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

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

they had nine inch nails in episode 5 and that basically made me forgive all this show's faults tho

lol elmo, I just asked about Elsie, too

I think the implication so far is that Elsie got taken out by Bernard and he doesn't consciously remember it because it's bad

maybe elsie got taken by a diff faction, feels right

something about the physical laws of danger don't make sense to me (read: shit is incoherent)

the confederados shot a gatling gun at the train, shredding the car walls. but presumably guest william is supposed to be impervious to those bullets; maybe thumped a little but not seriously injured. eh ok. we saw one of the bullets (pulled out of maeve) and it had some kind of odd screw shape? is that meant to signify "tech here" and everything gets handwaved after? i guess i'd appreciate if the show didn't stretch it too much past that...

MIB setting off some minor explosions was presented as something special; something approved from the office for a preferred customer. but then later on we've got a lot of shit blowing up for everyone, nbd.

as a commentary on video games it's got a glaring oversight: missions where you're totally ok but have to protect a vulnerable NPC (MIB with teddy, william with dolores) are annoying as hell and no fun at all. i would expect a player to want to know if a storyline has graduated a character into special or semi-protected status, so you don't feel cheated if they get shot unexpectedly! esp after trekking days into the desert with them...

yes i do feel like a chump for putting this much thought into it

itsnotthatdeep.jpg

idk, bullets deform when they hit things

Anyone read any Jonathan Hickman comics? This is starting to remind me of that. No characters, no free will, just a very sophisticated diagram. I'm still enjoying it though.

That said Bernard being a toaster and Anthony Hopkins being EVIL are about the least mindfucky twists I could imagine

the best show on tv right now is Ash vs Evil Dead btw.

also, what happened to Marti (Bojana Novakovic) ?

gave up on this

It's still fun but it's definitely petered out, expectations lowered etc.

Bernard at the end perfectly captured hoe I felt at 3am last Tuesday

This took a turn toward 90s NBC fodder in ep 6 but I'm still hooked

Wonder if Bernard's wife was just cg and ai or if she is a bot locked in a room somewherr.

MIB setting off some minor explosions was presented as something special; something approved from the office for a preferred customer. but then later on we've got a lot of shit blowing up for everyone, nbd.

He was disrupting the scripted storyline. They had to trigger pyrotechnic effects that weren't already in the storyline. The other explosions are all planned, built in to the environment, expressly designed so as to never risk harm to guests.

the confederados shot a gatling gun at the train, shredding the car walls. but presumably guest william is supposed to be impervious to those bullets; maybe thumped a little but not seriously injured.

Hey, this is why you "print" a piano instead of just building one, why everything is constructed to purpose from synthetic components. Ford and his hosts/employees can have complete control over how things react to stimuli, whether they pop squibs and die, allow a bullet to pass through and hit a host, or stop it so it doesn't hit a guest. The behavior of the cover in a firefight is variable, just like hosts have different scripts to respond to the attitude of guests.

QED BLAM

man y'all are harsh on this show

OK, I haven't been following this thread at all, because we literally just finished the second episode, and I doubt I can convince my wife to keep going without good reason. The acting, particularly the (what I assume to be) humans is just so bad, and the dialogue is worse - or should I say, "The fucking dialogue is fucking worse, fuck, what the fuck?!" And there are just so many (not good) questions we have about the very setup, let alone mystery or motive or why the fucking company is fucking lit and decorated like a fucking dark, bleak bomb shelter, fuck!

So, if we stick with it will we be rewarded, or are the first couple of eps kind of what you see is what you get?

Rewarded is a strong word, but I do think that the show improved a lot in episodes three and four, once a lot of the exposition is out of the way.

This is more of a turn-my-brain-off, popcorn chomping type of show for me. I appreciate that it's trying to be profound/intelligent, but it's mainly a fun watch, nothing revolutionary.