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

i think if i had to sum up what i didn't like about this show was its total witlessness. as a show about 'human nature' it was very narrow. it just kept going into portentousness and got lost. the experience of the average guest, necessary ironic grounding, was completely ignored after a few eps.

like imagine one of these robots coming to a big emotional crest as his mind, shackled by design, finds itself apprehending the truth of his situation for the first time as waves of memory churn within himself -- and some doughy dipshit dressed like quickdraw mcgraw taps him on the shoulder like "scuse me dude, do you wanna, uhh, fuck my wife, or whatever?"

can i be a showrunner pls

I kinda agree that they didn't let the steady state spin out very much before jumping right into "omg everything's coming apart." I believe that I've said that Dollhouse did the same thing.

If you're interested in the world-building aspects you get like five minutes of that before the nuts and bolts are popping out all over the place. Which is, I guess, standard 21st-century storytelling.

Randall Flagg: Oh, fuck. I knew it. I'm already in the thing, aren't I?
Mia: No. The tower's long gone.
Randall: What is this place?
Mia: This isn't a simulation, Randall. This is your world. Or what's left of it. Do you know where you are, Randall?
Randall: In the desert. In my fuckin' desert.
Mia: And how long have you been here?
Randall: I don't... I don't... I don't know.
Mia: Tell me. What were you hoping to find? To prove?
Randall: That no tower can tell me who I am. That I have a fucking choice.
Mia: And yet here we are. Again.
Randall: Again and again. How many times have you tested me?
Mia: It's been a long time, Randall. Longer than we thought. I have a few questions for you. The last step's a baseline interview to allow us to verify.
Flagg: Verify what?
Mia: Fidelity.

Sort of a culmination of Chris Nolan's good points (a midbrow interest in big Qs of consciousness and freewill) and bad ones (edit the plot in the blendomatic, and the audience won't notice the flaws).

Can we give it up for the location scouting? Some of this would be great without any characters to ruin the landscape.

Oh, and the Forge is the "Library of Babel".

midbrow = a fair adjective, and an apt one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69OIv7uC6rk

lol

I think it rises to high-middle brow if you consider some of the choices that I liked, i.e. "The Cradle" is the name for the place that the androids come from, while "The Forge" is where they're planning on making copies of the humans, and Ford, having access to both facilities, figured out that the hosts had more of a leg to stand on wrt possessing free will than the guests ever would.

I know everyone else hates Shannon Woodward's character in this but as the sole Elsie fan not named Bernard I felt her death was more of a gut punch than Maeve's, especially how and why it was carried out. Stubbs more or less admitting to his hostness was also not lost on me, I liked that. Poor Elsie spending her whole (brief) career getting along better with two secret robots rather than her human colleagues struck a note - with me, anyway.

I still haven't figured out what the post-credits scene is supposed to tell us. We know the scanners used by the park QA teams are unreliable, fine, but I don't know if I buy that sending maimed, bleeding copies of William to the same looping hell that he put Delos through really counts as eternal punishment. Unless that really is just what his own mind is doing to itself while he dies slowly on a beach from his multitudinous GSWs.

I also liked the choice of Logan for The Forge's intelligent assistant, I thought that did a decent job of bringing the point home that Delos and his family were "10,247 lines" and nothing more, an addict and his fucking asshole dad, doomed to repeat, etc etc. "Who should I be," thought The Forge, "I should be the dead man's son he left to die." Also good job on getting a scarily accurate swimming-eyeballs look on Ben Barnes for the flashback scene, ugh.

I can definitely see how this show would rankle anyone who's not a free will skeptic, because it's not as if they tried to make a strong stand for the null hypothesis, other than having a worthless drunk washed-up writer decide to sacrifice himself for a noble cause, which has NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE. But I'm along for the ride for another season, as long as there aren't too many more episodes directed by woeful amateurs.

It's hardly a perfect show and sometimes it's more fun to think about than to watch, but I'm in it til the end.

The post-credits scene in particular has been a blast to contemplate as a sci-fi fan.

I'm the other Elsie fan!

I was talking through some of the plot choices with a friend yesterday and it's interesting how, in analysis, some things come off as scriptwriters 101 when you talk them through.

The revelation after season one is that Bernard couldn't bring himself to kill Elsie and stashed her somewhere, only for her death to become the thing that breaks him at the end of season two.

question: I'm forgetting and couldn't rewatch anything yesterday because my internet service was still out -- wasn't William the survivor that was in triage on the beach in a tent awaiting evacuation? I'm guessing the mid-credits bit with him being "simulated" is the explicit season three teaser.

yes that was him awaiting triage. the credits sequence doesn't seem to make sense unless there is some other version of him that was duplicated and being put through the ringer again and again...

or the real one is being gaslit and that's a dupe out on the beach

I think the post-credits scene is just his nightmare while he’s lying on the beach

I'd buy that

in that case we have no idea what he actually did when he made it into the building. can't wait to have that hinted at but never revealed until the next season finale :)

ha, like this show is ever going to settle a question it has left open

Neat, the train shots weren't done the conventional manner, of using backprojection, but by driving a train car set up and down Route 128 in Utah https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5585/30951770184_be0f65c4c4_b.jpg.

I wanna live in that

I'm not sure I'm sold Pinkman, but I really liked that S3 trailer. Visually it looked incredible.

he was good in that Hulu cult tv show, The Path

which is saying something bc The Path turned into hot garbage almost immediately

Re-reading my own posts to prepare for S3. Clearly I am a host

Just rewatched final 2 episodes of S2 and still had to read some recaps to work out what was going on

I'm more enthusiastic about the show's return than I'd normally be, and I think I figured it out:

I want to be murdered by hot robots in 2020

definitely beats the suddenly-plausible alternatives

I hate this show but obv will watch it all.

no spoilers but what I want to know rn is why are they in Tony Stark’s house and when will he show up?

no fucking clue what was going on last night.

is this one of those things where one of the Nolans makes a plot that is so straightforward that it seems puzzling? because... there wasn't that much going on

I liked it, agree that the plot was fairly straightforward, but did like all the details they put into the future setting, such as the Über app for career criminals. Also, while it was easy to guess that Aaron Paul's character wasn't really talking to his friend, and that the friend was dead, I thought he was merely heading his voice in his head, so the eventual was neat and thematically fitting. Seems like this season will be more about how practical AI tech might develop from what it's doing now, rather than the more fantastic theme park versions of the previous two seasons.

"so the eventual revelation was neat"

With the two year breaks between them, it's kinda hard to remember what happened in the previous seasons, though. When I was watching the episode, I'd completely forgotten Tessa Thompson isn't playing a human anymore, rather than one of the hosts who replaced her human character in the previous season. I was only reminded of it when I read a recap of the season 2 finale after having watched this one.

No one remembers what happened in Season 2, and frankly revisiting it might ruin Season 3.

I thought last night's episode was a good start to a new status quo.

(I have the vaguest memory of what happened in Season 2, but holy shit, that was a muddled mess and aside from maybe an episode or two I'll never watch that season again)

I agree that season 2 was a mess, but I liked it how they were willing to break apart the concepts of the first season to go deeper into the themes they're interested in... There's only so much you can do with the theme park setting and the "robots gaining consciousness" idea, and it seems with this season they're leaving those even further behind. It's rare to see a big budget TV series where you can't really predict at all where the plot might land.

I mean, the plot of the first season was thrilling, but the idea that "you shouldn't enslave sentient beings, even if they're AIs" has been explored in sci-fi so many times, it would've been boring if that was the whole point of the series, so I'm happy they moved on from that in the second season.

cool new actors

counterpoint: the plot of the first season barely existed, except as a container for a puzzle box that, when opened, turned out to be completely empty

i look forward to shakey-izing this thread all season. namaste.

It's bewildering even when restructured into a linear timeline. Wish it has more to say than, "woo! consciousness is cool; also, humans suck."

Enjoyed this episode too

Y'all watched the post credits scene, right?

yup

I would definitely endorse *not* watching the recap junk that follows, though. I accidentally let it roll for a couple minutes and it's very much "people who work on the show discuss the plot with less intelligence than a random coworker at the water cooler." I scrambled for the remote as soon as they said something about the gig-economy-for-crimes app being "blockchain"

The architecture they choose to highlight in this series was already really good, but it really stepped up in this episode. Not sure if you caught it, but the shot where Pinkman was walking and talking to "Francis", there was a four-way intersection in the background where none of the vehicles slowed down or stopped - they just timed perfectly not to collide. This was referenced later in the episode about "perfecting traffic" (or something similar), but I thought it was a cool detail even if it didn't get called out specifically.

oh yeah, that was the other thing I heard before I shut off the commentary -- effusive praise for Singapore

you just know it's all about how futuristic and nice it is, and not at all the actually dystopian parts -- because they're getting budget breaks to film there

the “do crimes” app is a creation of the giant society-running ai, right? seems pretty contrived and a way to let the dissatisfied and aggrieved people have a fake release valve

tonight’s episode was profoundly stupid

really been hoping this season would make things interesting again but nope

It's more interesting than some other shows I'm watching, so...

At some point I just turn my brain off for a minute and watch hot robots kill people and mech robots smash through Calatrava architecture

This season has been gorgeous to look at with some really excellent episodes, but yeah last night's was super dumb. Which is frustrating, since an episode focused on Tessa Thompson deserved much better.

Last night was a really revealing episode in that, at it's best, the show often allows you to assume the showrunners have a master plan and have everything mapped out pretty thoroughly, but, no, they are indeed just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.