WESTWORLD 1.03 - "THE STRAY"

NOTE:  While I don't truck with spoilers, and even avoid the Next Week On... teasers for that purpose, I do talk freely about the major fan theories I encounter out in the wild.  If such things bother you, tread lightly.

Last time I "reviewed" the opening episodes of Westworld without talking much about the show itself, so this time let's dive right into the story.  The titular storyline of “The Stray” is the least interesting.   The protests-too-much hostility between Shannon Woodward and Least Hemsworth* feels a touch forced, and the robut glitching has some neat, creepy detail to it, but amounts to nothing more than a tease of the more serious uprising we know is coming.  I’m not enthusiastic about the prospect of dragging out that turn for an entire season; even those of us who haven’t seen the movie know that we signed on for a cowboy-robut on human-dude revolt.  I’m all for philosphizin’ about the nature of sentience and man’s creative hubris, but I’m really for philosophizin’ whilst there’s some proper blood n' guts action and legit menace going on.  All movie violence is fake by definition, but if it’s not even real to the fictional participants I check right the hell out.  

The stray story also teases the possibility of hemsworth being a host, with Woodward’s snide response about letting him carry a gun when he mentions doling out weapons privileges sparingly, and his own comment about a knowledge of constellations being in his “backstory”.  I am optimistic that this is not the case, but also worried that that's only because it’s a red herring for the reveal that Bernard is a robut.  Ford’s description of his mysterious partner Arnold - very careful, personal life marked by tragedy, preoccupation with pushing the hosts toward genuine consciousness – mirror Bernard’s behavior in his conversations with Dolores and ex(?)-wife Gina Torres(!).  The idea that he is a synthetic clone of some sort is supported in the latter, where we see glimpses of his son dying in the hospital, which are presented in similar, silent flashes to Teddy’s newly-implanted “backstory”.    

Evidently, guests didn't find "Gossip was supposed to be my big break!" tragic enough

Again, I hope this is not the case, as I don’t want to turn every one of these things into a “who else is a new kind of robut” guessing gallery.  And it could very well be that the similarity between the flashbacks is only to underline the similarity between the hosts’ experience and us humans’.  But if they are introducing a special subclass of robut that operates differently than the regular hosts, that is the gateway to the type of navel-gazing crap that tends to drag down great genre shows.  What does it mean if this robut isn’t like the other robuts?  Well, genre writer, since you invented both types of robut, it means that you think toying around with the mythology you invented has become more interesting than the real-world themes that mythology was designed to probe.  

Protip: the answer to what it MEANS that your fictional robut got fictionally pregnant in violation of

 the fictional biology you made up is that I don’t care because magical pregnancy isn’t real drama

(same goes for vampires)

(...and bullshit, gluten-free vampires)

Anyway, that’s enough fretting about things that may not even come to pass, let’s move on to the big fan theory, that William is in fact Ed Harris’s Man In Black on his first trip to the park, and the most interesting plotline, Teddy’s new backstory. I like how the show has trod lightly on the meta elements thus far, and the handlers' expousing the importance of backstory as the cornerstone of their host/characters' identities tickles this fancy without overdoing it.  It is key to making them feel real, even if, as with Teddy's fuzzy guilt, it is never strictly defined, and it is built on memory.  Memory is what the handlers' do not allow the hosts, which Ford frames as a gift (a recurrent motif in Jonathan Nolan's work going back to his story for Memento).  But Arnold saw, and Bernard increasingly sees, it as a curse, denying them the building blocks to create a true identity and consciousness.

Anyway, Teddy is given a fuller identity as part of Ford’s new narrative, which he promises “is rooted in truth,” and I believe holds the biggest clues to the backstory, mythology, and shape of future storylines.  It begins in “a time of war…a world in flames” - the incident 30 years ago, where Arnold presumably lost his life?  And it involves an army officer going out among the natives and coming back with some “strange ideas” that involve mass slaughter and talking to God.  Assuming that the theory is true, William’s time out on the range and encounter with Dolores could lead him to return to town with radicalized, bloody intent.   

Or even worse, milky intent

Teddy further expounds that the followers of the desert prophet don’t feel pain or fear death, as they  “reckon they already died and gone to hell, and this is it” -  if hell doesn’t describe the hosts’ existence of perpetual victimization and torment, I don’t know what does.  The leader “claimed this land didn’t belong to the old natives or the new settlers.  That it belonged to something that had yet to come.  That it belonged to him.”  Which fits the MiB's presumed intent, if he is indeed trying to find the control center and usher in a new form of consciousness by “awakening” the hosts.  And as we’re seeing more glimpses of what he did to Dolores in the barn, it’s looking less like the rape it appeared to be in the pilot** and more like he was fiddling with her compubrain (arguably a different sort of rape in itself) to kickstart her increased capacity to remember her past “lives”. 

That wouldn’t address how Maeve the madam has also started remembering bits and pieces, or the how these malfunctions/evolutions have spread to the stray and milk bandit.  Hmm, maybe there are holes in my theorizing after all.  I hope so, because wasted typeface aside, the most exciting possibility at all is that I don’t have any idea where Westworld is going at all. 

 

Other Thoughts:

-  I propose a moratorium on including direct quotes/references to Alice In Wonderland in head-trippy sci-fi properties. 

 -  The score in this show is really, really great.  So great. 

-   The wranglers were awfully blasé about how the milk bandit seemed to ignore the “drop dead” directive after being riddled with multiple milk-holes last week.  I wonder if they will be more distressed at the stray’s ability to fight back against the hemsworth.  

-  How big of a wuss do you have to be, as a guest, to flee from confrontation with hosts you know are programmed not to hurt a hair on your head?  Yet we get a couple who do just that this week.

*  *a nickname I did not create, but Schwartzblog has never been one to throw back a bitchy nickname on account of it being only mildly amusing

*** Looking back at that scene, it's not clear he was part of the initial attack on the house, and he only even shoots Teddy as an offhanded afterthought, to silence the distraction.  His encounter with her in the thoroughfare, where his wistfulness about not being able to see her that night seemed to be a creepy reflection of how much he loves raping, could also be read as regret that he can't spare her a similar ordeal while he's out...er, scalping her fellow hosts.  Okay, so he has earned the change of hat to some degree.

WESTWORLD IS INTELLIGENT, INTRIGUING, AND MAYBE IMPOSSIBLE TO SUSTAIN

[While I don't discuss the plot in much detail, the following does casually spoil the pilot's twists as to who is/isn't a robut, so watch it first if that worries you]

If HBO’s Westworld fails, it won’t be for lack of ambition, and certainly not talent.  The cast is stacked with patrician thespian-types like Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, and Jeffrey Wright on the human side, while the robut side features even more impressive work from lesser-knowns like Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden, and Louis Herthum.  Even Thandie Newton and Rodgrigo Santoro seem cast perfectly to type for their by-design broader caricatures.  And the filmmaking and production values are as lush and polished as those of the park itself, the broadest of many meta aspects of a show that seems to be as much about media as artificial intelligence - whether the difficulties of crafting an HBO drama (see the handlers’ debates over the complexity of narrative and what it is the guests think they want from the experience vs what they actually crave), or our relationship with video games (see Harris’s Man In Black, who has resorted to using cheat codes to grind out his 100% rating, shot through with the sadistic boredom of the l33t), or a particular actor’s career (Teddy’s unending cycle of victimization as the apotheosis of Marsden’s uber-specific typecasting as the Nice Guy Who Loses The Girl).  

2 days later, Marsden came home to find Elmo with a mouthful of Swedish Chef

But we can dig into those elements in future episodes, as the most striking choice the pilot makes is laying our sympathies immediately with the robuts.  Westworld is diving straight into the deep end of AI pool, which intrigues but concerns me.  Artificial intelligence is a fascinating and ever-more relevant topic, but AI narratives have to walk a very fine line.  The great ones (2001, Her, Ex Machina, the early seasons of Battlestar Galactica) pose intriguing questions about the nature of sentience and what defines a “person” while maintaining an essential otherness about this new form of intelligence.  While the weaker ones (Short Circuit, Chappie*, the later seasons of Battlestar Galactica) take it as given that there is essentially no difference between robuts and people, and/or get bogged down in their own mythological weeds about what it means to be a particular variety of fictional robut, rather than what that fictional robut’s relations with fictional humans can say about actual human nature. 

I’ll use BSG as the closest (formally and temporally) point of comparison for the pitfalls Westworld faces.   It also had a bunch of androids made to pass as human running around, which led to some interesting philosophical ponderings and intrigue plots in the early going, but eventually to much of the show being swallowed by the guessing game of trying to identify the next sleeper agent to be revealed.  The speculation has already begun about who in the control room is actually a Host, and I really hope that issue is put to bed quickly.  The pilot introduced enough intriguing elements and characters that I don’t think it needs to lean on the cheapest twist available.  BSG went too far down that rabbit hole, and what they found was a bunch of sci-fi gobbledegook with less and less tether to any recognizable human experience.

[SPOILERS]  Who among us hasn't served a lifetime in the military, only to have the world end in a nuclear robut holocaust, only to be reunited with our presumed dead spouse, only to murder that spouse for their collaboration with the robut oppressors, only to find out that she has been reincarnated because you are both secret robut sleeper agents with implanted memories of being stupid drunks, to hide your past as brilliant research scientists that created secret robut sleeper agents in the first place?  And also there are angels.  [/SPOILERS]

The problem is, when you start to dig down into the question of “what makes us different than them?” in a work of fiction, that the answer veers inevitably toward “nothing much”.  I’d kind of love to see Werner Herzog’s version of Westworld, which concludes that the Hosts do not feel in at all the same way we do and using them as vessels to indulge our basest impulses is not so big a deal really, just because it would be so different.  But no (sane) creator is going to devote years of their life to a work of art that does not, ultimately, come down supporting increased empathy and understanding.  A one-shot movie can function as more of a cautionary tale, and end on a more ambivalent note.  But with a longform narrative, as the years go on the robut characters have to become more developed.  And as they are generally portrayed by human actors who have only a human toolset to try to make their motives comprehensible to a human audience, that generally means they become more and more indistinguishable from humans. 

Meanwhile, the conflicts between man and machine can’t help but take on shades of real world conflicts, making the whole thing more and more into a parable about prejudice.  As this happens, the subtext becomes so bold and potentially ugly that it starts to drive the text inexorably in the direction of humanizing the robuts. It becomes very hard, maybe impossible, for a show about robuts to stay a show about robuts as robuts, rather than robuts as stand-ins for an oppressed minority group. If such a narrative doesn’t conclude that Machine Lives Matter, that carries some very nasty implications for the real world, that no one (I hope) would condone.

The return of Half-Assed Moralizin' has been brought to you by Papa Johns

What I would prefer to see is a show that doesn’t lose sight of the fact that it is the difference between artificial and human intelligence that drives the more interesting conflicts.  And simply dismissing those differences feels pat in the simplified solutions it provides to thorny questions.  Since we don’t have actual AI that we can fact-check their depictions against, we can’t exactly call bullshit when a writer decides their AI thinks and feels precisely like a human would, but doesn't that still feel like a pretty easy out to give yourself?  And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be asked to feel empathy for robuts.  I’m saying it’s easy to ask us to feel empathy for robuts when every discernible difference between them and us has been hand-waved away. I am more impressed by a narrative that compels us to feel empathy in spite of such differences**.  

So what I hope to see from Westworld, besides some surprising deaths and beautiful people humping each other on/around scenic vistas, is a thoughtful but exciting examination of the interaction between intelligent robuts and humans, and the questions posed by the very existence of the former, that maintains fundamental differences between the two types of intelligence, without allowing those differences to manifest in subtextual endorsements of bigotry and racism.  No pressure.  The good news is that the first two episodes are as promising a start down that road as you could possibly hope for.  The bad news is it may be actually impossible to maintain that balance over a multi-season haul. 

"That's when I realized, this show is here to lose."

I have rambled on a lot already, without really touching on the plot or characters.  So I’ll resort to the last refuge of the critical scoundrel, bullet points, for random observations and questions that occurred to me during the first two episodes:

•  The pilot is chockfull of ominous foreshadowing, but one exchange that stood out was Dolores explaining the Judas steer that the rest of the herd follows to Teddy.  Once they are fully “woke” to the existential nightmare of their lives’ design, I wonder whether Dolores will be leading the uprising herself, or be more of a power-behind-the-throne type, with him as its figurehead (sort of the cowboy directing the steer directing the herd, so to speak).

• There is so much of the park’s functionality that remains a question to me.  One of the most niggling is that they appear to have manufactured the wildlife as well as human hosts, from horses down to snakes. Why bother? I’d think PETA would be the least of the ethical detractors that would plague this place.  Wouldn't real animals be easier, and provide better immersion for the guests? 

•  My biggest question on that front, however, is how the protections to keep the guests from being hurt work.  I’m not just talking about how the guns seem programmed to somehow trigger squibs embedded in the hosts (?) while impacting the guests like a little puff of air.  I mean where does the excitement in joining a posse to hunt down bandits come from, if the guests are all fully aware that the bandits can't possibly hurt them?  For as meaningless as “dying” in a video game is, that dynamic is still built in to represents at least a temporary setback; if there’s no possibility for failure, it's not even really a game.  It seems like for the video game metaphor to hold up, and for the adventures the park is selling to function as such, there would need to be a set number of “lives” or something that a guest could lose by messing up whatever sidequest they take on.  But there’s no indication of any sort of system like that in the first 2 episodes, so it seems like a game of Tetris I played on the train into the park would have higher stakes than any of Sizemore’s narratives once I’m inside.    

• I hope they find continued use for Louis Herthum, he absolutely slays in the scene where Pa Abernathy threatens Hopkins with Shakespeare.

• I’m loving the score, with the ragtime/orchestral redos of Soundgarden, Rolling Stones, and Radiohead tunes.  It’s kind of gimmicky, sure, but damn if that lush, pulsing version of “Paint It Black” didn’t give that saloon heist all kinds of kick. 

• My favorite video game moment came during that heist, when Hector’s blonde sidekick shot the guy off his horse, then kept repeatedly, pointlessly, blasting his corpse as the horse drug it past.  That moment was straight out of GTA, where the target lock system leads you to frequently empty rounds into dead bodies in the middle a hectic firefight.

• One question I had going in was why Westworld?   This may have seemed a more natural fit for the original movie, as 1973 was closer to the heyday of Westerns as a dominant form of entertainment.  But today Renaissance Faires seem to preferred as a form of historical cosplay, while the outright fantastical/sci-fi dominates the convention and digital circuits.  As the show went on and the park’s role as a live action version of a Grand Theft Auto sandbox game became more apparent, I wondered if the guests who come exclusively to rape and pillage wouldn’t get more of a transgressive thrill rampaging through a more contemporary setting.  But then it occurred to me that the setting is in part to encourage them to embrace the lawlessness, by placing them in a context defined by the relative scarcity of law and order.  It is the Wild West, and when in Romeworld…

-         I’m going to be traveling next Sunday/Monday, so while I intend to write up individual episodes starting with 3, timeliness may not be their strongest virtue.   Until then, back to sleep mode.

 

*I haven’t seen Chappie, but no one seems to like it and the marketing seems to fit this category.  Also, it seems to have been named specifically to slot into snarky lists of dumb movies.

**Part of the lasting power of 2001 is how it forces you to feel empathy for HAL without altering its machine nature, or even villainous status.  But one of the better examples of walking this line I’ve seen was in, no joke, the Mass Effect video game series.  The way it develops your understanding and empathy for the geth from game to game, without ever giving in to fully anthropomorphizing Legion, impressed me greatly.