The ‘Westworld’ Confusion Index: Welcome To Shogun World


HBO

The Westworld Confusion Index is your guide to what we know, what we kind of know, and what we don’t know about Westworld, one of television’s more confusing shows. We will make mistakes, surely, because we rarely know what is happening or why (and whenever we think we’ve figured it out, they go and change it on us), but we will try to have at least as many jokes as mistakes. This is the best we can offer. Here we go.

What We Know

HBO

Maeve is Keanu Reeves now

Welcome to Shogun World, where things are… not great. They’re not great! I guess that’s not much of a surprise, though, considering that things are not all that great anywhere on the compound. We were in Raj World for about 90 seconds the other week and we saw a robot tiger attack a lady. Is a robot tiger attack worse than a world-destroying rancher’s daughter with an ammo belt sash or rogue ninja assassins dispatched by a malfunctioning madman who also has an army of earless warriors at his command? Tough to say. I suppose we can leave that up to the dozens of one-star Yelp reviews I like to imagine the survivors of all this writing.

Anyway, yes, our big development this week is that Maeve is Keanu Reeves. She already was kind of Keanu Reeves, what with her ability to alter hosts’ actions using voice commands, but now she has developed the ability to do so telepathically. (A useful development, considering the earless warriors.) Results of this include: a ninja committing suicide by ramming his whole head into a sharp object and everything happening in the above GIF, which she set in motion because the shogun’s warriors were about to decapitate her and her Shogun World doppelgänger Akane, who had just used a hidden hair-blade to chop off the shogun’s head mid-face after performing a dance set to an old-timey cover of “C.R.E.A.M.” by Wu-Tang Clan, which is the best Wu-Tang-related moment on HBO since Nora Durst got her tattoo on The Leftovers. We like Akane.

So now Maeve and her crew of bizarro misfits — her safecracker boytoy and his ronin counterpart; Akane; Snake Lady and her Dragon Lady counterpart; freaking Simon, etc. — are staring down the barrel of a revolution and all they have to protect themselves with is a few swords, a hair knife, and an all-encompassing power to control their enemies’ actions via silent command. I like their chances.

If Maeve is Keanu Reeves, that means Simon is Useless Morpheus

I mean, it checks out, I think. If Maeve is now Neo from The Matrix with a dash of John Wick’s habit of killing anyone who crosses him, it would make Simon — the one who allegedly knows what’s going on, who is her guide to a dangerous new world she has just learned about — a kind of Morpheus. But like, a useless Morpheus. One who plagiarizes himself and whines a lot and is very little help in situations involving physical danger. He’s the worst. I love him.

Dolores is leaving on a midnight train to (the) mesa

Meanwhile, back in Westworld, Dolores and Teddy and crew are fixing up the train — “fix what’s broke, strip her for speed” to quote their fearless and increasingly terrifying leader — and headed for the mesa to find her daddy, Abernathy, the host with the priceless IP programmed into his fried circuit board, who was recently kidnapped and is being hunted by about four different groups right now, all for different reasons, probably. We’ll circle back and touch on some of this in a moment. For now, please know that Dolores — a violent killer with a fondness for profound statements and blowing things up — repeatedly referring to her father as “my daddy” is giving me serious flashbacks to Boyd Crowder from Justified. I think Boyd would like Westworld. Even this version.

It’s gonna take forever to clean this place up

Seriously. There are bodies everywhere. Characters on this show can’t go 50 feet in any direction without stumbling across a massacre. Assuming Delos and its possibly evil bald fixer can get things under control someday, it’s gonna take months and many millions of dollars to get things remotely presentable again. And a ton of manpower. Dibs on not doing that.

What We Kind Of Know

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Dolores is the Bachelorette now

I’m not crazy. Go back and watch all the scenes with her and Teddy in this episode. We had:

  • Teddy professing his love and saying they’re soulmates who should run off together (every one-on-one date)
  • Dolores taking him up to a room in a glorified brothel and hooking up with him (every Vegas episode)
  • Dolores pulling him aside later to tell him his lack of killer instinct and sweet disposition make him a liability (not there for the right reasons)
  • Dolores cooking his damn brain with an override and maybe killing him (him not getting a rose)

Also, Teddy is a perfect Bachelorette contestant because he is a blindingly handsome moron with a vague profession. (“I’m a cowboy” is kind of like the Wild West version of “I’m in real estate.”) And Dolores literally said the phrase “I’ve been questioning my feelings for you” when they were walking through the town together.

I mean, come on.

What We Don’t Know

HBO

Can the hosts get drunk?

This is actually two questions, a dumb one and a real one. The dumb one is the obvious one, which is whether the robots can get drunk and how that would even work, a question I asked myself after watching Dolores slug whiskey from the bottle before taking sweet dumb Teddy to bed. Think of it as another neighborhood in the same city as the “Do the robot horses poop?” question.

The real question, on the other hand, starts from the assumption that robots can’t get drunk, and takes us here: If Dolores is an all-knowing being who is aware that her body is not human and her brain is just a rapidly-altering code that processes all that information at lightning speed, shouldn’t she know that she can’t get drunk on alcohol? And if that’s true, why chug the whiskey?

Hmm. I guess they were both dumb questions.

What’s up with all the dead hosts in the lake from earlier in the season?

After spending all of the last episode with Bernard and William and Elsie and Delos, this week took us back to The Dolores And Maeve Show, which is traditionally bigger on questions than answers. We did get a brief check-in with Bernard and Delos at the beginning, though, where we learned that the recovered hosts had been wiped of a bunch of their code. So now we know that thing, in addition to the fact that tons of hosts end up floating in that lake, for reasons Bernard summed up helpfully by saying “I killed them all.” We still don’t know why or how, though. One imagines this will come up at some point.

Are scientists lying about the Bloop?

Speaking of water-based mysteries, do you guys know about the Bloop? It was this super-loud and low-frequency sound that ocean scientists picked up in 1997. They originally said it was consistent with the type of sound a large animal would make, but it was so powerful that the animal that made it would need to be bigger than anything anyone had discovered in the ocean to that point. More recently, they said that the actual cause of the sound was a large underwater shifting of ice, which they referred to as an “icequake.” And, okay, but a) that still sounds terrifying, and b) that sounds almost exactly like something a group of scientists would say if they were trying to cover-up the discovery of a Vermont-sized hellbeast that lives at the bottom of the sea.

Completely irrelevant to this episode of Westworld. Something to keep in the back of your brain while watching Pacific Rim on basic cable, though.

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