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HBO
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.
First things first
Keith: I don’t want this discussion to get too beyond the scope of the show itself right off the bat, but it’s probably worth mentioning that there’s a lot riding on Westworld’s success. It’s an expensive, risky venture for HBO and one that’s had its share of delays, including a full shutdown of production while executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy worked on scripts. Though it was supposed to debut in 2015, it didn’t.
But here it is, and it’s arriving at a time when HBO needs another event series. The end is in sight for Game of Thrones. Vinyl came and went. So maybe an adaptation of a 1973 movie written and directed by Michael Crichton will do the trick? Something with robots and cowboys overseen by the aforementioned Nolan and Joy with help from J.J. Abrams and his longtime associate Bryan Burk? That makes sense, right?
Will it work? Time will tell, but we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think it was worth talking about. Brian, what were your first impressions?
Brian: Well, I think the big takeaway here is that HBO very much wants this to become what we in the industry refer to as “a big thing.” It checks off a bunch of boxes. It’s got the high-end production value of other HBO projects (Boardwalk Empire and its $20 million pilot), it’s got a Western angle that led them to critical success before (Deadwood), and it’s loaded with the sex and violence that we’ve seen in their most notable hits (Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, etc.). And then it’s got a sci-fi/robots/AI theme running through it, too, combining scary futuristic threats with the non-human revolt aspect of a Walking Dead. It’s like the network ripped a little piece off of a bunch of shows and threw the whole thing in a blender.
The question is… will it work? Because throwing a bunch of delicious things in a blender can result in a strawberry-banana-vanilla smoothie or a cup of pizza-marshmallow-lemonade slop.
Keith: Immediate answer: I loved this pilot. It’s sharp and stylish and intriguing. It raised a lot of compelling questions both via its plot and its themes, and it introduced a lot of characters I want to see more of. (Except maybe Lee, the whiny writer guy.) Plus Nolan directed the hell out of this episode. The longview answer: We’ll see where it goes! (I liked the Vinyl pilot, too, but knew I was in trouble when I hit episode two.) How about you?
Brian: I’m definitely in for more episodes. I felt that way immediately after watching the pilot because I want to see where this is going and how it gets there, but I really feel that way now, after it fully dawned on me that James Marsden’s character is named Teddy Flood. Teddy Flood! I’m not sure who at the theme park is in charge of naming robots, but they deserve a raise for that one.
The Credits
Keith: Even if you didn’t know any behind-the-scenes information about Westworld, the titles set it up to be a big deal series. Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi provides the music, and while the theme song doesn’t yet seem like the sort of song that lodges itself in the brain, neither did Game of Thrones’ at first. It sets a somber, unsettling tone matched by imagery that will be key to the show, or at least this pilot episode: Machines etch fine detail into artificial bone and sinew. Robots have sex. An eye reflects a scene from the American West, specifically Monument Valley, a spot that’s become synonymous with the Western thanks to the films of John Ford and others. A player piano roll. And finally the creation of an artificial person suspended on a wheel and striking a pose reminiscent of DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man.
Watching this again after watching this pilot, it plays like a neat preview of what’s to come, one that sets the proper tone for what follows, too. Were those impressions, too?
Brian: I think they might have been my impressions if I hadn’t been so distracted by the unfinished screener copy HBO sent out using the filler phrase “Name Surname” throughout the whole thing in place of the actors’ real names. After the first few, I started chuckling. By the time it got to the end, after like 10 to 15 different times “Name Surname” flashed onto the screen, I was giggling like a nut. Especially at the very end when it fired up “Name Surname,” “Different Name,” “Name Surname” in rapid succession. This has nothing to do with anything and is extremely inside baseball, but I loved it so much.
Keith: I know! I really loved Different Name’s work on the script!
HBO
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Best season premiere I’ve ever watched. Just enough to capture interest without revealing too much. Two thumbs way the F up.
I don’t think the Man in Black’s assault on Dolores was just to make him evil but to also show all the crappy things she has had to go through.
It really added to the revelation at the end with Dolores. The fact that she has to deal with shit like that really shows why the system would break down.
I enjoyed the premiere but I hope the big reveal isn’t that the people running Westworld are just more sophisticated robots who are running the park on someone else’s behalf.
I doubt they go that route.
The quality of robot hookers is truly amazing.
Indeed Enrico, indeed.
I am SO on board with this.
The concept that they cycle the hosts through different roles is interesting. My guess is that Dolores, as the oldest host, has some past lives of her own?
Also, what’s up with them not showing Dolores’ mother much, beyond the dead body? Is there something to that? Seems like they kept intentionally hiding her for some big reveal later.
I think it would be even more intriguing for Dolores to have always had one role. Possibly contributing to her breakdown, since all of the others get cycled.
I dig it but I’m confused about continuity. I’m sure this will get explained at some point (or maybe it was and I missed it), but why does it seem like some hosts/guests are living the same day over and over and others are engaged in a longer campaign? If they are all at the same place, and it seems like they are, how can those both be going on simultaneously?
Probably has to do with the corpation running the park wanting to mix things up every now and then so the customers don’t get bored.
I think they had a line in there about hosts paths running to completion or something like that. It’s like NPC characters in an online RPG, they run their quests until completion and then go back to their starting point. Except in this case, the quest can end in many different ways. For example, in Quest 1 we saw Dolores and Teddy meet, so that ended back at Dolores’ house. But in the next iteration Teddy was intercepted by the Bros in the street, so Dolores had a completely different path.
So, in other words, some times the quest restarts each day, and some times it can run longer, depending on what interactions happen.
Bear with me (this is my little rambling half-thoughts about things I noticed):
The songs in this episode all seemed to be references to the Man-in-Black. We had “Paint it black” during the bank robbery, a Johnny Cash song over the closing, and during a saloon scene the PLAYER PIANO was playing Soundgarden’s “Blackhole Sun”.
.
Blackhole Sun has the following lyrics in the first verse:
In my eyes, indisposed
In disguises no one knows
Hides the face, lies the snake
The sun in my disgrace
Boiling heat, summer stench
‘Neath the black the sky looks dead
Call my name through the cream
And I’ll hear you scream again
.
Note the reference to “Cream”. At one point in the show, a malfunctioning robot is walking around pouring milk on his victims and drinking it so that it comes out of his bullet holes like blood. A scene or two later, they show the creation of a robot as it is pulled from a big vat of milk-like liquid. So I’m supposing that milk-as-robot-bodily fluid will be an ongoing thing.
The reveries are stored in the robots subconcious so they aren’t entirely aware of them, but they do effect the way they behave leading to aberrations.
I’m sure you “loved this pilot” and are “definitely in for more episodes” considering the two of you have been tapped to write a weekly episode review so long has the show runs. I want to like the show but now I kind of want it to fail because your journalism is so awful:
“It plays like a neat preview of what’s to come”
“The thing that interests me is how this all plays out”
Please don’t start sentences with the word “Like”
I also just have to add, the only Man In Black I know fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
Was the original movie an inspiration for King? I know Yul Brynner gets a shout out in the DT series.
cockenspiel you shot these fools in the throat like that dude on the show!
Wait, you want the show to fail so that two guys who probably don’t get paid very much to write about it no longer get to write about? There were some legitimate criticisms in the review. But overall, they liked it, so because they liked it and want more, you want the show cancelled.
You’re life must be super fun.
Someone isn’t a bad TV and/or movie critic because they enjoyed what they were reviewing. And if you’re reviewing a show you like, of course you’re going to want more.
PS In an article that is clearly sourced from a real, person-to-person conversation, it’s perfectly acceptable to start a sentence with ‘Like’. You’re just kinda being a d***.
I don’t think that the implied sexual assault was unnecessary. I think that it illustrated exactly what could make such an “amusement park” appealing to some people. They are free to be brave, heroic, evil, depraved… all because theyou know that there will be no repercussions for carrying out their fantasies. I think that the brief conversations & episodes of some random newcomers effectively showed diffevent things that people might seek. Then the man in black really drove home what some people’s darker desires might entail when there can be no consequences & – even though they appear very, very real – no real people are being harmed. What came to mind for me was playing Grand Theft Auto, but with the ability to physically experience the sensations (for example, very few people are twisted enough to bang a prostitute in their car & then kill them to get their money back… but I don’t think I’ve ever met someone that played that game & didn’t do it at least once for shits & giggles). I know we’re supposed to be offended by everything these days, but what occurs when we first meet Harris’ character doesn’t seem gratuitous or out of place within the context of the show. In fact, it seems like a pretty damned likely scenario.
The Man in Black is clearly not a host, or at least at this point we’re not supposed to think he is. Hosts can shoot and kill themselves all the want, so because he’s impervious to Flood’s bullets, he’s human.
Or a host that has figured out how to camouflage himself as a human and run amok in the environment. Though what with the technology they have to track each host, my guess is that they’d have figured out by now that they have a host that doesn’t respond to their calls, upgrades, etc.
I think Hopkins is dying and the upgrade wasnt a fluke.