Tag / Westworld

by Keets

Westworld: Season 3 — a review?

Well, that kinda sucked.

My reaction to prestige HBO series’ final seasons keeps being “Why did that have to get packed into one season?”, which bothers me for a number of reasons. First, do I really want more Game of Thrones, if the Game of Thrones I got made me so miserable? Why would I trust someone who made me watch Westworld Season 3 to instead make me watch Westworld seasons 3a, 3b, and 3c? Short answer, because I’m a masochist. Second, why can’t I just say that a season is bad, instead of trying to imagine a world where it was better?

Also, yes, this was the final season of Westworld, because I’m done watching it. As should you be.

Let’s try to recap this series in 3 sentences.

  • Season 1:  Dolores is conscious, and Old William is Young William is the owner of the park.
  • Season 2: The park existed to recreate human consciousness, but that project never worked, and now Dolores has escaped with the resulting data to destroy the human world.
  • Season 3: The world was run by a new omniscient AI, Rehoboam, but it could only predict humans, so Dolores could destroy it because she’s not a human, and she did but she needed help from a human who was Jesse Pinkman, and now humanity is going to destroy itself, and Hale-Dolores is making new hosts to take over the world which is still going to be destroyed, and also Jesse Pinkman is in charge of some “revolution” which has already ended, I guess? and everyone in the world knows what their future will… ok I think I’ve made my point here.

Instead, let me try to list all of the atomic plot concepts that were introduced and then discarded in this season:

  1. Hosts set loose in the human world
  2. Copies of Dolores interacting with each other and with their new bodies
  3. Hosts body-snatching real humans
  4. Omniscient predictive AI
  5. Ownership of said AI being its engineers or their capitalist funders
  6. Crime for hire
  7. Humans’ awareness of high-likelihood predictions of their future
  8. Reprogramming humans with false memories
  9. Icing thousands of non-compliant humans
  10. Certain human-generated apocalypse in ~200 years.

I got to ten massive ideas without even trying, and without discussing any of the relationships between pairs or sets of those ideas, like the hosts’ decisions about their morality with respect to these various actors. Can’t you imagine spending a compelling season of television on just one or two of those ideas? How about the first two: Westworld season 3 is about Dolores getting her footing in the human world, and her selves deciding who or what they are. Doesn’t that sound better than what we got? It’s crazy to realize that we actually… skipped that. By the time we see Dolores in season 3 she already knows that there’s an omniscient AI that rules human affairs and has decided to destroy it. Hale-Dolores has her subplot about self-harming into discovering love for her family, but all the other Doloreis are… fine. Wouldn’t it have been worthwhile to follow her/them in those discoveries and decisions?

One reason why I think I take this critical approach is that it lets me skip so much else – characterization, cinematography, soundtrack… 

Some of those might have been good, some were definitely bad, but you can just look at a storyboard for this season—not even a storyboard, a bulleted outline—and realize that it could not possibly work inside 10 hour-long episodes, no matter how good or bad those executional choices ended up being. 

As I said: that kinda sucked.

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week – 1/6/17

Aeon posted a video essay by the Nerdwriter explicating E E Cummings’s famous love poem, “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in].”

A lot of people are convinced that a recent Netflix tweet means a possible new season of Gilmore Girls (although I’m pretty sure it’s just a hilarious joke). Read about it on IndieWire.

Nashville’s back on CMT, and with it, according to the Detroit News, we might be seeing some increased efforts at representation, including a recurring character who’s African-American and another who’s the first out transgender actor on CMT.

Someone at The Outline recut all 10 hours of Westworld into chronological order. It’s amazing.

Related:
Our Gilmore Girls posts
Our Nashville posts
Our Westworld posts

 

by Nerdy Spice

Westworld Recap: 1×10 “The Bicameral Mind”

Previously on Westworld: Dolores wanted Teddy to take her to where the mountains meet the sea, but he put her off; Ford worked on a new storyline with a white church; Charlotte had Lee upload some info into Daddy: Original Flavor so they could get it out of the park; Maeve said some nonsensical stuff that convinced Hector to kill himself with her so she could recruit an army; Bernard told Dolores to find the maze so she could be free; The Man in the Black Hat Who Is Totally Named William (formerly known here as “Ed”) wanted to do the maze himself; William was looking for Dolores with Logan; Ford created Bernard to be the replacement Arnold, but then made him shoot himself; Teddy was looking for Wyatt, and had flashbacks where he was shooting up a bunch of people in Escalante; and Dolores went into the church, only to be confronted with William the Aged.

Just these previouslies are reminding me how many threads need to be tied up, or at least developed to a climax, in this episode. Is ninety minutes really enough? We’ll see…

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by Nerdy Spice

Westworld Recap: 1×09 “The Well-Tempered Clavier”

Previously on Westworld: A lot, like a LOT. Dolores and William got captured by Logan (the artist previously known as Goofus) and his buddies. Dolores and Bernard, apparently, were secretly conversing about her changes in consciousness. Bernard was mad when Ford got him to kill Theresa. Teddy remembered about Ed’s whole thing with Dolores and punched him, but then some blonde woman (Angela, according to the closed captions, not that they ever say it, with this show’s typical blissful lack of attention to such details) stabbed him with an arrow and told him Wyatt, the big baddie, needed him. Maeve got Lutz to help her get magical powers over other hosts, and she planned to recruit an army. Ed confessed that he had once killed a version of Maeve, and meanwhile, Maeve stabbed the new Clementine for no apparent reason. Also, there was a maze, dunno if you caught that. It’s kind of a big deal.

 

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by Nerdy Spice

Westworld Recap: 1×08 “Trace Decay”

Previously on Westworld: The man in the black hat was looking for a maze, with Teddy, who was looking for Dolores, who was looking for a place from her dreams, with William, the artist formerly known as Gallant. Theresa and Charlotte faked a problem with Clementine, which led to Bernard being fired; Maeve tried to force Lutz and Sylvester to help her escape; Bernard turned out to be a secret robot, and Ford had Bernard kill Theresa. Also—not that anyone cares about this—Elsie disappeared.

Ford brings Bernard online, down in the secret lab. Bernard is being quite emotive for Bernard, breathing heavily and crying softly. “What have I done?” he wails. Ford, rather cold-heartedly, says only that he thinks Bernard’s fake emotions are very impressive, since he was the author of many of them. The human engineers couldn’t create complicated emotions, so Ford built Bernard to do it. Bernard pleads that he loved Theresa, and Ford says that one man’s life or death was a small price to pay for the “knowledge that I sought, the dominion I should acquire.” Not that Theresa’s was a man’s life, but Ford is obviously not very interested in feminism. Bernard yells that he’s not going to help Ford, and he’s going to raze this place to the ground. It’s quite a change from his usual diminished affect. Ford, of course, freezes him just as he overturns his chair. “I don’t need a simulacrum of an emotionally ruined man,” he comments. He just wants Bernard to cover his own tracks. Bernard puts his glasses on and asks Ford calmly how he’d like him to proceed.

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by Nerdy Spice

Westworld Recap: 1×06 “The Adversary”

In the wake of the US elections, I almost didn’t bother writing this recap. TV, art, and criticism seem too frivolous and ephemeral to be interesting when you’re living in a country that is in the throes of a spectacular crisis. But Westworld is a perfect example of why art still exerts a claim on our attention, even in the midst of catastrophe. It’s a show about people indulging their darkest impulses towards women, knowing there will be no consequences for doing so. What could be more relevant to confronting the reality of the new American president-elect?

With that—to the races.

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by Nerdy Spice

Westworld 1×04: “Dissonance Theory”

Previously on Westworld: Ford had a partner named Arnold who wanted to create consciousness; Ford’s working on a storyline about a white church; Teddy got a new storyline to explain his mysterious backstory; The Man In Black (Ed) kidnapped Lawrence to help him find the maze; Elsie found a man in the desert who smashed his own head with a rock; Maeve started to have memories; Dolores finally learned to shoot a gun, then collapsed in the arms of Gallant.

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by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 10/28/16

It’s here!! A full trailer for Netflix’s Gilmore Girls Revival! At least two Adversion writers have shed actual tears watching it. The third isn’t disclosing.

Christopher Marlowe has officially been credited as a co-author on three of Shakespeare’s plays: all three parts of Henry VI. AKA the Shakespeare plays you never quite made it through.

The Walking Dead came back this week, and the resolution to the cliffhanger was almost as terrible as the cliffhanger itself. There are lots of scathing reviews circulating, but Vox calling it “terminally stupid television” sounds about right.

The Awl has a hilarious piece on creepy milk drinkers from popular culture, including good old Walter from Westworld.

Happy Halloween! Read Flavorwire’s collection of classic literature’s six uncanniest moments.

by Nerdy Spice

Westworld Recap: 1×03 “The Stray”

Previously on Westworld: Goofus and Gallant showed up to the park to make mischief; Bernard told Dolores she’d changed; Dolores dug up a gun; some dude murdered a bunch of people with milk and it was totally freaky; Daddy: Original Flavor got retired, and Elsie worried that it was contagious; Bernard thought it might be sabotage; Maeve woke up during surgery and saw a dead Teddy in a giant tank full of temporarily dead androids.

Cue the credits, which are super long—a thing I normally approve of, being nostalgic for the days of almost-full-length theme songs (remember “Searchin’ My Soul”? “California”? That song about God being one of us from the late great Joan of Arcadia?) but Westworld doesn’t show the actors in the credits, or actual clips from the show, so it’s more artsy and less tugging at the fannish heartstrings than other long theme songs which I have loved in my youth.

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