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

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.

it was very much an episode that was meant to place certain characters in positions for further plot, with the Hale/William development bits that fell flat

idk, every show gets a few of these but it didn't do anything that exciting, even if I enjoyed a few moments

giant robot pulling a kool-aid man through the wall was nice

the theory I saw alluded to elsewhere that would be a goofy twist: there is no Serac, he's a creation of the Rehoboam AI that thinks he's the brother

oh god, that is what they're gonna do with Serac, isn't it? Seems so obvious

Mostly I've been liking this season for the visuals and the ideas they play with. It would be nice if those ideas could cohere into a story that makes sense but given previous seasons I don't expect it anymore. This season has shared a lot of similarities with Person of Interest, Nolan's previous show, which was also entertaining with some truly moronic plot turns and character decisions

OK, i confess, the classic JRPG story beat of “now we must fight our way into a secret base to get some clues from a schizophrenic AI” has me interested again

nice CAS drone action as well

really need emp-hardened cores on the hosts if they’re going to keep battling

At least last night's ep was super entertaining. Thought the Clementine fight at the beginning was pretty cool, though I'll admit to still being confused as to what exactly the Dolores/Musashi is supposed to be accomplishing.

Also why Musashi's old friend there that ended up beheading him said Delores was doing his image a disservice or whatever. Because really, she's so far removed from any personal motivation. Gotta have a badass line to reintroduce a character to the audience but otherwise I was all "what does she care?" Showrunners forgot this scene was way more complicated than the typical good guys slaughtering bad guys scenario maybe.

I think maybe the Nolan scripting issue is not explicitly reminding the audience of the plot twist.

All you have to know is that the Dolores that is currently Charlotte Hale has flipped, and has now leaked information on Musashi-Dolores, to Maeve’s team

there’s probably a really dumb essay to be written about the mind-body problem and how Maeve’s group are essentialists about the physical form and the Charlotte/Dolores character is fumbling through that idea

Oh I get what happened with Charlotte flipping, but I have no idea how Musashi-Dolores was working towards main Dolores' goal. Did I miss some exposition about his moves?

Fashion aside: I'd wear Delores's transforming dress if I had the body for it. Inspired by Hussein Chalayan (2013) or perhaps by way of Evan Hirsch (2019).

I do not know who shared this video to give them credit or know where it came from but what I do know is that I love this dress and @evanrachelwood works the hell out of it ✨#Westworld pic.twitter.com/hsfO1u8kZI

— Maks (@Maks_Allyn) April 27, 2020

Still watching and just about enjoying. The human characters in this have never been westworld's strong point and this season has just reaffirmed that, can there be anyone in the entire world that cares about Caleb?? This season has really soured me on maeve and at this point I'm generally satisfied with Dolores being awesome each week. Bernhard still the absolute yawniest worst.

Isn’t the entire point that no one has cared about Caleb as a person?

His mom did, but she was an outlier, so she got tooken

l meant anyone in the entire audience that cares that noone cares about Caleb

Everyone still watching this show is an outlier

Just catching up on this and wondering how the computer is able to cope with perfect physics simulation and AI indistinguishable from the real thing. But it gets overloaded reading the wikipedia page on imaginary numbers that any maths student understands by the end of 6th form ( ok maybe 1st year undergrad)?

But also I am enjoying the futuristic shit and explosions and attractive people being cool

I love that they pulled out the ol' "overload the AI with a paradox" trope. It's like the Wilhelm scream of robot/ai stories

I'm still enjoying this show as pulp cyberpunk, which is all it ever was anyway!

Seems like they had pretty good ingredients for this season, but somehow managed it terribly unexciting. I mean, there was cloned androids with fake identities, family drama, betrayals, crazy god-like AIs, revolutions, the apocalypse... But mostly it just boiled to two or three people having portentous discussions in empty spaces, repeating the same stuff about free will vs. determinism again and again. Was it really necessary to stretch all this to eight episodes when it could've been done in three?

Basically the only exciting thing in the finale was the cliffhanger scene promising a full host-human war, but that was already implied by the previous season's cliffhanger, and the only thing this season changed is that we found out Dolores didn't want a war after all, and instead the instigator is... another Dolores. So yeah, was it really worth a whole season to get here?

"but somehow managed to make it terribly unexciting"

And I get it that they wanted to make a point that collecting behavioural data on a massive level and using it to predict and manipulate the future actions of people makes them just as much puppets as the hosts were, and that's why Dolores sympathised with humans and wanted to set them free like she did with the hosts at the end of season 1... The first three episodes or so, where they introduced those points and showed how the future world runs were genuinely interesting, but then they just kept hammering those points in again and again for the rest of the season, and it got so boring,

There might be a war but it wouldn't be host-human! The entire point of the finale is that Dolores decided she wants a full world of coexistence

so there could be multiple factions, but the main thing now is Caleb/Maeve/maybe Bernard looking for that world where hosts and humans live together and whatever the hell the Hale one wants, which is probably bad

tbf William wanted war but he's the third faction at this point and he got clipped by Halores

I was talking specifically about what the Tessa Thompson version of Dolores wants, which was implied to be something other than peaceful coexistence. Why else would she have built a host version of the Man in Black version of William?

It appears there does still manage to be some extinction level event, or at least massive depopulation, because no matter how remote that desert motel was, presumably someone would have eventually grokked an inactive host sitting in the middle of one of their rooms during the, presumably, years or decades it took for Bernarnold to get coated in dust.

it’s a desert, if they left the window open that’s like one sandstorm later!

I kid, I kid

didn't watch this season yet, questions: 1) is it worth it and 2) is it the final one?

not really and no

yeah I had that feeling.

Sorry that was glib. I'm still watching it because it's pretty and the futurism stuff is cool. Everything else is pretty hard-to-defend.

It is pretty, I think it's worth it for the architecture porn this season. And honestly, one of the better near-future set and prop designs I've seen on TV lately. Thought the rideshare cars and drones were really cool looking.

It was funny how useless the riot control robot was in an actual riot situation

Agree that when it comes to production design, architecture, technology etc., this was one of the best-looking and most credible future predictions I've seen on TV (except for the silly evil AIs, I guess). They really put a lot of effort in all those details, too bad the plot didn't quite live up to it.

TBH, I think this season would've worked better as an independent series without the baggage from the previous seasons dragging down the main plot, which was mostly self-standing anyway. For example, is there really much point in dragging Ed Harris and Thandie Newton around, when pretty much all they got to do was rehash the same character moments they did last season, which had little to do with the AI plot?

I was less into the architecture as a matter of plot because they used a bunch of existing buildings that are very aspirational and one-offs that get used as “the future” all the time! Very pretty, though

You could argue the use of buildings with those signifiers unironically are a strong indicator from the get-go that we’re seeing a dystopia

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 was the only approach to this show and even then there were diminishing returns. It's one valuable service was revealing how bad Aaron Paul is at acting. He was Vince Vaughn in True Detective Season 2 level bad, just much less distinctive.

it was the slipping into batman voice whenever things got stressful that bugged me

Paul just played a host version of Jessie where they increased his aggression rating by 50% and decreased his Limp Bizkit rating 25%.

Couldn't think of a better place to post this incredible, wide-ranging interview with Thandie Newton, where she talks about...everything, pretty much. Here's the Westworld-specific part, probably the least incendiary bit of the whole thing but still worth excerpting:

In Westworld, your performance is so poignant, both ferocious and beautiful. Do you have conversations with the showrunners around the arc of the season or where you would like your character to go?
I like to stay sane about my position, which is that I am being employed to tell someone else’s story. Where I do have a degree of choice is in taking the role, but once I’m in, I’m a team player. I do have frustrations with Maeve, but that’s part of her story line.

What are some of those frustrations?
Well, season one, the evolution of this robot who then has the revelation that she’s not human, and that she had a past that involved a child, and the betrayal of that, and then using information to empower herself — it was such a powerful story. I’m not surprised that it hooked people in. And then the second and third season has Maeve with a different directive, but it’s not her own. She’s following other people’s leads, by and large. In the first season, she was driving, dominating, pretty straightforward. I think Maeve is a metaphor for the dispossessed in the world, and she’s become that kind of leader, but she’s not had a chance to lead, and I don’t think she necessarily should. She certainly doesn’t want to.

https://www.vulture.com/article/thandie-newton-in-conversation.html

This show was terrible, a more expensive version of some random SyFy series shot in Vancouver, but what kept me watching is the bizarre way the show clearly thinks of itself as good, and in some ways it instantiates the themes it clumsily keeps expositing; it is an artificial product built to provide cheap, repetitive pleasures that is slowly coming to concede it is not the real thing

It was distracting but also somehow great to cast Todd Chavez as a tragic hero and just have him play the character in the exact same way, so that he's running around shooting a machine gun and bemoaning that his whole life has been stolen from him by hidden powers while deploying the exact affect of a hilarious fuck-up stuck on the couch

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.

― marzipandemonium (Ye Mad Puffin), Monday, November 14, 2016 8:51 AM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Wheel of Time credit sequence: threads become a tapestry weaves itself before your eyes