo, but the problem is that the narrative isn't reliable. Isn't it any wonder why people are having trouble following the show when they pull stuff like this? It keeps contradicting itself.
 
I think a key problem here is that wondering if the hosts have achieved sentience is a lot more interesting - in the heady sense, at least - than seeing what they do once they definitely have it. (Much like wondering if Neo was indeed The One turned out to be a lot more interesting than watching him be The One.) If the hosts gain self-awareness only to become “destroy all humans” Terminators, that could make for a fun action series told from the human perspective, but they’d cease to be interesting as layered characters.

On the other hand, if the hosts gain sentience and become more or less indistinguishable from humans, in that they’re equally capable of malice and beneficence, they can continue to deepen as characters, but that direction leads away from the kind of big, heady sci-fi concepts the showrunners gravitate to. Hosts can either develop consciences and rebel against their more ruthless peers (the Dolores/Teddy dynamic was one of S2’s stronger subplots), or they pretty much become humans with machine parts (like the Dolores-Charlotte bot who decides that being a Real Mom is more pleasant than being a murder-spy).

With S1, the showrunners had a season that was both philosophically heady and psychologically rich. Rather than allowing the tone of the subsequent seasons to evolve, however, they keep trying to cram philosophical headiness into their stories of complex characters, and the results keep getting messier.
 
Yeah, I'd kind of prefer if they were to go back to simpler writing, Not everything needs to be complex, as long as they touch on the general ideas. I feel like much of what they're trying to say is lost among the complexity.
 
Serveaux said:
There was never any "simpler writing" on Westworld to go back to.
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While this is true, I would argue that Seasons 2 and 3 were more straightforwardly written than Season 1, even though the themes and structure of those two seasons were no less complicated and complex than the first.
 
Serveaux said:
There was never any "simpler writing" on Westworld to go back to.
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Of course there was. The overall story of S1 is obvious by the end of the first episode, and can be easily summed up in a single sentence: "The hosts are gaining consciousness, and when they do, 'these violent delights [will] have violent ends.'" There were reveals along the way (the split timeline/old William, Arnold and Bernard's history, the extent of Ford's planning), obviously, but they all supported that general direction, and that's where the season ended up.

In S2, however, Dolores was out to exterminate all humans, except for when she bafflingly spared old William, and Maeve was looking for her daughter, and Bernard was dealing with self-inflicted (?) amnesia and generally just wandering around. And then at the end of S2, Dolores still seemed pretty bent on mass murder, but also brought Bernard into the real world, because... it was the sporting thing to do? There wasn't a clear direction beyond the prospect of hosts getting off the island. And then the post-season tag was laughably nonsensical. (Even if its old William is a bot not previously shown on the series, why would anyone be wanting to replicate human old William's character for "fidelity"?)

Then in S3, Dolores has overcome most of her murderousness between seasons, and is now fighting to dismantle the Evil LinkedIn society because Control is Bad, but she's also guiding Caleb along her grand plan by feeding him information in bits and pieces, and Maeve is now fighting Dolores, because if she does, someone will make her a version of her daughter again, maybe? And William is institutionalized, and Bernard and Stubbs are wandering around, and Dolores-Hale is still pretty murder-y, but also wants to be a Real Mom... it's a bit of a mess. And instead of contending with his part in all the goings-on, old William is just up and killed in a bunker, and now there's a William murder-bot. Yay?

If you don't see the drift away from simpler writing in terms of narrative progression in the above... :shrug:
 
^ And there was that one episode in Season 2, I believe the one featuring Akecheta's backstory, which was very straightforward in its approach, and it was a highlight for me because it had a much stronger story as a result. That episode felt quite powerful and beautifully done. It made me made want more of that type of storytelling. But the producers seem to feel the show needs to be complex. It gets a bit much for me to follow at times.

Granted, there are some shows that make their complexity work, but when your subject matter is already complicated enough, you don't need to make your stories overly complex. Just get your ideas across, and they'll speak for themselves.
 
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I miss the complexity of the first season, which was far and away the best across the board. That story was the reason for the series.
 
Season 2 tried to outsmart/outdo Season 1 and ended up hurting itself. Season 3 was about as straight forward as you can get with Westworld.
 
I just watched The Winter Line (episode 3x02) for the first time since it originally aired, and while David Benioff and Daniel Weiss' cameo didn't make me angry the way that it did when I watched the episode for the first time, I do think that giving them said cameo was an ill-advised decision on the part of Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy.
 
Oh, that's just silly. It's just a cameo, one that I found amusing. If you're getting angry over it, then you're taking this show way too seriously.
 
Aragorn said:
Season 2 tried to outsmart/outdo Season 1 and ended up hurting itself.
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Yeah, see that's what I'm talking about. They doubed-down on the complexity in season 2 and lost sight of what made season 1 so good. Hint: it wasn't the complexity. The problem for me with season 3 is that it began to feel pointless after season 2's messy story.
 
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