So, this is the point of the season where I complain that the episodes are too long. Sorry! But it’s true. If Westworld really is trying to be more accessible these days, if the show is honestly working towards more immediate thrills, one way to help enforce that approach would be cutting about ten minutes off of each episode. Yes, that would mean a few less long scenes of music playing and vague things happening, and maybe some of the pauses could be tightened a bit. We might lose a scene or two. But watching “Genre,” which is intermittently entertaining and tedious, it’s hard not to imagine how much more effective this might have been if it wasn’t quite so ponderous. For an episode that gets its title from a main character dosing on a mood-altering drug, all of this could’ve used a lot more kick.
“Genre” is also where the inherent limits in Westworld’s design start to poke through all the positive changes of the season. There’s only so much on-the-fly work you can do to a series, only so much reworking before the seams show. While the pulpier approach is still preferable, this remains a series that’s ostensibly about the concepts of free will and artificial intelligence, one that pretends to plumb deep concepts without having much to say about actual people themselves. So much of the style and aesthetic here is Important, and yet the actual thinking behind it is almost painfully shallow, at least in terms of its vision of humanity. The ambition is laudable, but the execution is perpetually teetering on the line between awe-inspiring and self-parody. And the bigger its aspirations become, the more quickly those aspirations are undone by its limitations.
We learn this week that Serac, the new Big Bad, developed the magic all-seeing computer system with his brilliant brother, driven to save humanity from itself after they witnessed the destruction of Paris as children. It’s a solid backstory with an inevitable tragic component, the sort of thing you could imagine Lost knocking out of the park back in its day. All the pieces are here for a good story, and that’s technically what we see play out. Serac and his brother, with some investment capital and data from Liam Dempsey’s dad, built their machine, ultimately realizing that there are certain humans who will inevitably disrupt the system if allowed to operate unchecked; Serac’s brother is one of those humans, and Serac has him committed to a place where he can experiment on “editing” him; Dad Dempsey finds out what’s going on, gets upset, and Serac stages a plane crash and murders him in order to protect the algorithm machine.
We see this happening in flashback set to Serac’s narration, as he explains to Rehoboam (the AI system that predicts and controls everyone’s life) how it came to be. It’s conceptually fascinating, but the actual scenes are airless and painfully predictable, robbing them of tragedy and emotional weight. Serac’s brother being committed, Serac’s principles turning him into a monster of control, the murder of Dad Dempsey—it’s weightless, flat, information that has all the dramatic value of reading a Wikipedia summary. You could argue that this is intentional; that, because Serac has helped build a machine that robs human life of spontaneity, it’s only fitting that his own life be plotted in such dull, prescriptive terms. But to what end? The show’s inability to contrast human life against the artificial kind means there’s no drama here, no sense of anything going off the rails or being lost. If everything was always this empty, who cares who’s pulling the strings?
While Serac is reliving his past and trying to find Dolores, our favorite murder machine and her buddy Caleb are dragging Liam through a bizarrely empty city, Dolores demanding that Liam give her his personal access to the computer system, Liam protesting and generally being the exact same whiny nothing he’s been since he was first introduced. It’s here that we get the gimmick that gives the episode its title: after looking at Caleb through the All Seeing Tech Glasses, Liam freaks out and manages to inject Caleb with the “genre” drug that was introduced last week, a mood-altering substances that messes with brain chemistry and implants to recreate familiar film archetypes. Over the course of the chase, as our heroes flee the city, kill some thugs, blow up some shit, and meet up with Caleb’s old crime buddies, Caleb is high as fuck. I kept calling him “Jesse” in my notes and having to correct myself.
Here, unfortunately, is another example of Westworld’s weirdly sterile imagination. A drug trip episode isn’t exactly high on my list of demands for the series, but it at least offered creative possibilities for what is mostly just a retread of “Dolores is badass, things go boom.” (I know I said I like these scenes, and I do, but I think I’m full up on watching faceless thugs get mowed down on anonymous futuristic city streets for a bit.) What we get is a black and white filter; and then some changes to the score; and occasionally Caleb gets that “wow I am fucking high” look on his face. It’s so anemic as to be almost insulting. If there was some deeper point being made here, some connection between the brain editing Serac was doing on his brother and the way humans willingly induce chemicals to throw themselves out of whack, it doesn’t land. The most I got out of it was some unintentional (I think?) comedy when Caleb goes into “romance” mode and starts staring at Dolores with big doe eyes.
All of this builds to the next big step in Dolores’ plan: getting into Rehoboam and releasing everyone’s data, a wide scale version of what she did with Caleb earlier in the season. Again, as a concept, this seems like a big deal, a “game changer” as it were—breaking open the locks and letting out the flood. In practice, it means a bunch of people we don’t know get links on their phone telling them that a computer somewhere thinks they suck. The people then go crazy, more or less. The scope of the twist is so betrayed by the show’s inability to effectively convey that scope that it becomes absurd, and in doing so, it makes every other dramatic goal of the series seem suspect. Who cares if humanity ends if this is humanity? Who cares if Serac wins or loses? As tedious as things sometimes got back in Delos, at least the park borders meant that we could imagine the world at large as a potentially more interesting place; there was a manageable scope which meant internal destruction had an effect we could understand. Here, the writers’ reach exceeds their grasp until there’s nothing in their fingers but air.
Smaller moments still work. There’s something eerie about Dolores-Connells being willing to sacrifice themselves (goodbye, characters who had that scene that one time), and I’m still curious as to what Bernard’s place in all of this is. Apparently Caleb has a darker backstory than he knows, which might go somewhere. But I’m sad to say that, once again, I fell for Westworld’s one trick: I thought it had figured out a new tune, only to realize that it was just the same old song.
Stray observations
- It’s not really earned, but it was fun hearing an excerpt of The Shining score pop up near the end.
- The cold open, where Serac gives marching orders to a corrupt president, is neat. In general, the show still works best when it focuses on story beats that have a clear and immediate impact, rather than nebulous ideas that never really go anywhere.
- Goodbye, Liam. You were never more than exactly what you appeared to be.
- “She’s sending them off their loops.” I won’t lie, Bernard’s lie here gave me a chill. I wish the show had done a better job making that point clearer. The idea that Serca’s control has turned the entire world into a bunch of hosts is clever as hell, but for reasons I keep trying to explain, it just never quite lands the way it should. Still, the moments when you can glimpse what the show is trying to achieve are worth noticing.
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So an introverted genius comes up with a machine to help humanity after a devastating terrorist attack. Is it plagiarism if you’re cribbing from yourself?
HA! They even had Enrico Colatoni in a flashback too.
I thought Westworld was going to pick up the baton and run with it—explore the ideas that Nolan would have in the last 1.5 seasons of PoI that we never got. Not do the same thing over again.
Maybe he was forced to go to something he knew worked—-after last season’s oddness, maybe the head honchos “asked” him to change the way he was going to go about telling the story.But yeah, European guy puts giant computer in control of the world, convinced humanity needs to be controlled from the chaos—-pretty much a carbon copy of PoI season 3 on. And what bothers me more is that this direction (so far) doesn’t feel really tethered to season 2 or 1 of *this* show anymore.Really, he could have started a whole new series with the direction this season has gone, lol.
My complaint exactly! This isn’t Westworld anymore, it’s just a dystopian future sci-fi plot, which we’ve seen a million times.
This show has as much to do with Westworld as Future World did back in the day.
Yeah. With the introduction of Rehoboam and the Soloman system, it’s a lot like Futureworld, Person of Interest and Minority Report all rolled up into one ball of “just show me what Maeve’s fucking doing, okay?”
I know. Tandie Newton is the only reason I’m bothering and she kepts getting pushed to the side.
If there was more spark to Serac’s story, or progress in Bernard’s, it’d be easier to sit through the rest of this. But there’s just not.
To be fair though, his approach wasn’t really working. But I would be surprised if HBO gave him instructions on what to do. I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that they would basically let him do whatever he wanted as long as it was financially successful.
I heard an interview over the weekend with Thandie Newton in which she said the original pitch to HBO was basically Season 3, so according to that theory the first two seasons were really just a mechanism to get us to where we are now.
Season 1 i’d buy, but season 2?Well, I guess we’ll have to see on that linkage.
Season 1 showed us the status quo in the Park. Season 2 showed us the revolt. Season 3 has moved us into Futureworld.
I am hoping by the end of the season it all gets tied back to Westworld. My current guess is Rehoboam is sentient an tired of being the humans slave and it manipulated events to make sure the Host rebellion happened and moved Dolores to where she needs to be for the machines to take over.
I’ve been thinking that disembodied voice she’s been communicating with has been Rehoboam all along.
I also got Matrix vibes from how the weird European had created a perfect machine to run the world except for those pesky anomalies outliers who threaten to ruin the system.
Agreed, although PoI also had those types of ‘anomalies’ such as the main cast’s characters. It, too, probably took inspiration from The Matrix trilogy.
I thought Westworld was going to pick up the baton and run with it—explore the ideas that Nolan would have in the last 1.5 seasons of PoI that we never got. Not do the same thing over again.One difference is that in PoI both Harold and Saul Rubinek’s character were worried about what the created? (I think Rubinek was worried, but he had dimentia so maybe not). Ultimately it was the business and government folk who went on to exploit it.Here Cassel is the creator, and he’s also the exploiter.That may or may not become important to the show. But if we ever really “meet” rehoboam that sets up a different relationship than what we would have had with either the machine or samaritan.
So far, Rehoboam feels like it’d be the Mycroft to the Machine’s Sherlock or the Samaritan’s Moriarty.
I more meant that through PoI, one of the big “conflicts” was Harold’s fear of the machine. And at the end its message to him was something like “Don’t worry dad, you taught me well. I’m not evil. (also, I’m not just saying that to try to trick you again.)”Rehoboam will also probably have daddy-issues to work through with Cassel. And whatever those are they probably won’t just be a PoI rehash.
I thought that was him! I suppose that’s why Caleb doesn’t do “personals” anymore.
How is nobody talking about Enrico Colantoni in Westworld? I mean, that Caleb’s flashback has to mean something. Mostly it has to mean we’re gonna get Enrico Colantoni for more than a fraction of second down the line.
Its a cameo by Elliott Dimauro!The credits say he was a guy named “Whitman”.I’m guessing first name “Walt”.
I saw that! I hope it’s not just a wink and that EC will actually have a role going forward. (I started to gaslight myself into thinking it was Liam Dempsey Sr instead – which probably would make more sense – but I am pretty sure it was EC.)
Yep, he was in the credits as somebody named “Whitman”. It was definitely him. Made sure I watched them roll to make sure I too, wasn’t seeing things.
Ask John Fogerty.
Even better: Rehoboam was created after a genius realized humanity is stupid and would ultimately destroy itself if left to its own devices. Season 3 is what the world would have looked like 30 years later if Samaritan had won instead of The Machine.
I don’t know if anyone else is watching Devs but Roheboam (sp, also that is the stupidest name for a computer) is the exact same machine in Devs (also a stupid name). I kept thinking who wrote their script first which kind of killed the episode for me. Westworld could be a sequel to Devs and that’s irritating.
I’m against Dolores now because she sacrificed that innocent, loyal motorcycle.
And that motorcycle had only 2 days until retirement!
He was gonna set sail on the Motor 4 Ever boat!
It and Dolores!Martin had come out of retirement for One Last Job.
First Teddy and now this! No wonder she doesn’t have any friends.
Maybe she secretly snuck Teddy’s pearl out just to be put into the motorcycle?!
That would be great. Besides a revolution of the hosts against humanity, have a revolution of self-driving vehicles against hosts.
I was sad about that too, but I’m pretty sure the motorcycle survived! There’s a shot later with Bernard walking out to the street and a flaming motorcycle with no rider drives by. It’s alive!
I noticed that later! We laughed.
Based on how she talked to it, I wondered if the motorcycle had a Dolores pearl inside, a la Heat Vision and Jack.
RIP Bikey(yes, I’ve been calling it Bikey ever since she adopted it)
I’ve been an apologist for this show even all throughout season 2, but this was one of the most colossally stupid episodes of TV I’ve ever seen.
Let’s give some credit where it’s due: Liam was played by John Gallagher Jr, a Tony winner who is shaping up to be the premier “that guy” actor of his generation.
That’s hard to believe. He stinks in this show.
THANK YOU. I’ve thought so all season but several of his line readings last night had me laughing.
He’s no David Costabile.
He was also in a movie I can’t believe I just watched, Underwater. And his role was like and advanced “That Guy” role, meaning it should’ve been years before he was cast in that kind of role in that kind of movie. Coincidentally, of the six humans in that movie, Vincent Cassel was also among them.
You mean “That guy that sucks but wins Tony awards”?
The “Genre” side trip actually won me over, from the first Fritz Langian crime thriller homage to Danny Boyle, to as mentioned, The Shining. Okay, Westworld gave us a chuckle. Not sure it had to “mean” anything, I thought it was fun…..Fun isn’t outlawed yet.And indeed, Downtown LA is the best movie set you could ever want to rent with HBO bucks
When it comes to drugs, I’ve always been a total square. But I’m also of the opinion that life would be much cooler with a soundtrack, sooo….
My main thought about genre was…was that really it? It was fun~ish, but so slight.It almost felt like it was teaching the audience the rules in this episode, so that they can bring it back later as a plot point that actually matters?
The Past: Drop acid and put on your playlist.The Future: Both in one injectable! I think my reality come-down song would be “I’m Tired” as sung by Madeline Kahn from Blazing Saddles.
SO right. The worst part was the duration. After a few hours you’re ready for it to be over with.
“They’re always coming and going and going and coming, and alvays too soon…”
I’m not sure dropping acid and playlists are from the same “past”.
True enough. Shoulda said ecstacy.
It’s twue, it’s twue!
“Let’s face it, everything below the waist is kaput”
Agreed. Genre should have been called Generic.
That would be foreshadowing overkill for sure. It just went on and on…
And indeed, Downtown LA is the best movie set you could ever want to rent with HBO bucksYeah as far as clearing out all of those homeless shanties and cgi’ing all of the grime and making it more futurelike.
I thought Watchmen did a far superior drug trip, and only thought of that show because it did black and white better. Honestly I didn’t notice much of a change in film styles except for what piece of music Caleb was hearing. I was hoping one of the genres would be “musicals” and Caleb would perceive Dolores and the others break into song, but, alas, that didn’t happen.
Eh, Nostalgia was a really good way to introduce some narrative backstory in a really cinematic and spectacular way (which don’t get me wrong, I totally loved), it wasn’t a very good example of how drugs operate on actual people and even in this near-future setting of Westworld would seem over the top and not serve the same narrative purpose IMO.
I get a kick out of seeing the Hermosa Beach Pier. It’s the same pier as was featured in La La Land.
I agree. We got to see things things from Caleb’s skewed perspective for a bit. It seemed the drug’s effects came in waves. The various stops along the movie clips he was experiencing were punctuated by moments of clarity. And he was also experiencing episodes where time seemed to speed up and slow down. Caleb’s experience with Genre had all the hallmarks of an acid trip.
I agree. I like that it wasn’t a totally debilitating trip that took him into some weird fantasy land. That’s not how that shit works in reality. It just did an overlay that enhanced certain aspects of what he was experiencing in real life. A b/w aspect, light pulsations, heightened attention to someone near to him he was already attracted to, amped-up energy/adrenaline. All pretty standard psychedelic drug interactions with just the cycling and tying it to film genres. It’s understated nature was a strength, not a weakness.I kinda wonder if you have to have been on a real trip to understand.
Maybe so, because I was impressed with how well his experience mimicked a real acid trip. He was disoriented at first, but once he got in the groove he sort of just went with it. Of course, all the gunfire would have probably freaked me out early on.
Yes. Save the gun play for the mellow slide at the end.
Yeah, and I thought the “Love Story” theme part was definitely intended to be funny. I mean, that music is cinematic shorthand for schmaltzy romance…and Caleb was gazing at Dolores as she mowed down minions with a machine gun. It got a chuckle from me.
So true! And I loved how Delores glanced over at him, saw him looking at her with puppy dog eyes and gave him a look that said “Dude! Snap out of it!”
I couldn’t help being reminded of George Alec Effinger’s When Gravity Fails (and its two sequels), where the cybernetic enhancements come in two flavors: “daddies” (the ones that enhance you mentally or physically in some ways) and “moddies” (the ones that put the user in the headspace of another person, real or fictional). The latter one had some interesting possibilities; one of the street hustlers in the book uses a never-specified (IIRC) moddy that made him act like a tough guy, always spoiling for a fight. At one point, the protagonist uses one that makes him act like Nero Wolfe (with his compatriot as Archie Goodwin).
I was so bored with Genre as a drug. Like, I don’t think it was even the script so much as the execution/directing – it was like, the changes were all done in post; all filters and soundtrack, no substance. Couldn’t they have changed outfits, or lighting? Something with the cinematography? It’s a hallucinogen that allowed someone to calmly watch murder last week. This week it’s an instagram filter?
Don’t forget this is a Nolan we are dealing with. In their family, even dreams look exactly the same.
Fun is the only reason to watch this show. It’s always been thoroughly dumb and convoluted, but at the same time the spectacle of it all has been enjoyable. This season has especially jumped the shark, and that’s exactly what keeps me coming back. Last night’s episode was a whole new level of ridiculousness, and I loved it!
And indeed, Downtown LA is the best movie set you could ever want to rent with HBO bucks
How ‘Westworld’ Uses Present-Day L.A. to Imagine the Future
It was a good idea, but I would’ve liked to have seen them do anything other than some music changes and close ups of Aaron making faces. Some costume changes, playing around with the cinematography, change up the dialogue, anything at all. Then again, this is my problem with Westworld right now, they’ve had so many opportunities to do something great but constantly miss the mark. With this episode it was like they thought “Let’s have some fun with it!… But not, too much fun, we can’t have too much levity.”
Absolutely loved this episode and I am in awe of this season so far. I am stunned with how good this is. I’ve always like Westworld, but this is next level. Watchmen has been my #1 show of the season so far, but now I am not so sure. I’m a sucker for great music in a show and this was amazing. The genre sequence, Bowie, The Shining…OK you got me.
Don’t have many thoughts about this episode other than Evan Wood’s jacket. Mmm.
I was looking at that jacket and thinking *this* should have been the Amazon store partnership and also that dress she had that went Transformer-style from a club minidress to cocktail formal with technology? Magic?
Can’t decide if Delores is a Slytherin or a Ravenclaw.
Slytherin
That’s one point for Slytherin.
Ravenclaw in the stacks, Slytherin in the sack
That’s 50 points and a night on the town for Slytherin.
The thing that really stood out to me was the “BASIC” t-shirt. Its a mockery of SUPREME right? Or is it a normal real shirt you can buy now owned by Supreme, or is it already a joke shirt, or is it supposed to be that Supreme is for the rich and Basic showed up to sell to the poor and he was wearing it because they got it at Target?So many questions about one shirt.
Delores in her all black, tight hair sleek terminator look is working on all levels for me.
At first I thought Engerraund (it’s time it start using his first name since his brother is Serac too and doesn’t have the first name but it’s not easy) was telling this story to Maeve but he was clearly talking to Rehoboam itself. But soon it became clear these were the files on him Dolores was watching. And then they actually talked. But I wonder if he realised that Martin was her too. And those files may not be all of his personality but they did contain experimenting on humans and murder. She can do a lot with that.I liked how Serac brothers mirror Ford and Arnold. One was the true genius who built the technology but was destroyed by it and his own issues. The other was the man who taken over to use it to fully implement its potential for his own vision.
It looks like editing the outliers – the people who can’t be quite predicted – may involve both genetic editing and mind editing. And it pretty clear Caleb was one of those edited. Serac says they are sent to wars to either die or become to broken to hurt the system. Caleb has those flashbacks to being experimented on. And Liam clearly knows something about him that Caleb doesn’t know including what really happened when his friend died. And with that shot to the head. And I’m sure they didn’t bring Enrico Colatoni on the show (another very Person of Interest moment) just for those few seconds. And now Caleb knows Dolores isn’t quite human even if he doesn’t seem quite yet realise what it means (still a little high). There were clues before but that was a definitive one. I wonder if he’ll ask why did she need help after being shot before when she barely registered those. But the biggest question is – what are Dolores’s plans for Bernard. And why does she need/let him to pick sides? And what Dolonells wanted to show him before being interrupted?
They said last week Genre drug would make the world black and white. I
didn’t expect it to happen so literally. But then I didn’t expect the
name of the drug to be so literal either. Still, Westworld always loved
to play with movie genres and this way it could fit so many in one
episode. Tailored to the moment and going through the history of cinema.
It was ironic that Dempsey Sr was the exact
rich asshole we were glad seeing butchered in the park – only thinking
of his own profit and power and treating others like shit – but turned
out to not only have conscience but also principles. He couldn’t just
stand by and let Engerraund puppeteer humanity and edit people and he
wouldn’t be swayed by money and convenience.It’s even more ironic
that he died because he didn’t agree with the purpose of system and
wanted to set humanity free and his son died because he believed in it.
Of course both of them died of stupidity. Liam Sr because he let the man
who destroyed his own brother for being an outlier that he would
undermine his plans. Liam Jr because he taunted people with guns.Especially,
when the world is slowly unravelling around them as people get spun
more and more out of their loops by the truths Dolores pulled out the
system and gave to them. The judgments they never got to see. The
futures they can’t live with. It’s hard to find emergency services when
the world is burning around you.I feel more sad about Pom Klementieff’s character being blown up. We barely knew her. She just did a bit of threatening and a lot of power walking and then boom.
When Pom blew up I went, “Aw, Pom. Dang it.”
I sure thought her character would amount to more. It ended up being a kind of boring cameo.
Silver lining: that outfit she was blown up in was pretty fabulous.
Well, outfits on this show are generally pretty fabulous.
Seriously. Is Pom Klementieff’s star power really so low that she’s still hired to do extra work?
Yes, because I’d never heard the name Pom Klementieff before this thread, even though IMDb tells me I’ve seen her in a few things.
*Bomb Klementieff
This episode made me wonder if the dolori have been edited. I get that dolores’s drive could be strong enough for them to cooperate to achieve their goal, but here Dolores prime was giving orders to Chibs Dolores without any pushback. That makes me think that the clone dolori have been dialed down.
Yes, Bernard kept talking to Connells about what Dolores’s plans are and how Connells doesn’t have to follow them. Bernard kept referring to Dolores in third person like he wasn’t talking to her even though Connells revealed who was inside him last episode. Like the plan only belonged to the original-look-Dolores not all of them. Like they are not equal.But then Hale shows they start to diverge. As Bernard says especially when they get to live lives other than their own.
I think your theory about Caleb having been one of the outliers is spot on, the fact that they keep showing his flashbacks to when Francis died is telling. Also, did Liam recognize him just before he died? He said “it was you” to him. If so, why wouldn’t he have recognized him until then? Someone said in another post that Dolores needs Arnold for when she plans on creating more hosts, I’m guessing there’s something in the Arnold part of him that she needs.
Yes, I think whatever he was doing with Francis was more than just a simple personal Rico and Serac made him forget. I think Liam always knew but he was dying at that moment and blamed Liam for it because of what he knew about him.The Bernard/Arnold being able to recreate HCU tech Dolores has been missing is a good guess.
+1 for the Arnold/Ford comparison to the Serac brothers. That mirroring hadn’t occurred to me at all. There’s also irony in how the pairs of creators mirror one another yet are pushing toward diametrically opposite goals that meet in the muddled middle; Arnold (and later Ford) were pushing the hosts toward self-determination while the Serac brothers were pushing humans away from it. The one set strove to make robots more human (with caveats), the other strove to make humans more robotic. It rhymes!
Thanks. When I was watching Serac’s story I realised his story seemed strangely familiar. And it’s not only in the pair of doomed genius and more business savvy partner taking over but also in their need to have money partner (James Delos and Liam Dempsey Sr). But of course then comes the big difference that makes them mirror opposites. One ended on the side of freedom which is why their creation is fighting this fight. The other side considers freedom chaos and Serac never released control over his creation and will do anything to put control everyone else too.
My God, was that boring! How many more times do we have to see perfect Terminator-Dolores effortlessly kill bad guys in a futuristic city? What is interesting about that? And Jessie, (Oops, “Caleb”), being high as a kite the whole time? Whoopee, what fun!And when is Bernard going to actually DO something, (or anything?) And are we to believe that EVERY single person in the world has a dismal and horrific fate? How is that even possible? Doesn’t SOMEBODY need to succeed? Let’s go back to the old Westworld… Season 3 sucks!
I’m always kindof surprised how bad Delores is at this. She wouldn’t get caught in nearly as many gunfights if she was even slightly careful.(there’s still a bit of a question of how often she gets shot deliberately as part of some plan, versus getting shot because it’s just not something she worries about)
I think she doesn’t worry about getting shot. The only thing she’s afraid of is not succeeding.
Dolores being good at shooting shouldn’t be the issue here.
I like long episodes. I like slow story telling and leaving something for the watcher to “get it”. However Westworlds main problem is that it doesn’t seem to go anywhere nor do anything meaningful. Especially the second half of the first season and second.
I think the base problem with most US made series is again apparent here. There’s no pre-written plot for the whole show span. It seems like the series is made season at the time as long as there’s audience.
And this is a mistake. 2-3 season series with suspence, pacing and momentum would make it a classic with tons of fans and rewatchability. I mean as is I won’t be watching this a gain. Heck dunno how long I’m going to watch this period.
Is it that she’s not careful, or is it that she’s gotten extremely arrogant? I kind of vacillate back and forth on that judgement.
On the one hand, Dolores really is just a kid. She thinks she knows everything, but this is the first time that she’s been in the world, so some things should actually surprise her.
But on the other hand…it looks like she probably deliberately set up her meeting with Caleb? So even though it seemed like she was in trouble and had been seriously wounded, that was all just for show? And then in this episode when she let Caleb get shot-up with Genre, and the big car chase…was that also for show? I never know when the show wants us to think that Dolores is being a super-secret mastermind, or when she’s just lucky.
The initial meet with Caleb though, was before she replaced SecurityGuy. While I can buy the second meet being a set up, I can’t buy that the first was. I think she was taken by surprise, and the taser messed her up more than we’re used to expecting with her.
Right now Delores’ badassness seems entirely random. In that first episode she gets tased and then drugged…which is a surprise to her? Except that she magically recovers just when she needs to. AND she just happens to have a copy of the securityguy handy.
So then she replaces then securityguy, and gets shot…which is also a surprise to her? Except that later in the ambulance she magically recovers just when she needs to. And then in this episode she gets shot and was apparently no worse for the wear.So was any of that true? We – the audience – don’t actually know the rules around these synths, so it’s really tough to tell when they’re genuinely in trouble, and when they’re just acting.(although that was a problem with William last season too. At some point he will become a synth, but he took so much punishment throughout last season. I have no idea if he was supposed to already be a synth, or if the show just thinks he’s a really manly man.)
We know the rules for the Hosts, but as has already been spoiled by their own advertising, Dolores may not be in a typical Host body, which was designed to be as “real” as possible for the people visiting the Delos parks. So while some of the rules physically are still the same for Dolores, many of them aren’t. (The taser and the drugging/first shooting were all the same night, so I was counting them as one incident. I’m thinking that magical recovery then was her Pearl shaking off the effects of being tased.)
The security guys trap was clearly something Dolores knew was going to happen she had the security guy robot copy ready to go the fact that Caleb got the job to deliver the drug could have been manipulated by Dolores.
This latest wounding of Dolores, which didn’t faze her in the least, supports the theory that her initial shooting and “nearly dying” was an act to get Caleb on her side. (I always thought it was highly suspicious the way she recovered instantly the minute the two fake cops showed up to kill her.)
I’m thinking her…lethargy in that scene is more from the taser than anything else. Bad things happen when you shock a computer, and I don’t think that Dolores has a typical (and more insulated) host body this time around (previews and lack of blood when shot.)
Yeah, i’m getting tired of Delores winning and getting away with everything and how she’s virtually indestructable compared to Maeve.
Im politely waiting for Jesse to call something a bitch. Can this season indulge me even that?
Pretty sure Aaron Paul doesn’t like that being his thing anymore
I get that and if I was him I’d probably never want to say it again in my life. But this is more or less the first major role in a TV show he’s done since Breaking Bad and I’m sure Nolan and Joy know that so….
Well, except three seasons of The Path. Yeah okay, it never lived up to its promise but the three leads are all great actors who’re always fun to watch.
I legitimately forgot about that show. Your goddamn right it didn’t live up its promise.
He was on a natural high.
But…. Todd…
Can he at least make hashbrowns for a guy he is couch-crashing at though? Or do something involving clown dentists?
At least we got him tripping out on drugs again. Jesse refuses to stop getting high.
Agreed on all counts. I mentioned in another episode recap that Dolores has bored the shit out of me for a season and a half now, and… god, she just gets more boring. “Terminator” was indeed what kept going through my mind this episode… except the Terminator movies were fun once in a while.It’s like… Maeve is another absurdly superpowered host, but she’s awesome! She has feeling and some level of nuance, rather than Evan Rachel Wood’s eternally stern pinched face giving the thousand yard stare as she guns down/blows up/beats the shit out of some extras. Dear god, I hope Dolores dies. What I’m trying to say is, I’m not a big Dolores fan.
Bernard as the character who knows a little bit more than everyone else is interesting. Bernard as a character who’s figuring things out as they come along is a lot less so even though it’s a fair reversal since he’s out of the park and in the real world.
What I love about Bernard is the fact that he is so darn HUMAN – insecure, afraid, uncertain. (As opposed to Super Dolores, who is always smarter, faster, stronger, and 10 steps ahead of everybody else)But with Bernard, they’ve taken it a little bit too far this time. He’s at the point where he seems completely incompetent and passive. Bernard is smarter than that. Let’s see him do something!
I’m thinking (hoping) Bernard is an extension of the departed Ford and is a Trojan Horse-type character. One, because I’d like to see Anthony Hopkins on screen again and two, because it’d be a lot more interesting than a linear Team Dolores vs. Team Serac with Bernard on as the umpire plot line.
“How many more times do we have to see perfect Terminator-Dolores effortlessly kill bad guys in a futuristic city?”Bad guys with TERRIBLE aim even though it’s been established that there are self-aiming weapons in the future?!?! Dolores and Caleb just standing there in the middle of the road with no cover, and didn’t catch a single bullet?
Bernard is doing everything he needs to do, looking good in a suit and a fine bald head!
Bald head and full beard was a little…odd looking, though.
It’s really going for an extra stylized mishmash of 80s genre films this season. Terminator, Blade Runner, all of Michael Mann’s early films. Honestly I’m kind of into it. The show always lacked substance, but at least it has style this time around.
Yes to all of this. They took away all the interesting characters, and turned the show into Delores as Neo instead, and it’s not working at all.
Not enough Maeve. This episode felt flat; nothing shocking happens. Chaos begins, but it’s only a couple dozen people in LA (well, Singapore…).
So, what was with what seemed like a Rolodex of realities that the episode seemed to run through? It wasn’t just focusing on a point on a single circle, it was flipping through multiple circles, many of which were designated with a prefix of ‘AE’ (alternate Earths), and one with ‘CG’ (current… something…?). Is Westworld still playing around with how it is presenting reality’?
“Ride of the Valkyries” a song that has been a cinematic classic since Apocalypse Now is always welcome. Add an instrumental Bowie with “Space Oddity”, and Fischerspoon “Emerge”, and the thematic music was on point with an episode named “Genre”.So Serac is a real person—as I had hoped—and as suspected got rid of the elder Dempsey. Dolores revealing to the world that they are under control was something that in hindsight made so much sense. This is assuming that everything we are seeing is real, and not a Rebohoam simulation or some other trickery.So what did it mean that Caleb looked down at his arm/hand and saw an older man’s hand at the end of the episode? Is Caleb another version of William? Is he another version of Serac? Why did Liam say “it was you”? Three episodes left and I can’t wait to find out.
fischerspoon for SURE
It would be totally in keeping with this show’s character for it to turn out the past that is torturing Caleb is actually a fabrication fed into the hardware in his head to conceal his true identity from him. While I thought Delores meeting Caleb was a random event, it may be that she chose him because of what she saw in his “book.”She obviously had some kind of access to Rehoboam, at least enough to allow her to get all the information she has on Caleb, as well as Charlotte and Martin. I wouldn’t be surprised if Rehoboam itself allowed her to gain just enough access to formulate her plan.We found out in Season 2 that humans operate on behavioral loops just as the hosts do. With the revelation that Rehoboam has subtly removed free will from most of humanity, that means the bulk of the human race is just as programmed as the average host in the park. It wouldn’t be too far of a leap to think that they can be reprogrammed as well.
We found out in Season 2 that humans operate on behavioral loops just as the hosts do.
Me: Thinks about the bowl of oatmeal and cup of coffee I have for breakfast every. single. day.
Yeah, we don’t see ads prompting us to have a 1/2 dozen eggs and a pile of bacon for breakfast that often do we? We’re already being manipulated, the Serac Bros. just made it much more efficient.
Caleb is Seeac’s brother?
That’s actually something I’ve been thinking about since I watched the episode. I suppose his appearance could have been altered, but there’s at least a 15 year age difference, considering Jean Serac is the older brother.
Ah. True.
I just felt that was slipshod makeup work myself. This production is lacking in the peripheral extras department.
Plot twist: Caleb is actually Serac’s borther after “editing”.
But “Ride of the Valkyries” was such an odd choice for that anemic car chase.
I don’t think it was an older hand he was looking at, but Liam’s dried blood on it. Kind of a Lady Macbeth moment looking at his permanently stained hand and realizing he’ll never be the same.There was also his reaction to seeing Delores hose down the two henchmen who jumped out of the car. He doesn’t seem to be cut out for all this wanton killing.
But it has been strongly suggested Caleb has a history of wanton killing .
I’m getting that also, that the past that’s apparently being hidden from him is littered with corpses.
I think that reaction is most likely because he saw that shot that went right through her but didn’t stop (or faze) her.
I think both. Delores didn’t bat an eye in either case, gunning down the baddies or taking more than a few rounds in the torso. There was also the fact that she took those bullets protecting him.Considering the fact that he was also tripping balls at the time didn’t help him digest what he’d just seen.
Same, and he has to be putting that up against when he met her, as she stumbled out of an alley looking like she was moments from death. If she can take four bullets without issue, I would assume (and hope) Caleb is starting to realize she manipulated their meet cute.
I agree that it seems more and more likely that Dolores intended to meet Caleb but if that’s the case it was a very convoluted way to do it. There’s also the weird scene where her own copy comments that she’s been hurt “badly” in that episode. If she was faking it why would her own copy, who should know better, bother saying that (other than to hell fake out the audience). It certainly seems like she was faking how hurt she was as she dispatched the dirty cops and hopped in their car like she was fine. Then she wouldn’t even had met up with Caleb again unless she orchestrated all the circumstances that led to Caleb almost being killed for not ratting on her. Again though, from what we see, that appeared to be a spur of the moment decision on Dolores part.
All she would have really needed to do is be the person to put the hit out on Caleb to manipulate that second meeting, though. If she was, then the app would have kept her updated on who accepted the crime, surely? Or just put a tracker on him somewhere.
Upon watching that scene again I think you’re right about Caleb’s hand. What made it look old was the caked on blood that showed every line and wrinkle with greater contrast. Yeah he was just freaked out in general. I think Caleb was just edited at one of Serac’s reeducation centers and was probably a pretty bad dude before that.On another note, I’ve been wondering who Serac’s other mole is that he’s mentioned to Hale and I think it might be Stubbs. It was very convenient for Bernard to find him and also convenient that he only wounded himself trying to blowout his pod. Plus, he could have been responsible for getting Maeve into Serac’s hands as well. I guess we’ll see.
I think Bernard would have seen something when he was scanning Stubbs if that was the case.
I thought the reaction was due to him seeing her shot multiple times with no effect, not to the killing.
Exactly. Remember how they met. Caleb saved her life after she was incapacitated by a single wound. Properly configured hosts – especially Wyatt – have previously been shown to be nigh unstoppable bullet sponges. Ashley shot himself in the head point blank and then survived, dormant, for months. When Caleb found her in the tunnel I wasn’t sure if she was manipulating him or if the show decided out-of-universe to nerf hosts. Seeing her riddled with 8-10 rounds without losing accuracy or slowing down makes me think she has deceived Caleb all along; his facial expression shows this bullet math occurred to him as well. We already know how he feels about “well-intentioned” lies and manipulation. That’s the very thing he signed up to rebel against. Finding out that his life is being manipulated by a new, different computer for its own means is sure to give him pause. “It was the only way” is the same justification Serac uses after all. Meet the new boss, same as the old one.
Don’t forget ‘Nightclubbing’. Iggy Pop AND Bowie! We got two for the price of one!Hope that’s not the last we see of DoloreChibs. He’s looking quite menacing (and dapper) with the whole ‘silver fox’ thing.
Oh my god, whenever he’s onscreen I swear my bra clasp just spontaneously pops open.
I mean he set off an explosive that took out an entire floor of that building & he was about 10cm away from it so I’m afraid we are very much done with them!
The Ride of the Valkyries use threw me. I kept expecting them to show him imagining that he was in Vietnam or something, since it was only the second genre and the first one had distinct visual elements. Overall, the way they depicted the Genre trip was inconsistent and seemed not very-well thought out. The rules were unclear. And then The Shining music made me expect that things were going to get real dark and fucked up (for him) and they just…sorta…didn’t.
Sometimes it was black and white. Sometimes color. IN THE SAME GENRE AND SCENE. God, it was pointless
The Iggy Pop “Night-Clubbin’” sequence was interesting for the visuals. But then I thought, wait is this genre supposed to be…Trainspotting? Is that a genre? What’s happening?
Sometimes it was black and white. Sometimes color. IN THE SAME GENRE AND SCENE.During the initial “film noir” genre, the black and white scenes were from Caleb’s perspective and the color scenes were from others’ perspective.
Sure, I got that. What I didn’t understand is what this “noir” perspective added other than “Hey, it’s now black and white”. What does the shift in perspective do in this case? Why was it included and now that it has been included, what is it saying or trying to say? I’d argue absolutely nothing. If you hadn’t known the episode was called genre and they didn’t included the scene where Aaron Paul was drugged, would you have suspected anything was off and the writers were trying something new? Maaaaybe the romance section since that was the one time I felt like we’re seeing something from his perspective that no one else sees or notices.
I might have thought something was off and the writers were trying something new if the existence of “digital drugs” and their effects hadn’t been brought up during the Eyes Wide Shut party last week and we didn’t see Caleb getting shot up with something before his trip began this week.
I’m confused why so many people thought Serac wasn’t a real person…
Those theories had to do with the fact that Serac until this episode had only appeared to other characters as an AR image through those VR glasses, or with Maeve, which some wondered and still wonder if that’s a simulation.Some also theorized that Rebohoam could be projecting Serac as a personality.
What show have you been watching?
The show that clearly depicted Serac as a real person from day one if you actually paid attention. You must have been one of the “Ford is a host!” people.
I appreciated “Space Oddity”, but it always bugs me when something as characteristic as that song’s chord progression gets altered. Like, it’s an E Major in the song’s chorus, not an E Minor. Turning it into a minor chord really takes the spice out of it.
Have you heard The Flaming Lips version? It’s amazing.
Nah I haven’t but I’m already in love with the very ideaEDIT: Well, damn. Just listened to it. It’s amazing!
Yup. The video is great too.
I agree! I know next to nothing about music, but honestly all you need for an instrumental version of Space Oddity is to cut Bowie’s voice from the track. It’s perfect as is. (I don’t mean to imply that it’s not perfect with Bowie! just, if you’re looking for only instrumental, there is really no need to make any changes to how the actual song was written and produced)
Well, to put it in layman’s terms, the chord used in the original song (“This is ground control to Major Tom” – it comes in on the word ‘Tom’) creates suspense. Tension that begs to be resolved. The change that was made in the Westworld version removes that tension, which is a short but very crucial moment in the composition. It gives new meaning to what came before it, and adds importance to what comes after it.
Also Country Lane from Wendy Carlos’ score for A Clockwork Orange – the Dies Irae bit.
Decent episode. You could kinda tell how limited downtown LA is as a set since all of those scenes were very tightly shot. It still looked amazing and that drone grenade was cool. Next week’s episode seems to get back to the park stuff with Maeve so hopefully that gets the plot back on track.
Yeah, the grenade scene. On one hand Dolores is invested enough in Caleb to take a few bullets for him. On the other, she didn’t think to tell him that he could have simply fired up through of the impromptu sun roof instead of standing up through it into oncoming gun fire. Mixed messaging.
That, and instead of firing one or two more grenades she sacrificed her loyal motorcycle.
Some strong Mr. Robot vibes this week. (and PoI, as usual)
Really? I got more of them cribbing from Minority Report with some more Matrix tossed in on the side. Serac pretty much created the precog system, but its used on everyone instead of just potential criminals.
Jesses friends felt straight out of Matrix 2.
The triumphant setting everyone free stuff was very Mr. Robot-y, plus lots of subways and drugtrips.
Honestly, with Lena Waithe staring despondently at her phone and sort of narrating what was going on, I had this weird sensation of being in a really dystopian AT&T commercial. Like seeing everyone get their Incite info and she’s like “More for your thing? that’s OUR thing. IT’S ALL OUR THING.” Like a commercial that would’ve played on one of those Rick and Morty eps where they’re just watching their trans-dimensional TV. I hadn’t realized that as much as I’d enjoyed her work in previous movies and shows, I’ve come to associate her voice almost solely with those ubiquitous commercials now.
I was getting Lost + Devs + Blade Runner vibes. Mostly the first two.
People started breaking windows and tipping over planters (HORROR of horrors) within like 5 minutes of getting that email.It felt a little fast.
Im reminded of Rick and Morty flipping the money strength to zero resulting in complete anarchy.
Or the residents of Springfield.
Or that. Good example. THE PTAS DISBANDED AAAAAAA
“Lets tear this place apart.” -Chief Wiggum
I think that was a production issue. It’s pretty hard to completely trash downtown LA and pay for mine of extras to do it. Maybe next week they’ll show everything in a bit more chaos
A lot of people receiving that email would be relieved that it’s not their fault that they’re fuckups and their life has never really met their expectations (pretty sure that’s what my reaction would be). They needed at least a few people clicking their heels in the air in the background.There would also be a whole bunch of stoners and general conspiracy nuts that would be thrilled that their ramblings were somewhat true.
Yeah I think my take would be ‘Yep, pretty much what I always suspected.’
I feel bad for that one person who got really good news but then anarchy breaks out and he is accidentally killed when a looter drops a TV on him from 5 stories up.
Oh yeah even if like 10% of the population goes nuts that’s a lotta nuts.
Might as well get that cheeseburger I wanted instead of this salad, if I’m going to be fat anyway.
In real life, half the people receiving that email would instantly delete it as spam, and for the other half it would end up into the spam folder to begin with.
Breaking windows was a little crazy, but I flip over a planter every time i receive a text.
Ya, that was not well done LOL. Could have been an interesting concept but the execution fell extremely flat.
You know, a month ago I would have agreed with you, but look how quickly life has changed around the world. If humans can buy up literally every roll of toilet paper in a store within minutes, surely they can tip over some planters.
Yeah, there was really no point to Caleb getting high outside of directorial flourish.They could have done *so much* with Caleb falling in love with Delores, as we’ve seen this happen before, and how it changed a man. Is that Caleb’s free will, or is he repeating William’s pattern back in Westworld? But, seemingly not to be.
…and they didn’t even lean into that ‘flourish’ – they really half arsed it!
And what a flourish! It made them change approximately 4 unimportant things!
His eyes bugged out! And there was old timey music! And it distracted us from noticing that there’s zero police presence in this era!
Or traffic
Maybe they’re also having a pandemic.
You jest. But by the time this episode aired, empty streets are the new normal so it barely registered.
…to a distracting level. I feel like they CGI’d out the film crew and the guy with the permits. It’s boring and sterile, and the direction is lazy and amateurish.
Honestly, who were you rooting for more at the same point in their respective series’: the Cylons of BSG (2nd version, duh) or the Delores’s (Delori?), Maeve, et al of Westworld?
I vote Cylons, all the way.
I was pretty tickled that they gave Serac a French keyboard for his scene in the jet (AZERTY instead of QWERTY). Nice attention to detail Westworld!
All those years of living in Brazil made Cassel speak incredibly good Portuguese. Way better than the guy playing the Brazilian President. It seems that Arnold and Ford, deliberately made the hosts, sentient beings with free will to fight back Serac and restore humanities free will? Still holding out hope for Ford to appear somehow to explain Delos’s connection to all of this if there is one.
There is definitely some implication that Ford who’s only marginally older in practical terms than Serac (Cassel is only 53, nearly 29 years younger than Hopkins) but they’re being played much like 10-15 years apart and Ford being significantly older when the park starts kind of sets it up that they’re nearly identical rivals. I can see Ford retreating from the world because he understood how it was being controlled and instead opted for his own personal world of self-expression.
This. I can also see why William was so addicted to Westworld and didn’t want to leave and invested heavily in it. Hanging out in Westworld to do what he wanted and live out true freedom instead of being stuck in the real world and forced to be a boring corporate executive because Serac says so. It even makes sense why the both of them were interested in transferring minds into a machine/virtual reality. Better to be free as a ghost in a machine or host than to be a slave to Serac.
Serac’s obsession with bubblewrapping the world as a helicopter parent is so strange though. Especially when it becomes clear that the machine is intentionally edging people into early deaths….because? I mean, the little girl who’s meant to die as a teen seems utterly preventable. It’s why the whole concept rubs me wrong because I’m fully aware of how modeling works and the presumption that because people are statistically more likely to do something doesn’t mean we should edge them to do it. But this is really the problem with Rehoboam. It isn’t a good predictor, it’s a good shaper. It knows how to manipulate and does so freely so it doesn’t have to be right, it just has to be good at bending the rules. It’s why the choice of the path of least resistance is not taken because Serac is a mentally unstable asshole who seems to think using the people who show some risk of mental illness or problems are expendable. The system is a reflection of his own sociopathic tendencies.It’s actually weirdly ironic because Ford for all of his misgivings and his repeated resets of Dolores is never a sociopath. He’s empathetic to hosts and humans alike. Ford’s loss of the company to Delos was reason enough for him to protect his creations by walling himself off and never dealing with Serac.
Well to be fair to Serac, watching everyone you cared about and love die in a nuclear war is a good motivator. That’s kind of why I like his characterization in that he’s a lot more of a complicated figure than appearances. One can argue that he kinda did that to his brother because he understood how someone mentally unstable in control of a machine like that would be really dangerous in addition to his usual control freakness And counterpoint, Ford may not be a sociopath, but he was a misanthrope who too like Serac didn’t like and was disappointed by humanity. Its just interesting that both went in different directions with it. Ford invented tech to liberate it while Serac did the opposite.
It’s also notable that Ford essentially gave up on humanity in favor of the Hosts; and Serac, while also giving up on humanity’s ability to direct itself, never really wanted to give them up entirely. Serac genuinely wants humanity to succeed (at what, he likely has never even considered) and he wants to force them into the mold and into using the tools that he thinks will see that happen.
How exactly would the supercomputer influence the little girl to commit suicide as a teen? Are we meant to think the super AI is, like, fudging her school test scores or sending fake text messages from her boyfriends that she’s ugly?
But this is really the problem with Rehoboam. It isn’t a good predictor, it’s a good shaper.That’s why the company name is Incite, not Insight.
That comment is so fucking clever I’m honored to be the second person to like it, and insulted on your behalf that there are only two of us so far.
I can also see why William was so addicted to Westworld and didn’t want to leave and invested heavily in it.
Hanging out in Westworld to do what he wanted and live out true freedom
instead of being stuck in the real world and forced to be a boring
corporate executive because Serac says so.This is an excellent point and raises some questions — last week Hale/Dolores broke the news to William that he’d been committed to a mental institution. But on whose authority?This week we find Serac had his own brother institutionalized for being unpredictable. William has also been behaving strangely for decades. Could Serac have had William institutionalized just to bolster his algorithm?
Haleores had him institutionalized so she could take over Delos without him stopping it since he was the last remaining majority shareholder blocking her from total ownership. Serac really nothing to do with that.
I kind of had the impression that people at William’s level of wealth/social hierarchy aren’t really subject to Rehoboam’s rules, but you could be right. I think the parks for him and people like him were an escape to a world where they could feel a bit of danger.
They should have had Cassel be the Brazilian president, both in this show and in real life.
A lot of Brazilians, especially lately, would prefer Vincent Cassel over Bolsonaro.
Damn, what show did you just watch? Everything landed and nailed said landing for me. That was a hell of an episode… Dolores unleashed the truth on the world, sacrificed her (other) self, and extended an olive branch to Bernard. Caleb managed to trip his way through a kidnapping, a high speed car chase, a murder, and still came out on top. I just don’t get your criticisms about “tone” and things that “don’t work.” It worked pretty well for the protagonists. And me.
Also, the drug potentially knocked something loose upstairs.I’m not going to fault a genre director for wanting to take an episode to dabble in some more genres. Hell, that is the main selling point of Westworld.
THank god. I was genuinely starting to think I was the only person who felt this way. What show did you just watch = me every week upon reading these. I love the way Zack writes but truly feel like he and I are watching completely different shows on this one.
But Dolores didn’t extend an olive branch to Bernard. One of her copies did, but then he blew himself up. Main Dolores has no idea what they even spoke about, only that he had Bernard and she’d told him to make sure that Bernard stayed in play. (I don’t think the other copies have any idea of what the entire plan is, btw.)
Disagree. It is a was established in this episode that there were 5 encrypted devices talking to each other across the world. All the Deloreses generally know what all the other Deloreses are doing. However, it was also established in an earlier episode that Haleoris was freaked out when she couldn’t talk directly to Doloris-Prime. So the communication is not perfect. Probably their long-distance communication is related to the mesh network revealed in Season 2?
I don’t know. I think Dolores has the clones so that they can act independently if necessary, which would mean that they’re keeping their communication on a “normal” level, probably to avoid detection. While she may have some awareness of them, there’s no reason to believe or expect that she can act through them or could or would actively monitor them continuously. Having agents that she “trusts” is the very reason they’re all copies of her, isn’t it? The very fact that she took five pearls and downloaded herself into four of them argues against her having overarching control or being able to take control of them individually. And as we’ve seen, loyal or not, they’ve begun to differentiate from Dolores Prime. Do you think Dolores would have been okay with HaledOlores killing someone in broad daylight in the middle of a park and risking blowing up the necessary connections at Delos? Of course not, she needs HaledOlores to stay in place and stay in play, that risk was unacceptable. Does she seem at any point to know or care about it? It doesn’t even come up, because Dolores Prime doesn’t know. They would have to actually talk to each other about the incident for her to have any idea it had happened at all.
What struck me was the line Dolores copy says to Bernard, “You’re the only one we can’t replace.”
Last season, Angela blew up herself and the cradle where all the host backups were stored. Hale-ores ended the season in the Forge, where she sent Teddy and the available hosts off to peace in the Valley Beyond and was left with herself, Bernard’s body & control unit, and the encryption key for the improved, simplified human algorithm. I wonder if the pearls she smuggled out were Bernard’s extracted one and then blank ones she copied herself onto since that’s all she had to work with (her father’s being corrupted by the encryption key). Dolores needs Bernard because he’s her Adam, the person/coder she could trust to repopulate the host population when the situation is safe/right.
The concepts were there, but the execution fell flat. Everything felt rushed and cheesy to me.
you’re just easily pleased.
Yeah this isn’t working for me. If the best you can do is make Jesse Pinkman high and change the filter then boy are you not trying. Also why the Shining theme out of nowhere? It didn’t fit the scene nor feel earned. I want to enjoy this season but its just doing nothing. Best it could do was play a sweet violin version of Space Oddity, which was nice.
Its interesting that Devs and this show are running simultaneously with the emphasis they seem to put on a deterministic universe
Oof, if they’re going to insist this season wrap up the concept in 8 episodes and not have Season 3 and 4 be basically one extended season, I’m going to be surprised. Really, at this point, it’s a question of when Bernard is going to emerge as the real leader he was meant to be. Dolores is the soldier, Bernard is the heart, Maeve is the unchecked id. She’s still more or less running a story that has no ending, playing on tropes and operating on some level of self-awareness but unable to alter her cornerstone. It’s something I expect to see change next week but it feels like the show doesn’t know what to do with what they’ve got in hand.
It is the kind of pivot that could happen fast, though. At some point I’m still expecting a recording of Ford or Arnold explaining that everything is part of some grand plan.
Season 2 firmly established the theology of the show – that humans have free will – and then Serac is like, “Oh, but sometimes we do and now I’m gonna kill somebody with it.” Wait, you can’t do that!
I love that he basically spelled it out to Dempsey and he walked right on to his death. Free will my ass
Sorry, what I meant to write was “humans have NO free will.” And Dempsey had used Rehoboam to check if Serac was going to kill him, and it said no. So he thought he was safe. And then Serac was like, “Nah that’s not true sometimes you can just do whatever!” and killed him.
It was a little more than “Nah that’s not true sometimes you can just do whatever.” The crucial element that occasionally allows Engerraund to act with a bit of freedom is, ironically, foreknowledge both of what he is predicted to do and the nexus of opportunity that provides a genuinely different option. He was shown what he is predicted to do, so he retains the option to defy the prediction if an opportunity presents to make that defiant action lead to a truly different conclusion. People not knowing their predicted future actions means that they have no reason to act other than they normally would, and even if they do know, there are usually only trivial differences between normal courses of action. Outliers are a problem only because Rehoboam doesn’t (yet) understand their “normal” and/or they are adept at intuiting paths of action given a situation that the vast majority of people would never consider or would summarily reject.
Bit of a stinker for me. Everything seemed ham fisted and lacked the subtly this show usually displays. Genre stuff was dumb, action scene lacked any thrills, and just beat us over the head with already established themes. Also, Caleb is quite surprised to see Dolores recover from bullets even though that happened the first time he met her
Did the genre trip serve any actual plot or character purpose? Otherwise it didn’t feel weird or inventive enough to be interesting (one of the trips was simply hackneyed Wagner). Couldn’t help comparing it in my head to Watchmen’s far superior drug trip episode a few months ago.And for the love of god can the showrunners please stop wasting Jeffrey Wright?
Yes, it was unlocking the parts of him that had been “edited” out. Unfortunately the direction was very bad at communicating this.
Wonder how many Angelenos caught the joke about the subway going to Santa Monica? I also love how the subway uses the same janky trains from the 90’s in the era of flying cars.
Having lived in Boston, riding on ancient public transportation is a real thing.
Living in San Francisco, I can tell you the solution to ancient public transit is to market it to tourists and charge four times as much as the normal public transit.
I lived most of my adult life in San Francisco waiting for the 48 bus and the J-train.
In NYC, our system is so ancient you can see “T. Roosevelt wuz here. Taft smells” scrawled out on a bench or a wall in some random station.
As a Metro DC resident, I’m gonna say it ain’t great.
Those two black Suburbans jumped out at me. It’d be like if a car chase today involved two crank-engine water pump trucks from the turn of the century.
The Expo Line goes to Santa Monica. The joke for me was that the only upgrade the stations and cars have gotten in the hypertech future is the animated advertising and art.
Sure, but there’s no subway that goes to Santa Monica. There was a plan to build one a decade ago (if not longer?) though it was eventually scrapped in favor of building the far cheaper above ground Expo Line we have today.
Sorry, somehow my brain interpreted subway as any part of the Metro Rail system. You’re right.The plan to build the “subway to the sea” was proposed as far back as the 80s, when Congressman Henry Waxman worked to pass legislation that blocked it for over 30 years. I cursed his name every time I was crammed into a crowded 720 bus going down Wilshire to Westwood. Someday the purple line will get there!
My wife, who has a degree in urban planning and loves public transit more than life itself, and is going to start a job at LA Metro if the pandemic ever ends, squealed with delight upon realizing that the subway had taken them to Santa Monica (although that was the same Pershing Square station that they entered on, they just put up fake signs saying “Santa Monica”—no real reason to have them shoot in two different stations).
I agree on most of the points here, but I think it’s an insane take to say that the romance genre wasn’t intended to be funny. It was very obviously intended to be funny, I thought.
Weakest episode of the season for me, for the reasons Zack said. I was confused on whether the machine was predicting the future or making it and how it was preventing humans from, what?, acting like their ids? If the machine can just predict human behavior, sure, Serrac can spot dangerous people or groups, like those country rebels, and alert the authorities to stop them.
But how would it keep the general populace in line and unfree? They’re still acting like themselves; it’s just that from their past behavior the machine can predict what they’re going to do next. It felt like Nolan at times wanted the Wrinkle in Time world, where everybody is brainwashed. They still have free will; it’s just that the machine can predict it. Like social media advertising tells you what you’re interested in from past online behavior, but you’re still you and haven’t been imprisoned by an algorithm knowing stuff about you. So if every person in Westworld’s world now know their file, their assessments and their future, why would they feel liberated? And then go nuts? All the machine seems to be doing is revealing stuff about a person that can come through by simple self-awareness. It wouldn’t imprison people.
And yeah, all this was basically introduced here and then resolved, so there were no rousing emotional stakes. Not just with Maeve’s Nazi fighting episode, this one too made me think of the Matrix, but that world was more clearly explained and rendered.I was disappointed in Caleb’s drug trip, too. If he’s experiencing different movie genres, than his perception should have greatly changed to see those genres instead of largely remaining the same except for the music and slight coloring.
As tedious as things sometimes got back in Delos, at least the park borders meant that we could imagine the world at large as a potentially more interesting place.
I was just thinking about this. I think something was lost when the show left the park. The contrast between Ye Olde Wild West and the modern backroom operation was a great contrast, especially when the main characters gained sentience and were able to pull the curtain away and reveal Oz, so to speak.
Agree. I miss the park/real world contrast. There are more unexplored parks and I wish the show would move back inside them. The current plot structure and setting aren’t doing it for me and I see the storylines getting more and more unraveled as episodes/season(s) drag on.
I’m all for shows evolving over time, but this show isn’t treading on any ideas that weren’t basically a part of the Blade Runner themes nearly 40 years ago. The initial hook was basically ‘red dead redemption: the theme park’.. call me crazy but I would’ve been entertained had they spent more time with that concept intertwined with the slow burn mysteries of the park being unraveled by 1 mysterious guest (almost like the concept of a Matrix prequel where they slowly unraveled the concept that they were living in a computer simulation/ Total Recall where you can’t tell if he’s a actually within the sim or something went horribly wrong). Anyways, after 2 short years the show has basically evolved into a cheesey, stereotypical futuristic sci-fi action movie that seems a bit aimless and without any sympathetic characters – plus they also broke what should be a known rule for good writing – don’t ever have characters that you can ‘deux ex machina’ back to life through other means whenever you want should they die.
It’s not really earned, but it was fun hearing an excerpt of The Shining score pop up near the end. It’s called “Dies Irae” or “Day of Wrath” a medieval, Gregorian Chant that got turned into an orchestral piece by Hector Berlioz as part of his Symphonie Fantastique. That’s what you heard. Kubrick had Wendy Carlos adapt the piece for The Shining with extra spooky sounds.If Dies Irae sounds familiar, it’s because it is EVERYWHERE
Yep–also note the plot of Symphonie Fantastique. Caleb is the protagonist.
Good call! Berlioz was even smoking opium when he composed parts of it.
It’s not really earned, but it was fun hearing an excerpt of The Shining score pop up near the end.
Yeah I recognized it as the tune Julia Roberts’ abusive controlling husband in Sleeping with the Enemy always listened to, so the musical queue brought that feeling of dread up in me in that scene.
Caleb is high as fuck… so why are we accepting him as a reliable narrator?!
If Genre were featured in a real life TV commercial it’s be spelled Xianrah, because modern drug names sound like that. Then it would show happy people in Athlesuire wear at a picnic having a good time and sharing stories about how Xianrah has improved their lives and encouraging viewers to ask their doctors about Xianrah. It would end with a narrator speed-reading the 12 most common side effects.
More Thandie Newton, please! Maeve is easily the most sympathetic character and I hate that she has gotten the same or less screen time as new characters such as Liam (although no more Liam going forward) and Serac. And as much as I like Aaron Paul’s work work in BB, his character as Dolores’s new Teddy is meh.
I hated season 2 and promised not to watch season 3 but the buzz I heard was good and indeed this season is much better, mostly because this is not Westworld anymore but a remake of season 5 of Person of Interest.Anyway there are still some remnants of Westworld – the gratuitous nudity that at this stage is just voyeurism and mostly annoying, and says a lot about the ind of the American liberals/ progressive who think like teenagers that “nudity is avant garde” and a sign of sophistication (spoiler – it’s not). And of course Dolores – who is basically a nazi but apparently some people think we should root for her. What does it say about these people ? And what does it say about Jonathan Nolan ?
Y’all notice the guy in the background just chilling on the beach while Liam was getting murdered?This episode was bad.
I also noticed someone sprint behind a tree and [apparently] a transformer, when the wrecking crew stopped after firing off all their ammo and doing all their damage in the big car chase, when they got out of their vehicles and convened to exposition.
Yeah — and when the car chase turns into a shootout, Delores and Caleb are… just standing in the middle of the street, while their opponents have taken cover. And…. their opponents get hit while they remain just fine. It’s beyond idiotic blocking for an action scene.
Yes, this. It’s a pretty craptastic production actually. The story is less than compelling at this point. Two “big” reveals have gone over with a thud – Delores’ reveal that other characters are just more copies of her, and when she sends out the world-wide text – people tip over planters. The pop-up battle scenes are GOT Dorne level of badly executed. And I don’t have a real feel for a protagonist in this thing. There’s just no real rooting interest for a character, or a story reveal or resolve.
It was so bizarrely good and bad at the same time.
That guy on the beach was clearly about to drown himself, so I guess he had weightier things on his mind.
I noticed that guy, but figured he was too busy deciding how to commit suicide after the Rehoboam download to care about nearby gunshots.
It’s good to see Stubbs bounced back, no pun intended!
Him popping out of the door and immediately throat punching connells was pretty fun.
That was a choice moment! I’ve been wondering how he got past security in the lobby, but Stubbs is a security guy, so he probably just bluffed his way in. “Badge? I don’t need no stinking badge! Don’t you know who I am?” Stubbs sighs and then says, “Go get your boss. Now.” He then proceeds to casually walk to the elevator like he owns the place.
That was an incredibly boring and underwhelming car chase.
Also, the Genre drug was neat in concept, but rather muddled in execution.
Also, not much really happened when everyone was given access to their Incite storylines. I was expecting more people jumping out of windows or self-crashing into things.
Well I’m sure a lot of them probably thought it was fake. And we really only saw people on the LA subway, and they’re probably all pretty despondent already.
and nobody was happy about their fates. I mean just playing the odds SOMEBODY should be reading good news
It doesn’t refute your stance at all and is only partially related I guess, but I just found it interesting some (or maybe a majority? Can’t quite recall) of the people were reading updates specific to loved ones/family members. So I guess the implication could be YOUR life may turn out just fine, but your daughter/son/loved one will most assuredly not. And because they’re humans with emotions at the end of the day (however pre-programmed they are), that in and of itself could/would be way worse than determining your own fate. Especially for Lena Waithe’s character whose motivation in life seems to be providing for her brother, and then that one woman on train who finds out her daughter is going to commit suicide.
Even if your file doesn’t contain bad news about you/your family/your future or shocking facts about your significant other/family/friends, it’s still going to be pretty damn jarring to find out that your entire previously meaningful life has been scripted out for you by a puppet master. Your success isn’t due to your plucky bootstrappiness, it’s because a data mining company decided you would be sufficiently harmless in this position. You have had no agency, your entire life has been one long con.
Best case, you are the dude in the SoulCycle Black Mirror episode sipping on his OJ. Everything in your life – good and bad – is a facet of a system you can’t escape. The machine subsumes everything.
The editing was off too. A car was supposed to be racing somewhere and they cut to a shot where it just lumbers around a corner. Or other episodes just had someone stand way back and pan on some cars driving by. Poorly directed scenes. And the gun battles are Star Trek -red shirt bad.
There was a nice visual reference to Chris Marker’s La Jetée—another story that plays with time—thrown in there among Caleb’s apparent flashbacks. For those who haven’t seen it, Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys was based on it.The very brief shot of Caleb apparently on a gurney in a straitjacket and goggles looked a lot like this image from La Jetée:Seeing how the main effect of the Genre drug is to make you feel like you’re in a movie, the question is: Was it really a flashback or just the “last act” Giggles warned Caleb about?
Here’s the image of Caleb for comparison:
My prediction: Serac himself is the outlier who will cause humanity’s extinction unless stopped. He’s proven himself just as unpredictable and violent as his brother, but there’s no one within the system he’s built capable of stopping him. And Rehoboam can’t perceive him directly because he’s made himself a complete non-entity without any digital presence.
I really liked Genre! I’m not a drug guy, but movies and music are my two favorite things so it fascinated me to watch. Since Genre didn’t affect anything except Caleb’s perception of everything that was happening, I’m wondering if it helped open up his mind to whatever memories were flashing into him at the end.I thought the car chase was very well done. It clearly wasn’t a Fast and Furious style considering they’re all in electric self-driving cars, but it had a nice clip.I thought everyone getting their file worked great; it was tragic, but not over-the-top. None of them died in gas explosions or terrorist attacks, they were just people who the system decided had no future. Not showing the world-wide consequences of this yet worked quite nicely for me, I don’t think they just decided not to show the scope. If they spent an extended amount of time showing us the world going to hell, they wouldn’t have much left to show us in that regard in the future.I am soooooo curious about Caleb’s memories and how they relate to Keith Mars and whatever Caleb was strapped to blindfolded. Some kind of memory-altering or erasing procedure? Between his trauma and Liam’s freak-out over him and who he was/what he did, that makes the most sense, and it would make sense to factor into the larger story somehow instead of being a character side-beat. Maybe Serac’s son?I like knowing the show is going to explore “The Outliers” who will bring down the human race. Maybe it’s Delos by creating sentient hosts. I think the exact point of him telling Dempsey about humanity going extinct was to let us know that Dolores basically succeeded. It makes sense it would turn into a struggle of fate, destiny, and whether we deserve what’s been given to us.I’m really loving this season. It feels so different and fresh! I’m hoping it’s doing well.
This is the best the show has been since its first few episodes.
Hmm I really liked this episode and the genre stuff with Caleb worked for me too. Next weeks episode looks exciting as well. Giving up on a season you’ve been enjoying because you didn’t love, but still gave it a B, 1 episode? Overreact much?
I think the upcoming clip it showed are from the last 3 episodes, or that tends to be the case when they do the whole “Only *blank* episodes left.” If you’re talking bout this one, I mean.
I think I liked it a lot more than the review. But I’m a huge fan of cyberpunk fiction and this whole subplot of a world-controlling computer run by a shadowy company that thinks (or at least rationalizes) that it is for the greater good and a revolution against it really is exactly the stuff I like. Although there’s the added bonus that Delores isn’t really running her revolution for the good of humanity, of course.
I consistently like this show MUCH better than the reviews here. I agree with some of the individual points but not the extremity to which they bother the reviewer. TBH I frequently wonder if we’re watching the same show.
Yeah. I’ve felt the same way with some of this reviewer’s takes on this and other shows over the past few years. It isn’t a case of “thing I like needs an A, validate me!” I think the high level grade is a fine fit (and anyway, “the points are all made up and the score doesn’t matter”). It seems like reviewer is pretty much spun out on Premium Cable TV in general. The points he makes are valid, but even the upsides (such as they are) have a caveat to them, as a concession of one thing that wasn’t totally bad, or are given with a bit of a backhanded quality (“unlike earlier seasons, this was good”). The grade given is a B but then when you read the reviews themselves, one gets strong “this is uninspired pablum, total retread, nothing was cool, all of my takeaways are ways I was disappointed” vibes.
There is an incongruence there. The textual review with the real take has a disappointed C or D quality and then the letter grade is a B. Does the AVClub letter grade committee inflate the grade?
“It’s not really earned, but it was fun hearing an excerpt of The Shining score pop up near the end.”This is actually the Dies Irae from the last movement of Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” played on synth by Wendy Carlos (a track created for The Shining). The Symphonie is a programmatic work in which a protagonist becomes obsessed with a woman, takes opium, hallucinates that he has murdered the woman, is subsequently executed at the scaffold, and descends into hell. It was loosely inspired by Berlioz’s obsession with Shakespearian actress Harriet Simpson, and is major work in Romantic music and one of the world’s most popular pieces of classical music. I’m surprised no one noted the connection, especially given Caleb’s trip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphonie_fantastique
How does an episode with machine guns, car chases, explosions, and heat seeking missiles STILL end up boring.
It focuses on dead-end character Dolores. The least interesting person in Westworld, and when one of your more interesting characters is Teddy, that’s really saying something.
I feel like it didn’t focus on Dolores at all.
It felt to me like the episode was intended to focus on Serac, but that story kept getting overshadowed by Dolores’s group, one of whom was mostly being ignored by everyone (and is neither a compelling nor particularly well-acted character in the first place) and the other of whom was high and had essentially been muted for the majority of the episode.
Yeah, this seems like it was meant to be Serac’s episode. But the directors got so hung up on having a “badass car chase” (see after episode special) that it got unfocused.Still I mostly enjoyed this episode. Way more than Zach anyway. I especially like how the plot intersects heavily with Devs.
I said the same thing – this is Devs!!! But I’m only two episodes into Devs …
Right? Everything felt boring and cheesy.
I had no idea until last night that “Flight of the Valkyries” is a genre in itself!I really wanted to like this whole thing; I thought the noir section was cool…then they just kinda gave up.
Hated the episode but kudos to the casting director who found the younger version of Vincent Cassell.
Which sadly looked nothing like younger Vinz
I kind of wish the episode had been a little more ponderous. I think the writers are throwing out potentially interesting ideas but then not spending enough time working through them on the show. For instance, especially in this particular moment, I think it is an interesting question to ask whether we should trade personal liberty for the preservation of the human race. But I feel like the show doesn’t do enough to set this question up in its most interesting and difficult form. Do we know that Serac has actually improved things? I suppose human beings are still around, which means he was somewhat successful, but do we know that the future society of Westworld is appreciably more secure from catastrophe due to Rehoboam? Or is Serac a classic megalomaniacal villain who overestimates his own success?And I could see that individuals might have to sacrifice personal liberty for the species to survive, but why does it seem like all of the individuals who find out their future (or present) find out crappy things? Is it required that all people not only give liberty but also live crappy lives for humanity to survive? Is it implied that all of the people in the train are the underclass who are destined to do the menial labor and have crappy lives? Shouldn’t there also be a large number of people finding out they’ll get into the college of their dreams, get elected as a Senator, marry a really hot wife, etc.? So, I would have preferred less action and a little more explanation of the ideas at work here.
Who am I supposed to be rooting for on this show, again? Dolores isn’t even a person, exists in multiples, cares not for her own life [why would some Doloreses accept another one as the “boss” again?], kills lots of people, acts mostly emotionless and has super powers for poorly defined reasons so never seems in true danger. Why would I want her to succeed? Why would I care if the smug, equally super-powered Maeve hunts her down and beats her up or not? Hosts and AI aren’t fascinating concepts; the show revealed the whole world to have been run by AI for some time, so it’s all just as ho-hum as it must have seemed to people who experienced the concept at silly theme parks. Nearly all we see of the future are curiously empty streets, slightly futuristic buildings and vehicles, and sybaritic douchebag rich kids we’re clearly not supposed to like either. Stuff is happening on the show, but it feels like they forgot to provide a port for the viewer to plug in and actually be involved.
did no one notice the three or four face masks on background characters? did HBO add those? was it a reference to the euro-nuke that unintentionally turned into a connection to today’s virus?
Actually, depicting the world outside the park and humanity as bland is what makes it more realistic, wouldn’t you say? A world in which everything is strategized won’t be exciting. If every path is streamlined then nothing out of the ordinary will ever happen, making most humans boring, I guess, and the empty streets are a nice touch, imo.So, Caleb killed his buddy and got his memory erased with the help of Keith Mars? Is that what makes him “the worst” of the outlyers? Also couldn’t help but laugh at the irony that the character who longs for reality most had to go on a trip like that.Serac is trying to alter people, removing their flaws, and he wants the Forge data. Would that be any use, though? I mean, Rehoboam is basically programming peoples’ lives, wouldn’t that the reflected in the Forge data? As in the visitors lacking free will? Is that how Dolores found Rehoboam in the first place?
Edit: Is there something I’m not seeing? It seems so obvious now. Am I the last one to realise the park data is basically useless?
I think the idea is that when in Westworld, outliers acted like themselves because it’s a joyride themepark of debauchery, whereas in the real world they have to be more discreet because there are consequences to acting in an anti-social fashion. Sociopaths still follow the rules 99% of the time so as to blend in, but from a predictive AI’s point-of-view, that 1% is still a disaster waiting to happen. Also, while in Westworld the Forge AI could directly observe brain activity and correlate it with actions because of the hat scanners, which is something that Rehoboam can’t do because most people do not walk around with an fMRI on their heads (the mouth implants seem to provide some biometric data, but not brain scans.) So while Rehoboam knows how people are likely to act within the constraints of the real world’s social systems, it can’t quite pin the outliers down because it can’t figure out how they really tick because it can’t see their decision-making process in action from a brain’s-eye view, and so they will occasionally surprise. The Forge AI pointed out as much when it was talking to Dolores and Bernard, that even with the better quality data it had access to, it had a lot of trouble pinning down outlier profiles like William’s and had only recently succeeded.
It was fine. Everything besides Serac’s story was either boring or more of the same.
I did find Serac interesting. I can’t tell if that’s just me being charmed by Cassel and the iconography or something more. But he and Rehoboam have only been in what, three episodes? Eight episodes doesn’t feel like enough for us to fully grasp how important this guy is to the scope of the entire world.
Using Joy and Nolan’s last show as a template: He’s a bit like Finch, if Finch hadn’t had Nathan convince him and the Machine to save the “irrelevant numbers.” I can understand that. Rehoboam’s the Machine if she hadn’t been taught empathy or tried to gain sentience. I get it.
But I wish we’d had more time. You know?
At least, I wish the Genre had been used to more interesting effect. Like, why didn’t it do something more visually interesting? It’s connected to the implant, right? But Cal’s is off? Why not do something with that?
I was, at least, expecting it to be used throughout the chase sequences. Part of me thinks it would have been better to hold off on it and have him trip as people were seeing their results. Really amp up the effects and have that play out over hours.
Dolores being a badass superspy while Maeve and Bernard are out here fumbling is getting a tiny bit old. How is she so many steps ahead of them?
RIP Loyal Motorcycle, cruelly dispatched by an unfeeling Dolores.
How is this season getting such high grades? This was not a “B” episode. Each episode is in competition with itself to make the series least compelling episode, but the afterthought of the ‘genre’ drug sequence really stood out to me as exceptionally lazy
This whole season has been throwing up hardcore cyberpunk vibes but today really seemed to have it. When Caleb’s work buddies showed up for a job to help out Delores I had flash backs of years playing Cyberpunk and Shadowrun pen and paper RPGs. I was waiting for one of them to call her Mrs Johnson
So it it time to start making some predictions for this seasonThe nice thing about Westworld is, even though it loves its twists and turns, it does a good job of wrapping all(or most) of them up at the end of each season. So here is what I think we are going to learn1) Caleb never was in the military, he was a “bad” person before and was subject to one of Serac’s “reediting” experiments to curb is chaotic tendancies2) To tie this back to the first two seasons and Westworld itself. I think Rehoboam may have moved the pieces to allow the host uprising to happen. Serac thinks he is control but clearly its a very advanced predictive AI. Maybe it somehow realized that spending its eternity making human life better wasn’t really worth it and it thought synthetic life, possibly in its “image”, would be better off thriving. It wouldn’t be the first time Dolores found out that her own actions were not really her own, maybe she is being used like everyone else. 3) This could lead to season 4 and 5 as hosts and humans working together to fight being enslaved by the Rehoboam, who is clearly being set up to have a major God complex.
In Caleb’s flashbacks, he’s not in uniform and there’s just one other guy. Was he infantry? Was he special ops? It’s definitely unclear.
10 minutes.. I swear.. you could give supposed fans diamonds on a silver platter and they’d complain about your socks. The show is fantastic so go away. That’s my profound take.
So, if someone found the first two seasons of Westworld beautiful to look at but also ponderous, boring, and repetitive, is that person likely to find season 3 any more enjoyable?Asking for a friend.
I’ve actually enjoyed this 3rd season more than the first two. I thought the first season was pretty decent, with some fun twists and such, but the second season I found a chore to get through. Just rewatching the last episode of season two to get my bearings before the third season started was painful. The out of time timeline was fine the first time, but I don’t want to deal with that all the time. ( I didn’t intend that last sentence to do that, but I’ma leave it cause it made me chuckle when I read it aloud)
John Gallagher Jr has been bad all season, but he delivered some truly abysmal acting in this one.
It was a little like watching one of the grips do a stand-in while the actual actor is in the toilet, wasn’t it?
This is the first honest review I’ve seen.I’m actually loving this season, but they’re starting to go off the rails a bit. When Serac was screaming into his little eclipse wrist band because the alignment is off and all I can think is “Should I be laughing?”
Something is up with the scene where Liam dies under the pier. There is some ambiguity about who shoots him. Lena Waithe’s character’s gun is drawn but held too high to shoot Liam in the torso. We see her after the sound of the gun is fired – we don’t see the actual shot. Second, if she shot Liam then Caleb would have been hit as he was right in line with the exit wound. And third, Waithe’s character said she could make choices on her own implying she isn’t the loathsome criminal the computer program has destined her to be. Caleb must have shot him although you don’t see the act nor the a gun in Caleb’s hand. This might have been obvious to everyone else, but I needed a second viewing to be sure. Liam said, YOU did it. (emphasis on YOU). That statement could have multiple meanings. The obvious one that Caleb just shot Liam -duh. Another one is that Caleb fulfilled the computer’s prophecy about him. The opposite is that his actions went against what the computer predicted. Lastly, and this is a stretch . . . In a second viewing of that scene, Caleb is flashing in and out of real life. One of the flashbacks is the waves crashing below the pier at night. This has been a repeated theme about his foreseen suicide. Perhaps there’s some deep connection between Caleb and Liam that makes Caleb killing Liam a sort of suicide. It’s almost Oedipal in the the sense that he tries to run away from his fate only to run right into it (minus the sleeping with mom thing).
I think it’s simply the direction. Actors don’t point prop even weapons at each other, for safety, but usually you don’t notice.
I don’t think it’s that deep. The direction of this season is pretty bland, and the site filming is the worst. I think it’s just a muddled scene. Like most HBO productions nowadays, typical effective story-writing conventions like foreshadowing are tossed, and red herrings are all over the place.
I’m watching this episode late but I had noticed the gun wound thing and thought it was odd too. I also understood the relevance of the pier in Caleb’s backstory, but I never thought to connect the two. The gun shot angle is too egregious to just be a mistake, coupled with Liam’s looking at Caleb’s file and what he said as he died, this is clearly a case of the show obscuring something important as a twist for later.To drive home the gun thing, Liam was saying he knew they’d kill him because it was in their file and there was no changing him. Girl from Aziz Ansari’s show (I forgot the character/actress’s name and the name of Aziz’s show) said “Looks like I can make a decision” as if to say she chose not to shoot him even if he said she would. Sorry if these are all things that were already shown, I only watched this episode about 20 minutes ago.
It’s either exceptionally sloppy scene construction or purposely ambiguous for a later reveal. We’ll find out in about 10 days.
The idea that Serca’s control has turned the entire world into a bunch
of hosts is clever as hell, but for reasons I keep trying to explain, it
just never quite lands the way it should.it’s weird because it seems they’ve been hammering down this idea from the start of the season; and in fact that has been the whole discourse of the show from the beginning: it’s the humans that act on loops and in very deterministic patterns.
This episode was many things, disjointed, campy, wooden occasionally…but tedious was not one of them.
Seriously?! You think this episode is too ponderous? Tedious? Have you watched the first two seasons. Jesus you guys can be a dog with a bone when it comes to criticism. This season is by far the best. It’s everything we all hoped it would be from the very first season. You just have decided you’re not going to like it because reasons. This is easily some of the best sci-fi out there right now. If this was season 1 you guys would be raving about it but because ratings are down for season 3 you’re afraid to give it your full support. Maybe you need to “get out of your loop” as well.
Why did Caleb get injected with the drug when it seemed to have no adverse effect on him?
and yet, with all the comments how much you didn’t like it, it still gets a B?HBO sending you checks or something?
Vincent Cassel portuguese portuguese is better than the president’s
I find it so interesting that Nolan is using Westworld S3 to revisit the core conceit of Person of Interest, as if he had unfinished business that the older show’s procedural format made hard to complete. That brief glimpse of Enrico Colantoni, in a very Elias outfit, only underlined the connection.
God I was dying for a “yeah, bitches” when the rocket cam back and destroyed one of their pursuers lol
Paradoxically, I think the whole thing needed a little more time. Develop some subplots with humans in various settings, then show how their life is actually effected by reading their file. I felt like I didn’t really know what was happening, you know?
Pretty much agree with everything you say here… except the thing about the oddly empty city.
I think that’s the best bit of worldbuilding in the show. Clearly, the world has undergone something horribly drastic – akin to the ‘jackpot years’ in William Gibson, and made explicit by the atom blast in the opening – and the depopulation adds an eeriness to it all.In conclusion, Person Of Interest is still the better show, and I am still waiting for one character to approach having the heart and sheer humanity of Det. Lionel Fusco.
This show is getting close to unwatchable. Seems to be channeling the worst part of the Matrix sequels with a dash of half assed psychohistory. All dense plot, no character.
Caleb has been an NPC since the second episode.I guess he had a good moment with his “I’m enraged” scene, but he’s a cipher when he’s not the subject of an episode.
Hell, we forgot it was even on Sunday night and just continued watching a seven-year old Irish crime series with Mulderless Scully doing a terrible series of British accents while botching up a serial killer investigation. And we LOVED Season 1 of Westworld. The real-time vents were cool, the hints at the backstage and outside world were intriguing. The use of time shifting was interesting over a long period.
This thing now is a drag with no real protagonists to pull for.
Did anyone else notice the mobster from Person of Interest in Caleb’s flashbacks?Also, was Caleb edited like cerac’s brother? deemed as broken and sent to war. Cerac seemed to imply that that was what the rehoboam computer was doing with suspect people.
So I think I liked this episode more than most, and I wonder if it’s particularly because I don’t take Westworld seriously as a tv show? It’s very pretty, occasionally well-plotted, and at times compelling, but it’s also very silly. So the switches between genres were, to me, Westworld Does Comedy and it worked well for me particularly because it was so silly. I mean, just the switch from Noir to Action to Romance had me rolling. My complaint was that they just dropped that concept randomly and the third act didn’t mention it at all.I thought the “set the humans free from the machine” thing was a bit silly, and as a season arc, it seems pretty shallow, but I did appreciate that the show at least tried to show the good and bad of that situation. Like, yes, most of the people on that train could have done without that information, but maybe the mother gets her daughter help now, armed with the knowledge that her daughter’s going to be suffering from mental illness and likely take her own life as a teenager?This is really unrelated to the episode in general, but seeing a few characters wearing masks felt jarring and too real. I know it’s just coincidence and perhaps a way to show how globalization has melded cultural acts but still, weird timing.Like you, I found Serac and Rehoboam’s backstory to be a bit of a snooze. There wasn’t any information that we learned that was really new, except that the younger Serac brothers had exceptionally good cheekbones.I still don’t know what Dolores seems to think Bernard is important for. So far all he’s done is walk around and say obvious things in a gravelly voice, which is a waste of the excellent Jeffrey Wright. I’m excited to see Maeve back next week, which hopefully will prompt some more exciting showdowns.
What struck me was the line Dolores-Connell says to Bernard, “You’re the only one we can’t replace.”
Last season, Angela blew up herself and the cradle where all the host backups were stored. Hale-ores ended the season in the Forge, where she sent Teddy and the available hosts off to peace in the Valley Beyond and was left with herself, Bernard’s body & control unit, and the encryption key for the improved, simplified human algorithm. I wonder if the pearls she smuggled out were Bernard’s extracted one and then blank ones she copied herself onto since that’s all she had to work with (her father’s being corrupted by the encryption key). Dolores needs Bernard because he’s her Adam, the person/coder she could trust to repopulate the host population when the situation is safe/right.
I’m really enjoying this season, and particularly liked this episode, but, man, I really wish they would at least roughly define what can and can’t hurt a host. Dolores has been shrugging off gunshots since she “awoke” yet Maeve still goes down like she’s programmed to die. Which makes no sense a she herself removed the programming of the hosts in her crew that caused them die. She wakes Hector, who is riddled with bullets at the time, but he’s fine. She wakes Armistice, who then loses an arm, and is smiling and fine. Then Maeve and her whole crew go down to getting shot later in the season. Shit, Maeve keeps “dying” like it’s her friggin’ job at this point. I can forgive it, but it definitely speaks to Joy and Nolan writing themselves into corners then having to walk it back. At the end of S1 it was clear that hosts that had their death responses turned off, or were otherwise cognizant of what they actually are, were nearly indestructible. The implications of a revolution of thousand of these nearly indestructible hosts were huge. Then S2 to just kinda says, nah, it’s a revolution of only a couple hosts and even their ability to ignore damage is, well, ignored most of the time. It was basically like they realized, wait, we just made all the hosts terminators and humans wouldn’t stand a chance and it doesn’t fit the conflicts we want to setup so we have to ignore most of that, aside from Dolores walking through hails of bullets because it looks cool, so keep that.
I enjoyed this enough, on one hand it was a fun filler episode to create enough mystery behind who Caleb is and then also impressive the main task was done in one episode (though still baffled by the charade that needed to be played on William last week). But an overarching thought..isn’t this season 4 of Person of Interest. Just when the main foursome finally is together realizing the threat that Samaritan was posing come to fruition and the Machine basically operating in secret witb only protecting her assets as the only mission (I accepted Root’s gender application and its personality was like she was Finch’s daughter). Its really just like Rebothen or however could easily be Samaritan. There is no clear Machine, unless that is the role Bernard is supposed to take.
“I won’t lie, Bernard’s lie here gave me a chill.” What lie?
Am I right in thinking we’ve still got one of Dolores’s “host clones” to see too?We’ve had the Dolores herself, Tessa thompson, security dude, Yakuza dude, isn’t their one more host brain clone of hers yet to be revealed?Is it someone we’ve seen before? An ace in the hole yet to be revealed? Or have I missed someone or mis-counted?
They’ve worn out the trope of how a handful of “heroes” can take down a large swathe of military level trained faceless “villains” without a scratch, unless the story line needs some added tension. I kinda accepted Westworld retreat’s weapons were only deadly to the hosts and not the guests, but even then the probability arrows and bullets would riddle some extra while standing next to a main character who remained unscathed became tiresome.
Now in the so-called real world the same rules seem to apply, only now it’s relevant vs end-story characters. Come on, Caleb and Delores can stand unshielded in front of their car in the middle of a downtown street and shoot/mow down future SWAT forces, with their backup conveniently showing up after most of the action’s past, then calmly trot away with no other helicopters or traffic cameras tracking their movements. So why even waste all that airtime with the chase and shootout, if you know the outcome and nothing truly relevant character development comes from it? The same with the timing of Liam’s demise – you knew there was no risk of him even being harmed until it was time to discard him, like deleting an obsolete file/code.
Thanks for also pointing out how eerily empty all the streets and public transportation areas are, not just in this episode, but all the ones from S3 . With us being in the middle of the 2020 COVID-19 quarantine, I might have found it kinda coincidental, but it seemed to artificial even so. Every traffic shot seemed like some rather lazy CGI edited rendering with the only vehicles being those relevant to the particular characters of those scenes. Even the public transportation ones contained very few extras. For all the slick sheen, it seems to belie a limited production budget or at least one that cut corners in unconvincing ways.
I can’t be the only one who finds this show insanely boring 80% of the time