![]() But doubt has been planted both about the story she’s been telling herself and the story the show has been telling about the robot awakening. Even when faced with that knowledge, she insists she’s still acting out of her own free will. Amid spectacularly violent scenes of her and her allies battling out of the Westworld compound, the finale revealed that someone had programmed her to try and break out. Such is the suggestion of the dramatic escape attempt by the Westworld head madame Maeve (Thandie Newton). ![]() Or perhaps the issue is moot, determined not by the moral judgements of a newly conscious race but by human hardwiring. Perhaps they’ll be worse perhaps they’ll be more enlightened. Perhaps the hosts will be as horrible as humans. What comes after consciousness? Aren’t the awakened hosts doomed to the same amorality that Westworld has enabled in its visitors? Or have their experience of being raped and tortured by the park’s visitors-and treated as livestock by the park’s creators-made them more empathetic? This looks to be the existential mystery of the next season. In other words, stories do have the power of improvement. The implication: Through the assemblage of narrative, a person becomes a person. Dolores (Evan Rachel Woods) then made a halting journey through a mental maze, stringing together images and moments from her past into a coherent narrative that revealed the nature of her existence-and brought her into self-awareness. In the park’s very early years, his partner Arnold discovered their machines could eventually achieve consciousness when given access to their memories. Aren’t the awakened hosts doomed to the same amorality as Westworld’s human visitors?īut the hosts, at least, could be changed by story. “You can’t change, or don’t want to change, because you’re only human after all.” Presumably “you” are the park’s customers, engaged in ever-escalating loops of carnage as epitomized by the decades-long transformation of the naive young visitor William (Jimmy Simpson) into the hardened villain known until the finale as simply the Man in Black (Ed Harris). “For my pains, I got this, a prison of our own sins,” he said. Ford’s final monologue spelled it out: Once upon a time he believed that good stories “ennoble” the people who experience them, but over the years he realized he was wrong. Or you can see it as a story about stories-and about whether they are, in the end, transformative at all. Or you can slot it alongside other sci-fi allegories about subjugation and man’s hubris, like Jurassic Park or Planet of the Apes. Ford’s on-stage sacrifice), and now apocalypse. That narrative can be interpreted as a Biblical tale involving original sin (the advent and enslavement of conscious AI), the fall (the first-ever host, Dolores, being ordered to kill her creator and fellow robots), redemption (Dr. ![]() The show’s complicated threading of flashbacks and flash-forwards ultimately has revealed a recognizable, even familiar, design: a linear narrative beginning 35 years in the past and concluding in the finale’s violent end. But a sizable audience remained hooked by the suspense of disorientation, by the handsome cinematic execution, and by interest in the show’s apparent ambition to rewrite the rules of popular fiction.īut in the first season’s finale, the ideal of “a good story,” with all of its absolving power, returned-both within the show’s universe and in the overall form of the show itself. The results were sometimes tedious or confusing, wringing drama less from cause-and-effect plots than from the filmmakers withholding information. Westworld has all along defied certain conventional notions of “a good story”: It scrambled beginnings, middles, and ends it hid character motivations so that every action doubled as a mystery and it mocked the moralizing plot archetypes of the Western-a foundational genre of American entertainment-as hokey and square. The admission-that his goal has been to improve the world through storytelling-was strangely jarring, one of the more subtle twists in a show otherwise packed with unsubtle ones. “I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being. “I’ve always loved a good story,” he began. But just before the climactic revolt, Robert Ford, the venerable park architect played by Anthony Hopkins, laid out his original idealistic vision for the place. The final episode, “The Bicameral Mind,” was a lurid one, involving severed limbs and sexual humiliation and a bloody ambush by the “hosts” of the show’s immersive cowboy theme park against their human masters. ![]()
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