WestWorld: ...Where nothing can possibly go worng!

OK goddamnit, I'm in for the season.

$40,000 a day huh?

lol Sufjan

There's still been no real anchoring time evident has there? I mean only times have been relative. Ed Harris storyline already being 30 years old, Anthony Hopkins having set the park up a certain amount of time ago. So could be 30 years or upwards away from now, just needs a time line where life like seeming androids are invented and computer memory has somewhat advanced.

Otherwise main points of technology are that hand held device related to the office landscape.

So still wonderig when it is actually set, though not sure how relevant to the story that is

Hoping the Julian Jaynes allusions are going to be a recurring theme!

uh, was that the smoke monster I heard?

they named it Arnold

fantheory where westworld is secretly revealed to be a prequel to lost and the island is the ruins of a theme park gone wrong

My theory is that westworld is just an adjunct to Wally world

going back a bit, i thought it was pretty clearly telegraphed that the boy Ford talks to in the desert is himself as a child (both British, both costumed in white shirts and black pants; the talk about the remark "both" their fathers made about boredom). not sure why he would make a host of himself

the fact that we don't get to see "arnold" in flashback suggests to me that arnold either doesn't actually exist, or that arnold is someone we've already been introduced to.

i'm a little puzzled about dolores' disappearing-reappearing gun.

she's glitching, for sure

tbh i have had those days

I saw that as rapidly flipping back and forth between the memories of all the variations on that scenario that she's lived through.

Super into this btw, which I did not expect.

did not expect to hear "Pissed up in SE1" on the piano roll this week.. the show is constantly bringing a smile to my face. will Wyatt's crew hurt the new guest? was Teddy tortured, or....?

really weird feelings about the implied rape revenge dynamic going on here

This is pretty neat

http://www.polygon.com/tv/2016/10/17/13306082/westworld-dolores-bioware-npc

This season is going to be one long MIB origin story.

I scanned this thread a bit before watching the first episode and was waiting for Michael Ian Black to show up.

I was waiting for Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones

what the hell maze game

Good to know that in the future bucket wheel loader technology hasn't changed one bit.

Also we seem to have gotten an answer to a question I had about whether 100% of the life in the park was artificial - Ford says he and Arnold were responsible for every blade of grass - but how does the ecosystem work then?

it was rhetorical

Does Delos have other themed parks juxtaposed to Westworld in this? The space they have seems vast as it is.

In the movie there were other theme parks--one of them Ancient Rome--but nu-WW runners say this isn't the case here (though they have lied before)

I'm currently a host in Midwestworld. We're self-aware that this is a simulation but it's mundane enough that I just kind of deal with it.

I don't think it was rhetorical. I think the ecosystem really is supposed to be fully self-contained and artificial.

going back a bit, i thought it was pretty clearly telegraphed that the boy Ford talks to in the desert is himself as a child (both British, both costumed in white shirts and black pants; the talk about the remark "both" their fathers made about boredom)

patron sailer completely otm, think this is meant to be clear

i didn't pick that up at all.

this is holding my interest but i'm kind of planning on it getting ropy and stupid pretty quickly here. i feel like it's doling out its secrets in irritatingly small pieces but i guess that's the form innit.

it's unclear to me in a not-pleasing way exactly what kind of diagnostic alerts and real-time monitoring the managers have. you'd think if there was a set procedure for dealing with hosts that start to have strange ideas, then something like thandie newton discovering her earlier drawings of hazmat men would set off alarm bells.

otoh i like the idea that the software for fake-consiousness is so complex that they are stuck w/ using the conversational 'interface' and limited logs to figure out what they host was 'thinking'

i don't think the show has really captured what a game-player's mentality is, the good guy dork and evil brosexual are a snooze. there's something about a double consciousness that doesn't have much to do with "morality" -- wanting to really enjoy and get into 'character' as part of an immersive experience, but at the same time level up, acquire shit, maximize your time, see the outer limits of the design, fuck with the rules, etc. the show is def too self-serious to be all that insightful about how ppl behave in sims and what that might mean.

the scene between hopkins and the danish manager was pretty tense and unsettling but idk corporate conflict between R&D and bean-counters is not usuall so operatic. it all seemed a little unprofessional if u ask me.

The quest to find Wyatt
- Secret origin of nice guy gunslinger who previously had no real backstory
- Black hat's quest finds tattooed snake woman who is searching for Wyatt
- Wyatt has some demon cult, the native americans have figures of the WW technicians that resemble Hopi kachina dolls and some backstory that they view them as walking between worlds

The quick cut from the revelation snake lady's plan is to bust into the prison to black hat being on the prison transport was something I didn't quite catch originally. A prison break always happens but it's triggered early (with the exploding cigar gag!)

"Where are you from?" "Same as you, don't you remember?"
camera pans down to little girl's sketch in the dirt of the maze pattern
orion's belt -- it's not orion's belt, but the lines and dots look like they could be laid over the maze as a map with waypoints

"a world where you can do anything you want -- except die"
who is it that really can't die? the guests can't be killed, but the hosts are repaired, repurposed, or put in storage

desert hills aren't 100% safe regardless what the robots are supposed to do. maybe the guy just tripped or drowned or something.

I hope for a multi-season mystery of what happened to arnold, then they reveal he accidentally tripped and hit his head on a rock. Or maybe it was auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Arnold is Dolores you guys

Can't spell Dolores Abernathy without A R N O L D

I hope for a multi-season mystery of why in the name of fuck they leave the bullets inside the hosts sometimes. Maybe they'll leave it completely unanswered!

Didn't get how a request for explosive use was communicated. & is that something that happens every time a guest improvises an apparently spontaneous plan with danger involved.

Just caught one of the story moderators or whatever the HQ job is called responding to the call & giving ok.

I guess that was just to communicate that THEY ARE WATCHING EVERYTHING

But I guess they are NOT ACTUALLY WATCHING EVERTYTHING if Thandie Newton can bury all those pictures without being noticed

Is taht down to her being a host not a guest. & they've only been expecting hosts to follow pre-programmed storylines that they know the parameters of for the main part.
BUt looks like AI is becoming stronger even if it is just old programmes corroding and running into each other which isn't a way I thought those things worked. Certainly not to take on a life of their own.
But maybe I'm thinking of things in a more binary way than things will turn out to be. But I thought that was still the basic model idea for programming anyway.

They're not watching everything, just the guests.

That's not true. It's also been shown that they watch the hosts to check if they're deviating from their loops. The logistics of running the park seem all over the place though, bascially whatever's required to fit the (show's) plot

last week stumble, this week faceplant. four episodes i told u

WW has the feel of one of those quickly vanished post-Lost shows from a few years ago (like Alcatraz) but one that sat in development and had a lot of money and stars thrown at it

Was brusque scando business woman scratching her nose while mentioning that she was sitting in the same chair she sat in when she visited with her parents meant to be a hint that she's a robot

What if all the guests and staff are robots and all the hosts are human

or something

This feels a lot better than those post-Lost shows (not just because of the $$$ and actors)

I guess they didn't have the awesome feature of making us guess if x is a robot or not

But, yeah, the early maze conversation between ERW and Jeffery Wright did push the limits of "I'm going to be pointlessly vague about this to maintain suspense"

If you're interested, Vincenzo Natali has posted a handful of his storyboards for the recent episode on twitter: https://twitter.com/Vincenzo_Natali/status/790859254517395458

xp but also killed the suspense by sketching a lot of the mystery out immediately, it's already on action thriller rails

they are p meta upfront gamey about the rails tho so maybe there has to a deeper level to this etc zzz

That's not true. It's also been shown that they watch the hosts to check if they're deviating from their loops

That mostly seems to be the dumb QA team seeing if a robot has literally wandered off, not running brain diagnostics or anything.

I hope for a multi-season mystery of why in the name of fuck they leave the bullets inside the hosts sometimes.

Tbf they did have that little voice-over implying that the techs were rushed because QA wanted her back out right away.

At least they're making stabs at plausibility.

i like this show mainly because I like the actors and the set pieces but there are some annoying internal inconsistencies that don't make sense like, what is a day for the hosts vs what is a day for the guests? don't the hosts wake up every morning and repeat the same thing? then why don't the guests see the hosts acting out the same shit daily? and when do they clear the robot bodies away and clean them up? etc.

show is hella dumb but watching anyway

well yeah sex robots

like, there seemed to be a point where evan rachel wood is with Bernard that happens in the middle of the night when she's apparently also with dude from House of Cards by the campfire. Did they just come take her out of the scene? doesn't that screw with the sense of reality for the guests?