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

the board knows what this place is for

btw we can have a meeting now it's fine

god that last scene was soooo tedious and drawn-out, doesn't bode well for further attempts at that sort of thing

I thought it was some of the best acting Jeffrey Wright's gotten to do so far! And Anthony Hopkins being horrifying. It was certainly more fun than that confederates & ghost nation nonsense.

it's fun following along at home and ending every one of hopkins' lines with "clariiiiissssse"

my god this show is bad, what a spectacle

the sexy young executive, the most obvious reveal ever

at least bernard being a bot excuses his terrible dead child storyline

I GUESS

You have to check for hopkins' storyline tropes to find the bots

And escape (watching) westworld

Game of Thrones credit sequence: mechanical mapworld comes into being before your eyes.

Vinyl credit sequence: an LP comes liquidly into being before your eyes.

Westworld credit sequence: various biobots come liquidly into being before your eyes.

The Crown credit sequence: molten metal liquidly becomes a crown before your eyes.

I think we've found the MMteens' dominant visual cliché. It's the new teal & orange.

i like the credit sequence. it's not about the 3D printing eye candy, it's about the piano. when the bot fingers first touch the piano it represents the hosts impersonating culture and speech and creativity. it's music that already existed (like a narrative/storyline in the park), and now they're reproducing it. then there's that shot where it reveals that it's a player piano, and then bot hands lift off the keyboard slowly while it continues playing, followed by the shot of the player piano roll. that's alluding to the growing sentience of the hosts, the knowledge of what's under the hood and their true roles in the theme park: the music is already written and will be played regardless, they're just window dressing to make it seem more "real", etc etc

i guess all of that is obvious but i still think it makes for a more interesting credit sequence then, say, house of cards

despite all that i'm really starting to dread watching this show. everyone around me loves it and were blown away by the last episode and i can't even force myself to like it on the Lost level right now.

better intro sequence would just be the video for All is Full of Love, straight up, no edits, with "WESTWORLD" tacked on at the end

Do we think that Ford was building a host Theresa down there in the basement?

o god probably

we do think that, to the degree that we can be arsed to think about this show at all

I've watched the first two episodes of this. It's good, but boy is it slow... Not the plot or the action but just... I dunno, I found myself getting itchy and/or tired of waiting for it to move on. Does it pick up?

it picks up and gets very bad

I'm still into it. I cannot explain why in any convincing way. Maybe I'm just a sucker for AI stories.

entertaining and dimwitted; i thought the big twist was pretty well executed.

funny how the nature of HBO shows is such that murder (OH SORRY SPOILERS) seems like really low stakes in a conflict.

what used to set HBO apart was how well its shows dramatized people struggling as individuals in a particular organization with its own rules and prerogatives (the mob, cops/gangs, a lawless town). even the Leftovers was at its best when in that mode (how do we live together in a world with different rules). WW is more concerned with 'mystery' in a basic sense, tune in next week etc

wright is so good, can't take any objections here

boy william really went for it didn't he. what a dope.

Karl - I respect your deep metaphorical reading: What I don't get is: why would they 3d print a fucking piano? Why not just use one of the like thousands of existing pianos?

I get why you make a personbot; those are needed because otherwise you'd have all kinds of consent problems, what with the frequency with which guests want to fuck and/or kill them. Reproducibility, reparability, comparative disposability. It's nice that they make horsebots too, for some of the same reasons. Birds? Uh, well, sure, make birdbots too, what the hell.

If piano strings are so scarce in the distant future that they need to extrude/spray them out of high-tech nozzles, fine, I guess. But is that also how they get chairs, wood, glass, whiskey, guns? At some point wouldn't it make more sense just to buy and have actual stuff?

idk if there are thousands of existing faux-1800s player pianos

If you wanted an exact replica of a 19th century piano w/o wear and tear you could just punch the details into the printer instead of hauling some antique shop piano into space or wherever

They have wood and they have metal. Someone could make a piano the usual way.

Can't wait for the Westworld character who's the equivalent of Arthur Dent complaining that the replicator can't make tea that tastes like tea

why would they 3d print a fucking piano? Why not just use one of the like thousands of existing pianos?

my one remaining wish for this world, this westworld, is that they resolve this mystery at the very end of the last episode of the series, just before dramatically cutting to the final credits, with no music.

knowledge of pianomaking vanished during a data back-up in 2076

You know, this whole "Arnold and I built the park together" thing... two dudes, or one dude and his robotic apprentice?

"arnold is what i call me left ball mate" --anthony hopkins, final line final ep west world

imo arnold was real and anthony hopkins is the left ball

fiiiiiiinally caught up to this show after spending the whole run being 1-2 episodes behind (also apparently HBO Go starts hosting episodes the actual minute they finish airing on TV?? who knew!!). The real winner of this show are (were) Bernard's impeccable suits.

is there a real bernard somewhere? you think HR could have looked this up. am i dumb for asking? yes.

true bernard is stylin xp (love jeffery wright generally altogether)

OK what the hell this got renewed for a second season. WHAT IS THE SECOND SEASON GOING TO BE ABOUT

a new expansion pack

only three episodes left in the season!

at this rate we need a second season to figure out the other half of what's going on other than minor corporate shenanigans and an off-kilter android designer

did I miss something or are we still technically up in the air about whether Elsie is alive

no clue as yet

this show is lowkey bad but also immensely entertaining

idk I have seen what else ppl watch on tv and this isn't that bad

like are you going to watch two episodes of "how i met your mother" or like an episode of "orange is the new black" and unflinchingly say you better spent your time

I'd say some highbrow elitist thing about reading a book but I have read (or at least started) some really bad books

The real winner of this show are (were) Bernard's impeccable suits.

OTM

had this same conversation

feel like this show is spectacularly bad in a way that a lesser show cldnt hope to achieve

anthony hopkins performance feels like a protest against the show itself

so... what happened to Elsie?

i hope it ends with the protagonist finding philly at the edge of the park and becoming a mcpoyle bro

i mean, i like watching it very much, hence lowkey bad rather than high. the dialogue is often objectively bad, and the seriousness with which it takes itself is both truly not made for these hyperironic days and at times difficult to easily swallow

so I guess Bernard is an Arnold-bot then

i was stoked on the mystery of the first couple eps but after that it just seemed like they were all "lets do everything in the world all at once"

i was pumped about the show early on but i have to admit that when there were oldtimey piano covers of johnny cash, rolling stones, AND soundgarden in the first episode i got a really bad feeling

ha good call