Each week, Brian Grubb and Keith Phipps will attempt to unpack the latest episode of the HBO series Westworld, a show about an amusement park populated by lifelike robots that’s also about… other stuff.
Bernard’s Memory Trip
Keith: Brian, there seems to be only one way to start talking about this episode, and that’s by talking about Bernard. It’s a big week for Bernard: He slips out of his programming — sort of — and breaks into Ford’s office. He comes up with a plan to get Ford to reveal where he comes from and what it all means. He sees his beginning in full, both his cornerstone memory (the episode introduce a new term for our Westworld vocabulary) and his actual beginning, waking up like Frankenstein’s monster as Ford looks on. And he learns that Ford looked to his old partner, Arnold, for inspiration in building him and that, just like Arnold, disagreeing with Ford seems to be part of his programming. He’s done it before and he’ll do it again. Or, oops, he won’t, as he ends the episode by committing suicide.
So what’s going on with Bernard? And will we truly never see him again? I don’t have a good answer for the first question. He seems to have flown too close to the sun this episode and suffered a fall because of it. But I suspect he’ll be back. He’s too central to what makes the series work and it’s becoming clear that Ford needs a strong antagonist to spur on his creation. And “dead” has a pretty loose definition for hosts. (Oh, hi, Clementine.)
The more compelling question might be what did we learn about Arnold this week? That it was he, not Ford, who wanted to push beyond mere artificial intelligence to see if he could create actual sentient beings. That his work had an elegance and complexity that Ford’s lacked. (See also some of the Man in Black’s comments this week.) So is Ford the Salieri to Arnold’s Mozart? Or is it more complicated than that? Is Arnold truly unstable? And did Dolores really kill him or is she just speaking metaphorically when they speak? Also, we don’t know who the third person in that picture Ford shows Bernard (BernArnold? BernAndroid?) is, do we?
Brian: So here’s my problem with all of this, and I’m just going to gallop past the thing where Ford was able to bring in a new number two who apparently looked like his old partner and had no Social Security number and no one involved in the process was like “Hmmm” (I’m sure they’ll have an explanation for all of this, but still): We had this big emotional moment where Bernard realized everything Ford had done and was doing, and it culminated with his “suicide,” and none of it did much of anything for me.
That’s not entirely true. It did do a little for me, but that had more to do with Jeffrey Wright putting on an advanced acting seminar than anything stemming from the actual plot. (This is The Night Of all over again, where I thought Naz’s whole arc was rushed and sloppy but was still sucked in by Riz Ahmed’s performance.) Alan touched on it in his review last night, but with all the killing and reincarnating and on-the-fly rule-changing the show does, the stakes just don’t feel as high. Bernard broke down and blew his robot brains out and I’m still something like 70 percent sure he’ll be back again in some capacity. So why should I care?
(Ford has a few problems on his hands here, short-term and long-term. Short: If we assume Bernard doesn’t come back right away, Ford now has to explain the deaths and/or disappearances of a high-ranking Delos executive, two high-ranking coders, and another corporate employee who went to investigate something around the midpoint of the episode, was captured, and then was not mentioned again. Long: If Bernard does comes back and/or Ford replaces Elsie with a host, he has to explain why neither of them are aging. Dude has a lot of balls in the air.)
As far as the Arnold thing, I… I don’t know. I think you’re right to have a million questions about all of this. I sure do. The show has been nodding and winking in this direction for a while now, but now that we know, I’m not exactly sure where we go. I’m very interested in the third guy in that photograph, though.
Teddy “Remembers” Wyatt And The Man in Black Takes A Meeting With Charlotte
Brian: Man, poor Teddy. My dude has basically been taking a non-stop string of L’s since the show started, save one machine gun massacre, which was really only a “win” in that it allowed him to continue on with the Man in Black so they could get captured and he could remember more about his part in a mass shooting, up to and including killing a defenseless woman whose reincarnated body then guts him and lets him bleed out near a campfire in the middle of nowhere. So… not a win. Again, poor Teddy.
The rub here, if I’m understanding this properly (and God in Heaven knows I probably am not), is that Teddy might have been “controlled” by Wyatt (or whoever) back then in the way Bernard and the other hosts have been controlled by Maeve since her awakening. Maybe? And since the massacre in question took place in the same little town that Dolores keeps flashing back to, and since Dolores dropped her big reveal about killing Arnold, I guess the question here is if/how this is all related. I guess we’ll find out more when Teddy wakes up again, provided no new drunken yahoo guest on the train he rides into town decides to slit his throat for kicks and leave him dead in a gulch. Can’t rule that out.
The other thing we learned from this week’s episode of Teddy and the Man in Black’s Somewhat Excellent Adventure is that the Man in Black is on the board of Delos. It’s fun to picture Charlotte going back and trying to explain why he isn’t there at the vote to remove Ford. “No, yeah, he’s fine with it. I asked him. What? Where was he? Oh, in the park with a noose around his neck, briefly hanging from a tree because the horse attached to the rope ran off. What? No, it wasn’t a sex thing. Some of the hosts were just trying to find a loophole so they could kill him because he’s been terrorizing them for decades. What? Yeah, he’s still doing that. Anyway…”
Keith: I’ve enjoyed how so far Charlotte’s role seems mostly to be to show up and deflate characters who think they know what’s going on, be it Lee, Theresa, or the Man in Black. She’s so familiar with him in their scene together, just dropping by to say to talk a little business, and confirm their conspiracy against Ford has hit a snag, no big deal.
I’m a bit torn on the Wyatt sub-plot. On the one hand we have cannibals in weird monster masks. That’s a big plus and makes Wyatt seem extra spooky. On the other hand, when we see Wyatt in flashback, he doesn’t seem all that intimidating at all. And I don’t think we know Teddy well enough to be all that devastated that his past is less pure than he thought. And, does it matter for hosts anyway? If he were a more developed character, the revelation that he’s done a lot of bad stuff in the past might have hit harder. All of this is feeling like a bit of a trouble spot for the show, but I suspect it plays heavily into Ford’s new narrative, so I’m OK reserving judgment until we get the bigger picture.
Maeve Takes Hector To Hell
Keith: If you’re a superintelligent robot hellbent on defeating your creators and escaping the artificial surroundings that are the only world you’ve ever known, you’d probably want to create a badass as part of your army early in the process, right? So hats off to Maeve for choosing Hector early in that process. Apart from reminding Bernard that he’s a robot — and demonstrating she can manipulate even the highest-ranking of Ford’s officers — Maeve spent the episode mostly laying the groundwork for the uprising to come, though her recruitment technique for bringing in Hector was creative. It’s a reminder that Maeve, whatever metal alloys make up her body, sees herself as a woman with passion and desire and wants to act on those passions and desires in the grandest way possible. So if she’s going to enlist a gunslinging bad guy to her cause and doing so requires them both to “die” to get the job done, she’s going to take them out in the most overstated way imaginable.
Brian: It says a lot about Westworld that there’s a plot about a diabolical robot madam with a tragic backstory who is hatching a plot for revenge against the human race and that’s the part of the show that feels like a breath of fresh air.
But yet, here we are. I will very much agree with you that this week’s fiery demise of Maeve and Hector might have been a scooch much, but when every other thing that is happening on the show is a layers-deep foggy puzzle that is developing at three or four different points in time, it’s kind of nice to check in with the prostitute and safecracker as they hump to death inside a burning tent.
Anyway, I’m kind of rooting for Maeve to kill everyone? Between Ford and the Man in Black and Charlotte, most of the humans on this show seem duplicitous and awful. Not sure I expected to be rooting for the robots when this show started. Life comes at you fast. I guess that’s the lesson here. Although shotgun-toting madams can also come at you pretty fast, too. So let’s say there are two lessons..
Logan And William Are Not Getting Along
Brian: A few things:
– I’m not sure I buy Logan’s huge 180 from evil host-gutting pseudo-general to goofy whiskey-chugging brother-in-law. That happened really quick. A lot of things happen really quick on this show, though. It’s hard to accurately gauge lengths of time because the entire chronology of the show is basically a bowl of minestrone soup, but how long have the two of them even been there? A week? Two? And William has gone from a naive little woodland creature to a limb-removing maniac who is ready to throw away his entire life for a smart robot with a gaping abdominal wound? That’s kind of a lot.
– Exactly how much whiskey does one have to drink to sleep through someone killing a few dozen men and leaving them and their detached body parts strewn about the camp?
– This all appears to more or less confirm that William is the Man in Black, right? What with his new violent streak and the thing at the end where Dolores calls his name at the church and the Man in Black walks in?
– Shouts to Logan for doing the supervillain thing where you run the back of your hand down the side of your hostage’s face as you say something creepy and/or threatening. Between this and Maeve’s “We’re not so different” speech the other week, the show is out here ticking off all of my favorite action movie cliches. I can’t wait for some hot shot detective to show up to investigate all the human disappearances and then get taken off the case by his chief for being a loose cannon.
Keith: I was puzzled by the logistics of that slaughter. Sure, he’s a human and they’re all hosts so maybe there’s a workaround, but that’s still and awful lot of Confederales for one person to take down in one night. And, you’re right, that’s a pretty fast turnaround for William, who’s rapidly transformed from lamb to wolf. Will there be an explanation for this? Probably not, but it’s feeling a little forced to me right now.
This is probably the harshest we’ve ever been on an episode of Westworld and, objectively speaking, it was a good episode of the show. Michelle Mclaren is one of the best TV directors out there and this is as memorable an hour as the show has produced. But as we get further away from the “Ooh, what an intriguing set-up” of the early episodes to the “Oh, this had better make sense soon” home stretch, it’s hard not to ask more of the series. Early infatuation has given way to commitment jitters. Is Westworld going to be there for us when it counts? That’s a big TBD.
Dolores Finds Her Way Home
Keith: It was arguably as big a week for Dolores as it was for Bernard, though I have to confess that I’m finding the Dolores thread a bit too enigmatic for its own good at the moment. If I have this correct, the Dolores of the William/Logan timeline finds her way back to Escalante, the small town of her dreams, walks into the church and at this point the memory slips back into the past as her outfit switches from Gunfighting Dolores to Sweet Farm Girl Dolores and she’s drawn below and into the past where she recalls an argument between Ford and Arnold and a conversation with Arnold that might exist only in her mind. Something like that? I suspect next week will shed more light on what’s going on here. It kind of has to, right?
Is this strand picking up greater interest for you? Is the William and Logan subplot? I feel like a strong finish could redeem some slower stretches in both for me.
Brian: Yeah, I don’t know. I’m at the point now with Dolores’ story where it’s all going to be about the payoff for me. If they’re able to tie things together and explain them all in a satisfying, semi-logical way, then all of this murky, occasionally slow-developing business with William and Arnold and the timelines will have been worth it. If not, Groan City. And while part of that is obvious (BREAKING: Conclusions are important), part of it is pretty dicey. Maeve’s journey, wherever it ends up, has been fairly entertaining week-to-week. I don’t feel the same “This better be good” pressure there, because even if it disappoints, it was a fun ride. The Dolores stuff… less so. And the longer it takes to develop, the more that builds.
But that’s the tricky thing with a show that relies on mysteries piled on top of mysteries: Every reveal takes another bullet out of the gun. So now we know Bernard is a host, and that he’s Robot Arnold, and that Dolores killed Human Arnold. That’s cool. But now new or deepening mysteries need to replace them, and then those will need reveals, and then the process will have to keep going without it all just getting hopelessly frustrating or hokey. Is it doable? Well, yeah. But the degree of difficulty is really high, and if you swing and miss you’re gonna have a ton of peeved diehards who invested time into the whole thing.
Again, I don’t know. I think this is all coming off a little harsher than I intended. So much depends on the finale, really. Could I see a scenario where a lot of things come to light and everything gets settled and/or set up in a way that has me pumped up for season two? Sure. But could I also see it going the other way? Yup. So, you know, see you next week, Westworld. No pressure or anything.