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

Dollhouse was the same way. There were interesting bits of problem-solving and each mission was its own little world; that was plenty diverting enough for a half-dozen episodes in the mode of a procedural. But of course, to generate the overarching conflict narrative they always hurry to introduce the equivalent of OMG-the-AI-has-achieved-consciousness, OMG-the-robots-are-developing-autonomy.

Same storytelling formula shapes almost every sci-fi thing, because television is a perpetual motion machine and no one can ever just be happy and nothing can just keep going. You're not going to see Romeo and Juliet living in a nice brick house with some cute kids.

In the first episode they imply management has much grander ambitions than entertainment. I assume this is explored?

season 2 a robot runs for president

the twist: the other candidate is also a robot

don't blame me, I voted for the good robot

This is really addictive but not exactly satisfying so far. Hoping it learned some lessons on how NOT to do things from LOST. Will keep watching. Definitely a lot of potential.

― circa1916, Monday, October 31, 2016

Yeah it's all very *hmm mysterious* but 5 eps in there's still very little sense of goals or stakes. Nothing we're hoping for on a character's behalf, nothing that could be snatched away to dash those hopes... Establishing stakes and objectives and honest to god characters was something that LOST actually did quite effectively right from the start.

Just watched first ep of this. Cannot WAIT for the rest. In it converge many of my wheelhouse genres: wake up / start again movies like Run Lola Run, Edge of Tomorrow etc; the pathos of sentient AI a la Akta Manniskor i.e. Humans; and just general pulp SF and OH MAN is this some pulp. I like how almost every line of dialogue between Birgitte and the storyline guy has a gratuitous "fucking" in there. "There's someone on the FUCKING phone for you." None of the setup around the company who makes Westworld is believable in the slightest - yes, sure, you have horses walking around on immaculately vacuumed, spotlit carpets, you have principals taking enormous, company-risking decisions on a whim - Jeffrey Wright is terrible and his character appears to be an idiot - but all of it somehow doesn't dent my fondness for it. Probably because all the "in-world" stuff is so delicious, Ed Harris is fantastic (and tho I haven't seen E2 yet he seems like an obvious candidate to be the actual good guy?). I mean in REALITY (??) obviously the factory cranking out people/horses etc is piling them up in musty, sawdust-covered outbuildings like cordwood, rather than placing them delicately on wheeled stools in moodily-lit antechambers. I guess that's "atmosphere". Anyway I'd expire of happiness to see an Akta Manniskor crossover episode. Get Thandie Newton in one of these:

http://skreened.com/render-product/n/o/j/nojnawzsyazafagagqdc/image.skreened-t-shirt.camo-green.w460h520b3z1.jpg

In the 2nd ep we learn that Thandie's bot is getting long in the tooth, can't keep up. Ominously, her guest satisfaction metrics are down. The "assholes in Narrative" made her more aggressive, but our young troubleshooter says all Thandie needs is to be more in sync with the guests, more aware of their desires. Well yes, but - how? A number of plots suggest themselves - can Thandie be made to figure out this sort of thing on her own? Can she be taught it? Will she fail, and take out her frustrations on her masters? But the troubleshooter just goes "bump up her acuity and perception by 1.5" - oh well that was easy. Westworld is RIDDLED with moments like this. Constantly fumbling around with the basic rules of itself.

idk I think the main conflict there actually is "can she start to do things outside the confines of the park before her performance is so bad they just shelve her"

xpost to Tracer, yeah, basically my thoughts exactly after the first ep. It's such a rich concept that there are a lot of places it can go, despite the (inevitable) shitty stuff getting in the way of telling a good story. Not least on that front the notion this can sustain a multi-season arc, but whatevs, maybe it can, let's see where it's going.

mh I don't think I've gotten that far yet

Basically everything "in-world" is terrific and the rest of it is basically there for me to wonder who is going to have sex with who, next

Hahaha lol is anyone actually as potty-mouthed as the company employees are on this show? (Apart from 11-year-olds away at summer camp, that is?)

"We'll be fucked if these poor assholes ever learn how to fucking dream"

Alright alright, easy fella..

depends on the job and workplace

I usually only talk like that around my family, eh

OK I'm bingeing this

I wish they'd GET ON with Ed Harris and His Deal! Maybe i'm spoiled by this modern golden era of Too Much Story but this dutiful checking in with each member of the cast.. pushing each one ahead two spaces... is making me antsy. It's like a Parcheesi player who gets all his pieces out right away and makes them each take turns advancing toward home. (I feel this way about The Water Knife too, which I'm reading right now) Sometimes you just gotta TAKE A PIECE ALL THE WAY!

Also.. what about these storylines? These "subtleties" that make people come back again and again? What stories do we actual see? We knows there's whores OK, there's alcohol, there's bounties, some gunfights... and that's it! It's as if they'd taken the already cartoonishly foreshortened collection of wild west activities in Red Dead Redemption and made it even less varied.

it's a spaghetti western with robots you can fuck i mean

xpost Water Knife is awesome, would make a great HBO series.

The first episode had a family on a family adventure. Does this come up more, kids in the park? Anyway, the storyline stuff is just lazy writer shorthand I think for their programming, because yeah, if the "story" is you just head into the hills and shoot a bad guy, or listen to/repeat the same dialogue again and again, how often would you want to pay for that? (Obviously Ed Harris for one has something else in mind.) Though is Disneyworld any less "scripted," in a sense? Regardless, no wonder Crichton went with dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, because a zoo where wild animals and instinct and random chaos leads to disaster takes less set-up and thinking.

And yeah, the gratuitous profanity was like watching (listening to?) some bad English as a second language b-movie where in lieu of good dialogue they just sprinkle in a lot of tough guy/gal cursing. But still, I'm cool with the premise so far. The robot stuff is spooky and haunting, but I'm a sucker for that. (Ex-Machina was robbed of ... something. People taking it seriously?)

xpost Sorry I don't mean in the show; I mean in the park they've built. I don't see the evidence of what Hopkins was saying to hotshot narrative douche-bloke.

I love the fact that nobody at the company seems to have the slightest clue how anything works, the entire enterprise with all its risk and danger and complexity is "one line of code" away from wreaking all havoc on everyone

NB The most generous spin I can put on the effacing of race politics in the park is that OF COURSE they'd whitewash historical race politics in a game for the idle rich

-- START LOOP 1 --

Jeffrey Beardbreath: "Sir, the hosts have been remembering fragments from previous loops"

Anthony Oldman: "Yes.. well... keep me up to date on that"

Birgitte Danesker: "Jeffrey you'd better get your fucking shit straight, you ass-hole!"

Jeffrey: "Give me a break mom"

Ed Harris kills someone else

-- END LOOP 1 --

etc

Speaking of the idle rich, an inordinate number of them appear to not be interested in playing any sort of game or immersing themselves in any sort of past or story, they just want to walk into the Mariposa bar and start slaughtering strangers pell-mell which seems like.. I dunno not the most interesting way to blow 20 Gs

i'm saying

Is everyone on ludes on this show? I swear to god somebody could tell Jeffrey/Bernard his house was on fire and he'd be like "interesting"

feel like they've written all the office people to talk as if they're holding back some secret about what they're up to but haven't figured out what that is yet.

Blond tattoo badass is the greatest

well I figured the dark secret was that they fuck the robots but that's apparently not allowed for the most part

lol at robot corpsefucker guy

Odd choice to use the full Gran Turismo V opening credits for each episode but I guess it works?

Seems to have found its feet but I better not have to wait around another 3 or 4 goddamn episodes to find out what that map is

Yeah the opening credits sequence is really shit, especially considering the amount of time they have been pissing about with this project for.

sorry to be dimm but how did Dolores find the gun in the dirt.. and then in her drawer (which it instantly disappeared from).. and then in the haystack?

Some people like to keep a gun hidden in every room

When she finds the gun it's evident that she's hearing a voice in her head telling her where to look. At that point we may suspect it's Bernard's voice; we are later led to believe it's Arnold's. But it can't have been buried by Arnold - it was just in the dirt and not wrapped in anything (which would be bad for a gun in any case, but it certainly wasn't there for 34 years). Perhaps Ford or Bernard planted it there.

It does seem to disappear in the drawer, and it definitely appears suddenly in her hand in the barn. She didn't draw it from a pocket or root around in the hay. I'm not sure about this, but it may also be the gun that happens to be in her hand quite suddenly in Pariah when she and William are escaping from the Confederados.

One explanation: Ford, at least, can freeze hosts. Maybe someone paused the action, buried the gun. Later, that someone paused Dolores to remove it from the drawer. Then later paused the action and placed the gun in her hand so that she could shoot whatsisface.

I just want to say I love the opening titles

Maybe they'll do more with this later but... For a park in which robot sex is such a major selling point you'd think there'd be some fantasy option in-between having sex with prostitutes (which is probably something these rich guys do in the real world already) and raping a ranch maiden.

There is: they can bonk the blonde who meets William at the train and shows him the wardrobe room.

I agree that the scarcity of women other than hos is noticeable, but then that may have been true of yr Old West as well.

don't forget the, er, "varied" (t0tes boring) delights of Pariah

all the imaginative shortcomings of the park i chalk up to shortcomings of the clientele: they have focus-grouped the shit out of this place and yes, that is in fact the only sort of desired sex that is statistically significant

by the way, anybody else slightly dreading meeting "the board"?

I think it's more likely that the producers, having set themselves up for the parcheesi strategy narrative you described above, don't have time to introduce other imaginative sexy stuff that isn't part of the stories we're already following. There's not that much time to do world-building with other guests in the park, like "Marti" the gunslinger lady in Ep 3 or the family in Ep 1, the drunk guy who shoots Teddy in Ep 4 or the dorks who approach the MIB in Ep 5 (I think)

There was one lady guest in an early episode that went off with a hostess. & there seemed to be others on the train.

I wonder how long William and Logan are gonna be there for. Other guests seem to do like a weekend or a few days and then get back to their lives (presumably fairly busy, because rich). If they're an Executive VP and part-owner of a thriving business, their storyline can't last multiple seasons. Ed in Black supposedly has an active foundation and presumably a profit-making business of some sort, yet he's spent most of his time for 30 years wearing a fucking cowboy hat and carving up robots for fun.

We watched "The Truman Show" the other week with the kids, and something occurred to me. Truman starts getting suspicious when things start going wrong in his simulated world, but ... who the fuck would watch a 24/7 hugely rated reality show where nothing ever changes, and everything/everyone is more or less the same day in, day out? That's the dead-end of a "scripted" (within the show) WestWorld: a park like that would only be appealing, not just for repeat business but also first-timers, if things went off-script and allowed for surprises at least once in a while. Otherwise it might as well be the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride. (Insert "Jurassic Park" quote here.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKK4KmDlj8U

Truman Show was good in first season

when it was called "Baby Cam" and everyone felt really bad about themselves for watching

when dolores finds the gun in the dirt, then in her drawer, etc., i am pretty sure she is remembering finding the gun there in the past.

the dead-end of a "scripted" (within the show) WestWorld: a park like that would only be appealing, not just for repeat business but also first-timers, if things went off-script and allowed for surprises at least once in a while. Otherwise it might as well be the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride

Yeah but you can't fuck the pirates of the Caribbean

Not officially anyway

Disneyworld: After Hours.

Anyway, that gets back to the aforementioned sticking point that the only reason someone would presumably prefer a lifelike robot prostitute to a real prostitute is that they can kill and abuse them. But it's crazy to think WestWorld is a park that courts families but look out, don't cross the river, that is where rich psychopaths fuck and torture and kill hookers, like, I dunno, the "Hostel" films. For that matter, why the hell would families with kids even give a shit about WestWorld? Why would a kid give a crap if there were lifelike robots and fake horses walking around acting all wild west, which is as easy to simulate in the real world as, well, they do on the show? Save the cash and go to some living farm or colonial Williamsburg or something.

Hmm, wonder if I'm soon going to have more problems with this show than I first assumed. I'll give it a couple more eps, for sure.

We don't know what the real world is like yet. Obviously despite massive advances in medicine, children still die. People still smoke and drink. There is VR, so not only could people go to a Colonial Williamsburg, they could go on the holodeck, but they still choose Delos Destinations, and sometimes the kids come along. Vegas.

If the "real world" has effectively cured all disease, what did Ed in Black's foundation save that dweeb's sister's life from?