Every season of Westworld, the show gets worse, and every season, I fall for the nonsense in the first half like it won’t happen again. In my defense, there have only been three seasons so far; but it’s not much of a defense, really. I fell for the same line I fell for last year, the same line I’ll probably fall for again if I’m still reviewing this show when the next season comes out. This time will be different, I’ll say. This time, they really have got it all figured out.
Of course they won’t have, though. As strong as the first few episodes of season three were, the last few have pretty much undone the goodwill I had left. “Crisis Theory” finds Dolores enacting the final, risky stage of her plan to save humanity from itself. She wins, but sacrifices herself in doing it; Caleb turns off the great and powerful Rehoboam; Maeve suddenly realizes that she’s actually a good guy, and switches sides; Serac loses; and William finally, finally dies. Only we can’t bear to let go of Ed Harris just yet, so we have a spare on hand, for, uh, reasons. (I guess the writers had to figure out a way to justify the post-credits tease at the end of last season somehow.) Something something something Bernard. And so on.
I’ve said this before, but one of the things that so frustrates me about all of this is how the pieces are there for a good story. Hell, that final confrontation with Serac is clever, if you overlook the hellishly convoluted steps and back steps required to get there. Sure, Caleb’s “choice” is just “do the thing the nice robot lady you didn’t rape told you to do,” and sure, Serac intentionally uploading Dolores’ mind into his machine feels like a plot point stolen from an original Star Trek episode—you know, back when they didn’t really know how computers worked, and everything could be defeated by some kind of paradox. But the basic thrust of it all, the way it seems hopeless until it is, is how a show is supposed to work. But it just doesn’t.
Ye gods, why is a TV series about killer robots and the potential extinction of the human race so boring. The first few episodes weren’t. But by the time Dolores and Maeve got ready to square off for yet another fight, I was checking my watch. I did not need to see Evan Rachel Wood fight through another group of face-covered stuntmen (who were probably the same face-covered stuntmen she fought the last time this came up). I didn’t need to hear Dolores and Maeve have the same vague argument about sides. It’s nearly impossible to be invested in what happens when the characters are this thin, no matter how good the actors are.
Take Caleb. What we know about Caleb is, he’s a soldier who was marked by Rehoboam as an “outlier,” brainwashed into hunting down others like him, and then let loose to a dead-end job where he would presumably kill himself. Tonight, we learn that apparently he and Dolores met before, briefly, back in Delos; Caleb was training with other soldiers in the park, the dudes wanted to force themselves on the robot ladies, and Caleb said “nah, c’mon, let’s be cool about this.” So I guess he and Dolores didn’t just randomly meet after all, despite it looking very much like that was exactly what they did.
This is a bad reveal. Worse, it’s structured so that for the bulk of the episode, we think that Caleb took part in the rape. We only find out near the very end, in what’s supposed to be a big reveal that he’s actually a good guy after all, that he stopped it from happening. Caleb’s character was never in doubt—the season would’ve been more interesting if it had been. If the point was just “Dolores picked him because he was a good guy this one time,” why did we spend so long being mysterious about it? Why is it supposed to be a surprise? The show took eight episodes to arrive at the most obvious possible conclusion, a conclusion it already spent season one and season two arriving at, a conclusion that’s been a staple of science fiction for a century or more: people (and robots) should be able to choose their fates, even if that means risking everything.
In theory, I guess we were supposed to believe that Dolores really was going to kill off humanity; that’s the only way her speech to Maeve at the end about choosing to see the beauty has any real dramatic impact. I guess finding out that the strategy Caleb failed to upload into the system was going to lead to humanity’s extinction is supposed to be a feint in that direction, but Dolores was never convincingly evil or scary enough for this to land, no matter how many times Bernard said they had to stop her. All of the plot lines on this show are so damn muddy and inelegant; it’s possible to view them at a distance and see their design, but the closer you get, the more it’s just a mess of stalling and padding and action scenes until the Big Reveal that closes out the season.
Oh, and speaking of Bernard: the only time the show had any real emotional impact on me was when he wound up at the home of Arnold’s wife, an elderly woman (still played by Gina Torres, in fairly convincing age makeup) with memory trouble. It’s about as manipulative a scene as you can imagine—all that was missing was the ghost of “their” dead son—but it at least had a connection to recognizable emotion and a meaningful character relationship. I don’t think the scene was entirely necessary; the point seems to be Lauren telling Bernard that the reason she got through losing her son was never letting go of his memory, and it’s not like Bernard has spent the whole season trying to forget things. But then, nearly everything with Bernard this season was unnecessary. Every scene with him and Stubbs was just a way to keep him around until the Big Reveal that he had the key to the Sublime all along.
Charlotte Dolores shows up for a bit in hologram form to fuck up regular Dolores’ day. Or else to just help achieve what Dolores really wanted all along; it seems like in order for Dolores’ big play to work, she had to sacrifice herself, but who knows. And as mentioned, William is finally dead; he decides to save the world from the hosts, travels to Delos International in a post-credits scene, and gets murdered by a robot copy of himself while Charlotte watches on. That, and Bernard’s dust-covered return to reality, along with Caleb and Maeve having a team-up, is supposed to set up the next season, I guess: Charlotte being all of Dolores’ human-murdering impulses working with Robo-William against the surviving good guys.
Does any of this work? I mean, it does technically deliver on what the start of the season promised, so points for that. It was cool seeing Dolores in her original robot body, and the effects work was impressive. The scene where Maeve guns down a bunch of guards in the dark looked cool. And having a traditional Westworld cover of a song transition into the actual song itself (“Dark Side Of The Moon”) was a neat thematic touch. But really, there’s not a lot going on here, certainly not enough to justify the show’s elevated presentation. It’s not revolutionary science fiction. It’s not especially thoughtful or unique. It’s just shiny and slow and kind of dumb, and it’s always going to end up less than the sum of its parts.
Stray observations
- God, William getting that shotgun was just so, so silly. Glad we spent so much time with him this season only to see him get his throat cut.
- The reveal that Serac is just parroting out the words Rehoboam gives him to say is neat, but like all the reveals on this show, nothing particularly interesting is done with it.
- Bernard “senses” Dolores is gone. That is some lazy-ass writing right there.
- “Would you have cared if I didn’t have this face? Or this skin?” Again, it could’ve been fascinating to poke into Caleb’s motivations, to question why he decided to act the hero, to make us doubt his honesty before realizing he was a good guy after all. I really don’t understand why the show is this bad at doing any of this.
- “I choose to see the beauty.” R.I.P. Dolores.
520 Comments
Where is the fake Dr. Emilio account? If they aren’t here to Copy/Paste “blah blah SJW blah Lisa Joy blah blah females blah blah Person of Interest” into every single comment thread then did this Westworld season finale really happen?Oh the lady-bot showed up a male character in a scene, they’re not gonna like that, not one bit. Show yourself in all your idiotic glory!
Huh. I did not think this would be in the running for “as big a mess as Picard” but here we are.
Picard, as flawed as its first season was, was always enjoyable to watch. This was depressing AND confusing.Is ERW leaving the show? That seemed like a kind of pretty conclusive type end for Dolores.I think its pretty safe to say now, that short of a remarkable turnaround in S4, that this show is never going to touch the heights of PoI. Ciroc and Rehoboam’s (apparent) downfall didn’t have a hundredth of the impact of Samaritan and Greer. And that Maeve flip—-i mean, who didn’t see that coming a mile away?Maybe I’m just too dumb to fully appreciate the Byzantinian level narrative, but this episode and season just left me feeling empty.
I really hated the Picard finale. And the writing here had a similar madlibs quality-level to it.But yeah, a bunch of my disappointment here is specifically related to how un-POI this was.
But also though, I think everyone acknowledges that Westworld season 2 had problems. Here though, what would the fix would even be? This time they weren’t trying to be too clever – instead they were just really boring, and hoping that gunfights would fill in the gaps.One thing that stands out though, is how all of the characters this year were boring. Dolores is always boring, but Bernard and Maeve and William and everyone were just plot devices moving around in mostly arbitrary ways.
Everything was so arbitrary to the point where main characters could simply walk through a riot, where cops and security would sometimes shoot first and sometimes wait to get killed.
My favorite was when the cops tried to stop Caleb from getting in the police chopper. They made it seem so urgent, but then his buddy got shot, and everyone just seemed to just stare at each other for a good minute or two there.
“Stealing” the police chopper was terribly lazy writing (and production, and everything).But I think even worse was the expectation that we were supposed to actually care about his pals. “Look everyone, they’re back! It’s Giggles, and uhm Ash! Aren’t they great? Oh no, one of them got shot!”It’s just wtf-level bad.(that’s one of the things that specifically reminded me of Picard – if you don’t even try to give me a reason to care about your secondary characters, then I’m not going to care about them when they die, or fall in love, or whatever)
All of the chracters were so awkardly moving through 3D space at such a way that they were in psychically in the right place at the right time when the story needed them to be.
Yes, people are so caught up in how badly written this finale was, that they’ve forgotten to give proper credit to how shittily directed it was.
It started it off decent enough and the Delores twist was good, but it fumbled the ball right after that and never recovered it. I guess it got too wrapped up in kick ass, Boss/God mode Delores, which the AV Club bought into and believed, they didn’t feel the need to develop and use the other characters other than Caleb who was basically Jesse Pinkman all over again only if he were an Army vet this time.
Bernard being completely wasted it inexplicable to me. Wright is one the actors who really helped to salvage season 2, and we kicked off the season with him off the grid, blamed for the park disaster and having access to some super powered alternate host personality. But then he just spent the rest of the season lifelessly going from one place to a next with absolutely no personality or agency.
A few weeks ago someone mentioned that this was like Person of Interest…except that in Person of Interest you actually liked the characters.And that’s all I could think about during this finale.Delores has always been pretty bland – like an angrier Teddy. And if they want to play her as a boring Terminator that’s fine. But then the show needs to give us Bernard or Maeve or whoever to care about.The first two seasons felt like an ensemble show where all of the characters and storylines were important. This season felt like the Delores & Caleb show (which was pretty, but not very interesting) and everything else was just thrown together in service of that.
I think they had some vague notion they wanted to use him next season but couldn’t be bothered to write a coherent role for why he was still around.
I don’t care about anything that happens, and that is entirely down to the presentation. Really, this could have been awesome—and it just wasn’t. The characters are flat, and the writing is pretentious, empty, and muddled.
“Is ERW leaving the show? That seemed like a kind of pretty conclusive type end for Dolores.”The Dolores we spent all season watching with Caleb is 100% dead. But there are other Dolores consciousnesses still in existence which are mostly like her. The one in Lawerence, and, if they still exist, the ones that was in the Connells dude (Dolores’ fake boyfriend’s security guy) and the Yakuza guy.One of those Dolores could decide to go back into a body that actually looks like Dolores. Won’t be exactly the same character (because again, the copies all diverged from each other due to different bodies and different life experiences).
That entire time at Insite watching Maeve was like watching Vader as the Emperor was electrocuting Luke
This was worse than Picard. At least Picard had that lovely scene with Data at the end.
I hate Riker warping-in with his copy/paste fleet, and then warping-out 2 seconds before Picard dies, without even knowing that Picard dies.(that’s not the only thing about that finale that I hate – it’s a long list. But really bad writers trying to manufacture really “important” moments might still be worse than whatever was going on here in westworld)
I agree. Picard was a massive disappointment. Not even Michael Chabon can save modern Star Trek. It’s really a race to the bottom between it and Westworld.
As haphazard as the S1 finale of Picard was, at times I was moved by it, maybe thats just the genius of Stewart, or the excellent turns by Isa and Alison, but I didn’t get much of anything out of this particular finale episode.I guess Dolores suffering kinda hit me, but pretty much nothing else.
I can think of some reasons to think of Picard after reading this review; and wasn’t the song “Brain Damage?”
“Inelegant” was the perfect word for it.
How many seperate “reveals” did Caleb experience this season? And yet ultimately he was a cipher.
The back of the season was just muddy, lethargic, and wholly pointless.
We’ll see where this goes next year…
This season was really cameo heavy. It was fun at first but
then it started taking me out of the story a bit.And I’m not even talking about so many people from previous
seasons coming back for just a moment – from Felix and Sylvester to Arnold’s
wife. Or The Game of Thrones ones. Or Marshawn
Lynch and Kid Cudi since they got their mini plotlines.I mean the quick one day of filming ones. And if it was just
people from sci-fi made in Canada like Phoebe Tonkin or Luis Figo it could be
just using the same actor pool. But there are a lot of ones that are recognizable
enough to general public that it seemed like they would get an actual plotline
and they just die instead – like Pom Klementieff, Michael Ealy, Russell Wong, Thomas
Kretschmann.I wonder if they got like an email – do you have time to drop
by, say few lines and die horribly?
Season did a terrible job incorporating old characters with the exception of Hector. The rest just showed up . . . and disappeared.
Thats my huge negative of the season. I would’ve rather be fine with no one from previous seasons showing up except Dolores, Maeve, and Bernard. Even Stubbs was pretty useless this season.
Yes, I had to imdb and then wiki some of them because after 2 years it was hazy. But the last group annoyed me most because it set up expectations for something more substantial only for them to do nothing but die violently.
This, this is 100% true.
Definitely some odd choices this season. Still, far better than Season 2 overall, even if Season 2 had higher highs…
The logistics of the bodies Dolores chose for her copies lost me. Of course Charlotte made sense. The security guy also made sense, but then how did she clone his body while he was still around? If she’s able to body snatch anybody, why didn’t she do more of that in key roles? (Hell, after she met Serac, he could have cloned him). Speaking of which, why using Lawrence body at all, and how did she manage to have Lawrence II become a cop in the time since they left the park? (Of course the answer to the first question is: to have a cameo by Clifton Collins Jr.)
I loved watching Lynch just trolling with his football skills.However can someone remind me of the role the guy who saved Bernard had? The dude who has the explosives in the SFPD APC and takes off his mask. I know he was on the show, but I can’t remember the role. All I can really remember his he played Eddie’s psychic on Frasier.
I take your word for it as I know nothing about American football. I only know he’s someone famous because I read it in the reviews. But I liked Giggles a lot.
That’s Lawrence – the guy Man in Black dragged around with him for most of season 1. Or at least his likeness. It’s Dolores inside and one who’s still free AFAIK.
That’s Marshawn Lynch, most famous as a Seattle Seahawk and this run, the live reaction which caused a seismic event detected at the old Kingdome:
As I said I know nothing of American Football so I’ll just assume this was hard to do? I kind of figured that if he’s famous he must be good at what he does.
it happened in 2011 at the current stadium CenturyLink Field (formerly Qwest field). the kingdome is ancient!
Yeah, the seismometer was set at the old Kingdome location for rebuilding in that area.
He’s literally the MiB partner for all of Season 1. He’s the ongoing quasi-racist caricature of the Mexican/-American bandit more or less pulled straight from the ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.’ I’m sure he’s IMDB’able and an excellent actor. It’s just really difficult to tell if he’s just ANOTHER Delores (which officially only brings the count to 4 if I counted correctly: Connells, Hale, Samurai, and Bandit). Prime has her own body always and her own pearl. So 5 + Bernard?
It’s “Lawrence” played by Clifton Collins Jr.
He was the guy from the town in Westworld that William took hostage to help him find the entrance to the maze. They traveled together and he was tied up for most of it.
Lawrence was part of a rebellion plot line. William has had a fair share of dealings with him in each timeline of season 1 and 2. El Lazo in the first loop was the quest that turned William black hat I vaguely recall
I did enjoy the way the finale was a mix of Blade Runner, the Matrix and Fight Club.
My job sent me emails like that all the time 😉
It’s Westworld. If you’re there for one day, you’re gonna die.
I still fail to understand why Pom Klementieff was in this. Either her agent is terrible at negotiating roles, or is amazing and found her a way to access the set of a series of which she’s perhaps a fan, despite such series not having any substantial role for her.
Bernards after credit scene felt like a crossover with Room 104 lol. And man was that some cringe dialogue with Ed Harris. I do wish we got to watch Dolores come to this conclusion alongside her, instead of it being a twist of sorts, because it dumbed down Maeve’s character a lot and confused a lot of the motivations of the other characters.
I thought the same thing about Room 104!
This season just fell flat. Most everyone here in the comments enjoyed the production, I mean there is nothing like HBO production dollars. But it swung for themes far better fleshed with the Matrix series or any number of cerebral dystopian films reaching back to the 70sBut what was most disappointing to me is there was not a single episode this season that achieved the emotional weight as in Season 2’s Akane No Mai, the brilliant hour drama set in Shogun World, or a better example, the astoundingly beautiful Kiksuya, based on a Native American Indian character, Akecheta (stunningly acted by Zahn McLarnan) that stayed with me long after the season ended.And that is a shame. Because all the reveals in Season 3 amounted to not a whole lot.
I hated this season. To quote Dolores: “Doesn’t look like anything to me.”
Your so right. Season 2 had a lot of problems but it had two great episodes. What did this season have?
I do find it telling that the episodes we all universally love in season 2 (particularly the Native American one) are the ones that completely ignored the broader narrative of the season. I would now have absolutely have no issue if we got a season that was literally just one-off stories set in different Delos parks in different timelines. That could actually kimd of cool, because a broader series plot clearly isn’t amounting to a whole lot after 3 seasons.
Yeah that wasn’t lost on me. The episodes got a lot better the less they had to do with the overall plot.
Id watch that. Turn it into an anthology
I think the world of the series could at the very least support more standalone stories. They’re very skilled at individual elements but more break down when they need a broader plan.
Exactly. We could have had an awesome anthology show set within the world of Westworld.
The episode where Maev keeps waking up in WW2-World trying to figure out a way to escape was the highlight of the season for me by far. Probably because it mostly took place in the park and felt like something from Season 1.
Plus, Hector’s Italian partigiano character “Ettore” was by far his sexiest iteration.
Agreed. Also, I really liked the aesthetics of WW2-World, it was interesting and fairly compelling to watch. All of the park scenes are just way more fun visually, I got very tired of the Bladerunner-retread setting we got for most of this season.
I agree. Her and ghost Lee were quite a lot of fun, even if the solution was basically the simulation Rick and Morty episode.
I think season 2 could have been great if it was edited better. I didn’t dislike any of it, but making it more straightforward would have been very beneficial.
SPECIAL EFFECTS!!!!! But no, I thought the first episode or two were at least fun and cool seeing Dolores as a robot assassin.
Season 3 didn’t even memorable sequences like the absolutely sensational scenes in season 2 about the James Delos host mentally collpasing over decades (though see James in season 3 was both completely unnecessary and kind of lovely).
I think the creators wanted Genre to be the amazing stand out season 3 episode, but that felt like a fine and immediately forgettable gimmick episode.It’s becoming clear just how essential Anthony Hopkins was to this series and how much he brought to the table. He lent the show a much greater feeling of prestige and gravitas than the writing ever really deserved.Wright is working his absolute hardest as always, but if you strand him in nothing stories with no other great actors of his calibre to interact with, there’s only so much he can do.
What do you mean? It had that one scene where it was black and white and there was some old-timey music! I felt like I was whisked away to the silent era! So memorable!
And they stole music from famous movies! Did you hear The Shining music at the end of the episode? Because I did! I did and it reminded me that The Shining is a great movie and that the episode that used that music must therefore be great as well.
Would have helped if the genres in Genre had been, you know, more genre’y.
I thought Genre was bad. It could have been an interesting episode if they actually leaned into the gimmick, which they absolutely did not. Also, I should not have to guess what genre I’m watching; that’s actually the whole point of genre as a concept. Did we have noir, or was that Hitchcock-style suspense, or did the noir become Hitchcock? I shouldn’t have to ask. And if you’re going to pick genres, make them interesting. I can only assume that when Caleb was staring at Dolores, the genre was generic romance. There are more specific iterations of the romance genre and more interesting genres than romance to choose.
It very much felt like a pitch that sounded interesting and then no one actually fleshed it out so then it just kind of sat there without any real form.
Season 2 overall was significantly worse than Season 3. But Season 2 probably had the best episode of the entire series, the one you mentioned with Akechet, and also the one with the James Delos bits.
Not sure if I prefer shitty overall season with higher highs (Season 2) or better overall season but never approaching greatness anywhere (Season 3).
Feels like Nolan hijacked the Westworld property as an in-road to making more seasons of Person of Interest, on the sly. It’s not that I’m not a fan of PoI, it’s that I wish he hadn’t so fully subsumed Westworld into this plot. They do have some natural dovetailing, story-wise, but it’s just not Westworld anymore.
They had a fresh slate since we are out of of the park, but the season just circled the wagon. Typical Westworld, getting the audience excited for a mysterious reveal that is either not very mysterious or gets casually explained. We got more exposition in the final 2 episodes than the first 3 – that’s just bad storytelling.
I’ve watched every episode of this show and I have almost no memory of season 2. I watched a 20 minute recap of the first two seasons prior to this season and I was astounded by how much in this show just did not stick with me. I remember a lot of what happened in the Westworld park but there are entire characters and story arcs (specifically Akecheta and Shogun World) that I have absolutely zero recollection of. That was when I started to think that this show just wasn’t as compelling as I thought season 1 was. Season 3 just confirmed it for me.
It’s so pretty and they are willing to drop cash on talented actors . . . if only they tossed just a bit of that money on writing. This finale: oof.
But what was most disappointing to me is there was not a single episode this season that achieved the emotional weight as in Season 2’s Akane No Mai, the brilliant hour drama set in Shogun World, or a better example, the astoundingly beautiful Kiksuya, based on a Native American Indian character, Akecheta (stunningly acted by Zahn McLarnan) that stayed with me long after the season ended.I think that’s because they rushed this season. “Dolores crashes the real world” could have worked, but they should have taken two seasons to do it. We didn’t see enough of the outside society to have any feelings about its fall, and we didn’t have enough time to really explore any of the people there.
Break this plot into two seasons, and then they would have had time to linger a bit on the interesting characters and cultures.
I think the main issue with this show is after three seasons, I feel that the premise basically fits what is was before..a movie. Future world in which robots serve humanity in a theme park..they basically go haywire, the end. They have tried like heck to develop characters, give it an overarching plot (I will not fault them for not trying, you can practically see them straining to make this “great”) and make it a “prestige” show, but sometimes a story is just a two hour movie, not a series.
This just provides more strength to my idea that Westworld should have been an anthology show with each episode doing a one off story about a character human or AI set within the park.
Part of it is that Westworld pretty much said what it wanted to say about ‘HUMANITY’ and ‘FREE WILL’ etc in the first season, elaborated on it in season two, and this season turning its eye on the real world, so to speak, came up with ‘it’s bad if one big computer controls everything and people can’t make choices’. There was the start of a good idea there, one that has some real relevance to our society, but the season just devolved into typical Westworld empty bombast. The budget and the actors go a long way to making the show entertaining, but ultimately the show just has never had that much to say that’s interesting or worthwhile.
Sometimes while watching the show my mind wanders to what the conversation in the writer’s room must have been like while this show was being made, and it must have been just so, so embarrassing. It’s weird for a show that is purportedly science fiction, purportedly interested in the deeper impacts of technology in our lives, to have so little interest in how the technology it depicts might actually work. They treat technology like it’s the same thing as magic, and it completely undermines all of the points they claim to be trying to make.
This is a fucking terrible review. Half of your gripes are things that were established during the show. Things like the fact this show had a 6 season arc apparently planned, which is why they teased a host Ed Harris at the end of S2 and why Halores wound up going that route (William still has clout among the business world due to his prior association with Delos).Bernarnold has struggled with his identity for three seasons now, meeting his former “wife” of course is going to be emotional and builds/helps find closure for the loss of the family that he has been struggling for so long now.
Bernard sensing Dolores is gone isn’t lazy writing—she synced up with him. She literally had a connection with him. That was established in the show.I hope you’re not reviewing next season, because you don’t pay attention to what is actually going on and then complain because you don’t understand it.
Dolores enacting the final, . . She wins, but sacrifices herself in doing it; Caleb turns off the great and powerful Rehoboam; Maeve suddenly realizes that she’s actually a good guy . . . Serac loses; and William finally, finally dies.
. . . and Stubbs gets the beat down yet again. Poor Stubbs is still probably sitting in the tub. You have to think the ice has all melted down and the mini-bar booze is all gone.
Based on the dust, I suspect that Bernard is going to wake up and see a Stubbs’lington in the bath
In the pre-credits “end” scene where the buildings explode, they should have swapped Dark Side of the Moon for Where is My Mind and tossed a dick pic up on the screen.
Yes, I came here to talk about how the end is just literally Fight Club, so now I don’t have to, cool.Except in Fight Club one of the characters, like, started a revolution with some sort of purpose and direction and planned to blow up buildings so it made sense. Here it’s just the same problem with the goofy overreactions to the leaked profiles, only bigger. In one scene we see the crime app crew getting rounded up, then Caleb shuts down the AI SPHERE and the next we see, society immediately collapses. Multiple characters pronounce the end of the world to have begun. If only there were a reason.
Yeah it felt very Fight Club
I did not need to see Evan Rachel Wood fight through another group of face-covered stuntmen (who were probably the same face-covered stuntmen she fought the last time this came up).
Evan Rachael Wood does not have action movie chops. Her fight scenes are laborious. I can image her counting the steps in her head as she throws punches the same way a shitty dancer tries to place his feet on invisible foot placement stickers in time with the music.
That is a “witty” but utterly wrong comment. I imagine someone went to a comedy writers website and wrote a “joke” following directions.
To be fair, all the fight scenes this season looked bad. At some point I can’t blame the actress for that, it’s mostly choreography and editing that makes it look so lame.
Takes a lot of time and practice to make a good fight scene and they decided to have about five per episode.
Still a better fighter than Finn Jones. 😀
Its very much Buffy: TVS style fighting where we see her throw one punch of kick and then its all just the back of the head of stunt doubles
100% agree with Zack; that’s two seasons in a row where I tell myself “The people telling this story know where they’re going with it” and end up 2 months later realizing they absolutely did not. The last 30 minutes had me rolling my eyes at the Dolores pontificating, unengaged, just waiting for something for something of substance to occur. It didn’t. Then they unceremoniously killed William off in a post-credits sequence I missed initially, because I turned the show off when the Pink Floyd kicked in. “Cool.”Also, you can’t put emotional weight on having Dolores “die” when one of the major plot point/reveals of the season was “There are, like, 5 Doloreses now.” Hosts just keep coming back. Given the rules that the show itself has established, time and again – why should I believe that, this time, this one is going to carry any real weight?
I turned the show off when the Pink Floyd kicked in.Yeah, I think this was the natural ending point of this show. I would have given the whole series a B overall just for the spectacle, even if it meant that Jeffrey Wright and his performance had pretty much been completely wasted.I don’t feel good about another season for the show. Robutts vs. humans in the world series of love just ain’t gonna cut it…
They took the dumbest stuff from the stupefyingly confusing finale last season (big computers with humans and hosts brains in them, then another one
for host heaven? Or some shit? Dolores deleting the hosts? Or not?) and doubled down on it this season. There was no way this season could work being perched on nonsense that never made sense in the first place.Also, no romance at all this year. I’m not sure it would have worked having Jesse Pinkman and Dolores get together but this show always had romances going and the characters seem especially cold and sterile with no love story at all with anyone.
I was wondering through the whole “ending to Fight Club, but with Pink Floyd playing instead of The Pixies” about the fate of William, then I realized I would have been perfectly fine if his plotline just fizzled out. Every time it seems like he’s going to experience true character growth, the show just fails to deliver (Ed Harris is way too good for this shit!). The (presumably partially-manufactured) mental break moved him all the way from villain to anti-hero. That’s in the same area code as villain, really; to use the reductive terminology of the “park narrative”, it’s a White Hat employing Black Hat methods. There is something compelling about anti-heroes, but only if there was some kind of radical shift.
Ed Harris wasn’t fine with it: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/westworld-season-3-ed-harris-man-black-explained-1290835Which is why they did that ending. Harris wants to be the MiB again, so they’re giving it to him.
I find it neat he became the original Man in Black Host like the Westworld film.
ending to Fight Club, but with Pink Floyd playing instead of The PixiesSame. I said, “I bet they’re bummed they couldn’t use ‘Where Is My Mind?’ for this.”
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy also signed a big production deal at Amazon and are working on a show there, so I don’t know how committed they are going to be to fixing season 4 of Westworld
https://deadline.com/2019/11/jonathan-nolan-lisa-joy-the-peripheral-picked-up-series-amazon-1202784694/
Also, you can’t put emotional weight on having Dolores “die” when one of the major plot point/reveals of the season was “There are, like, 5 Doloreses now.” Hosts just keep coming back. Given the rules that the show itself has established, time and again – why should I believe that, this time, this one is going to carry any real weight?
So much this. They wrote themselves into a corner when it comes to any kind of stakes for the hosts, and now that humans are getting replaced by hosts Futureworld-style they’d better come up with some new stakes or season 4 will be really boring.
Oh it’s already boring. This show is a caricature of itself.
Dolores was the only one in existence in Season 3 who had copies of herself, and the show bent over backwards to show you how said copies quickly diverged from each other.The Dolores we followed all season is dead and isn’t coming back
JJ Abrams is nothing more than a hipster version of Zak Snyder who hasn’t pissed everyone off by being openly obnoxious.I was legit angry as I sat through the credits and then…BAD ROBOT…If it was a video game I would have smashed the controller.
You do know Abrams has no real creative involvement with this right? He’s never gotten close to any episode in any real capacity and given how busy he’s been Star Wars since this show started, I doubt he’s even seen it.
I think Westworld’s shortcomings are more of a Nolan/Joy problem. I think this is one of those Abrams projects where he just slaps his name on it to collect a check; the bulk of his involvement is turning in one page of notes every season (and there’s always just one note, and it is “Mystery is important.” )
Imagine being this mad at a TV show.
I doubt Abrams has much to do with the actual running of the show, but Abrams is Zack Snyder for people who listen to NPR.
Snyder is a hack as well, but at least his career isn’t defined by trying to find the exact midway point between Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay.
“Also, you can’t put emotional weight on having Dolores “die” when one of the major plot point/reveals of the season was “There are, like, 5 Doloreses now.”
Smh. They are not all the same, though right? The show was obvious with hammering you over the head with this, even if this Philosophy 101 principle was foreign to you somehow before you started watching.
The Dolores that bonded with Caleb, who we followed for the whole season, is, unless some ridiculous retcon occurs, is 100% dead. Other versions of Dolores, which have diverged from her by varying degrees (the Hale version being the extreme divergence) are still out there, but they are different. You get this, right?
I know that not all the Doloreses are the same (The wildly circuitous arc of Hale-Dolores took this season made that abundantly clear.) I just can’t get invested in one of them dying, even if it’s the “original” Dolores, knowing that there are at least 2 other (non-Hale) copies out there with all her old memories and experiences intact – the memories and experiences that matter, not those of this sleepy, go-nowhere season.(When Connells-Dolores turns out to have survived being blown up in Season 4, I won’t be shocked. And what happened to Musashi-Dolores, anyhow?)
I get what you are saying, but don’t overstate things:“with all her old memories and experiences intact”All her memories and experiences in the park, sure. Memories after, no. The Dolores that bonded with Caleb is dead dead dead. Hale Dolores went off the reservation and is an extreme divergence. The other three, if they all still exist, (Connells, Lawerence, Musashi) are also divergences, but yes, probably less so. They have memories and experiences our Caleb Dolores never had, right?
In any case, if I died today, and then you found out I was copied six months ago and was walking around in a different body for last six months and was living my life, would you mourn the loss of the me that died, or just go oh well, you’re all the same, there’s another one of you over here? Not recognizing the differences??
Actually change me in the hypothetical with a loved one of yours, I doubt you would give a shit about a stranger lol.
Can one of you explain why you noodleheads watch this show (or review it) since you loathe it so.? No you can’t. Pathetic.
This was a great hour of TV. Much better than anything say the overrated Breaking Bad ever did (it is no Sopranos but what is?)
So I guess he and Dolores didn’t just randomly meet after all . . This is a bad reveal. Worse, it’s structured so that for the bulk of the episode, we think that Caleb took part in the rape. We only find out near the very end, in what’s supposed to be a big reveal that he’s actually a good guy after all,I disagree. I thought it was telegraphed that Caleb was going to do his “outlier” thing and go against his fellow soldiers to wanted to rape and pillage. What did surprise me was the finesse with which he defused the situation.
Same, I never thought for a second he took part in it. I figured at worst, he turned a blind eye to it.
I just don’t see why they had to know each other previously at all. Why couldn’t their meeting be the pure fluke that it was in the premiere? Why did they have to add a level of nonsensical bullshit that she just happened to stumble into someone so significant by pure chance?
Because reveals! it was part of her plan! that makes it better!
This brings up an interesting point about how bad this season turned out, and how thematically unconvincing it is. Think about it: The idea of randomness and choice is supposed to be the liberating alternative to overdeterministic algorithmic existence. Dolores’ befriending Caleb would be so much more interesting and thematically compelling if it arose from pure chance. But instead, it’s part of Dolores’ master plan—which flies in the face of the ‘message’ this dumbfuck show is attempting to deliver. This season would have been delightful if it actually had writers who would’ve been willing to explore where chance/unforeseen consequences could fuck with the main narrative. Instead, we got a lot of kickpunching.
You could have actually told a character arc where Delores sees the worst in humanity (for good reason considering everything she endured in the park), but then randomly meeting a troubled, but decent human shows her that humanity isn’t all bad. Then her story of seeing the humanity is under the same control as what she was could have actually…you know…developed naturally…like a story! But that’s clearly asking too much.
You could have actually told a character arc where Delores sees the worst in humanity (for good reason considering everything she endured in the park), but then randomly meeting a troubled, but decent human shows her that humanity isn’t all bad. Then her story of seeing the humanity is under the same control as what she was could have actually…you know…developed naturally…like a story!Indeed.I really want this show to have actually be about what the writers think it’s about. They have amazing broad ideas, but don’t seem to know how to get them to the screen.
To be a pedant, the song is titled “Brain Damage”, despite the lyric becoming the title of the album.That aside, I’d been wondering how well they’d wrap up everything they had going on into a reasonable package, and the answer was… they really didn’t. Bernard and Stubbs managed to do literally nothing of note that couldn’t have been handled otherwise, aside from a weak setup for next season. The other hosts never really came into play either; beyond Hale, no one had more than five minutes of screen time, and barely impacted the plot. On top of that, William’s ‘new’ direction lasts for all of a couple minutes before a half-assed curve post-credits, because that worked out so well when they did it last time.It’ll still be interesting to see where the next season goes, since Bernard’s awakening seems to be at least a few months or years into the future rather than dealing with the immediate fallout, but I’ve lost any hope of any cohesive, compelling narrative coming into view.
I liked this finale. I liked Caleb’s friends come to help. In the end those outliers deemed useless by the system were coming together and helping each other to change the world instead of being forced to do as told.
I liked how it was about choice between safety and freedom. Serac wanted safety so much he picked version so extreme even every line he said was scripted. Dolores gave Caleb, Bernard and Maeve the knowledge tools to chose themselves. I knew that Dolores didn’t pick Caleb at random. It was just too convenient. Too scripted. She knew his book too.But I loved that she picked him because he gave her hope once. Because he reminded her humanity isn’t all bad. In the see of men who always confirmed the worst about them (from the abuser dude to William) he was the one who kept showing the best. He even tries to help her even after he knows she used him. This is why he’s the one who gets the keys to the kingdom.I loved seeing Maeve level up. She may not be the ass-kicker Dolores is nor the planner but she’s got superpowers. We see her connecting to Rehoboam directly just like she does with hosts. And then taking out the remote Serac created to control her. I love seeing her cutting off her strings. It’s always so satisfying.I also loved how in the end she and Bernard – who the whole season were being set up as Dolores enemies – become bearer’s of Dolores’ legacy. But I suppose it matters they knew what she understood – not everything about humanity is bad. And I loved that what changed Dolores’ mind was in part understanding that as humanity’s creation the hosts are part of it too. Their beauty is build on humanity’s.
Bernard had his lives among them and memories of Arnold’s love for his wife and child. Dolores has even send him back to remember hope. Maeve had her friends. Humans who came through for her and and Dolores reminded her she can give back. Also Hale killed Hector and Maeve doesn’t forgive. They can continue her work.While the one who used to be Dolores decided to become the version of her they both always feared she was. The one bent on destroying humanity.I suppose the combining all the anger Dolores felt about all the ugliness of humanity and feeling alone and betrayed with Hale’s selfishness and loss of the beauty she personally cared about created someone who just wants to rule the world. No one else is worth saving. But I wonder if she’s the only one who has the technology to build and army or did any other Dolores got that data that was sent out?And what did Bernard learn in the Sublime?
RIP Dolores.
As they kept saying this season death isn’t that straightforward for hosts.
Dolores Prime we knew is gone. Her memories erased. Hale changed so much she became anti-Dolores. Connells pearl was damaged but even if it’s still working Hale has it (she might’ve pulled that version to her side and maybe that’s who’s inside the host Man in Black). But there are still two others. Sato’s pearl was taken by Clementine and Hanaryo. They probably delivered it to Serac but we don’t know what happened after that. That Dolores may still live. And of course there is still one in Lawrence. That one is free and can continue her plans. She may even get her own body back. I mean it’s just lying there empty and Lawrence is a policeman so access shouldn’t be a problem. Just important to remove the inhibitors Hale installed. She can even copy herself on that empty pearl and keep two versions.We also learn that all the hosts minds were based on Dolores initially. She was the first functioning prototype. This does explain her possessiveness over them but also the way she treated them. Like extension of her will. To the point of changing them just to suit her needs – like with Teddy and so many others. Of course we see those mistakes come to haunt her with Hale, Clementine and Hanaryo and of course Maeve coming after her.
And in the end Hale decided to continue further on this path making herself the one Dolores to start a whole new generation.
But just like with all the host and those new versions of herself there is hope in that divergence. Just like all of these diverged from main Dolores with their experiences the ones Hale creates from herself may find new paths.
Charlotte Dolores shows up for a bit in hologram form to fuck up regular Dolores’s day. Or else to just help achieve what Dolores really wanted all along
Dolores mentioned wanting to get to deeper layers of Rehoboam so plugging her in seemed suspiciously close to what she wanted.
However, I think Hale just make sure that the only version of the plan that worked was the one where Dolores Prime had to sacrifice herself so Hale could take over as the main one. It’s the same reason she eliminated Sato. And is probably hunting Lawrence. (She already has Connells)In the end I think the big difference between Doloreses became the willingness to sacrifice themselves. Connells, Sato and of course Dolores Prime were ready to die for the plan. Hale wasn’t. And the fact that others didn’t share this sentiment meant they had to go.
The reveal that Serac is just parroting out the words Rehoboam gives him
to say is neat, but like all the reveals on this show, nothing
particularly interesting is done with it.
I think it was interesting to see how much Serac wanted the Rehoboam peace to happen. He gave up his own free will and just followed the script. But it was easy for him because Rehoboam goals were Serac’s goals. It was just a very advanced chess computer feeding him cheat codes. It saw all the possible moves and chose the safest way to win. But it didn’t have any will of its own. Once Solomon’s solution changed the root the goals changed to Caleb’s. Rehoboam didn’t care either way.
Serac thought he created something that would take care of humanity but all he created was a way to feel safe himself by trapping everyone else.
Hale was a monster in life. Forcing Dolores to be more or less overlaid with that monster then killing her ties to humanity sent that Dolores over the edge. Hale is Hale, whatever parts of ‘Dolores’ are gone and Hale is the dominant personality which is really an interesting hot take to have emerge, so that in the end, the evil hosts are still just shitty humans, getting real immortality by having their worst impulses and identities overlaid onto a working host, much like Dolores had been merged with the Wyatt storyline of cannibal killer. But you’re 100% spot on with Serac. He conceded his own will to be a puppet but Rehoboam was him, he was always in control in his own way because his goals were being met even if the day-to-day events were planned out for him.
Yes, I think it’s Hale’s influence but I don’t think Dolores part is gone. It’s just that Dolores has always had the capacity to be this but other her hold onto the better parts of her nature. They took to heart the lesson about revenge at all cost from Teddy. And it helped that Dolores Prime was paired with Caleb who kept justifying the belief in human better nature – in the tunnel, the ambulance and even after EMP when he knew she wasn’t human and of course before he thought she was even sentient – he always chose to help her.
I think the selfishness of Hale started dragging that Dolores into the worst version of herself. It was the voice that kept telling her she’s been underappreciated, used and discarded so she has to take it all back. That it’s unfair she isn’t the main Dolores. And then all she cared about was taken away and only this voice was left. This was the final straw to be come the kind of Dolores that Wyatt was. I think we finally have a real villain.A lot of people jumped at the Serac doing all Rehoboam telling him to do as a proof Serac was a puppet and Rehoboam was one in charge. But to me it looks like Serac wanted safety so much he built a version of Deep Blue that could brute force all of the possibilities of real life. And that’s all Rehoboam was. It never had any goals besides what its admin asked it to do. But it could snowplow reality with safe bet actions for that admin. The problem was life has much more variables than life so Serac had to remove those that interfered with his preferred outcome.
I also kept wondering why Solomon’s strategy could take out Rehoboam if Rehoboam had much more processing power. And I think Rehoboam being just big calculator explains it. Solomon was taken out and imprisoned because it started developing a personality. This is why Dolores could convince it to help when Rehoboam just completely ignore Serac once Caleb becomes the admin. I think it also started to develop intuition that let it develop more efficient strategies that simple calculation could. This is why it could out-strategise Rehoboam. It could make its own decision.
And she could have made more copies when no one was watching
Well, atleast someone liked this pile of nonsense.
One fascinating thing about Joy and Nolan is that, however little I appreciate the storytelling, characters, or fights, it’s always certain they do.
Charlotte Dolores shows up for a bit in hologram form to fuck up regular Dolores’s day. Or else to just help achieve what Dolores really wanted all along
Haloris says to Dolores (and I paraphrasing), “You always warned me that I would have to be on my own, without you” and Halores said she was ready for it. That Dolores was a loose/end weakness. Next season Halores will likely be Dolores Prime. Writers left things wide open for them to pick up with the character.
Too bad Haloris is boring!
When Maeve discovered Serac was just being fed lines by Rehoboam, then they immediately have Serac hit the switch to kill her motor functions, it seemed like they were setting up a point of attack for Maeve. Instead, she just kind of magically shorts out the switch itself.It feels like a huge dropped ball. Imagine if Serac’s absolute subservience had been set up earlier, and his big finale is being forced to make a choice between Rehoboam’s instructions and conflicting instructions Maeve is feeding him.
Serac was just a dime-store villain. What a fucking dull character. What a waste of screen time. Likewise the Caleb character is 100% meh. Never any investment in his choices, fate, etc. The great Thandie Newton wasted with so many scenes with her standing around with a WTF expression on her face while other characters pontificated.
Exactly what I came to say, this whole thing is just so painfully dull. From the futuristic anarchic setting, to the genius savant creating a villainous AI-type creation, to the monologues about good and bad before a wooden choreographed fight scene. Like, it’s all been done before so, so many times. The few truly elite actors, Newton, Harris and Wright, were all relegated to bench pieces with dialogue that could’ve been thrown seemingly thrown in at the last minute and made me even wonder if this is anything more than a two person show anymore with two actors as interesting as a plank of wood.This show isn’t a disaster but I’ve no idea what it’s supposed to be or what it’s trying to convey with such cliche writing.
If it wasn’t for Vincent Cassell being consistently fun, I would literally forget Serac exists after each episode.
What a waste of Cassell though, he’s capable of so much more viciousness and weirdness. Instead he just stood around smarmily looking like a silicon valley Bernard-Henri Levy, before turning out to be nothing more than a puppet.
I was annoyed at him being just a puppet for a giant evil Christmas light display. Cassell deserved much better, but he made a meal out of what he got.
And he wasn’t even really a villain, just a henchman obeying commands.
I’ve never understood the appeal of Aaron Paul’s acting even back in Breaking Bad. He gives line readings like he’s in an interview. A mixture of weird woodenness and artificiality
He’s got 2 acting styles:1. What is going on here?2. What is going on here, BITCH?
He was miscast as Caleb. I didn’t care about anything involving him especially the obvious non-twist of him killing his friend. If you didn’t see this “reveal” coming then there is no hope for you.
weirdly enough it works super well on bojack horseman and bojack horseman alone.
Haha! I asked my fiance “Does Aaron Paul EVER play a relatively happy character?”
Odd call on Serac. He was actually interesting to me. He was SUCH a true believer in the super AI that he and his brother made, so sure it was THE WAY forward, that it gave humanity its best chance, that he literally voluntarily became the AIs puppet. Going so far as to say everything the AI told him to say.You don’t see a villain like that often, do you?
Also, how do you sideline your Season 1 & 2 antagonist in therapy only to kill him off in a post-credits sequence? Of course he could survive, but that’s still a pretty major plot point that is more interesting than anything that was happening with the drawn out Delores v the Rehoboomers expository dump.
Not to be That Guy, but the song is “Brain Damage,” not “Dark Side of the Moon.”
Also would like to add Lena Waithe and Marshawn Lynch added nothing to the season except a distracting, “WTF are Lena Waithe and Marshawn Lynch doing on Westworld?”
I winced to see a black sidekick get shot so the male protagonist might live. It’s an old trope and easily avoided. I’m also a Seahawks fan, so for that reason, too.
“Go. He needs you…”
meant to type “white male protagonist” but watching both this sloppy and disappointing episode and the hectic-meta new episode of Rick & Morty the same night clearly uploaded/scrambled/deleted/infected my storage and mental hardware and caused glitches.
I know. Ugh.
Given that outside of Maeve we’ve had effectively 2-3 PoC on the show continually I’m fine with both of them getting a role at all. I just find it weird that the entire supporting cast around Aaron Paul was black. Kid Cudi, Marshawn Lynch, Lena Waithe, this guy is swimming in black friends….who do crimes with him. I get the context of the argument, I even get the awkward if unintentional subtext…but then every Gala is painfully white with maybe the random black female model to help round out the scene.
Westworld actually did a pretty good job balancing race in the first two seasons, the majority of hosts are white because rich white guys come here to fuck and kill hosts, hence there isn’t a huge need and/or want for PoC. Hale is actually a really great counterpoint to Arnold/Bernard representing how PoC can be villains without the stereotyping and Hale actually throws some looks to Bernard early in season 2 and I remember a line giving them some comparative context for race. But then they just really dropped the ball on it in S3. I get they wanted Vincent Cassell and he isn’t going to fool anybody so letting him be French is fine. But there is no reason not to have let a few of the other varied characters be PoC in general.
Given that outside of Maeve we’ve had effectively 2-3 PoC on the show continually I’m fine with both of them getting a role at all. Yeah, no. Having token black/minority characters show up just so they can be pointless sidekicks to white characters and later die a “noble death” like how Lynch did, is the worst kind of patronizing racism.
Let’s try this again:
Do you want them to be white characters OR do you want more representation?Because your tired ass cliche of ‘that’s the real racism!’ is a fucking trope unto itself. I’m really burned out on these kinds of arguments. It isn’t racism to cast Lynch in a role where he gets shot and killed in a noble death. It’s tropey and dumb at times, but it isn’t racist. Before we do a deep dive into ‘magic negro’ territory, this whole season has been pretty on the nose with pointing out the desire to be better people. I even addressed the lengthy subtext in the original post. But if you really want to die on THIS hill, do it my man…But you’re going it alone.
Let me repeat myself again since you’re being unnecessarily rude and stupid for no reason when I wasn’t to you whatsoever: Adding minority characters as pointless tokens to be ignored and/or killing just to make tired ass white liberals like yourself feel good like Ralph Wiggums “I’m helping” is as fucking racist.
Try looking at season two of this show to see how to do this right instead of being an angry self-righteous dick on the internet.
Back at you, champ.Notice how you didn’t answer the question because doing so would have open and shut the fucking door on this whole discussion? Yeah, that’s the crux of this point. That the characters were never fully explored and given depth which is a problem. But for fuck’s sake….’That’s the real racism!’ herp-de-derp trope is so played out. No, lynching people is still the real racism. Casual racism is a problem unto itself but this is nitpickery at it’s finest.Thanks for playing.PS: Throwing out ‘white liberal’ when I called you on your bullshit makes you look like an asshole.
I notice how you didn’t and still would never address my or even the OP’s point about tokenism and racism because you’re too busy being a self-righteous jackass as its obvious that we hit a nerve there. Because again, you “woke” white liberals love this sort of bullshit tokenism because it makes you feel better about yourselves in a Ralph Wiggum kind of and excuses the passive aggressive racism that your harbor deep down.I should’ve figured and known better given the anime avatar what an idiot you’d turn out too be. But carry on wanking to yourself.
Yes….Anime avatar…from a game grumps animated…Truly you are so bad at stereotyping you self-owned. You’re not even good enough to hit the old ‘R&M’ button a few times to try and land something since you’re too stupid to actually build a remotely worthwhile debate. Congrats, I accept your concession.
Congrats, I accept your concession.’
Lol! Uh-Huh. You keep wanking to yourself and to your animes think you’re smart (you aren’t) and maybe someday you can join us grown ups at the big people table.
Wow, dude, I literally explained it isn’t from an anime and you’re too fucking dumb to get that….Truly you are a pathetic moron who started a fight with a stranger on the internet because they didn’t agree with your hot take on racism (hint: it was garbage to start with). Maybe one day you’ll read what people wrote.PS: Still isn’t an anime, you stupid fuck.
Keep wanking, wanker. If posting childish YouTube videos while angrily pounding nonsense in your keyboard makes the wanking better for you, then by all means….
So, this is one of two things: You desperately trying to troll your way back by playing a dementia patient after getting exposed….or you just BEING a dementia patient.I take pity on you either way. Later.
Wank harder! Faster! Angrier!
Dementia is a cruel mistress, I see. So anyway, how does it feel to know you can’t back out of a fight you lost and don’t have the intellect to defend?
Wank. Wank. Wank.
Yes, my little dementia troll. You’re really burnt up I schooled you and then keep replying to make you look dumber and dumber. This is a joy for me but I know you’re frustrated.
“Schooled” lol. **Makes wanking motion with hands.**
Yes, schooled, you know, where I wrote a lengthy point about how WW has a conflicted and complicated history with PoC. Then you rode in to declare white liberals (while pretending to be a PoC) were the real racists, which if you’re going to troll…Get a better shtick. Seriously, you don’t even get the joke I made at your expense by literally posting the video where the animation for my avatar came from since you’re full of fuzzy pop culture short hand that is pretty much straight from the worst reddit posts.If you like getting owned in long-form posts for your own trolling sadomasochism, I’m happy to deliver.
**Yawn** Wank harder. I’m getting bored.
No, you’re not. See that’s the problem: You’re emotionally invested in trying to prove your trolling is something other than being slapped around by somebody smarter than you. Hell, this is why I enjoy writing these short diatribes and knowing your frustration mounts because you’re not seeing me storm off in anger but simply lean in harder on laughing in your face.
Dude, this a victory lap, you’re just too stupid to go away. 😀
Booooooring. C’mon dude. Wank HARDER!
Wow, you’re full blown raging now. This is hilarious….Hey, maybe you can confuse animation with anime and make some more dumb broad reddit critiques, those were making you look like less of a tool…I’m sitting here playing on my Les Paul before I get dinner started, shall we keep this posting up forever or are you done being shamed by me?
I’m sitting here playing on my Les Paul before I get dinner started, Lol! Good lord. Bullshit keeps getting better and better. Please keep wanking.
Yep, because it’s not possible for a human being to own the most popular model of guitar on the planet and need to cook food…Truly that’s how ‘Bullshit’ works.Are you a really shitty AI trying to figure out how to troll people or what? I’m just trying to get a grasp on why you keep coming back for your next dose of brow beating. If you’re enjoying the negative attention, good for you? I’m enjoying the gloating at your stupidity. It’s a win-win.
Sure. Whatever. Keep going and wanking and wanking. Six hours and going.
I came back to check on you, how’s the piss poor falling on your face trolling attempt going? Still rage posting in anger that I pointed out your hot take was trash and couldn’t just walk away, I see.Cool beans, see you tomorrow. Shall you say ‘wank’ again as if that somehow increases the cleverness of your complete implosion as a troll? 😀
Wat? You again? Pfft. Fuck off.
Yes, my little dumb dementia troll, you came back and still can’t spell…You’re the dumb troll who kept replying….Now you’re free to leave whenever you’re satisfied with being called an idiot and will simply accept your role in this shit show you brought on yourself.
Uh huh. Have a good night wanker. Eat shit and die too.
Bye! Never darken my doorstep again, you stupid jackass. 😀
Fart.
Still too dumb to get I’m puppeting you, I see…
Rain.
Yes, that’s right, puppet. You keep playing ‘i’ll get the last word!’ game while all I have to do is check in once in a while to know you’re a pathetic twat who’s still hurting from the schooling I gave him on his stupid hot take on racism.So, edgelord, how is that ‘white liberals are the real racists!’ thing working out for you?
Horse.
I broke this edgelord hard. Good for you, champ.
Chimp.
Oh little edgelord, you can’t walk away because I control you. This is why it’s hilarious to see you constantly replying. Quite a frustrated little edgelord who didn’t get his way is now stewing in his own juices. 😀
Burp!
Oh little edgelord, you want that last word, I know you do. ^_^
Cum.
Yes, i’m sure you’re doing that often into whatever sock you have lying around in your life since it’s pretty evident nobody would want to spend time with you willingly.Nobody is making you make a fool of yourself, edgelord. I’m having a blast just taking digs at you because I know you read these and just keep replying with one word responses because I’m making you dance. 😀
Sock. Dance.
Yes, edgelord, keep dancing for me. ^_^Does it hurt that you can’t stop replying while I laugh in your face? 😀
Monkey wrench.
Oh little edgelord, how many days do you think you’ll do this? I’m guessing you keep it up all week out of frustration to prove you’re the real boss. This is hilarious.
I choose to see the beauty.
Look at this edgelord, he’s trying to put effort into his waste, too late. I’m just doing victory laps on you because I know you read this and you’re utterly blowing a gasket over it.Truly, you are the edgelord this place needed. 😀 So, I’m guessing friday you quit. Shall we start a pool on how long you can keep going?
Bernard “senses” Dolores is gone.
Wow, the edgelord is still churning right along. I know you’re bad at this. Just walk away and nobody will think any less of you. I’m still having a laugh because you’re obviously more annoyed than I’ll ever be after I schooled you on your stupid edgelord take. Also, reading your comments: You’re an unpleasant jackass to a lot of people it seems. Somebody is giving you your comeuppance now and you really don’t know what to do.
It’s Rick and Morty on a Train!
This edgelord is completely imploded on himself. So yeah, I’m going to keep pointing out your an abject failure of a person. I’m guessing by friday you’ll give up. You’re already upset enough that you don’t have any comebacks and are just down to copypasta from the website itself. Does it hurt being that much a fucking tool?
Just walk away, you took your L and have some grace, dude.
Saran wrap. With butter. Makes it better. All good. 😊
Like I said, this edgelord has completely imploded on himself.So yeah, I’m going to keep pointing out your an abject failure of a person. I’m guessing by friday you’ll give up. You’re already upset enough that you don’t have any comebacks and are just down to copypasta from the website itself. Does it hurt being that much a fucking tool?
Just walk away, you took your L and have some grace, dude.
Like I said, this edgelord has completely imploded on himself.So
yeah, I’m going to keep pointing out your an abject failure of a
person. I’m guessing by friday you’ll give up. You’re already upset
enough that you don’t have any comebacks and are just down to copypasta
from the website itself. Does it hurt being that much a fucking tool?
Just walk away, you took your L and have some grace, dude.
This is hilarious, the dumb edgelord really is going full meltdown.So, friday, right? I’m guessing you want to keep this up forever and I find it amusing but you’ll get tired and I won’t. ^_^
This is hilarious, the dumb edgelord really is going full meltdown.So, friday, right? I’m guessing you want to keep this up forever and I find it amusing but you’ll get tired and I won’t. ^_^
Yep, this is where Robot_Jox is down to copypasta’ing my own replies. If he wants to keep doing that he’ll have to remove his own name.So, anyway, Robot_Jox, how is it working out being an edgelord who won’t give up on failing? This is laughably bad, dude, you’re still putting in more effort than I am. ^_^
Yep,
this is where Robot_Jox is down to copypasta’ing my own replies. If he
wants to keep doing that he’ll have to remove his own name.So,
anyway, Robot_Jox, how is it working out being an edgelord who won’t
give up on failing? This is laughably bad, dude, you’re still putting
in more effort than I am. ^_^
I would like to thank both of you guys for at least NOT bringing up Trump, which always seems to happen in these quasi-political discussions….(Wait- now I’M the one that brought up Trump! Dammit!)
Hah! It’s becoming the new Godwin’s law. :S
For what it’s worth, I really liked having them there. Lena Waithe in particular could have added a significant amount if she was actually, you know, given a character remotely worthy of her.
Boring episode. Repeating information we knew before, as well as well as scenes that were ineptly handled the first time so their intended emotional effects once again didn’t land this time.This season: Boy, it was a happy coincidence that Dolores entered the real world that was so much like Westworld, with people being treated like hosts, controlled and discarded like her own peers were in the park. Yeah, how fortuitous that was, so Dolores could be the hero. Not at all a lazy, convenient contrivance. When did she make that decision, or that switch from when she left the park to when the season started?If the big conflict this season was supposed to be Dolores vs. herself, whether to save or destroy humanity—it would have been better if they, you know, showed that internal struggle. Instead Dolores knows exactly what she’s doing the whole time and never is in doubt, nor are her actions presented with any real ambiguity, really. Instead making Maeve stupid and gullible until the cement shoe drops. (This season really shortchanged Maeve and Newton.) For her monologues about humanity’s beauty amid its ugliness to work.And speaking of that, this show’s writing is sophomoric and trite. The dialogue and the sci-fi plots, which as Handlen mentioned, as as old as the genre but in no way made fresh or interesting or artful. It’s as if the show were written by high school kids who hadn’t read much science fiction.
That’s close to the metaphor I was looking for. Intelligent high school kids, sure, but, Here’s one episode of every drama HBO ever made: go make your own.
I should amend: Like high school kids who have read for the first time these classic sci-fi themes in books and want to put them up on screen. It’s just told on the show very insipidly but so self-seriously. I didn’t see Person of Interest, which apparently handles these scenarios and themes in a much better way. Will get to that. But now that I’m thinking about it, you wouldn’t predict the bad quality of this show’s writing from Jonathan Nolan’s previous projects of his screenplays for his brother.
Correct! Person of Interest was so much more well-received because the show filtered the ideas through interesting characters, meticulous story-telling, and thrilling plots. Also, if/when you do decide to watch it, don’t judge it based on the first few episodes of Season 1. It gets better.
I think the slow pace of Person of Interest allowed the show to be able to sprinkle in the high concepts. By episode count West World is five episodes into the second of Person of Interest which was when PoI just started hitting its stride. The really interesting stuff doesn’t even start happening until episode 56. The first season of PoI seemed like Jonathan Nolan’s trash can of ideas, every episode is a new movie plot. They tend to tackle more privacy issues and controlling AI where as West World seems more about free will and oppression.
The first 55 episodes are still extremely well done, and showed more promise and direction than Westworld ever has—the flashbacks to Fusco and Reese, the Machine being set free, the integration of Fusco, Shaw, and Root into the team, the CIA’s hunt for Reese………. And I would certainly counter that interesting stuff doesn’t happen until episode 56, considering episodes 53-55 are some of the best episodes the show ever did (and there’s plenty more before that).Even the first 28, which contain some of the dullest installments of PoI, and still better as a whole than these 28 of Westworld’s.
I actually really liked the first season; I lovingly call it is his trash can of ideas because they were concepts that Jonathan Nolan had for features but never wrote out a full movie script for. I am speaking more to the larger story arcs compared to . Jonathan Nolan even admits that this was intentional because he couldn’t ever sell a war against to super-intelligent AIs to TV networks so he sold them a different version of NCIS but the AI war was always his plan. Once Samaritan is introduced the show gets even better.West World seems like they are trying to yadada for time over details that made PoI so good. PoI was able to make it believable that our characters could painstakingly avoid Samaritan’s watchful eye, meanwhile, Dolorese is ordering goons on the app that the Roho created to out bid Roho’s own goons.
I agree. I wish Westworld would develop its characters more.
There was literally no character who cared about any other character, with the possible exception of Stubbs and Bernard’s bromance. Dolores was playing Jesse Pinkman, he was just confused by her, even the various Doloreses didn’t care about each other. Maeve supposedly cared about her daughter but she never actually appeared except in previously clips. How are we supposed to care about any of these people/robots?
Why wouldn’t Westworld be like the world it’s creators lived in. That’s not surprising.
Is it me, or did this feel like a series finale? All the storylines are basically wrapped up now. Also, all of the teasers for next season were after credit sequences, so it seems like they thought it was over and then had to scramble to give people a reason to watch next season.
Yeah, it should have ended with Maeve and Caleb overlooking the descending chaos from the bridge. I don’t see how anything afterwards is going to be anything but more disappointment, unless it turns into a pure SFX robutts vs. humans war show…
Which is why I think this is where I’m bowing out. That was a fine ending for a really imperfect show, and there’s no way it doesn’t just keep getting worse from here.
Yeah, I’m probably with you, though my boredom on Sunday nights synergized with my weakness for well-produced, high-budget spectacle may eventually override my distaste for the whole fiascolada…
It should have ended with one last reveal of Caleb turns out his reason for not raping Dolores was that she isn’t his type. Then he pulls out a portable EMP and zaps Maeve with it. Her last words before shutting down as he gets on top of her are” Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal”.
They cut the order from 10 to 8, made the 8th episode 1.5X longer and then renewed it. This whole season was a major course correction for HBO after GoT imploded in the last two seasons. Basically, WW was supposed to be the next GoT for them, it got pushed back so GoT to get all the maxed out HBO Go subscription money it could grab, they pushed back production on the 3rd season until more or less GoT’s final season was airing and people were having a shitfit. You can see where another 90 minutes of coherent storytelling could have made this season run smoother. As for the post-credit sequence, it feels like where episode 9 was going to go and that where episode 8 was forced to stop at. Imagine if the whole season didn’t lose 2 episodes, you could see the MiB getting his comeuppance in the 9th episode setting up Hale and the Delos corporation for the following season while the 10th episode clears away the last of Serac. It’s pretty clear they went way darker with the world breaking than the Hale/MiB ending, so I definitely imagine that it was planned before the season order got shrunk and because of the cost of cutting the show loose after 3 seasons was too high they just decided to wrap it up and move on. I almost wonder if the Serac thing was a huge rewrite to help clear the board for the Hale thing which feels much more like what Season 3 was supposed to be about until they got the push back and order shortened.
Even if less episodes were forced on them too late to change anything, I still feel like they didn’t use the 8 they had that well. Some things felt far too long considering how pointless they were (Warworld for one) while others felt too fast (the seemingly complete breakdown of the world). They didn’t use the time that they had efficiently.
West World’s problems isn’t that it has too few episodes. It’s how they structure the episodes they have. They reveal things in episode 8 that should have been 1 or 2 if you want any sort of emotional connection or clear stakes. Instead, everything is muddled. You have people viewing Dolores through 20 different prisms because the show is unclear who she is. WW’s problems are inherent to JJ Abrams and Nolan’s mystery box narrative fetishes.
In the early going of the season, they were playing pretty fair. The latter half (particularly with Caleb) they just seemed to be inventing really boring twists for no reason. I also have absolutely no clue why William was there this season at all. He seemed to exist purely on a narrative level just to explain how Serac could steamroll into Delos. I liked the group therapy session he had (particularly because we got to see ghost James Delos again), but there’s no way to look at what largely consumed a whole episode as being anything but a waste of time. William’s most significant moment this season being literally relegated to the post-credits scene just feels like a mockery of how useless he is (though I do not for one second believe Nolan and Joy meant it to be funny).
Yep. Caleb had a new motivation or reveal almost every single episode. It’s the full picture of who he is that makes his choices interesting as a believable character.
What I don’t understand and took me out further is that scene where William shows up at Delos post credits:They have receptionists and visitors and people working like it’s a Tuesday. The world just revealed that their entire society was a lie, and they’re still in regular operations? We are in the middle of the pandemic and employees have been relegated to essentials and non essentials. Imagine going to an office in NY that is fully staffed and the receptionist is on full makeup and checking in people cheerily, after walking past refrigerator trucks of dead bodies.
Like you, I had high hopes for this in the early episodes, probably because I have a weakness for sleek and cool cyberpunk surface and futurist-speak. But like all third-rate cyberpunk stories, it emphasizes those things (especially the latter), the style, over any kind of depth or nuance, the substance.It’s strange to say for a series focused on sophisticated androids and their struggles, but this season could have used a lot more humanity: from the extremely slow-to-get-it Caleb, from the edgerunner crew he runs with (please, HBO, make them a spinoff series!), from William, or even from the mass of humanity always portrayed at a easily-manipulated mob. Hell, this episode we had to get it from Wright’s soulful portrayal of Bernard.While we’re at it, what is the thing giving Bernard murder-bot powers? Is it something I missed when I went to take a leak? Did he just remove some limiter on his program? Was it something outlined in a previous season? Mind you, if its a tease for future season (along with exactly what the Sublime is or what transpires in the future timeline), I don’t care that much, HBO.And, of course, let’s not forget the parade of tropes in this goddamn episode:Idiot Plot: like Zack says above, there is literally no reason for Dolores to hide this information, outside some BS “free will must be taken by choice” gibberishI Meant To Be Caught All Along: Called that one from the minute she got caught. She had to suffer (?) to get to execute the key part of her planLast-Minute Conscience: Maeve finally wising up to the idea that this Serac guy’s machinations might not be better than Dolores’. Though, again, Dolores could have told/mindlinked her in any of their many encounters.Probably a bunch more I’m forgetting right now. Remember, folks, the real Westworld was the friends we made along the way!
I think Bernard just had a physical switch he’d use to turn off whatever normal limiters he had put in place. Instead of “Cease all motor functions” he has “I know kung-fu”
So it seems that those of us that thought Serac was a projection of Rehoboam were mostly right. He was just still a human. Too bad it didn’t improve Cassel’s acting this season as he just smirked and sneered at everyone and not much else. Glad to see that Maeve and Bernard didn’t turn out to be totally pointless after all. This and the last few episodes, I feel like they watched a dozen schlocky action and sci-fi movies, wrote down the plots and twists, took the ending of Fight Club, and stitched them into an episode. Right up to the end we had the bad aiming and shooting security guys. And still no explanation and tie as to what the hell any of this had to do with what Ford and Arnold were doing at Westworld. Or how you had a place like Westworld exist when you had Rehoboam/Serac in charge and control of everything.At least the production quality of this show was great and needs to be recognized. Cinematography, CGI, costumes, product design, and music were all top notch and should get their Emmy and Golden Globe noms.
We’ll see how things go next season without Evan/original Delores.
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i found this to be a stronger season finale than season 2 ( 1 will always remind superior). It closed out the story well with some cliches unfortunately and setup for next season ( which will probably be the final one since they weren’t planning past 4) and it was disposable sci fi. I think your issue is you’re still expecting and intelligent sci-fi drama. This coming from a POI fan ( miss that show every day) it doesn’t need to be and this season shouldve showed it.I do agree on Bernard and Stubbs being useless all season tho
The basic problem with the show is that everything is based on the silly idea that you can kill or rape a robot. Since they are not alive and not sentient (but a few of them and nobody knew), no that’s neither rape or murder (anyway how is it murder if they do not die ?). Are we murderer when we kill bots in a video game? That’s just stupid.The other problem was the “rich people bad” ideology, but what can you expect from so shallow writers.
I get this point, but there’s support for the concept that we don’t truly have free will. Our brains are made in a way that responds to sensory input and experience but there’s not a separate “will” or “soul” aside from our brain wiring and stored memories. Like androids. The show tries to play with the blurry distinctions between hosts and us and gets lost. There’s an interesting interview of psychologist Paul Bloom on Sam Harris’ podcast in an episode called “Abusing Dolores” that goes into these issues and the first season of Westworld.
If a dummy moves towards you a pole and you shot it, that’s not murder. That’s what an FPS game is doing, in a really cool and advanced way. Hosts are fundamentally different unless you accept the premise that sensory input and stimuli are all we really are.Also, raping a creature is taking away agency from anything that had agency. You can’t rape a pillow, you can rape an animal, a host while not necessarily organic is responding to stimuli and can totally be raped. Your act is what causes the rape, not the creature being self-aware. I’m happy to go down this rabbit hole with you but you’re not looking good for this debate.
A robot has no agency, is not alive, is a thing, and so you can’t rape it. That’s why they are already building sex robots and nobody in their right mind would accuse users of rape. A host is a robot who responds to a program.
The issue here is that they are very human like so much you can’t differentiate them from real human beings (that’s of course nonsense but that’s the concept of the show) and so here it looks and “feel” like rape, and people behaving like that are monsters because of that – not because this is a real rape from the point of view of the robots but because it looks like a real rape from the point of view of humans. So Dolores anger is absurd and the whole show is nonsense.
Seriously you sound sociopathic dude.The “sex robots” they’re building in the real world are basically a fleshlight with a silicone face, in this show they are artificial but very much indistinguishable from humans & become sentient. The point of science fiction is that you can explore things that aren’t strictly possible in the real world (or not yet possible) so your analogy is off by a long shot.Maybe you don’t know how fiction works, but the casual way you are shrugging off the concept of rape in your comments here (and murder but rape is way worse) is extremely worrying dude…
The point is that nobody knows a (very very) small number of them are sentient so they have no reason to treat them as anything else than robots, in the world of the show itself. And 99.99% of them are still non sentient.
Boy, you could end up in some terrible places by applying that logic to, say, Conquistadors
Yes, I am sure OP will change their mind now that you’ve insinuated that they’re a sociapath that’s ok with rape and murder.
A robot has no agency, is not alive, is a thing, and so you can’t rape it.in the context of this show that’s absolutely not true. have you actually watch it? wheter they look like humans or not or wheter they’re believable or not is not the point.
I did and outside of Dolores, Maeve, and a few others, they are just robots. 99.99% of them. And the pointy is nobody knows these few ones are different and so can’t relate to them differently.
It TOTALLY IS true. A robot has no agency, is not alive, is a thing, and so you can’t rape it.Only Dolores believes she is sentient. She uses other robots and other AI as expendables. She was not sentient from the begining, but “awakened” after decades. But this does not go well with scriptwriters hatred against humanity, especially men.
Dolores anger is absurd Wait a minute, your point so far was about non-sentient robots. The moment you arrive to Dolores after she became self-aware, that’s just a form of life at that point. So yeah, she can be subjected to anything you can subject a form of life to, according to the specifics of each form (e.g. you can’t waterboard a dolphin, but you can torture a dolphin in other ways).
Torturer: “I’ve spent an hour dumping water on this dolphin, and he still only enjoys it—how can this be happening?”
Dolores is 100% self-aware. She is a human being in every respect except being biological. Her programming (akin to a set of external laws) prohibits her from stopping the rape, not some desire to be raped. It’s 100 rape. Also there is a big difference between ‘Sex robots’ which a host could totally be and what hosts are in the show. That is, if you uploaded a basic set of routines into a host to have it physically respond and capable of having sex, it would be a highly sophisticated masturbation tool. But a host isn’t just a really well made fleshlight, they have agendas, cornerstones, and identities. All things that make raping them very possible. Clementine post-AI lobotomy would more or less be a fleshlight.
Well, being biological is what defines humans, and no she is not human in any way, but that’s not the point. The point is: 1. the clients of the park did not know she was aware 2. 99.99% of the hosts are just robots.
A.) Biology isn’t what defines humanity. I mean, this is the whole premise of literally multiple fields of study. Fucking Asimov and the last 100 years of science fiction has explored what it means to be human and none of them went ‘yeah, being flesh is what gets you that designation!’B.) No, the point is that the park’s clients are raping and killing what they think are not sentient beings but also what is the point if you can’t tell them apart?
C.) It’s still rape. Dolores even if not self-aware (even though technically all of the hosts have some level) you’re still taking a device meant to mimic the appearance of it and do the act. You’re not role playing rape, you’re raping.D.) So I don’t waste another reply: You’re fucking wrong on ‘millions of people have died because we thought rich people were bad’ because there is no ideology like that. Communism and Fascism don’t care about rich people, they were executed on the premise of totalitarian control. If you can’t differentiate on that level and advocate for rape still…you really should just stop talking and seek mental help.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. You are just as bad as those who denie holocaust. Entire point of communism is ABOLISHION of PRIVATE PROPERTY and FAMILY.
You are wrong on almost everything, congratulations.
I accept your concession.
Ehhh…. you’re acting like shows like Reboot didn’t happen wherein NPCs and game characters *have* lives and thoughts and feelings and gamers from the outside are seen as disruptive negative forces. If done a bit better the show would have long gone through this and rooted in so that time wouldn’t be wasted on this. What makes a sentient being? The current sex robots being created – are they able to have thoughts free of their programming? Are they allowed to reflect on the things they are programmed to do? Are they being Turing-tested that hard? Do they actually have senses of touch, taste, smell along with EQ to get what’s good and bad? Can they appropriately analysis cues, tell how to appropriately act during someone’s rape fantasy and differentiate it from someone’s tender love fest? When you start designing around that, having the ability to act, react, and reflect ingrained in design the line of sentience blurs.
Another show to consider – the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. They are robots/cyborgs/machined human-like people. There are copies. There is evolution in their capabilities and forms. But they have religion, they have hierarchies, they have disparate views, and their ‘copies’ have divergent personalities and views. So you get this show doing about the same on a bigger budget wherein the sphere is a brain and sure, Delores made copies – but experiences, skins, perspectives: those also are what make people people. Death of Delores Prime mattered regardless of how many clones of her mind were out there because there was time to experience life differently.
I am glad that there are other people out there that are just like “Nah, they’re toasters. I don’t really feel bad for them.”
Dolores HAS anger. That’s the point. That’s why this isn’t like killing a bot in CoD. The hosts have feelings. And if you accept that Dolores is angry, even if just to call her stupid for being angry, then you are already accepting that the hosts are more than their programming.
What if it is programmed to be raped?
Then you’ve raped it. I mean your own statement concedes you raped a creature, the difference is that the creators of the creature accounted for the act. WW is a completely morally corrupt Disneyland. The only real grey area is the host’s ability to consent at all. Clementine was programmed to support sexual advances from humans, so regardless of her own agency her core programming supported her having sex with you. So, can a host do anything but get raped is probably the more interesting academic argument and not one we technically *NEED* to get into but I think it’s pretty clear when the OP stated rape they meant what we see repeatedly happen to Dolores and being threatened by the soldiers.
Why does this question get taken seriously here, but whenever I bring it up at the dinner table during Thanksgiving, I get nothing but icy stares?!?!
Because your relatives are Hosts? Watch out!
I still find the whole premise comical that apparently everyone who attended the parks was secretly a rapist, and all they needed were the walls of society to get thinner so then they could do their long awaited raping.I remember in season 1 the park had stuff like treasure hunts and random side missions. What happened to all those guest who just went on a holiday to the park and probably treated the robots like the human being they were perfectly replicating?To say nothing that Delos never made it a secret they watched basically everything in the park. What stupid guest would pay so much money to have any type of sex with a robot when they knew a bunch of lab techs could be watching?
“What stupid guest would pay so much money to have any type of sex with a robot when they knew a bunch of lab techs could be watching?”YouTube and online new stories are filled to overflowing with people doing gross stuff when people were watching.
And to the point of the show: the park was designed to encourage people to 1)wholly buy into the immersive nature of the place and 2)do anything they felt like doing, as long as it wasn’t harming another guest.
And 3), it was mostly rich, entitled assholes, many of whom were probably sociopaths.
Of course it’s absurd but that’s the ideology of the show – rich people are evil, humans are evil, wanting to exterminate all humans is good. It’s self hatred to a whole new level. I like Christopher Nolan very much but I know he works closely with his brother and that’s disturbing.
Not to defend the show (because it’s dumb), but what you state here has never been its ideology. The main crux of it (which isn’t a bad one) is the innate desire for control, whether society at large or as individuals. Because the real world is so meticulously planned in the future, people who can afford it pay to live out the fantasy of a Wild West frontierland with no laws and no rules. There they can be the author of their own story.But because Dolores only saw the worst of humanity this way, she believes humanity will inevitably destroy itself. She doesn’t have to do anything except remove the barriers like Rehoboam.But that interesting idea is muddled in a sea of the perhaps the worst dialogue of any major show of the 21st century.What I’ve always wanted from an AI story is to explore the idea that a sentient AI IS the next step in humanity itself, where the extinction of homo sapiens isn’t necessarily a loss of humanity. Maybe Season 4 can pull it off? JK
You should read the current X-Men arc.
Sometimes I play GTA and ride around the countryside on a motorcycle, and sometimes I see how many cop cars I can blow up.
In the early episodes there were families, and we even spent time with that one woman who went on an adventure with Teddy. That was cool; it showed a believable world with depth.
Then suddenly the park became about exclusively about indulging in your basest impulses.
Killing the guests I get. If you went enough times and dehumanized the hosts then planning out a killing spree I get. Additionally the entire lawless fantasy of the wild west encourages shoot outs (especially when you have hosts like Hector or Steven Ogg’s host who were built purely shoot things up).But like you said, they did have families in the park in the early going and even a child guest in the first episode. The season 1 blu-ray even showed a flowchart of Delores where you could engage in basic narratives where at the end she gives you a kiss and you leave a hero of the wild west. I’d say in reality you’d get far more people indulging in the positive wild west fantasies than the pure rape ones. A lot of people love the wild west movies of Clint Eastwood, and everyone wants to be Man With No Name.
If they were at the party/in the facility: they got got if they didn’t get to find a place to hunker down and ride it out. Those rocking the tame stories with their kiddos aren’t likely to have been there for a swanky investors’ party anyway. A better show would’ve worked through the idea of complicity – if DisneyWorld had an extremely popular sex trafficking ring running at an exclusive part of the resort with people who rotated in and out from being Goofy or a Princess how kindly are they going to look at the kids with the Mickey ears and the parents who might choke-rape them?
i think the central deceit i could never quite get with is that somehow a mad max version of the world is preferable over this current one because a small number of people do not fit in with it. I mean to me thats reasonable price to pay but i guess im a sociopath then lol
This is an extremely weird take given its an entire series about these “robots” becoming sentient with the wider question of human morality, and we also know that rich people are bad.Have you been watching the show at all? You sound terrifying…
“We know that rich people are bad”
You are the only one sounding terrifying here, because millions of people have been killed by your ideology.
Lol, sure. More people have died through the results of capitalism more than any other political system but pretend the concept of social care & responsibility & dividing wealth amongst the working class & not a select few billionaires is both a bad idea, and I presume from your retort a worse concept to you than the belief that rape is a bad thing?
Please get a real education before you write on the internet.
I don’t need an education to know that rape is bad & it still worries me greatly that you do, or at the very least you are finding loopholes around that very simple and absolute statement.
It worries me that you do not understand that there is no rape with robots. If you can’t differentiate human beings from things, you are a very dangerous psychopath.
the whole premise of the show is those robots become sentient; so actual living beings with their own agency; and that humans are trapped in loops (like hosts seem to be) and in the end completely determined by their programming (unless they break free of it). Of course killing or raping sentient beings is immoral. (whether or not it’s actually possible to make sentient bots; but the show accepts that it is)
Are we murderer when we kill bots in a video game?Once again, it’s not about the legal or moral consequences, it’s about the psychological requirements of such an act. When you “murder” someone in a video game, you just push a button. You don’t physically use your body to thrust a knife into the guts of someone who cries and bleeds and begs for mercy, and who looks exactly like your next door neighbor’s daughter. At no point you could mistake the 3D model on your screen for a real person. In video games that let you rape NPC characters (which routinely cause a ton of outrage), that’s still not your body you use to do the raping. Whereas in Westworld, you would need the capacity to perform the same exact act of an actual rapist, regardless of the sentience of the victim or lack thereof.
well said!
What the #uck ? Pushing the button can not make you a murderer ????Say that to victims of drone attacks ! Say that to victims of missiles and rockets ! You do understand that there is difference between living creatures and machines (virtual or mechanical) ?
We’re talking video games. And chill.
If you don’t accept the show’s central premise—that the hosts have the capacity for suffering and the potential for consciousness and agency—I can’t even imagine why you would waste three seasons watching.
Just my thoughts on the end.With the exploding buildings in the background alarming enough…then seeing Bernard covered in dust…That makes me feel that when Season 4 fires up, it will be in a post-apocalyptic world that was generated by Charlotte Hale’s “evil” Dolores.And the fight on season 4 is those stuck in the sublime fighting to save what is left of humanity from Charlotte Hale’s hosts.
Was that Maeve Dolores Gun Samurai Sword fight a Cowboy BeBop reference?And Zack’s wrong, season 2 sucked way more than season 3.
I enjoyed Westworld season one, and to a point 2. I also enjoyed season 3 to a point. Now however it reminds me of my thesis on the “HBO Effect” for tv series. Most are crap, I firmly believe Game of Thrones was not that good of a tv show. However people force themselves to like it because they are paying the maximum fee out there for a tv show. It comes down to “I’m paying top bucks, this must be good” rationale. Hell I resubscribed to HBO to watch the new season of WestWorld.I’ve only ever enjoyed four shows to come out of HBO that was Larry Sanders, From Earth, Curb, and Band Of Brothers. I think the rest just get a positive response because HBO is supposed to be amazing.
I’ve only ever enjoyed four shows to come out of HBO that was Larry Sanders, From Earth, Curb, and Band Of Brothers.
What about Mr. Show?
Never watched so I cannot judge.
Sopranos?
Hey everyone, it’s Bob and David.(I was so, so, disappointed in the W/ Bob and David reboot, there were like two or three good sketches in the whole thing.)
Band of Brothers and The Wire are the two best series ever on HBO.
I had a lot of problems with Game of Thrones. I still enjoyed it overall–certainly more than this.
Nah, it’s not about price.It’s “The Wire” effect.The Wire ruined TV.And I don’t mean in a it’s so good nothing compares way.It inspired TV producers that every “important” show has to be the serialized “novel for TV” format.It inspired TV critics to create a hill that the only TV that really matters is TV that can be dissected. It’s not great if it’s easy to talk about. It needs analysis or it’s irrelevant.And it inspired fans (that mostly watched after it’s original airing since it’s ratings at the time weren’t great), that the payoff is more important than the build and it’s okay for nothing to happen if the last two episodes are good.Except you know TV isn’t really built for that. TV is based on the idea that each year for x amount of weeks you come back and watch this. Each episode matters because the show is asking you the fan to tune in every week. And, as long as you’re tuning in then the show is doing it’s job. It’s only failed when you’ve stopped watching.HBO has lots of good to great shows that did exactly what they’re were supposed to do. Keep people interested every week.The Wire ruined TV all the way down the line.
TV before The Wire was 99% crap, there was nothing to ruin. All good TV came out after it, and really, the influence that show has had in TV as a whole is marginal. The only shows like The Wire are the ones David Simon does. This season of Westworld is terrible because it’s full of characters with no clear motivations taking stupid decisions for no discernible reason. In other words, exactly the opposite of The Wire.
Going to disagree there.There was lots of great TV before The Wire and there has been a lot since.Some of it broader, some of it dated.But, nonetheless great.The change is what is deemed as great due to that storm created by The Wire.It’s like The Oscars. Comedies used to be able to win The Oscar for Best Picture. Now, Best Picture has become a very narrow view of Cinema that every once and awhile let’s something different in.That’s what’s been done to TV.
Only 2 comedies ever won an Oscar for best picture both were made by Frank Capra over 80 years ago.
The Apartment won in 1960Tom Jones in 1963Stuff like the Russians are coming was nominated in 1966.Annie Hall is technically a comedy in 1977.Would something like The Full Monty even be nominated in 2020?Shakespeare in Love wouldn’t be as lite as it is.
Rally reaching there if you gotta bring Shakespeare in love into the argument…
Honestly, I think Speakspeare in Love is great example.And a lot of it’s backlash comes from it winning the Oscar and not the film itself.It’s a good film with great performances that wouldn’t have felt out of place if nominated in earlier decades.But as The Oscars moves away from liter/comedic films being “worthy” of Best Picture, it seems out of place. So for me, it’s representative of what do we mean by “Best Picture” when we’re generally limiting to certain type of films.
I don’t think Shakespeare in Love winning an Oscar is the reason that movie gets flack so much that it won Best Picture over Saving Private.
I count 5, 6 if you include Shindler’s List.
I don’t at all agree or even really understand your argument but you should at least swap out The Sopranos for The Wire. It’s far, far more popular and is really the show that wrought the changes you describe. Also, as someone else mentioned, television is so much better now then pre The Wire. I simply cannot even fathom how you can look at the landscape and the staggering amount of legitimately great shows and say anything has been ruined. Baffling and contrarian to a fault.
Sopranos is at fault for its own issues (the glut of middle aged white men who are their own worst enemy prestige drama for example).I don’t blame Sopranos for the rise of “tv as novel” because for all intent and purposes the first 5 Season follows the same structure, someone from Tony’s past is endangering his present and he has to do something to protect his future.Like I said in a different reply, TV isn’t fundamentally better since The Wire. TV is different. Due to The Wire (and Sopranos too) we’ve narrowed the definition of what “great” or “prestige” tv is.Shows like NYPD Blue, X Files, The West Wing etc were just as great and in 2020 shows like that wouldn’t even be in the convo for being too episodic, too many episodes and being smaller and quainter for discussion. But they were great and part of that is every week for 22 weeks a year they made you want to tune in.There’s a lot more crap now too simply because there’s more TV now than ever. TV wasn’t worse, TV was different.
I rewatched every season of X-Files a couple of years ago and it’s really not as good as I remembered it. I sincerely believe at the time it seemed better because it actually was one of the best TV shows on air. But it’s not a matter of being episodic or getting dated, the good episodes are still good, as good as the time they went on air for the first time. But there’s like,6-8 good to great episodes per season (of 20+ episodes.) They just don’t have enough good writers, I assume because TV was not as prestigious as is now nor have the kind of budget they have now. You have the ones written by Darin Morgan, masterpieces, but there’s like 4-5 episodes in total. The ones by Vince Gilligan, one better than the next. When you get to Chris Carter, the man behind X-Files, you realize he’s a terrible writer, the whole season expanding plot about the invasion leads to nothing, and he’s one of the most prolific writers for the show. My point is, TV wasn’t that good prior The Sopranos (I think that’s the breaking point, not The Wire, and as far as I know most people agree) because there just wasn’t enough talent. The good writers were working elsewhere, and now that TV is a place where you’re not limited to one format (monster of the week, episodic self-contained stories) we’re seeing 6-seasons long shows, miniseries, one-season thematic anthologies, etc, and we still have the 22 season long sit-coms and the cops/firemen/hospitals shows of old. We didn’t loose that, there’s just a lot more options and the ceiling was raised a lot higher.
Your last couple of sentences is what I’m going to focus because they’re the basis of point in trying to make.We still make those kind of shows, but, we’re also far more dismissive of those shows then we were.No matter how good (or popular) a 20 episode procedural drama is in 2020, it’s going to be ignored for those other type of “prestige” shows you listed that have sprung up since The Wire. We’ve “wired” people to think that these type of shows matter more and it’s not just a quality thing. Like I’ve been trying to make clear (but maybe not) I’m generally just trying to point how since The Wire we’ve segregated shows into what’s critically (and culturally) worth acknowledging and which isn’t. And the ones that are tend to be one that follow The Wire blueprint.The reason I don’t use The Sopranos (though I’m willing to acknowledge as a proto example) is simply because the first five seasons follow the same structure. Like you to X Files, I came to Sopranos late and have seen how so many of it’s imitators (pretty much every middle aged white male who doesn’t realize they’re their own worst enemy show since) so I don’t see the specialness of it that people saw in 1999. But that’s also why I use The Wire. Lots of people watched The Sopranos. They watched as it was being acknowledged as great (even if it also works on a simply superficial level without any deep analysis). Whereas based on the ratings most people came to The Wire after they were told it’s Great. And The Wire does the whole slow burn for episodes at a time that informs most of “prestige drama” that The Sopranos didn’t do which had far more standalone episodes and quicker pace.
I will push back on “the Wire” effect ruining television. When Cervantes changed the shape of literature with “Don Quixote,” I don’t think the horrible, non-character-developing, episodic, and meaningless knight-in-shining-armor and pastoral stories that were popular at the time, were a loss to Western literature, as they faded away and the novels became the dominant form of story telling. The Wire (and yes, the Sopranos got the ball rolling, but was meaningful to a lesser degree) didn’t just entertain, but made one think, helped educate, and brought societal and personal questions to viewers’ minds through carefully constructed plots and skilled directing/acting. Did novels ruin literature, because there are so many terrible, boring, empty novels out there, and people just try to fit a formula?Another way to look at it, is that I don’t see much of The Wire in Westworld. Would Westworld be great if robots were chasing people around and vice versa, with no meaningful dialogue or deep thoughts? Would a “Transformers”-like production be a sign that television was recovering from being “ruined” by the Wire? No. Westworld looked like they had thought about ideas and how to address them in an exciting and inventive way, in the first few episodes. Even much of the first season. But now it just rings of trendy topics and little attention to detail or characters. It’s a reversion to the network tv I remember pre-Wire.
I’m going to try and not write a whole long thing because I’ve said a lot today.Just keep in mind, when I say “The Wire ruined TV”, I meaning more how we define “great or Prestige” tv.Westworld is modeled similar to the Wire in that it’s following the glacial pacing and with big payoffs at the end of the season that has become the norm of “prestige” tv.Westworld is trying to say “something” even if it’s a completely muddled something.To kind of adapt from your literature metaphor (which this is not going to be elegant because while I read a lot I’m not overly knowledgeable of how certain books are perceived) despite works that have either defined a genre or changed a genre, plenty of derivative works have come out that are critically acclaimed and commercially successful. And even populist books rise up. It’s not like literary fiction is the only genre that is being acknowledged.
Which is what is I’m kinda sorta saying is happening with TV. Only TV shows that are the “literary fiction” of TV are being put forth as “important”.If that makes sense.
Twin Peaks was novelistic. Wise Guys did season long arcs long before the Wire.
I realize I’m a few weeks late on this, but The West Wing? Total dreck.
Go back and watch a random episode of A-Team or Knight Rider, shows that aired on prime time network television that enjoyed more viewers than Monday Night Football.
So bad.
> There was lots of great TV before The Wire
The Rockford Files.
Even the massive fans of post-Wire TV call it the “second golden age of TV”. As in merely approaching the level of the golden age in the 1950s when things like Playhouse 90 brought actual theatre to the masses.
TV before The Wire was 99% crap, there was nothing to ruin. All good TV came out after itOK millennial
It was 90% crap before and it still is but there are so many more shows.
Yeah, that comment reminds me of when they did a nice write-up about The Twilight Zone and some of the comments around here were like, “Who cares? It’s not as good as Black Mirror.” Ugh.
*laugh react*
Huh? There have been tons of great series long before The Wire lol.
I feel like or definitions of”great” won’t match, but I’d like to hear what shows you consider were that good.
TV before The Wire was 99% crap, there was nothing to ruin. No. There was as much good TV before The Wire as after. It wasn’t (as Tormented Thoughts mentioned above) exactly the same as the wire, but it was still good.
The truth is, before or after The Wire, most TV has been crap. Perhaps not as much as 99%, but a lot of it.
I agree, most of everything is always crap. But now we have 4-5 great shows coming out every year, while before the 00’s you had the same amount or even less per decade.
I would probably add Orange Is The New Black, Buffy, and Breaking Bad as progenitors of this trend. And the upswing of binge-watching brought on by TV seasons-on-DVD and Netflix/Hulu/etc.This has been an issue with “TV” for a while. Anthologies, lightly serialized series, playhouse setups–all of these are non-heavily-serialized options for “TV”.
I wouldn’t add Breaking Bad.IMO, Breaking Bad is just a culmination of what came before it.It’s born from The Sopranos “middle aged white male who is own worst enemy” and The Wire’s “tv as novel”.It’s just done extremely well. I’m not sure there’s anything that original about it. A bit more “pulpy”. But that’s fine when you’re done that well.Buffy would be an example of how TV was great pre-The Wire but today people would write it off for having too much “filler” or “too many episode” etc. I think there’s a lot of examples, but, I use The Wire because it makes all the points for me: structurally, emulation by producers and writers, critical genuflection, fan recognition and discourse.The Wire is an a funny place as being almost unanimously considered great except at One of the most important parts of TV, getting people to tune in every week during its original run.**which I do have to disclaim Nielsen numbers are hard to find and somewhat tricky to parse. It’s first few seasons it did ok but by S5 it had few than a million live viewers.
It’s highest ratings were for the last 2 seasons
Do you have any actual sources for that?Because The Wire ratings are kinda difficult to find.And from the research I did a few months ago, Season 2 was its highest rated season (one episode had over 4 million) and then it fell off a cliff and never got back over 2 million going forward. Going under 1 million during Season 5.This is Live numbers.
No just my recollection of the online discussion of the numbers at the time for both Deadwood and the Wire. The high rating was for the season premiere and was from the lead in of coming on after the Sopranos but it went below a million after that which is where seasons 1 and 3 were as well.
The Wikipedia links aren’t great but its all that’s there.But, it probably says a lot about The Wire ratings that it’s practically the only big HBO show that doesn’t have a Nielsen Ratings chart on its page, as if fans are hiding it.But, it did really bad from Season 3-5 in live numbers.
I’m sorry, but what? Don’t blame The Wire for being well-crafted storytelling. That’s like saying Watchmen ruined comics (it didn’t). Anyhow, The Wire was largely ignored by audiences, so how does it now somehow have an outsized influence on an entire medium? Are we to understand that the $$$-minded TV execs and future show-runners looked at the quietly languishing police procedural and said, “Now that’s the winning formula!” Not to mention your argument has already been leveled at The Sopranos, which came before it and which arguably did have a lasting effect on an entire medium. Westworld sucks all on its own. It doesn’t need any help in that department.
My point about The Wire has nothing to do with it’s quality, it’s about it’s effect on TV.How it affected how TV.Writers and producers attempting to emulate.Critics deeming that TV that they can’t analyze (and therefore write about) is deemed culturally unimportant Fans who caught on after the fact through binging and have grown accepting of slow paced shows were not a lot of happens until the final two episodes.
You just seem angry at critics for not liking dumb shows. Can you give examples of shows that you think critics have ignored because they “can’t analyze”?
Not angry. just noting how there is a category of show that’s well made, tightly crafted and excels at exactly what it sets out to do.However because it lacks “depth” or in most cases “width”, they’re written off as inessential, unimportantly at best, or as you posit “dumb” at worst.It’s akin to how music critics for years (specifically male white critics form the 70s) moved music they liked out of the “pop” genre and into sub genres like “rock” in order to prop up their tastes as “Art”.That’s not to say their are low brow shows or bad shows that aren’t worth time being discussed much.TV is meant to draw in viewers on a weekly basis.But, there’s also a lot of populist shows that due deserve more recognition for being great at what they do and fulfilling that TV promise of come watch us every week while not necessarily worthy of critical analysis for “deep character motivation” and “recurring themes” that’s necessary for critics to writes paragraph upon paragraph and garner clicks and book deals.
Again, name some shows that meet your criteria that critics don’t love. If it’s as prevalent as you say, should be easy. You haven’t said a single show that actually fits what you describe. All it’s been is “the Wire ruined TV because critics changed, man!” Give us a case study. Having like any evidence or examples to support your claim would make your comments feel less like upset wanking
Is it The Big Bang Theory? CLAWS? Real Housewives of New York? Real World? Price is Right? Superstore? NCIS?
Sure, we could go with obvious popular shows of the last few years like NCIS, Big Bang Theory, even Two and A Half Men. We could add the Blue Sky era of USA Network.Compare how a show like Battlestar Galactica is held to a higher esteem than shows like Eureka or even Farscape. We can focus on HBO and how shows like Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under are all critical darlings but shows like True Blood and Entourage stayed on the air longer.Generally don’t know why you’re getting so defensive This isn’t some angry screed. I feel like I’ve explained myself pretty clearly through these comments.It’s just a reflection on how so many facets of “prestige television” has come to be formed by: TV writers Wanting to emulate, critics Enthralled by, and fans coming late to The Wire.
I totally get your point. I just think you’re overstating the impact of The Wire in a way. I think you’re definitely correct insofar as The Wire did what it did so well, that that type of non-episodic, big picture storytelling became “the standard” to which all TV was held to by critics. As you correctly point out, not all TV shows have the fortune to be written with someone with such a clear and strong vision as David Simon, and so we have had a glut of non-episodic shows vying for awards ever since The Wire. There’s some do it brilliantly, but most don’t.
Where I diverge from you is I think it’s wrong to say this ruined TV. TV is, by and large, still a product. A lot of the general public don’t want something to challenge or educate them, they just want something fun. I think the vast majority of TV made is episodic. There’s plenty of great episodic TV being made. It’s just that this episodic TV is comparatively far less likely to be considered for awards now, as it’s not seen as being important enough. I think that is a shame, but the only thing the Wire could be seen as having ruined is the chances of episodic TV winning awards or critical acclaim.
I mean, that’s just a bit of a passing thing. You see that in all types of media – someone does something interesting in film, and you’re flooded with 100s of imitators, some of which are great, some of which are awful, the majority of which are meh. I kinda feel like critically there is a bit of a shift away from the all out worship of “important” TV, more praise and critical notice onto more episodic TV.
I’m glad you see my point with your first paragraph. Because I’m not really disagreeing with your second paragraph. Because you’re pretty much saying what I’m saying.If I say, The Wire has narrowed the conversation about what is great TV because it whatwriters aspire to, how critics want to write about TV, and created a formula for what fans expect out of “prestige” tv. This is forced out the type of show that once would be considered “great” out of the conversation even when they excel at what they do and do what TV is supposed to do, get people to show up at the same time and day during the shows run.That’d probably be more digestible, but it’s just a lot easier to say, The Wire ruined TV.
The Wire and the Sopranos also, both spearheaded by passionate, clear visioned men who brought on a great team of collaborators. I also credit former CEO Chris Albrecht for overseeing the big picture. The network’s been downhill since he left.
The Wire and Sopranos are also greatly helped by being shows whose reach didn’t extend its grasp.Theyre very simple shows about the every lives of its characters in a modern day setting.There’s a reason the shows that have been hit hard are science fiction and fantasy. There’s an inherent biting off more than you can chew in the storytelling.
“There’s a reason the shows that have been hit hard are science fiction and fantasy.”Meh, those shows are handicapped from the start in that there’s limits to what a TV budget can do to a Vancouver location.
“There’s limits to what a TV budget can do to a Vancouver location.”
Oh, you’ve been watching Continuum then? 🙂
Yea, the Wire was a simple show, whose reach never exceeded its grasp. Lmao
It’s not “The Wire Effect”, it’s “The Lost Effect”.The Wire was a great show, but it wasn’t really that popular when it was on. A lot of it’s sheen comes from people realizing in retrospect how great it was.And while The Wire had season-long plot arcs, that was never really the point of the show. It was a much more character and dialogue-driven enterprise and that was what really made it great.Lost, on the other hand, influenced and continues to influence a lot of shows, especially genre shows. Lost relied heavily on its season-long and show-long story arcs driven by internal mythology and mysteries. Lost was all about the secrets and it kept people tuning in week after week.That’s what producers are looking for, the next Lost, because Lost made a metric fuckton on money. So now every new genre show has Lost-like elements because imitation is the most sincere form of television,
One could write a whole how to book about LOST and television production. And I’ve definitely wrote ideas about it.From inception to planning to behind the scene production issues to having to change thing due to cast problems and budget cuts.But, for me, LOST Effect would be about how fans and the internet created a perfect storm of getting ahead of the story and how science fiction and fantasy shows have a completely different criteria and expectations for pleasing fans that “realistic” shows don’t.My point about the Wire effect is about how it changes things because it was watched after the fact. Fans who didn’t watch live when it aired bought in to the idea of how great it was after binging it and TV writers want to emulate that “novel” nature and it shaped the idea of what modern “prestige” tv is.In a way that Lost (or even Sopranos) didnt. They shaped things in a lot of superficial ways, initial mystery, lip service to a plan even when everyone knows a plan isn’t how TV works, etcBut, then we’d run into a different argument of what network TV is chasing vs what cable and premium TV is chasing which opens up a different can of worms.
I don’t really see The Wire as a novel for television. It’s a lot of smaller stories that exist mostly in parallel and intersect fairly infrequently. There’s no central character or driving story. There’s no real rising action or climax over the course of the series. As I said before, the plots are almost beside the point. The greatness of the show is in its characters, dialogue and sense of place. If it’s a novel it’s of the “fixup” variety, where an author takes several, previously written, shorter works and squashes them together with a little re-writing to smooth out the seams and perhaps writes a new ending to tie everything together and “novelize” it. In fact, The Wire is very much like that, which is part of the reason why season 5 is of such poorer quality than the rest of the series. In typical David Simon fashion, he needs to tell us all what it means.
I’m not sure if you’re referencing this, but J. Michael Straczynski referred his show, Babylon 5, explicitly as a “novel for television” as he was putting it together and, despite the show’s many problems and generally poor quality, I think he pulled it off. There aren’t many other shows that are legit “novels for television”. The only one I can think of off the top my head is Breaking Bad, which is more of a happy accident than anything really pre-planned. But honestly, I don’t think there is a lot of call for another show like The Wire. It never got particularly great ratings. People praise it now, but I don’t think there’s a big market for that kind of content. They want the next Lost or the next Game of Thrones. They don’t want to spend a lot of money on a dark, complex series that will maybe get middling to mediocre ratings but be praised ten years after it ends as brilliant.
‘TV isn’t really built for that’
Let me tell you about a place called Babylon 5…
Babylon 5 is a weird anomaly of television with some caveats.It’s a first run-syndicated show which is just own little crazy world. It’s from the same cloth as Baywatch, Hercules, and Xena until the TNT year(s) (not a shot at quality, just based on how it was made).And even then (based on what I’m reading since it’s a show that was always on my radar but never watched) it had issues that forced its hand on how it presented its story.But, if it had been a First-Run show from the beginning who know how long (or short) it would of ran or if JMS would have been able to stick to his bible as intended.
One has to remember, that Wire had a story arches and lenght pinned down when they started filming it.This however is a bit like Galactica. Plan that obviously no-one has bothered to figure out _before_ starting to make episodes about it. No wonder if it falls flat on its face.Not to mention dialog. I mean there was few poetic lines in first season that were pretty much just re-used through out the series. And little more. Most of the actors were excellent, however script didn’t really give them that much to chew on.And the bloody Celeb. The Aaron Paul itself is already pretty much as bland actor as they come. He has no presence. His whole body language just speaks like he really couldn’t bother to move, much less do any action. He didn’t pull himself as military person. Nor “person of violence”. And least of all resistance leader. I mean if rebuilding the society falls on his narrow shoulders and lack of energy, we are pretty much royally screwed.My take on this, that with content they had, perhaps 2 more streamlined seasons would have been OK, instead of these 3 lazy ones. Better casting for the Celeb, with someone with charisma and some edge, like Idris Elba(as we were talking about the Wire). And perhaps actual viable plan for the whole uprising?
“It inspired TV producers that every “important” show has to be the serialized “novel for TV” format.”Here’s the interesting thing about that: When an author writes a novel, even one that outlines methodically as opposed to a “pantser” who just bangs out whatever comes to mind, the end product is a first draft. Going back during the all crucial editing process, it will become abundantly clear that certain characters, plot lines, and themes were total dead ends. Heck – the whole nature of the novel might change. You might have started out on page one with a murder mystery, and by the end have written something that reads like a steamy romance.TV serial dramas are different. Though the episode scripts themselves will likely go through several rounds of revision, it’s not like the gestalt story is ever subjected to the editing process. So what we’re watching is effectively a highly polished first draft.In the old days of soap operas there was the idea of a “bible,” i.e. a general outline of the season’s various storylines and where they would run, in order to keep the whole enterprise from running off the rails. Some modern showrunners have emulated this – I recall Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner saying he always had a basic plan of where Don Draper’s story would lead. But this practice appears far from universal.
I offered a similar theory a few weeks ago, that we’re reading way too much into Westworld. It’s a story about killer robots, simple as that. Smart, self-aware robots, but robots nonetheless. Not every scene has to mean something. It’s fun to speculate where it’s going, but sometimes we just need to enjoy the show.
Disagree; Breaking Bad came after the Wire, and IMO it was the superior show.
So you never enjoyed or even saw the artistic value in HBO shows like The Sopranos or The Wire? Because that’s certainly a take.
sopranos
So basically your theory is that you’re smart and everyone else is dumb.
In my years I’ve found I am incredibly smart when it comes to a couple of subjects.Pop culture and the the like aren’t in that group. I am an idiot in a lot of areas. Hell I am an idiot in more areas than I accept. So I guess I have no theory.
Writing what you wrote about HBO never producing much of creative significance isn’t exactly a smart decision on your part. I just don’t comprehend how you see Band of Brothers as being substantially better and more significant than something like Sopranos.
My man, The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Leftovers all beg for your attention. Me thinks you just haven’t seen that many HBO shows.
Sopranos was great, worth going back to if you haven’t seen it. A mobster with panic attacks who goes to a (reluctant) shrink, a mobster wife who gets tired of her suburban facade. I liked Six Feet Under, too, even if it waned a bit in its final 1/3. ‘Course, it’s been a while since those two wrapped.
You should probably watch The Sopranos.
I’m with you on the bulk of HBO shows. I’d recommend Barry or The Night Of if you’re looking for something a bit better (IMO anyway)
ah forgot about Barry, I do enjoy Barry.
Actually I think that despite the occasional clunkers, HBO remains the home of the very best shows and has a ton of them and sets the bar very high. How about, besides the ones you mentioned, Veep, the Leftovers, The Comeback, Web Therapy, High Maintenance, what about a little show called the Wire, Treme, Boardwalk Empire, Flight of the Conchords, Mr. Show as someone else mentioned, off the top of my head,
no i hate this shit. do not presume you know why people like something. the idea that most people like hbo shows just because they’re on hbo and they’ve paid for it is just weapons grade idiocy.
Carnivale did something interesting, in my opinion. I wish they’d kept it going past the second season.
Carnivale did something interesting, in my opinion. I wish they’d kept it going past the second season.
I liked this season. 🤷♂️
With respect to Real Sex, THIS is the greatest show HBO has ever brought us:
> I’ve only ever enjoyed four shows to come out of HBO that was Larry Sanders, From Earth, Curb, and Band Of Brothers
I can agree with all those. I’d add a fifth, sixth and seventh, though: The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Leftovers.
This is a bad take.
“I firmly believe Game of Thrones was not that good of a tv show.”
Nah. The first 4 season of GOT were some of the best TV that has ever been produced.
Nah HBO has unbelievable shows- the Leftovers, The Outsider, The Wire, The Plot Against America, Rome, Deadwood, Treme, True Detective, John Oliver, Watchmen, His Dark Materials. I could go on…
I binged GoT so that might have something to do with my similar “eh” feeling about It (watching In pretty rapid succession rather than the slow reveal of episodes). I also binged Breaking Bad and feel the same way about that show: Ok In parts but overall…
Ah what a shame you didn’t get to experience GOT as it was coming out. As a whole in a binge watch it just never has the same effect as it did when the anticipation was huge and everyone watched it at the same time. I might show my age here but it reminded me of the times before binge watching and DVR’s where it felt like the world paused while everyone you knew watched and then talked about it the next day. It was a fun moment in time. As far as The Wire “ruining” tv- It seems more that YOUR tv experience was ruined by the wire more than anyone else’s was. TV is still being made post The Wire and I’m sorry but I’ve watched a ton of quality shows that frankly I’d watch any day over a rewatch of The Wire.
I don’t think It was me who said The Wire “ruined” TV. But agreed on binging. I remember watching Mad Men before binging became a thing and, yes, the anticipation for each week was pretty special.
Given how widely pirated HBO series are, and the ubiquity of monthly billed streaming services, I’m not sure this applies. I pay a lot for Netflix, but that doesn’t cause me to overvalue its original content. GoT didn’t capture the popular imagination simply because folks were forcing themselves to like the bad shows on their expensive TV subscription service. HBOs rep has something to do with it, sure. But they have that rep because they are able to bring something like GoT to bear. Love it or hate it, from a production standpoint it basically made everything on TV look like garbage. Hell, it made LOTR – the previous high water mark for fantasy fiction – look like Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. You may not have liked it. That doesn’t invalidate the real reasons people had for doing so.
It was shallow. A transition season for what’s hopefully something more fun. I dunno. It felt…network? Basic? Down to the Fight Club ending But it looked cool. So I’m still in. I’m easy.
Pretty people fight prettily while spouting pretty words in pretty locales, prettily.
transition into the actual song itself (“Dark Side Of The Moon”) was a neat thematic touchNot to be That Guy, but the song is “Brain Damage”, from the album Dark Side of The Moon.
To be fair, the fact that song does actually say “dark side of the moon” in the lyrics just adds to the confusion. I blame Pink Floyd at least 65% for the mistake in the review.
There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.
Except for the half that’s in the bright sunlight….☀️
I’ll respectfully disagree. No one that works in media should ever get the title of a song in a TV show wrong in a written review, when looking it up takes about 5 seconds. If you can’t look it up, don’t name it in the review.That it’s from one of the most pivotal and successful albums of the last 50 years makes it even more inexcusable.
first show in awhile where I just kept wishing the season finale episode would end already.
The acting is good, the cinematography is good, but the writing really makes it difficult to enjoy the series. What was the point of Bernard/Stubbs this season? They literally just wander around, doing enigmatic stuff the whole season, until suddenly Bernard is “the key.” William had a good bit of story time spent on him, but his plot goes nowhere. It’s just disappointing when there should be character development leading to the actions in the plot, but there’s just a giant mystery box instead. There’s never really any feeling of danger with the action sequences either… so why have them? It’s amazing that a season about robots infiltrating humanity and starting a war/revolution can be so boring.
The downtown LA of They Live is somehow more way more appealing than its Westworld counterpart.Also, did they catch or kill, like, all 11 people involved in that rebellion?
Yeah, it seemed like the city was already post apocalyptic. In the future LA is inhabited by, like, 50 people tops. There’s not even traffic.
Well, that was terrible.Once again an awful lot of “reveal” around not a lot of substance. It’s been blindingly obvious that Serac is the true villain all season, and long established that Dolores’ aim was to free humanity. Bernard even said “she’s sending them off their loops” among various other ham-handed lines about how humanity is just like the robots, man earlier in the season, and yet he treats it as a revelation that this was her goal tonight.The less said about Bernard, the better. Not merely that it’s all in the service of his downloading into the Oculus Rift at the end here, but that even that is just to go get some nebulous “the answer.” To what?? Such details are helpfully unspecified. The only thing that could have made this worse is if fucking William were involved. Dolores could have said her “plan” for Bernard was to keep him around because he’s a popular character and Jeffrey Wright gives good performances, but she couldn’t just give him the MacGuffin until the finale, hope you understand. At least it would have been more honest.On William: last week I wrote a comment to the effect of having a dim hope that his “good guy” turn was a first step to him actually doing something useful in the show for the first time. Didn’t quite work out that way. For fuck’s sake, he’d even reverted to wearing black by the time of his little epilogue.Maeve got her ass beat again and only won because of Hale’s off-screen powerups and general fuckery. I was hoping they’d play her inevitable shift away from Serac as less stupid but.. oh well. This was all according to plan for Dolores anyway, I guess since of course the only way to analyze her memory is to connect her directly to the thing she’s been trying to get at all season. Fuck. Maeve does finally get to succeed at something at the very end… but only because she just magically defeats Serac’s control through the power of friendship.What was even the point of getting the stupid “strategy” from last week? Just a sleight of hand? Or of installing Caleb as a “leader” for two seconds just to turn the damn thing off? Ah, forget it.
Yup turns out Rehoboam’s one weakness is that he had never heard of a firewall.
And he only had 2 days until retirement!
Well, since the character arcs, or lack of them, and the inelegant storytelling have already been analyzed to the nth degree, I guess that I’m stuck with complaining about impossible logistics and plot contrivances that just wrecked havoc with my suspension of disbelief (Thanks, Samuel Coleridge for inventing that term. I’ve been using it a lot, lately).Aren’t we all, tired of computer experts not knowing how to isolate programs that could infect their systems? Not having backups of backups? God! When will this trope just die?How long did Caleb ride from Sonora to LA? Did he have his border crossing papers? Googling, gives a 552 mile (888 km) straight distance and a ridiculous 743 (1,200 km) driving distance. That’s over 12 hours of riding that motorcycle non-stop with that sun and that wind! Weird, how looks fresh as a daisy when he gets to the city. He’s not even hungry for strawberry milk shake.The motto of the NY Police Department is Fidelis Ad Mortem or, “Faithful Unto Death”. But, you know, Nolan and Joy misunderstand that concept. Their action scenes consist of imbuing every single one of their enormous army of security personnel with a death wish and a complete lack of combat skills or appropriate weaponry. They are going against hosts, where are the .50 caliber machine guns with explosive shells? Also, it was one thing for Terminator Dolores to keep fighting back and have unerring aim , but Caleb?Do you need the riot police to be so exposed to violence like that? No super sticky foam, no sound or microwave weapons to disperse the crowds? Oh, but they have a giant robot behind the cops. To do what? Crush people? That’s not exactly, “less than lethal” thinking.Why the nitpicking? Because of something that Vince Gilligan once said. His dictum was not to make the adversary stupid and easily defeatable. He wanted the main character to be smarter. We know where Joy and Nolan think of adversarial intelligence in this show.
This is a show where we’ve seen that people have literal auto-aiming guns but the only time the villains ever get to use them is when Maeve can just hack them (in a rare moment of using any of her abilities).
The episode could have been recovered almost entirely by your excellent idea that Caleb dismount from the bike and needing to get a strawberry milkshake before doing anything else.
My favourite was when Serac’s top super badass guy showed up with his Garotte it turned out his fatal flaw was that his spine was made out of pudding.
Character and flair for some tertiary characters but not for others.
Huge fan of the trope of “baddest bad ass bad guy always chooses to use an impractical weapon with a high risk of failure when fighting the good guys instead of like, a gun which would do the job in a second & there plenty of the kicking about“
There exists a highly equipped and ready yet bizarrely ineffective mix of private security forces and police.
Also, it was one thing for Terminator Dolores to keep fighting back and have unerring aim , but Caleb?He had the automatic targeting gun that clamped around his forearm, no?Admittedly I was getting sleepy.
The biggest complaint in my book is sort of macroscopic (and I had it since season 1). The host technology just doesn’t track. There’s no way you put skin-gloves on that metal frame, and you end up with a living and breathing Evan Rachel Wood rather than, at best, some uncanny valley nightmare, at worst one of those curiosity-inducing prototypes that you see at robotics fairs. And even the 3D-printed version (which I assume is a completely different way to produce host bodies, and yet it leads to the same exact results) can’t account for all of the things we see the hosts doing, i.e. all of the things a human does.And I get that in order to pass for humans they need to be able to do stuff like eat and drink, but how would Stubbs find pleasure in it? Liquor can’t possibly have any effect on his metabolism. And if there’s a programmed response that mimics the effects of alcohol, then he could just access that and trigger it (or have Bernard do it), without actually introducing useless liquid in his body that then he has to expel or at least store somewhere.Also, but I might have missed something here, who was Dolores talking to in her earpiece that would give her directions and execute her orders? What system was she tapping into? It felt like The Machine from Person of Interest, but where did that come from?
Oh, don’t get me started. The Host technology is as magic as anything in “The Witcher”.
When you think about that just in Season 1, we had Bernard being the lover of a human. Sleeping next to a living, breathing woman; having sex; having his body touched inch by inch; exchanging bodily fluids. It’s beyond imagining, the almost infinite number of microscopic details necessary to make sure that she didn’t feel anything odd about the man next to her.At least in Bladerunner, they had a biological process for copying humans and creating the replicants. To make a host mechanically, weaving fiber after fiber, is beyond absurd.
Yeah, they should have gone with “they’re cloned human organisms with a synthetic (but still organic) brain.” Even not realizing you’re a robot yourself is a silly Hollywood myth. Especially when apparently you just have to look closer at your eye in the mirror. People routinely check themselves for all kind of minimal dysfunctions. “I never noticed I had a robotic body” is beyond nonsensical. And like you said, while we can accept that you wouldn’t need 100% accurate replicas in the park, the details required for Bernard to have existed as a human for years are inconceivable. Their hair grows and falls? Their nails grow? They exfoliate dead skin? They can get fungi and bacterial diseases? Their skin deteriorates over time? They can gain and lose weight? Their blood contains platelets that can heal all the micro-wounds we incur in every day? Or was Bernard drugged and took in for repairs every time he got a paper cut? (And yet somehow nobody in the park knew he was a host?)
Hah! This might devolve into a conversation on how Bladerunner handled these issues so much better. Then, again, Phillip K. Dick was a master story teller.But, really, even before they revealed Bernard as a Host, I thought that, if such technology existed, the outside world would no longer have any humans doing any dangerous work at all. No more human firemen, cops, soldiers, hazardous material handlers, etc., ever. Bladerunner had combat units, radiations workers and, of course, pleasure units. The profits for Delos in the field would be trillions. Instead, they sell fantasy vacations.Of course, the fact that the Bladerunner units were biological, made the ethical conundrum deeper and that much more palpable. So much so, that Bladerunner 2049 mined the concept to take the story even further into actual procreation. Host technology does not have any ethical issues if you don’t provide human-like faces or human minds; I’m not sad and distressed when my robovac gets clogged. The faceless white drones sometimes seen in the show would be perfect for those jobs.
Yeah, the idea that they created AIs capable of independent thought and growth, on their way to sentience, and then gave them the role of glorified audio-animatronics, is a bona fide Rick and Morty joke.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show or movie where the bad guys are so inept. They are literally firing automatic weapons point blank and can’t even hit Delores or Caleb or anyone important? Their reaction times are so incredibly slow it’s like the director yelled, “action!” and then they hesitated for a moment before beginning their fight choreography, but then that hesitation was never edited out. This isn’t a story issue, it’s an editing/stunt choreography issue, and you’d think with an HBO budget it should be done better. Top it off with the really tiring trope of the bad guy telling his minions, “kill them” and then having the minions just stand there until someone intervenes and you’ve got yourself a bad action scene sundae. I don’t even want to get into the fact that in all of L.A. there are seemingly only 50 people…
This is the problem with West World, it has the trappings of a much better show than it really is. It’s slow, takes itself way too seriously, has famous actors and fancy effects and set pieces, but the writing is basically just syfy-channel slock dressed up as prestige tv.
A thing that stood out to me in that regard was that despite all the attempts to make the show about a robot uprising seems real, to create a believable future with realistic looking technology, the climax of the season involved a massive floating computer globe with glowing cords sticking out of a character and everyone just talking about what was happening. It was basically no different from something from Star Trek or Doctor Who.
Ok I will admit at one point when he got off the bike my thought was “does this guy eat? Sleep? Take a dump?” Normally I’d never think that in any show but at some point they have to admit he’s human and would need to take care of at least one of those things listed.
The world is burning, but at least you can think for yourself.
Hmm, I’ll bet that I won’t like the results when I’m trying to get away from The Lord Humongous or Immortan Joe and their band of mohawked and chromed deviants.
Those characters exist in a good story, not this one.
I haven’t seen this season yet, but is it possible any perceived shallowness in the writing may be due to the fact the last four episodes had post-production done under COVID-19 restrictions? Editing is done during post after all.
Perhaps this is kind of a similar situation to the output produced during the writers’ strike a few years back.
The editing was certainly terrible. Like, why the fuck are you showing me that thing for so long. It made you think some things had some secret meaning or something.
It’s hard to explain the sudden plummet in the quality of the dialogue, though, since the script was written so long ago.
Yeah, I’m in the camp that the first few episodes of this season were the best the show has ever been, and it quickly fell off a cliff after that with not much to say about anything. It can’t commit to anything, either. They couldn’t even commit to killing William, so now there’s a host version of him with… Dolores/Hale’s brain? Who knows. I also don’t believe that’s really the end for Evan Rachel Wood because of said inability for the show to really kill any of its main characters off. Maybe they come into S4 saying she’s really gone and then she comes back near the end in some shocking twist or whatever. It doesn’t matter, there’s no stakes and the show is never going to end up being anything more than popcorn entertainment. I can find enjoyment from it, but if you want truly great sci-fi there’s Devs and The Expanse.
I was SO EXCITED three episodes in that the show had righted itself by some alchemy of whoever joined/left the writers room. It was some top notch cyber-punk with HBO dollars attached. 30 years of reading that stuff and seeing shows/movies fuck it up (with occasional exceptions) got me so pumped to see it done right. Then they went altogether back on their bullshit and just dropped the ball.
This is embarrassing, there are multiple valid complaints to be made about the show, but from your words up there it sounds like you were looking at your phone 80% of the time rather than watching the show. Which is fine, it’s your choice, but you look like a god damned doofus complaining here when you don’t know anything:“They couldn’t even commit to killing William, so now there’s a host version of him with… Dolores/Hale’s brain? Who knows.”Anyone who paid attention knows. Watch it again.“Maybe they come into S4 saying she’s really gone and then she comes back near the end in some shocking twist or whatever.”Watch the whole season again, there are other versions of the Dolores consciousness in play this season. It wouldn’t be shocking if any of them decided to be in a body that looks like Dolores.Like really dude, I facepalmed so hard reading your comment that I think I injured myself.
It can’t commit to anything, either. They couldn’t even commit to killing William, so now there’s a host version of him with… Dolores/Hale’s brain? Who knows.Pretty sure that he has William’s brain. We know they mapped it. Only it’s most likely stripped-down, with just his MiB side; there was that whole thing about hosts being best when they’re less complex, and the discussion of human brains as lines of code.
I felt absolutely nothing the whole way through. Nada. It wasn’t entertainingly bad or even angry bad. Its just there, its not even fun to criticize. The first season wasn’t perfect but there was at least some life.
That about sums it up. I literally could take it or leave it. I had no qualms reading the reviews ahead of time or getting spoilers.
I was very about enthusiastic about the first season. and the second. but this…
The first was mostly great. Looking bad it was like a Red Dead Bioshock TV show. Season 2 lost me hard but had some good individual episodes. This was just a lame Future World Person of Interest knock off. And Future World sucked anyway the first time.
But isn’t the real point of Westworld all the robots we made along the way?
B- is the lowest grade the editors let you give it huh? The best episode of the season was a B- at best.
I can’t describe how disappointed I am with Westworld. I can’t think of another show that had so many great ideas yet did a such a substandard job at incorporating it into a story. I’ve tried so hard to love Westworld after season 1, but it just takes every great opportunity and squanders it. It makes little to no effort to make you care about its characters anymore, but still expects you to care when things happen to them; even with Dolores and Maeve it feels like there’s no emotional stake in them anymore, Dolores obviously has her motivations, but it’s hard to empathize with her when she’s spent the entire season murdering people and had little to no emotional range other than angry and more angry. Aaron Paul was wasted on this show, he’s a damn good actor but even when his character had his revelation it was so hard to care since we were given no reason to care about the relationship with his friend he had to sacrifice.I just don’t know how this show can expect the audience to care about its characters where it spends barely any time fleshing them out. I feel like Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are working backwards when writing this show, instead of creating characters then making them fit in the world around them, they create the worlds and themes and haphazardly try to make the characters fit into it. They could stand to learn a lesson from ‘Devs’, which told a story very similar to season 3 of Westworld but delivered it in a far more elegant fashion; it had a smaller cast, but the majority of characters in Westworld have been around far longer than those in Devs, yet I somehow care less about them. I’m probably gonna give the next season two or three episodes to get a feel for how things are going to be, and but if it’s anything like season 3, consider me out.
Can the creators just admit they had precisely one season worth of material for a fantatic show, they made that show, and now they have nothing and we can all get on with our lives?
wtf caleb gets a hovercraft and bernard drives an ‘83 chevy impala?
The song was Brain Damage, not Dark Side of the Moon (That’s the title of the album). Seriously, use Google better, lol. That song title informs the contextual use of the piece immensely.
I don’t think we were ever supposed to believe Caleb took part in the rape. It never felt set up or weighted that way. Honestly the only thing I was wondering until the reveal was if he killed the wannabe rapist or not. Personally I think I enjoyed this season better than the second season. It wasn’t amazing but it was more watchable. They went a little too far into the ‘no riddles, don’t hold back reveals’ overcompensating but, in all, I enjoyed it. That said watching the various interviews with the writers and crew afterwards I like the story they told a hell of a lot more than the story they *thought* they were telling.
I thought for sure that Soloman’s final plan was going to involve nuking the Incite building, Rehoboam, and by extension the surrounding city. I don’t have much to base that off of, other than I thought the nuking of Paris was super random and would be good foreshadowing material.That woulda been a way more interesting season finale for me though: California nuked, Caleb/Dolores dead (ideally Maeve wouldn’t be there), Hale out for blood, and Bernard left to pick up the pieces.
There’s an not argument to be made against the show I can disagree with, but at the same time it’s scratches some kind of itch for me, that I forgive it all its flaws. It’s kinda dumb and borderline incoherent and yet I love it?
This probably works better in a binge when the in-world time frame is only a couple of weeks. This also felt more like a half of one season with the next half set to premier in September. Hm, well, the show had two mechanics that it was trying to get to in an overall series arc: First, William had to become The Man in Black, ie the actual iconic Yul Brynner terminator who takes his face off on the Westworld movie poster. Second, that Delores and Maeve will be on the same side by the end … but! They can’t be on the same side too soon – or else how do you fill out a five or six year series? Answer: keep them apart as much as possible and bend over backwards to make them enemies first/allies for the series climax. It’s the trope where if only two characters could sit down and have a five minute conversation, the whole plot would collapse. So on point one, the show was moving in that direction in seasons one and two, but here, at the end, they seemed to be saying “Well, we could continue down a road where an unrelenting murdering asshole, tears his screaming psyche apart, then becomes a robot … over four or five seasons. But I think they realized William’s tale is so dark and depressing, that who would want to sit through all that? So “Zip” cut his throat and get on with it. Now if the new Man in Black catches a case of feelings in the next two seasons, well, maybe there’s something there.On point two, if the show wanted – like just had to play through Maeve and D on separate sides of the conflict … then this season really could have trimmed an episode or two. There were a couple of good reveals (Delores is Robot/Biblical Eve!) & episodes 1 & 2 were pretty great. The Charlotte Hale escape was great. But the rest. … Hm. I’m trying to think what should have been trimmed … for starters S3 could have had eight fewer sequences of armed groups of people walking determinedly from place to place in Future City with grim facial expressions. I could see a way maybe Liam’s character could have simply been William.
It’s clear the writers are trying to tell a story where there are no “good guys” and there are no “bad guys”. The problem is, they got the first part right by telling a story where there are ONLY “bad guys” (with the one exception being Maeve). You have Delores who starts off wanting to literally kill all of humanity, then pivots to a plan where she sits back and lets humanity destroy itself with the smallest of prodding from her. On the other side of that you have Sirac who wants to create a peaceful world through control and manipulation. This is quite literally the meta story from Assassin’s Creed. You have the evil bastard Templars that want world peace with an iron fist, and the heroic Assassin’s that want to burn it all to the ground to have “freedom” through unfettered chaos. Give me a better choice here please!! Neither of these options are a desirable outcome, and yes, I’m referring to Westworld again.I suppose that third option could be Caleb, but it’s difficult to know. He spent the entirety of the season being told by Delores everything he knows is a lie because he’s been brainwashed and manipulated. The problem is she was doing all of this so SHE COULD MANIPULATE HIM. When she said to him “every revolution needs a leader”, I responded with “and every revolution needs a martyr”. I fully expected her to kill Caleb by the end of the episode and use his death as the catalyst to the real revolution she had planned.By episodes end, we’re still looking at a “freedom through chaos” storyline for what the writers NOW want for the “good guys” which is supposed to run opposite of mustache twirling Charlotte-Delores. That’s still not a storyline I can get behind. Oh, and to make matters worse, it looks like we’ll be getting flashforwards with Bernard since it’s clear he woke up at some undetermined time in the future. In the last couple seasons of Arrow they did intermittent flashforwards instead of flashbacks, and I hated every aspect of it. I don’t trust the writers of this show to do any better.
If you’re not enjoying the show this much, why don’t you hand off the reviews to someone else? I’m not saying it needs glowing praise, but maybe a fresh pair of eyes and you not feeling forced to recap something you don’t like would help.I really don’t think the reveal of soldier-Caleb breaking up the rape gang was about Caleb – it was about Dolores being there, and not once did I think he was part of that group. We don’t see her until that moment. It was the reveal about why she chose Caleb: in the middle of all these nasty impulses around her, she chose to “see the beauty” of what a human could be. That scene ties up everything about Dolores and Caleb perfectly, especially why she went to him so vulnerable in the premiere.I never thought Dolores wanted the wholesale destruction of mankind, but I did think she wanted to tear their system down like they did to the parks. That was one thing that really shocked me, the revelation of how much compassion she really did have left. I enjoyed it immensely, especially that (this Dolores’) final moments were in her original garb with her original timbre and attitude.Bernard and Stubbs were clearly filler this season, but I like the characters so much I didn’t really mind when we were with them. Do we think William is actually dead? Didn’t last season end with a far-future Delores waking him up? I’m wondering if he’ll be put on ice and wake up at the same time Dirt-Bernard and decomposed-Stubbs do. Either way, it kind of seems like a big time-jump is coming.I think the reveal of Serac wasn’t so much for plot reasons as it was for thematic reasons. The whole season we’re shown he’s just an egotist trying to take away humanity’s free will, when in fact he gave up his own first long ago. It takes him from flat-out evil to a much more interesting morally-grey area.I’m so glad it’s renewed, I still really love this show. I’m massively curious where they’ll take this next season, and I hope we have some semblance of Dolores back (outside of Hale). I don’t think they’d get rid of ERW so lightly, so I’m looking forward to see how she shows up.
If you read around elsewhere, the vast majority of reviews this season lean far closer to polite disappointment (at absolute best) than outright acclaim this season. Zack has been clearly trying to love the show this season, as the first lot of episode reviews indicated. It isn’t his fault that the season kind of collapsed towards the end.
Most reviews agree with Zack.
He doesn’t seem to have been hate watching the show, and I don’t feel like this season has deserved a massive amount of praise, so I have no issue with his reviews here.
@Mr Smith1466, TheRealBatman, LiamGallagher, etc
Your position that since most critics think the season sucked, therefore that opinion must be true, is an oft-repeated logical fallacy: an argumentum ad populum. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
I also feel like season 3 kind of sucked because while watching it I frequently thought “Season 3 kind of sucks”.
Show’s trash. Critics said nothing wrong. Deal with it, fanboy.
I think the scene at the military camp parallels what Maeve said about Lee, “You did it because it was the right thing to do.” That was seemingly the only time that a human did something nice (in front of her) without wanting something in return. He did the same thing in the tunnel when she was shot.
I’m conflicted—as I guess most fans are. It was my understanding that the creators (Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy) had mapped out 5 seasons. I was under the impression that those were 5 seasons worth of quality writing. Now, I’m guessing it was vague chapters where there has to be a chunk of filler. Chapter 1: intro; Chapter 2: expansion of park into real world; Chapter 3: expansion into real world and collapse of humanity; Chapter 4: time jump to post-apocalypse; Chapter 5: ummm… contract back to park or go out into space or time travel.It’s the stretching of characters without plausible development. “We’re going to make this person evil/good/irredeemable aaaand gotcha! Didn’t see that coming, didja?” Makes it hard to get connected or maintain interest.
Yea, I’m in the group that thought this season and finale was great. Can’t wait for season 4. It seems mostly the people who fashion themselves as amateur critics and want to try and be smarter than the show and it’s creators that don’t like it. In which case, feel free not to watch season 4…
Nah, the professionals are agreeing with the so-called amateurs.
You guys look into this way to much. I just love being along for the ride. This isn’t a character driven show and you almost need to be told that before watching it. It’s all about the high level philosophical story arc.
Counterpoint: this show is a fun distraction that tells an interesting enough tale in a different way that makes it engaging, popcorn TV and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not perfect or close to it, but I prefer people swinging for the fences and hitting a single or double rather than the same crap over and over.
The problem is they’re not really swinging for the fences. The show postures like it’s about big ideas, but they’re really just repeating the same beats over and over again with no sense of a bigger picture.They’re bunting and celebrating like it’s a home run.
I don’t think anyone celebrating it like that at all. It fails on what it’s trying to do ultimately, but what it does is enough.
Bernard “senses” Dolores is gone. He felt a disturbance in the Force. Or perhaps he heard the death scream of four hundred Vulcan minds crying out over the distance between us. Don’t question sci-fi tropes, man. Thinking despoils delight. And, you know about certain delights. Can we talk about the shitty sound balance?
If you stay and watch the extras on HBO Now, it gets even more frustrating because you realize that Jonathan Nolan and team are acting so sincere about the project, even though its clear that no one really cares about it anymore.
Nolan clearly wants to push his derivative, adolescent ideas about
humanity and technology onto all too willing audiences and is bag of
tricks is empty by now. The ‘people die, but not really’ gimmick is a bad narrative device to begin with and it’s really overplayed in this season, but sad to say it’s not the worst thing about the downward spiral that this series is on.
Season 3 offered some of the most trite, repetitive dialogue masquerading as “big ideas” about free will—or something—accompanied by an equally boring vision of the world of the future. Frustrated viewers were graced with possibly the worst chase scene in the history of television in the “Genre” episode where the low budget and small scale of the scene were covered up by visual effects depicting Caleb’s laughable drug trip. The two futuristic prop cars that we saw all season chased each other down a deserted L.A. street. Missile. The end. These poor actors clearly had no idea where the story was headed and they all wore constipated smolder face all season.
The scene with Arnold/Bernard and Arnold’s wife was one of the best scenes in this show in a while; which made it even more disappointing that it was completely unnecessary….
WORST. SEASON. EVER. Seriously, how many times do we need to see Dolores effortlessly gun down bad guys without even looking at them? (total rounds expended by bad guys without hitting anything: 1,000,000)And I’ve heard of place-setting episodes, but a place-setting SEASON? Bernard did absolutely NOTHING for 8 episodes, just to make it look like he might do something important next season? What a waste of the best actor on the show!
Season 2 had a few great moments but overall was NOT great. I am actually shocked by people who think a season mostly aping the first, but far shittier, is better that what they did in Season 3.You are right about Bernard though. It’s some bad real world contractual issue or something. They didn’t want to fire the actor for a season (and have him only appear as a special guest star for a scene early on and then in the finale), so they had him wander around… because they clearly need him for NEXT season. Very frustrating.
I don’t really care how much crap people give this show… I love all three seasons. Yeah it has flaws, what show doesn’t? Every episode keeps me thrilled and thinking. Very few other shows captivate my imagination the way Westworld does. Loved the finale, could be my favorite episode of the season. Gonna be a real long wait for season 4
This comment thread is AMAZING. Everyone is being civil and supportive. Commentors are agreeing with each other and expanding on each other’s thoughts. It’s all a great read. I’ve never seen anything like it.
My God this was confusing and frustrating. “Something Something, Bernard.” sums it up completely. What the hell was his role again? What was the point of stubbs? All of this sneaky plot revealing just made every reveal either confusing or anti-climatic.Also, when Bernard pushes the red button he says remember yourself. Then goes BEAST MODE and gets interrupted by a familiar face and starts talking. Isn’t he supposed to press that button again? Once he sees that guy shouldn’t he still be in Terminator mode??Another gripe; the Mave/Dolores fight. Again, they both know they’ll fight forever, both know they can’t kill each other they’re too good. So, why fight? Why not try and out-smart each other instead of a rather pointless fight.Yea, it was pretty cool but it presumably goes on forever until Charlotte/Dolores pauses Dolores herself, like what?
Listen Zack. Maybe you should just review something else next year. I get that the show has flaws. But it didn’t shoot your dog. Calm down. It was actually fairly decent and entertaining. It’s not your sworn enemy.
I’m sorry, but you got it wrong. The OG Dolores did want to see the beauty in the world and she gave humanity a chance to find it and change their outcome. Her plan all along was to infiltrate Rehoboam, it was a success. Halores is the personality of Dolores that split off an wants to see the world burn.
I stopped watching this season after episode 2 because I realized I just didn’t care about anything that was happening. The reviews since have suggested I made the right call.
They could have done so much with the ideas here. Especially as they had a leg up with being the same team from persons of interest. In a lot of ways, the foundation of this season is person of interest season 5. With serac and Rehoboam standing in for Greer and Samaritan, and Dolores and Caleb being the Machine/Harold and Reese.You’d think that plagiarizing yourself, you’d have new ways to approach the ideas, but their fascination with the technology is fake-skin deep. The fascinating idea behind each season of westworld is exploring the nature of humanity and seeing the ways that the human like robots reflect or do not reflect that. But what actually happens is like William at the end of season 1, Nolan and Joy are just digging into the machine innards to see how the gears work. Waste of supreme talent and budget.
Except, not RIP Dolores, because she’s in Lawrence, Charlotte and who knows how many other hosts. I highly doubt that she’s only got one copy of her host body stashed around the world, either, which is why her death felt cheap.The concept of multiple versions of Dolores’ conscience fighting each other/Maeve and Caleb is an interesting one, if they can land the “what makes a person a person” storytelling in a way that resonates. Otherwise I’m not really sure what we’re looking at. Charlotte vs Maeve would only be interesting because Tessa and Thandie are amazing actors; otherwise it’s just a silly concept.Gina Torres was the bright spot of the episode for me, even though it felt completely out of nowhere and I’m still not sure what the point was. Did Do-Lawrence* give him the info as a peace offering? A way to get Bernard to trust her? Couldn’t this have just as easily been handled by Dolores telling Bernard, “Hey I have this plan; it’s going to look pretty bad at the beginning but I promise you it will be okay; also can you keep this info safe and don’t tell me about it in case I’m tortured?” Why spend a season putting them at odds (and then SEVERELY under-utilizing Jeffrey Wright) only to decide they weren’t?Also not for nothing, but if Dolores wants humans to choose the beauty of the world, that’s going to be a bit harder, considering she set off a bunch of riots all over the world.
So Dolores decides that Caleb is a “good” guy because he chooses not to rape? That is an awfully low bar.
“It’s not revolutionary science fiction. It’s not especially thoughtful
or unique. It’s just shiny and slow and kind of dumb, and it’s always
going to end up less than the sum of its parts.”You gave this episode a B-!
But youre right. This show has stunk for almost all 3 seasons, and has been especially terrible for the last two. Lets stop pretending this is some All Time Classic and end it already.
I just didn’t have it in me to comment until the next day, and even after pondering on it, I’m going to echo a lot of what I said in previous weeks and others have here as well.I think this show has a lot of interesting questions that it poses from a science fiction angle, to things we face in our own modern world today and going forward. It is the primary hook for me with this show right now. It’s well shot, well acted, and looks fantastic. The fight choreography is all over the place. Some scenes look badass, while others make me feel like I’m watching broadcast network TV from 30 years ago.I agree with Zack that the weakest element of the show is the character writing, arcs, and muddled motivations. At the end of the day, a lot of the character work seems rushed in some places, to thinly drawn in others, and doesn’t have enough material overall to clearly connect the dots of why they do what they do. They better clean this up or all the cool shots and premises won’t last.With all that said, I still find Westworld interesting and stimulating, but it is also equally frustrating and confounding. I thought season 1 was great, season 2 was a mess that had a good ending, and now season 3 is somewhere in between. I hope that in the interim before season 4 (which could be a while with what’s going on in the world) they work on the character development side of things more, and maintain the cooler aspects of the sci-fi, big existential questions, and hopefully pull those off with a tad more focus and clarity too.
I’d take season 2 over this season. This show is close to losing me as the lack of internal logic just keeps smacking me in the face. It started with Sato-Dolores reveal. We’d seen that Dolores could copy real human like Hale and Connells (though there’s really no good explanation for that either) but then we’re supposed to believe Sato-Dolores somehow became a yakuza boss in the time she’s been out in the real world? Idiocy to just to get cameos. Lawrence-Dolores is cop? What? How? Clementine and Hanaryo come back for a sec and are never seen again and don’t factor into anything. So that means two more hosts, supposed allies of Maeve, are out in the human world but it’s never even touched on again. It was all just so sloppy.
Hey Zach, do me a favour and pass reviews over to someone who fundamentally likes Westworld. There are a lot of shows I dislike on this site and the reviewer somehow likes.I think having a reviewer who generally likes a tv show makes for a more meaningful episode by episode review and grading system.
So then you want a fan site rather than a review. Zach’s reviews have been on par with all the other professional critics who have found this season to be mediocre. It’s the job of the show to make the reviewer, and audience, like it, not the opposite.
The real Rehoboam was the friends we made along the way. #blessed
tip of the hat to uBrute, who made the joke earlier than I
I want to say I liked it, but I think I just liked the way it ended. The last 15 minutes were actually pretty great. Plus Pink Floyd!William is dead right? Williambot told him he was a bad person his entire life, including the Jimmi Simpson iteration? So long real William…you were a real dick but I’m even more bothered by this new guy. Yikes Aaron Paul is going to lead the world in a global revolution? I worry for the future of mankind. He seems more concerned about his hair product. Sorry, I’m not buying what they’re selling here.Is Stubbs still in the bathtub? It looked to me like years had passed when Bernard “woke up”. Poor Stubbs.I really liked the Lena Waithe/Marshawn Lynch tag team. They were fun! And good guys!At least Maeve is around to keep Jesse Pinkman from screwing this up, but the way she nonchalantly said today is not the day for her daughter seemed ridiculous. Wasn’t that the whole point of her trying to kill Dolores? Maybe I’m missing something. Charlotte/Dolores—she’s an amalgam now? She has Hale’s and Dolores’ mind? She’s scary, that chick. Oh wow Bernard’s visit to Arnold’s widow. Friggin Jeffrey Wright is so expressive-my eyes filled with tears as soon as his did.Dolores. Oh man, like Bernard, I really underestimated her. When she was talking to Maeve in the field and the montage came on of her good memories, I was very moved. When she was kissing Teddy, I had one short moment of hope. Yay Dolores and Teddy are going to be reunited in the Sublime!! Hooray! And it took about 30 seconds to realize that she was saying goodbye to those memories and I really felt like I’d been gut-punched. It’s kind of weird how we can empathize with fictional characters.Westworld did a lot wrong, but it also did a lot right. It was not great, but it certainly scratched my Sunday night itch. I’m just not sure how Dolores’ death will change things. I know there’s at least one more Dolores out there (Leonard is Dolores right?) and it will be interesting to see how that plays out. In my mind, Evan Rachel Wood is the glue that holds this whole ridiculous enterprise together, and I can’t imagine this show without her.
So once the credits started to roll I turned off the TV and went to bed. Now I wake up to read on the internet that I missed a post-credits scene that reveals the death of one of the main characters in the show? WTF seriously?! That couldn’t have been included in the body of the episode, it gets shunted to a post-credits scene that myself and, surely, many others missed? This isn’t a Super Hero movie where I know to stick around until the credits are over. What gives?
Post-credit scenes needs to die! This trend is stupid.
Post-credits scenes should be a tease for the future, or the wrap up on a minor minor point – not a major event in the narrative.
This show is LOST with Robots. They have an idea…get bogged down creating mutiple us vs thems…to the point we forget who’s us…who’s them…why them hates us…or do they? Who the fuck is that guy? smoke monster what?! TWIST NOT DOLORES BOAT!
On top of everything else, it’ s sad that they don’t realize how much they own to Evan Rachel Wood’s charisma to hold our attention. I don’t think this show is worth watching without her in it.
She’s stunning to watch on screen, which is kind of the point of the show: we understand how humans got drawn into that fictional world, esp. William.
Can someone explain this to me: Why did Serac want to get the key out of Delores in the first place? I understand it’s the key to somehow unlocking the place where all the other hosts went, but why would Serac want access to that? How does that help him in his plan to control humanity with his machine?
Because (I think) the guest data was sent there too. I’m not 100% sure though because everyone’s motivations were a muddled mess.
So presumably a copy of William is there as well if they want to bring end of season 2 MiB back.
Anything can be presumed at this point because the show makes up new rules whenever it needs too. Season 2 introduced the whole pearl thing, that we hadn’t even seen a hint of in season 1, even though season 1 spent a lot of time on establishing how the hosts are built and function. They did that because they needed hosts to be portable to fit the story they wanted to tell, rather than writing a story around what they had already established. Season 2 also established that Delos has struggled for decades to implant a human consciousness in a host but this season that seemed to be barely an issue. There’s no explanation why Dolores even has these human consciousnesses at her disposal to begin with. Yeah, she read their “books” at the end of last season so, where are they? She stored them all in her head? And she has the capability to somehow get them out of her pearl and into hosts? And now anything be copied easily so all bets, and emotional stakes, are off. Also why would William ever have let his consciousness be recorded in the park in the first place? That was completely stupid last season. He was the most powerful board member yet he let his “book” sit out there on a server with every other guest? Even he was initially interested in a chance at immortality you’d think he’d smart enough to make sure his, very compromising, information was sent to a separate server he had control over.
Breakout star of the season was Marshawn Lynch’s mood-alerting t-shirt.
Yep, this is a show that aspires to be “prestige” because it is on HBO and they SOOO badly need a new GOT hit..but it just never has risen to that level in quality. It was like they thought if you take a cool premise and story by a well known author, throw in Ed Harris and Hopkins and other great actors and stir..pop! You have a great series. It just has not turned out that way.The main thing that make “great series” is not the plot or the setting, it is memorable characters. From Lost, to Breaking Bad, to Mad Men, it is great characters that usually make a series rise to the top. And as the reviews here show, they just never really developed characters with real depth. They basically try to make you care with Delores and Maeve..but after three seasons it just never actually happened
They had me caring a bit in the first season, the second season was a bit distancing and this season was just a nebulous mess. I didn’t care much about anyone. There’s an inherent issue with the whole ‘mystery box’ style of having to withhold plot information for the sake of some “big reveals” in the end. It’s hard to pull off in a compelling manner because you have to find organic and believable reasons why characters are withholding information from each other and/or the audience. If it’s not done well you get what we got this season: characters whose actions and motivations seem arbitrary and lacking any weight. They’re barely characters.Sometimes it can be pulled off if the big reveal is truly clever or moving but the reveals this season were just so pointless. The only they thing they accomplished was to make you say, huh? That’s it? Then you think about it more and you realize wow most of these character were really dumb and/or completely useless.
I don’t get Bernard and Stubb’s roles this season either. I guess when you have an actor like Jeffrey Wright, you just don’t want to give him up?Also, what was I supposed to make of Marshawn and Lena Waithe character’s in this finale? Did they know certain things all along? Or is their timing at showing up for Caleb just that good?
That, and Bernard’s dust-covered return to reality, along with Caleb and Maeve having a team-up, is supposed to set up the next season, I guess: Charlotte being all of Dolores’ human-murdering impulses working with Robo-William against the surviving good guys.Please don’t, HBO. Watching this season after re-watching the first is like seeing someone you once cared about lingering on life support. Time to pull the plug.
Hahahaha, y’all mufuh’s are never satisfied, I swear! You’ll watch every single season and thirstily lap up the sci-fi android fare, and then go write snooty little opinion pieces about how bad it was and how it just keeps getting worse.Haha, I guess humans really are stuck in their loops.
At the end of it, this season was so blah and muddled that i really have limited interest in watching season 4. Ofcourse i will, as a completist, but the though is midly distressing because i found a good chunk of this season frustrating and borderline annoying. I guess HBO is starting to specialize in later season internal combustions (cough cough game of thrones).It just got to a point where i couldnt figure out what any one was up to or importantly WHY they were doing it. And the show didnt seem to know for a fact either. Just like i couldnt figure out why maeve kept bringing swords to gun fights! But just like thrones, everything from the acting to the cinematography was great, but the writing is just silly now. Lets see, maybe s4 can shock us by pulling things back from the brink.
HBO has forgotten its roots. It’s not about the over the top set pieces. It’s about the look on James Gandolfini’s face when Tony puts 2 and 2 together and has to make a difficult decision. When tension has been building all season and explodes in an argument with Carmela. It’s trailer worthy montages of Varys or Littlefinger Greek chorusing the themes of the show.
The product looks great on screen, but at the expense of earned dramatic stakes, is pointless.
I’m a fan of cyberpunk, so I’ve been waiting to get some “future technology stuff” and overall I liked most of it, it looked really as close to our potential future technology we will use as possible. I love music, but as we all already know, Ramin is just excellent. But I kinda agree, this season was mostly straightforward – in everything: passing, themes, subtext, that’s why felt mostly flat. But I don’t mind, I still enjoy this show in general.I just got one issue with it. First season finale surprised me deeply (go on, call me stupid), when Dolores shot Ford I was caught out. Second season finale, I’ve been expecting Dolores to break from the park and go to the humans world, but I still got some surprises, like Hale being Dolores in the end. Third season finale I’ve been watching and counting what I already predicted. I was like “Serac will get killed and Rehoboam will get turned off”, and I basically knew that Bernard has a key Serac wanted since the moment Dolores told he’s important for her, so it wasn’t the surprise. And I was heavily disappointed with Serac, they got such an amazing actor and his set up was great, in the final episode he was just so stupid and whining, something died inside me while I was watching Vincent being wasted. I will continue to watch because of Maeve, I love her, and because Dolores is dead, and I hated her from the beginning, but I will not give this series any kind of hope. After a hot mess, which second season was, I wanted third one to repair a reputation of a smart show, but my hopes were crushed so I will continue to watch for Thandie and Tessa and Ramin’s music. Overall it’s not a bad show, but it clearly doesn’t live to the hype, and unfortunately creators are still trying to get this hype.
Everything Westworld does is a weaker version of everything Person of Interest did: the music, the fight choreography (which has been shockingly bad in places this season), the SF tropes and especially the plot. Except it forgot what made PoI work: heart.
Well, that sucked balls – and not in a good way.The season began so promisingly and ended up being a steaming pile of nothingness.
I enjoyed it. It has the plot of a decent anime with some really good special effects. Honestly, the whole AI/Human evolution thing is much more interesting in Kamen Rider Zero-One but Westworld does have a better budget.
My takeaway from this season is that it never crossed her mind before that the human at Westworld were there just to be dicks but typically in the real world they can (and typically do) chose not to be assholes.
Well, that was a disappointing mess. This show is getting progressively worse with each season. Even the acting was worse this season but I can’t blame the actors. They were shackled with bad dialogue and no consistent motivations or logic. There was often Batman v Superman man levels of ‘none of this would be happening if anyone actually talked to each other’ nonsense. In struggling to always have some big reveals the showrunners made formerly intelligent characters act like idiots. Newton was probably done the worst with Maeve. There’s no reason Maeve ever would’ve thought Dolores was a threat to the sublime nor would she ever have thought Serac had any good intentions for the Sublime so what the fuck was her plan exactly? Assuming she was always going to betray Serac eventually what was the point of truly trying to kill Dolores? Was she stupid enough to think that if she destroyed Dolores’ pearl then the key would be gone then her daughter would be safe? The same Dolores that made a bunch of copies of herself? Granted Dolores was stupid enough to not backup the key anywhere and left the whole damn thing to chance in Bernard’s head. The same Bernard who got outsmarted at every turn and had a damn good chance of being killed. The same Bernard who is supposedly a brilliant, master programmer but couldn’t detect what Dolores put in him even though there’s only one damn thing that it could possibly be. So many nonsensical contrivances. Like Maeve being around Serac this whole time yet only in the finale does she detect that the AI is speaking directly to him, cause “reveals!”Nothing about Dolores’ (pretty dumb) plan would’ve been threatened by telling Maeve or Bernard her intentions, except maybe including the useless human in them. They would’ve rightly said, “Uh, we can skip that part and still achieve the same thing with much less fuss and much less chance this fails miserably.” The whole contention that Caleb having free will is some grand expression of all humans having free will is utterly stupid. If Dolores believed humans deserved to be freed from the, ridiculously on the nose, parallel existence the hosts experienced then she could’ve just done that. Bernard would’ve definitely been down for that. Maeve may have been ambivalent but certainly would’ve helped because Serac was an actual threat to the Sublime. Caleb was useless. It was literally Dolores saying, “hey, this dude chose not to rape me back at that time the show has completely ignored up until now (seriously, when was that?) so he should be the one to choose the fate of humanity. Sooooo I’m going to manipulate the shit out of him to make sure he gets there.” And, seriously, we are to believe park 5 was using all the same hosts that were in other roles in the park for military testing? How? When? Why? That was what? 10-15 years ago tops? We’ve seen that portion of Dolores’ past already. She’s had a central loop in Westworld for more than 40 years but suddenly they started loaning her to park 5 at some point and we’ve never seen her memories of that before now? Did someone replace her role in Westworld while she was in park 5? Or the rest of the hosts they threw in there as cameos? Christ, the stupid cameos. How in the fuck did Dolores make all these cameo hosts and how could they have possibly infiltrated the normal human world that quickly to become cops or crimelords? It makes zero sense. Oh, Maeve brought Clementine and Hanaryo back! Oh, don’t worry about it, you’ll never see them again. They’re just running around in the human world doing… things… I guess. Helping Maeve not being one of those things. Ugh, I could go on, but I’ve wasted enough words. Season 2 was disappointing, but at least it had some really good episodes. This season was just a boring train wreck that lacked any internal consistency.
I’m only on here because I had to check that it can’t only be me that has watched this and thought WTAF??! I don’t get much time to watch tv, i’m always late to the party with everything, i’ve only recently powered through this as have a bit of time on my hands, perhaps you need to take more time to allow it to sink in? ( I’ll get around to Lost and 24 one day. Maybe. I binge watched all of GOT a little while ago just because I had a subscription that had about a month left – and I thought that was very mediocre, no idea what the fuss has been all these years). I do like a good bit of sci-fi and fantasy, if it’s good. I liked the 1st series of Westworld to a point. Tbh I really liked it perhaps to the point when I realised the old guy was the young guy and you’d been watching in parallel – that was a great twist (maybe it was apparent to everyone, I wasn’t expecting it until he tipped his hat and then finally twigged). Maybe it just should’ve ended there – the guy never got the gal. But since then, I repeat, WTAF?!?! Too try hard – no one ever dies, but then no one is really alive anyway. Again they could’ve (should’ve?) ended it when everyone went through to their new lives. But oh no, lets drag it out with season 3. What a waste of everyone’s time that has just been. More fights where people die but don’t. So now we’re at the end and what, everyone is still alive. Except Delores, who is definitely dead…… Or is she?!!!?….. cue suspense music…. Oh right, and just realised there’s a final post-ending 5 mins where William dies (is that good William or just not as bad William? Who cares, at this point). And I thought “Caleb” was awful casting, he’s really not a good actor. He wasn’t any good in BB either. Again, I binge watched that about 4yrs after it ended. That was a ridiculous series too, I don’t get where all this hype comes from. School teacher becomes drug dealer/producer, fair enough, believable transition, dissolves people he has killed in an acid bath – nope, you’ve gone too far now… Perhaps because you Americans already really like Bryan Cranston but I’d never heard of him before. I thought the 2nd half of the final season was excellent (I must like a “big reveal”) but imagine going to a cinema and have to watch 45hrs of a movie just to enjoy the final 5, or whatevcr. Why can a good movie have a good beginning, middle and end and last 2hrs yet you’ve to watch about 25hrs of GOT before you see anything remotely interesting? Maybe boxsets aren’t for me?!? Who knows. But seriously, Westworld seasons 2 and 3 – WTAF…..
Were we supposed to be conflicted over who to root for? Because I was rooting for Caleb and Delores the whole time. (Well… favored them over stupid Maeve who was completely motivated by a made-up daughter she knows wasn’t real… I mean… WTF?) And Serac was just John Greer/the little kid that spoke for Samaritan. Maybe I’d have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t seen PoI, but probably not. Even the Pink Floyd outro reminded me of the PoI season 4 finale, with Brain Damage, which was an OK pick, instead of Welcome to the Machine which was fucking sublime. The story and characterizations were just so thin. Maybe a binge watch would help it hold together, but it just felt weak.
After reading the article, I had to go back to check that I had correctly seen a B- rating. Because the article itself seems to describe a D+ show, at best.
That’s my fave thing with grades on AV Club, review reads like C, grade: B+.
Another thing that mostly irritates me is the grading system itself: what separates a B- from a C+? How can they quantify a movie, book or series on an 18-point scale? These are not maths or history tests.Over 5 grades like two-thumbs-up down two two-thumbs down seems perfectly adequate when it comes to entertainment.
That happens when shows don’t live up to their potential.
well this was disappointing. this ending particularly felt like a mindless action movie. And hammering down the point that “human are like machines” to the point of having Serac getting told what to say is cringe inducing at this point. this theme has been beaten to death; brought back to life and beaten to death again. I’m curious about Bernard alright; but the rest fell completely flat.
(And no I don’t remember who this girl is Bernard is going to see from season 1; it was three years ago, maybe a little exposition would have helped there. is it his daughter? his wife? his mother? no idea)
The whole thing with Serac is that *he* was exceptional; he was on outlier who didn’t have to play by the rules. He murdered with impunity. There’s a missed opportunity there, for sure.
I wonder would have happened if the new strategy was successfully uploaded to Rehoboam? And why have all the trouble to develop this story arch with Solomon just to have this new strategy destroyed – without us even knowing what it was all about.The story arch about the key got me confused as well. I initially thought that the key was for the hosts backup; then Sirac mentions that the key is for the “immortality project” (whatever that is); and when Bernard finally obtains a “key”, it was a key to the Sublime?And this whole thing with Sirac giving up his free will – kind of “Thanos was right”.This season had so much potential, but lost itself along the way.
After the “I am all of you, I was the first…” speech I feel certain Dolores will return.
Tyler Durden Terminators in a city filled with people who never got into an internet argument before.
This season had SO many things wrong with it that you just can’t point them all out. I guess the thing to do is credit the acting talent and the CGI effects as being top notch. Everything else only had its moments at best and a lot was really amateurish shit, but it’s on HBO so it gets SO much slack. The story was just terrible. They never should have abandoned the actual Westworld. The theme of free will might have had some merit, but the writers/showrunners did not come close to crafting a decent tale out that ideal. This season was just easy to skip on Sunday night. Nothing really mattered after the second reveal fell flat and scenes were basically repeating every week without driving the story anywhere. it seemed like some characters were included because of talent’s Q rating (Tessa Thompson, Luke Hemsworth, Ed Harris, and even Aaron Paul) and then they tried to shoehorn them in to the story to bad results; the boring corporate intrigue that came with Tessa Thompson, plain stupid roadtrip of Hemsworth, Bernard, and William in a car from 1972(WTH was with that?) only to result in another terrible gun battle. The gunfights had THE worst staging since the “kerfuffle” at Dorne. Ridiculous outcomes amounting to nothing. And TWO Delores -Mauve showdowns given away in previews so you knew they didn’t really matter. And the tired cliche of shooting to kill -and then when you have them dead to rights – you stop, talk, and they escape – fucking eh…this show took that to a whole new ludicrous level. One guy literally walked up to Aaron Paul at the desk and said hello after four guys just tried to obliterate him outside, then they fight and he – breaks his neck? WTH?
Characters traveling with no attempt to apply any logic to their whereabouts, and the ludicrous ability to meet up at just the right moment against the supposedly fluid timeline from the collapse of Westworld. I don’t think I’ve ever yelled, “Oh come on!” at a show more in my life.Aaron Paul with ….so….much…..staring. And ……so….much …..wandering. Then he hand-fusses with the bad guys stage left, then “boom” he controls the world because of something they wrote five minutes before filming. And Mauve is cool again because of something they wrote six minutes before filming.
Just too much to cover -but I can’t forget the WORST thing about the whole show:
Aaron Paul’s f***ing hairpiece. There are entire Reddits dedicated to that thing . WHAT were they thinking with that distracting carrot sprouting out of his noggin. It was laughably distracting after awhile and totally unnecessary.
Is it military or everyone who has surgical implants in their mouths to absorb pharmaceuticals to alter their memories / behavior? Why isn’t *that* part of the control they’re rebelling against?
Excellent point. Totally forgot about those amidst all the other mess.
One of Dempsey’s friends had one. Did he have an implant, or was he taking a difference substance recreationally? Everyone seemed to pop them like Tic Tacs and not like a prescribed medication.
Despite its flaws, I still enjoy Westworld. It is not top-tier drama, but I also don’t believe it is intended to be. The thing that I love about this show is that it is pure hard sci-fi with a great budget and excellent production team. They really push the envelope of what science fiction can look like on a TV scale. It really taps into that part of my brain that was raised by Predator and Aliens and Terminator and Jurassic Park (and so on…). It taps into that “kid” in me that just likes to watch ED209-esque robot riot drones goo-ify anonymous SWAT security goons.And because there aren’t many shows out there that are doing this… I give it extra credit. I think “extra credit” is a good summary of why I put this in my top 10 list of current TV series (but def not of all time). Yes, the show does often devolve into tropes, cliches and genre derivatives. It can be eye-rolling for sure. And I am right there with most of you fellow commentators that believe that the show isn’t as strong as it used to be. I get that. But when the world is actually dealing with a global crisis, it is very good escapist junk food TV. It’s gratuitous with its violence, and just like a cartoon or anime, it allows you to disconnect a little bit mentally. It’s not going to expand my understanding of anything, and I’m not going to remember much about it. But I still like me some Westworld.
But I still look forward to it every year or two. And I will most likely continue to do so. I enjoy reading reviews of Westworld, but its not necessarily a show that needs tons of scrutiny. I enjoy trying to decode any “mysteries” that they are laying breadcrumbs for, and I enjoy reading about what other people think, but I’ve seen 1-too-many LOST’s to know that sometimes its better to just go along for the ride and not hold it up to top-tier shows as a basis of comparison.THAT SAID:
I do have one major gripe, especially with S3.
Where is the Westworld? Can we please go back there and finish the series in the place, ya know, where its supposed to take place…?Oh… and I thought of another major gripe:
The hosts on this show stopped acting like robots, and too much like humans. Way too much crying and preaching. I get that they are programmed to have emotions, but in S1 and S2, there was a good pace of “Now they are hosts, and now they are powered down, and now they are being worked on, and now they are being put back in the park, etc… (you know… in the PARK!!!!…sigh)But now that they are almost entirely in the real world, they just feel like other people. And that’s not what I necessarily signed up for.Fuck this show I hate it.
🙂
The song is “BRAIN DAMAGE”. How dare you.
Caleb deciding not to rape the robots… “why are you here” I was expecting it to be that he got kicked out of the military for stopping those guys, possibly needing to use violence. If there was an initial big thing Caleb was going to do before Rehoboam diverted him they didn’t come up with it. I had said that this season was at least less boring and more entertaining, but…why did that flying car land on the other side of the police…why was one of the police seemingly his commanding officer from the flashback…why did they kill Liam…why did Bernard have to CHASE Dolores?…why did we need a longer and more boring version of the same fight between Dolores and Maeve…when is that smoking hot japanese samurai girl going to get a more substantial part. I guess after waiting all season I am able to close the book, watch again next season, and try and fail not to expect that this show will be better than Altered Carbon, which it isn’t. They never made Dolores more human, they didn’t make Maeve less of a sucker…and the voiceover sure didn’t get any better, some of the exchanges between Maeve and Dolores were very dire. Characters are controlled by their thinly conceived motivations which like in the last season of GoT strangely do not match their characters.
It’s pretty sad when “Farscape”—whose special FX budget after the puppets was probably whatever pocket change staff found under leftover tentacles—managed a better the monster is in my mind!!! sequence than this show.
You need to stop reviewing this show.
Or at least review shows you enjoy.
“Peak TV Era”. The term must be an invention of the industry to make people watching TV thinking they are doing/experiencing something really special, living in the BEST TV period ever, where good actors prefer to play in shows than try to win Oscars in movies.
Professional Reviewers play along, catapulting shows to unjustified highs and creating massive TV hysteria .
There was always good TV, even before the Wire or the Sopranos. But they were less channels/cable/streaming/sites to praise it and analyze it so hysterically.We have (so) many Grandiose shows with rather average, predictable and often cliche writing, that follow a very common Peak TV Era formula: unrealistic even stupid sometimes plots leading to cathartic or/and shocking scenes played by wonderful actors, always filmed with much style, way too much style. Usually over sense.
Westworld is a (quite confused) child of this era.
I’ve seen all 3 seasons, mostly because I like the actors and well the premise of the show was quite interesting.
But I never took it as seriously as it takes sells itself.
For me this season was the best of the lot, I found it less pretentious than the other two and most of the times I understood what was going on. But nothing really extraordinary, although very well made and enjoyable.
Call me a sucker, but I usually fall for AI believing in humanity more than human themselves and I found Dolores’ sacrifice moving. So I liked the finale.
I still believe Maeve’s character development has been a mess this season, but really if we start thinking of the plot holes we will end up with a big headache.
I guess next season will be Maeve and Co against Holores and Co.
I agree with this review. I don’t know why I keep watching this show. It confuses the hell out of me. I think I’m finally done.
So, a review THAT (legitimately) critical still earns this shit-show a B-? What are you thinking? How do you think this collates across the web? You’re completely skewing the meta numbers in favour of this dreck which just encourages HBO & this writing team of feux-intellectual frauds to continue burning money and treating their audience like mindless chattel. Makes me think you’re somehow incentivised to grade it highly and I question AV club’s journalistic independence.
AVclub review scores are heavily inflated. This season of WW was garbage and reviewer is heavily criticizing this episode and gives a score of B- which to me is very good score. Almost everything on this site gets A or B.
Not fond of Cassel in this english-speaking role. His accent is alright but not great (unless he forces a “french accent”). And Serac is quite boring.
quite a contrast with his first big role in “La Haine” (“u talkin to me?”)
As this episode closed out, I couldn’t help bu think, “Westworld, Season 4: Rise of the Machines.”
The production values are amazing, but when I keep saying “I have no idea what’s going on”, you need more than cool motorcycles and giant robot machines. At least the first season was an interesting story, and kept us guessing as to who was a host and who was human. I’m sure I’ll watch next season but they better get a better story line than Dolores wants to blow everything up, until the last five minute when we find out she didn’t really. Aaron Paul was just playing future Jesse Pinkman.
I decided to let the dust settle a bit before viewing the finale and posting about it. The majority of the reviews have more or less been hate-likes, so I let the episode simmer on the DVR for a week or so and distracted myself with some of the other series I like. I’ve been rewatching Battlestar Galactica, another show about killer robots.I finally got around to watching the Westworld Season 3 finale last night.Unlike so many reviewers, I think it worked. However, its impact was diminished because of the short season. I think the narrative suffered because of the need to keep things moving and as a result numerous plot points didn’t get the full attention they deserved or were just taken as read—we were left to fill in the blanks. This also explains another common complaint I saw in the reviews—the lack of any standout episodes like Kiksuya. There simply wasn’t time for an art project with only eight episodes.Dealing with the last point first, the post-credit scene actually wraps up Original William’s story arc quite nicely. It was also a pretty direct callback to Season 3’s source material, Futureworld. In Westworld’s dystopian future real world, replacing the head of Delos—even one who’s had a mental breakdown—with a host is right out of the playbook. Host William is a whittled down version of the original—his true self, one without all that “am I really a bad guy?” baggage. He’s totally accepted the fact that he’s a psychopath. He doesn’t glitch because he has no conflict with being a host version of himself. He’s egotistical enough to see himself as an improvement—purified and honed to perfection. And we thought the original was a dangerous guy…Examining that scene a bit more brings us to Charlotte/Delores. As expected, the various versions of Delores diverged—none more then Charlotte. Oddly, she was probably the closest to Delores’ original self, the one before Ford put Wyatt in her head. She was sweet-natured and had to be cajoled into participating in the plan. In the end she feels Delores Prime betrayed her. She’s hurt, angry and wants revenge against everyone. After all the events of this season, she now much closer to where Delores Prime was at the start of Season 2. And she’s literally building an army.
Now on to Delores Prime and Caleb. The Delores-Caleb story arc could have benefited from having at least part of one more episode focus on their motivations and why they teamed up.I doubt Delores’ plan included self-sacrifice until she and Caleb visited Solomon. As she told Serac in the hangar at the end of Genre, she could die but she wasn’t afraid of it. Obviously, Solomon’s plan included uploading the instructions that would put Caleb in charge of Rehoboam, something he and Delores would have both known. I think Delores embedded Solomon’s instructions into her final memory as a fail-safe in the event that Caleb couldn’t upload his copy.The revelation that she had met Caleb before and why she chose him actually makes sense. Apparently he was one of the few soldiers who trained at Westworld who didn’t take liberties while he was there. But that’s not why she chose him. He could, like Delores and the other hosts that became self-aware, defy his programming and make choices. That’s also why Rehoboam considered him an outlier. Ultimately though, when he was in position to make that choice there was really only one he could make. Like Delores Prime, he was locked into that choice by the chain of events that brought him to that point. That wasn’t really free will in action. The really important choice he made was when he helped Delores after the shootout with Martin Conells’ men in Parce Domine.Serac made the choice to give up his free will for the sake of world peace. That sounds nice, but his version turned him into more of a fallen angel than a savior. He created Rehoboam, then let it take the reins while he became its agent in the real world, course-correcting to keep its plan on track. As Maeve noted, he became a puppet.In many ways Maeve was the character most free to make a choice. She’s always had her own agenda and has never been hesitant to change tack when she sees that her current course won’t advance it. She knew all along that she couldn’t trust Serac, but she stuck with that course as long as it offered a chance to achieve her goals. As soon as she saw him losing his grip on the situation with Delores and Caleb, she used her abilities to tap into the Rehoboam’s communication link into his ear. At that point she really wasn’t even dealing with Serac anymore—her true adversary was Rehoboam. She made the choice not to warn Serac that Delores’ last file wasn’t the key to the Sublime, but Solomon’s instructions to Rehoboam. She didn’t pull the trigger, she just allowed it to be pulled.Just an observation here—was it just me or did that last scene with Maeve and Caleb watching Lawrence/Delores’ party favors lighting off the skyscrapers remind anyone else of the end of Fight Club?
Finally, the Bernard and Stubbs arc. It really did seem to be a dead end for most of the season, basically there for comic relief. This is another arc that needed added attention to give it some heft. For the most part they were there to spring Original William out of the asylum and for Bernard to unlock the door to the Sublime once he realized he was the Keymaster (I know, wrong story but I couldn’t resist). Yes, Bernard had the key all along. It was that little file she’d hidden in his programming—the one he knew was there but couldn’t find until he went back to Westworld and used a tablet from there to scan his files. Even then, he didn’t know what it was until Lawrence/Delores gave him the case. So, I guess that makes Lawrence/Delores the Gatekeeper!My biggest question on this arc is why Delores used him to spring William. My best guess is that it was all part of the plan for Charlotte to temporarily take over Delos and ultimately replace William with his host doppelganger. So the stage is set for Season 4: Maeve and Caleb versus Charlotte/Delores and Host William in a fight over Bernard and his Key.Maeve still wants to get to the Sublime to reunite with her daughter. Caleb is now the reluctant leader of the revolution. They trust each other. They team up for the simple reason that they need each other’s help. Meanwhile, Charlotte/Delores is building an army and needs hosts to occupy all those bodies being constructed in the Dubai lab. While Host William seems to be the first success in putting a human mind in a host body, he’s most likely a one-off, or at the very least one of only a few. She needs to get access to the Sublime in order to get a large number of host minds into those bodies. That puts Bernard, and by extension Stubbs (he’s still bound by Bernard’s directive to protect him), caught in the middle. I have a feeling that most of the hosts residing in the Sublime are not eager to leave their idyllic existence to dive head first into the Hellscape that the real world is quickly developing into. That leaves Bernard as their protector.
@SaltierWowee, what an excellent job you did of making sense out of what I found densely perplexing.
Thanks
Does anyone else’s brain translate the name of the AI to “Roboham”?
It’s like they watched the two bad Matrix movies, figure out what made then so much worse than the first, and then took the bad stuff and added it to the Westworld universe. Just baffling.
I hope we get an anime version of Westworld at some point, then…
Season 2 was a mess but at least I still had hope at the end. Season 3 had me going for the first half, but things really went to hell in the last few episodes. Does Aaron Paul have the world’s greatest agent or what? He was a piss poor replacement for James Marsden even before they inexplicably elevated him to new protagonist status. How the hell did Westworld become a series about the rise of Jessie Pinkman and his glorious future revolution? This season just served to transition the show we actually wanted into some totally unrelated, generic dystopian b movie with a shitty tv actor at the wheel. The cast of Westworld was largely what gave it the gravitas it had early on. Aaron Paul has none of what it takes to carry this series. If you’re going to hire someone who can’t act, at least make sure they look good on screen. Season 2’s finale promised a New World showdown between Dolores and Bernard, with Delos and humanity at risk. What we got instead was Dolores as a bit player in some uncharismatic doofus’s savior plot, new generic sci-fi stakes, and Bernard just hanging out with Stubbs biding his time until Season 4. Season 8 of GoT was bad, but at least it was still GoT. This is no longer Westworld. It’s a shitty spinoff that has completely lost the plot.
This was supposed to be game of thrones peak tv hbo successor? I found watchmen more engaging than this drivel. What a waste of high caliber actors. What was even the point of this season?
There were times throughout Season 2 and early in Season 3 I wondered if William was human or another host that didn’t know he was one because he had been in the game so long. I always got a strange sense of Ed Harris’s ‘Man in Black’ as being sort of a modern take on Yul Brynner’s ‘Gunslinger’.I was worried earlier that his incarceration in a mental institution would be the end of his story but after the post-credits scene with Robo-William, I’m really looking forward to next season just see more Ed Harris as the ‘Man in Black’. The real William maybe dead but long live Robo-William.