WestWorld: ...Where nothing can possibly go worng!

THE SEQUEL! I loved those movies.

i have seen this film two times. both times i was high.

(a) began asking my roommates some elaborate question about how they turned off the robots after the park closed, and whether they were rust-protected

(b) ate three bowls of oatios (blecch)

I'm not what you think I am
I'm the king of Siam
I've got a bald head
My name is Yul Brynner
And I am a famous movie star

Perhaps you saw me in Westworld
I acted like a robotic cowboy
It was my best role
I can not deny I
Felt right home deep inside
That electronic carcass

You're such monumental slime
Let the punishment fit the crime
Tie it to a chair
The house music will blare
And turn your ears into
A medicinal jelly

Stay inside on Christmas Day
And make believe that you are my candy cane
You said, "I'm not that type,
No I'm not sweet, and I'm not overripe

Bob Dylan sang in
"Its alright mama im only bleeding":
"Everything from toy guns that spark to flesh colored Christs that glow in the dark
Its easy to see we got in too far and not much is really sacred."

ihttp://www.ukquad.com/futureworld.jpg

http://www.misterposter.com/test/images/dettaglio/F085d-FUTUREWORLD2000ANNINELFUTURO-2F.jpg

but still, these are awesome.

=0

i can't seem to find futureworld on DVD anywhere (it isn't available on Netflix).

anyway, i wonder if crichton's death means that there won't be a remake after all -- the original is a fun little movie. the obvious comparison would be to jurassic park, but i wonder if westworld also had some influence on the terminator (to wit, the relentless robot that can't be stopped absent a malfunction) or even the nightmare on elm street series (yul brynner with his melting face and on fire seems very freddy krueger-esque).

Amazed this hasn't been remade yet. Happy it hasn't but seems like a surefire property for a cgi happy retread.

Just now remembering exactly how postmodern this movie is.

http://decider.com/2015/09/30/hbo-westworld-graphic-sex-scenes

This document serves to inform you that this project will require you to be fully nude and/or witness others fully nude and participate in graphic sexual situations. By accepting this Project assignment, you may be required to do any of the following: appear fully nude; wear a pubic hair patch; perform genital-to-genital touching; have your genitals painted; simulate oral sex with hand-to-genital touching; contort to form a table-like shape while being fully nude; pose on all fours while others who are fully nude ride on your back; ride on someone’s back while you are both fully nude; and other assorted acts the Project may require. The Project will also include language and sexual situations that some may consider personally objectionable or uncomfortable.

i can't seem to find futureworld on DVD anywhere (it isn't available on Netflix).

it was on (perhaps only UK) Netflix at least for a little bit. i must admit though I couldn't finish it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0127862/

Sex World! Go on a spree.
Sex World! Come here with me.
All you desire, we have for hire;
You'll turn to fire, we guarantee.

Sex World! Do what you will.
Sex World! You'll have your fill.
Give us your trust; climb on our bus;
Leave the loving to us, so great it will be.

Sex World! Let's make a date.
Sex World! Don't hesitate.
You'll find your love, below or above,
At Sex World, my God! Just wait and see...

Futureworld currently available as a Region 2 DVD in Fopp for £3

who the hell was demanding an HBO series of this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX3u0IlBBO4

Who's ready? I'm ready. The casting is so overcooked, this has nowhere to go but sideways. I can't imagine it being good.

Also, great chance to plug Artificial intelligence still has some way to go - the thread that will still be here when it stops being true

the cast means i'll def check out the first few episodes

im a big fan of jeffrey wright recently

I rewatched the film a few months ago, it is not "great."

i did like how Dick van Patten has maybe the 5th-biggest role, and perhaps 10-12 lines of dialogue

Yul is awesome obviously

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6Z__wbpDa4

yeah, I feel like there's almost no way this isn't incredibly stupid

in

in

someone told me ed brubaker is a writer on this... true?

looks like it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westworld_(TV_series)#Episodes

I've enjoyed Vincenzo Natali's tv directing work, so the episode that credits Brubaker as primary writer and him as director sounds promising

I think they may have broken some kind of record for Idiot Plot in a television series - only 40 minutes in and you have a dude interrupting his boss to say "Isn't this a Bad Idea?"
Followed by the schtick villain played by Ed Harris doing schtick and then uh

Oh maybe next week they'll use string arrangements of songs that have the color "blue" or "white!"

Anyway, I think I can dig it, even if it does turn out that Jeffrey Wright and/or Sidse Knudsen turn out to be robots, which btw I'm just calling that now
If they DO run with the color-by-song-title arranged-for-faux-period-instruments idea, I think I'll actually end up liking it even more

helped by the fact that I was expecting a hot mess, I enjoyed that. I wonder if it was the pilot or the subsequent episodes that HBO had to retool?

the review I read that said it was kind of formless for four episodes... what kind of narrative devices and exposition are these people looking for?

already starting to get the suspicion that stockpiling all your decommissioned androids in the basement, when the glitchy oldest models have been known to just "wake up," might not be the best idea

imo Anthony Hopkins is the surprise android out there in the world, and the original creator is in cold storage or dead somewhere

watching the original film, a couple of funny moments. The scientists / engineers around a table.. "in some cases the robots have been designed by other computers. We don't know exactly how they work." ?! WHAT

James Brolin looks like Patrick Bateman

Yul Brynner so creepy

http://i.imgur.com/EDCBW3B.jpg
1880s American Psycho

"check all the snake central mechanisms during tonight's repair period."

this is about like sex robots in the old west or something right

I think post-LOST sci-fi television really needs to quit it with the obvious tvtropes.com twist-begging garbage. I want to like this show, but we're being set up for:

* There's a DELOS globe in the sub-basement. Delos destinations! So the old west is just one, hmm hmm wonder what else is out there

* None of the "guests" have any home life that we get to see - nobody really doing a departure from future NYC, nobody changing into their period wardrobe, etc. OMG IS IT EVEN ON EARTH? IS ANYONE oh oh oh oh

* Wait up folks what if they're ALL ROBOTS?

I desperately hope there's no pan away to space, no obvious reveal that Jeffrey Wright is really an android, or god forbid some bullshit about how Ed Harris is an antihero (as opposed to the other obvious non-twist that he's the human version of Yul Brenner's Gunslinger because SCRIPT - FLIPPED!)

There's a lot to be said for Mad Men pulling the Dick Whitman reveal early and then moving on from it. But that was a show ostensibly about a real period and with real events to serve as milestones for the characters. SF/near-future TV needs to try harder to be like The Expanse or even, yeah, Firefly, and get away from stunts altogether. The audience is too ready for it and that makes it impossible to enjoy.

And by "the audience" I mean me and by "impossible to enjoy" I mean I have fun watching it but the way I watch it is thoroughly tainted by an unruly compulsion to decipher the entire production as if it were some kind of goddamn cryptic crossword and I blame M. Night Shyamalan & Chuck Palahniuk for everything. People with five syllable names wtf

You are making me not want to watch this

I should get paid

The Simpsons parodied this book/movie when the family visited the Duff beer theme park. If you liked that episode, you might also like this movie. /amazon.comrecommends

the last scene was telegraphed throughout the entire first episode but was still satisfying

I see the only book was a novelization; it was an original screenplay by Crichton in '73. He has nothing directly to do with this series, right?

well, he's dead

haha

i don't keep track, i assume it was some horrible theme-park mishap

longer version would be that Abrams mentioned having talked to Crichton 20 years ago or so about remaking it as a movie but nothing came of it

I think he got some sort of weird climate change-related cancer, of which he did not believe

What I've read (spoilers?) said that in the first 4 eps provided to critics, there is no robot rampage/human death toll. The question the review raised is how a theme park robot rampage can sustain a series, let alone a second season.

season two is when the robot virus makes it to eastworld

i watched last night and was entertained.

tomboto's Lost reference above seems apt. i watched Lost. all of it. i groaned many times. in some ways it was really predictable and in others just completely nonsensical. sometimes it was a really fucking awesome show. i ordered pizza with friends and watched it together when new episodes came out and tolerated the one friend in the group who was way waaaaaay into Lost.

let's just hope westworld doesn't end up putting out the equivalent of a Jack's Tattoo episode, though

eastworld is the set of cheers

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=115066

Is there a Five Night's at Freddy's Netflix series in development?

xpost
so it has already begun

I enjoyed it

i ordered pizza with friends and watched it together when new episodes came out and tolerated the one friend in the group who was way waaaaaay into Lost.

i did this, too, and it actually makes me a lil misty about LOST

i thought this was fine, and about what i would expect from a pilot ep. trailer had my expectations higher, tho

Is it just me or was Harris channeling a little bit of Peter Weller

"The question the review raised is how a theme park robot rampage can sustain a series, let alone a second season."

i was under the impression this was a one-off limited series

anyway, I really liked this. you all are picky

It's not. They've talked about doing five seasons

This is basically HBO's big roll of the dice for a post-GOT blockbuster

@ least no horses will get shot, probably

this was fun, but tempered by the post-LOST certainty that it will be sloppy and insulting within four eps

scriptwriting award of the year goes to [looks at robot while holding old photo of son] "good as new huh? sometimes i envy your forgetfulness"

iirc LOST really went off the track when Abrams wandered off to do other things

Person of Interest was kind of ho-hum and samey after a while but never went off the rails, so there's hope?

doubt i will become accustomed to softly jarring danish lady accent

appalled by the brit bloke. could they not tell or were they just not interested in the difference between annoying character and godawful acting

must admit i smirked @ old timey piano 'black hole sun'

took me quite a while to place the tune

friend of a friend at HBO said this was in development hell for years and went through a million script revisions. allegedly, HBO is in a panic over not haven't a replacement queued up for GoT

they kept pushing back the release, maybe they have been editing the hell out of it

this wasn't terrible or anything but if there are any riffs left to be had on "ai-becomes-sentient" i don't think they're coming here.

they kept pushing back the release, maybe they have been editing the hell out of it

IIRC HBO wanted a more expansive/solid game plan than had been prepared re: the overall plot and future seasons, which set them back 6-9 months or so. Not at all unreasonable considering the investment.

so was ed harris's scalp map a way to the computer room

or maybe a path to where the rogue bots hide

I assume the map is like the secret of the lost woods in Zelda; the Delos game worlds can't be exited by just riding off into one direction or another (they mentioned nobody's found the edge, right?) but you can hit the boundaries by following a specific pattern, whether you intend to find game HQ + host storage or any other "off map" location.

good theory!

You'd have to be some pathological rich fucker to play this enough times that trying to ride off until you hit the edge would be a goal during a trip. Maybe that is what Harris's character has become.

Oh I thought that was clear that that was exactly what he was

Didn't people escape from one World set up into at least one other in one of the 70s films?
Technology and expectations of technology have probably changed massively in the interim though.

2nd EP is up on HBO's streaming platforms

You know, to paraphrase Jurassic Park, the is the theme park where the Pirates of the Caribbean try to eat you. Which was probably a Westworld reference to begin with.

i thought this was pretty good. kept me going at least. great cast!

the physical character work for the malfunctioning hosts was great and really pretty unnerving, esp louis herthum (the dad) and michael wincott (the old bartender in the basement). i'm kinda hoping the show lets wincott stick around, i've always liked that guy.

funny tho in a world of 'big data' the menacing conversation between the manager and the young writer seemed pretty obvious. what does management get out of this? idk endless data on what people like to eat, watch, kill, fuck etc

You'd have to be some pathological rich fucker to play this enough times that trying to ride off until you hit the edge would be a goal during a trip. Maybe that is what Harris's character has become.

― dr. mercurio arboria (mh 😏), Thursday, October 6, 2016 11:51 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh I thought that was clear that that was exactly what he was

― Anacostia Aerodrome (El Tomboto),

i thought they were setting ed harris up to be the detective trying to uncover the mystery (AKA the avatar of the viewer) and/or save the robots from their plight?

industrial espionage maybe

yeah I dunno I think he's more of a seeker, having decided that there's something deeper than acting out hero/villain fantasies
whether that's using the simulacrum of the world that's in robot form to find human truth, or finding the meaning of artificial life is yet to be seen

that's the ~deep thought~ stuff that I'm assuming with be telegraphed very obviously -- the androids approaching human, humans returning to the well of simulation in the hopes of finding what being human even means

took a sick day from work, sorry for any incoming trite thoughts coming from cold medication and Westworld rewatching

if i didn't know better i'd say the character could be a commentary on the psychosis of trying to find the outer limits or glitches in any game; he's the "x0.5 A presses" guy

yeah, possibly unfortunately crossed with the people on LOST who kept turning over rocks looking for secret maps

If you'd given me five minutes to come up with my most withering parody of a johnny nolan jarjar abrams joint there's a good chance it would open with a v.o. saying "have you ever questioned your reality"

yeah it needed some better dialogue for that stuff. playing shrink to 19th century people as a framing method for getting diagnostics on a robot is a fun li'l writing challenge.

i miss milch :(

had my issues with the pilot but crazy old dad robot quoting shakespeare and freaking out was genuinely unsettling/good though

whoever that guy was he's a pretty good actor.

When they said he was quoting from his old modules I started hoping that at some point a cowboy will glitch and start screaming about an incoming asteroid field/orc horde, loads of AI prostitutes freaking out wondering what orcs are

Nice to know I'm finally getting to see a big-budget show with a soundtrack inspired by Richard Cheese & the Moog Cookbook

LOL at the old-timey Radiohead. Second episode better.

Is there a background database around that says when this is set and how many Worlds there are or anything.
Currently having to skip back to see how the Roman Polanski guy apparently steps through a door from the resort (presumably real) world onto a moving train.

Interesting move to introduce the (human) point of entry / audience surrogate, if that's what he is, in ep 2. Also unexpected that he's a McPoyle

I'm really enjoying this so far. Most of the puzzle-box shows since Lost have too sloppy or self-conscious about their mysteries, but this was fun. The Ed Harris sequences in the 2nd episode were all really gripping. And it's glossy and distracting enough to ignore how boring the dialogue has been so far.

i need to try this more seriously but even a glancing attempt suggested this is another sexploitation heavy series and i am fucking tired of this shit.

leigh alexander had some good tweets about his as a pretty brilliant critique of gamers and video games

for once I want to skip all the analysis and I'm just curious about this new story that Hopkins's character has created

w/r/t sexploitation: i read an article with the writers/producers where they made it pretty clear that an interrogation of exploitative violence (sexual and otherwise) is very much the whole point. might end up being a case of having their cake and eating it too, but i'm hoping that they take it seriously

Currently having to skip back to see how the Roman Polanski guy apparently steps through a door from the resort (presumably real) world onto a moving train.

i'm not entirely sure about it yet, but i'm thinking that westworld is VR and by the time he was in the wardrobe he was already in the virtual world

ed harris's character's quest is apparently not to break the fourth wall of westworld but some sort of deeply-hidden storyline that was scripted but nearly impossible to do?

Interesting move to introduce the (human) point of entry / audience surrogate, if that's what he is, in ep 2. Also unexpected that he's a McPoyle

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Monday, 10 October 2016 14:12 Bookmark

v disappointed he didnt meet the android pouring milk everywhere

[SPOILERS] episode 3 trailer looks fire though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPKGXgS3Fl8

regardless that they making truman show guy who also looks like robocop do it, i literally cannot deal with the dharma initiative scalp map horseshit every synapse in my brain is having nam flashbacks

jeffrey wright bedroom twist was bad

argh harris is the man in black too i forgot

I'm glad someone else thinks Ed Harris is partially channeling Peter Weller

So, since the hosts can apparently get infections, I guess that answers another question I had - can you eat the synthetic animals? I'd assume so. And: do they charge you an extra fee for that?

can you eat the people, and are they any good with bbq sauce

they can eat each other, that dude who has GREAT STORY IDEAS included auto-cannibalism in his pitch, which lol

I was wondering about VR but they do keep spending time fixing what seem to be physical androids.

hopkins and the boy in the desert: i should watch it again; i couldn't tell if the boy was a host or not

but hopkins said he had a vision (?) of a town with a white church. i wonder if his next great storyline is to let the guests build a town, settle permanently (open world expansion pack is always building your own place right) (hbo to david milch: drop dead)

he tells the boy not to come there again and he like blankly accedes so yeah. it's unclear to begin with cos he says he's "on holiday" which doesnt scan as a period detail, but i guess it is

they are def hinting at guest/host stuff tho

didnt mib say something like "i've been coming here 30 years i was born here"?

i couldn't tell if the boy was a host or not

the way he dismissed him and told him not to go near that spot again seemed like a command to me, so i figured he was a host
xpost

i ~think~ MIB snuck in a qualifier, like "it's like i was born here"

cuz like the dude is clearly waaaaay older than 30yo

i was a little confused about the interaction with the boy, too -- thought the commands at the end made it clear that he was a host, tho

also: the gun that dolores digs up at the end --- might this be a "real" gun that can harm guests (ie MIB)?

OH MY GOD THE DOUCHEBAG MCPOYLE BUDDY ACTOR IS PAOLO FROM NIKKI & PAOLO OH CHRIST IN HEAVEN NOOOO

at the end of the maze is damon lindelof who turns direct to camera and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯s as mib tearfully deletes his thirty year event log and starts all over again from the beginning

it was probably not intended to be read as such but a team of people in hazmat hosing the semen and blood off a room full of inert extras isn't such a bad commentary on HBO's product either (do u see)

xp really feel like my life has been improved by ignoring lost totally

30 years would be the age of the written programme which wouldn't necessarily corelate with the apparent age of the character.

Is he like a white blood cell cleaning up the set up or something?

he's a guest! which is why his actual ("actual") age is relevant

I was wondering if he was definitely a guest. That isn't going to be the twist - that he's a higher level of programming that people would assume is a guest because he appears to appear from the outside while he actually doesn't. Not sure anything's been established enough so far to give him an external background story, has it?

Did wonder on hearing that line about him being born thereabouts if that was some form of a clue.

i thought it had been leaked ahead of time that he was a guest (vs a host, like in the original)?

also seemed like he was being treated like a guest by the folks in the control room? "should we slow him down?" "no he can do what he likes" or something to that effect

it was probably not intended to be read as such but a team of people in hazmat hosing the semen and blood off a room full of inert extras isn't such a bad commentary on HBO's product either

I thought this was fully intentional, a "show 'em" bookend to the "tell 'em" line by the black hat guest in the beginning about guns and tits, man

pretty sure he's a guest who fully believes that he's found his true self by visiting Westworld, hence the disdain for all the "beginner" plots and reminiscing about all the times he's experienced things. "born here" is some evangelical-style rebirth stuff, or at least that's how it's presented so far

How about the white-hat nebbish introduced in this episode is actually Ed Harris 30 years prior.

*cocks eyebrow, extends pointer finger, taps temple 3 times*

unless they go completely crazy with a future setting, all the entrances/exits are via elevators and hidden doors
the train bit seemed to be elevators dropping them into the staging area into the world, with the train "coming out of a tunnel" to go across the landscape toward the town

reminds me a little of disney world, with the employee/entertainer doors being all over the park but very thinly disguised. so many locked/fake doors that aren't somewhere you'd want to wander, so you never think about them being actual routes that just aren't for visitors

I visited WDW in high school with my school orchestra and we played a little concert on one of the stages. The transition from "on set" to the "back stage" area is kind of jarring -- you never realize how many little details are set up to make things seamless inside the park until you go through a gate and suddenly everything is very functional instead of ornamental and there's a giant rack of costumes just sitting off to the side

unless they go completely crazy with a future setting, all the entrances/exits are via elevators and hidden doors
the train bit seemed to be elevators dropping them into the staging area into the world, with the train "coming out of a tunnel" to go across the landscape toward the town

― dr. mercurio arboria (mh 😏), Monday, October 10, 2016 7:19 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

was why I asked since it would break away from basic physical laws in a rather too magical way wouldn't it?
But it does seem that he goes down a corridor, through a door and is on a carriage in a moving train and the process is followed shortly afterwards by his friend.
You do see the light moving through the glass windows of the closed door in a way very reminiscent of a lift but it's onto a moving train.

Is the resort still called Delos in the reboot?

Yes.

Theory: white hat McPoyle introduced in this ep is past version of Ed Harris, his black hat friend gets killed, possibly by him, and the buried gun belonged to black hat friend. This season is going to be one long MIB origin story.

Also what's with the mouth on the lady scientist? She cursed more in one scene than all the faux saloon brawlers have together so far.

A dirty glass of cheap whiskey says white hat mcpoyle runs into Michael Wincott's host at some point and the music goes WAWOWEWAAA

Harris said "In a sense, I was born here"

it's shown in the first episode that the backstage area is actually in the same landscape as the park btw

You do see the light moving through the glass windows of the closed door in a way very reminiscent of a lift but it's onto a moving train.

It's on to a train car that seems to have some movement but the question "how do we get there?" seems like it'd be kind of silly if it felt like they were on a moving -- I figured they're dropped into the train car that has some illusion of movement, and the actual movement is when it pulls out of the "tunnel"

like idk maybe there's a teleporter but the simple explanation is they're dropped into a non-moving train that starts moving once everyone is on board

Dressing room car is on underground rails below the western train on parallel tracks - car switches on to a diagonal or perpendicular cantilever track, is carried up into a temporary gap between the western train cars, guest steps through door into the saloon car, dressing room rolls back down to underground tracks, western train cars close the gap.

I could draw this for you

it seems like there would be an easier way to transport the guests to the train

perhaps the guests could walk out onto a platform and step directly onto the train

Retrograde

televator

My 2nd favorite part of our cruise to Alaska was the opt-in guided tour of the engine room and all the kitchens and the bridge and such.

Kind of sad that you apparently have to ride for miles and serial murder a bunch of "crew" to get the same experience at a Delos resort. I'm just saying

well, they told you that was the engine room and the kitchen

could just be the show version they present to tourists

Every vacation you take is really just you and your fam buying some seats on the front half of the snowpiercer train. Think about it.

the simple explanation is they're dropped into a non-moving train that starts moving once everyone is on board

― dr. mercurio arboria (mh 😏), Monday, October 10, 2016 1:52 PM (forty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thought this was p clear tbh

also man i would totally love a tour of the behind the scenes of an alaskan cruise ship that sounds boss

It is! Also I never knew cruise ships are all hybrid and have been for years (decades now I assume?). The fuel is only used to drive generators. Everything else including the propellers is electric.

huh --- i guess that makes sense, subs/etc are the same. as are, iirc (and to get back on topic), modern locomotives

Man I'm loving the Disneyland allegories- Hopkins is Walt, "The fans come back for the little details" etc. Agree that the maze is a super advanced thing for special fans like Club 33 or something. Thinking Ed H is more of an Adult Disney rather than a video game freak.

Is there some form of leger de main with a train in one of the original films. Not seen either in quite a while but am getting images of that from distant memory. Like they actually project the locale supposedly passed through onto something visible through the windows.

I like this fine. It is pretty. I'm worried that it's dramatically flimsy, though. I fear that its potential success is predicated on a series of gotcha reveals about who is/isn't a robutt, and the game-within-the-game, and moments of drawing back a curtain to say ~look, the answer was in front of you the whole time, see? ~ and that such things are weak devices for a continuing series. There are a lot of characters with storylines that are being dribbled out in miniscule proportions, and the rapid shuffling of plots seems designed to make it seem like more has happened than really has.

Things I think have happened.

The blonde robot lady is an old robot who has been used in other modules, and she's got a gun and is becoming conscious and maybe free-willed. .
So is the guy who was her father, but isn't her father any anymore because another guy is her father now.
Anthony Hopkins plays David Attenborough, and he's up to something and is releasing a new DLC that nobody knows about. Possibly he is a robot. A church, a child, and a snake are involved. He can control the snakes, but probably will die rom a snakebite.
Jeffrey Wright has a robot wife, or not?
Thandie Newton wakes up mid-surgery, and runs around nekkid in the backstage area.
The Good StoryLine Guy doesn't understand anything.
There's a lot of drama laid on pretty thick w/r/t to the humiliation of the robots. It is laid on by humiliating the robots, and having people stand without clothes for the pleasure of the viewing audience.

I like the idea that Hopkins' character might die from a snakebite, like Cleopatra and the asp. What did we do before Chekhov's Gun?

waited for the play to start

like, this show seems to be fairly unclear on the distinction between mystery, suspense, and dramatic irony, and feel they are all equally compelling. but mystery occasioned by not knowing significant crap because of deliberately blindered POV characters is a pretty weak form of engaging an audience. and it doesn't reward repeat viewing. and if mysteries are just mysteries because the camera cuts away at significant times or the characters are super laconic, or if they whisper things the audience can't hear it's just kind of a neener-neener-neener from the show's writing staff.

imo Jeffrey Wright is the robutt and has no idea but the boss who is banging him and David Attenborough both know

I think good storyline guy thinks he's Quentin Tarantino writing a spaghetti
western but he's more like the Boondocks Saints guy writing a John Wayne movie

That is an excellent analogy, we're just trading compliments now

You guys have seen blade runner , right?

Cause it's the same shit

I'm seeing a lot of Miller/Darrow's Hard Boiled in this.

Caprica did it well!

Blade Runner had a lot more going for it than wondering who was/wasn't a synthetic iPods or whatever

I want them to show the pre-Wild Bill android and it's Chappie

Caprica was fun as I recall. How come people who imbue synthetic life with consciousness always seem to smoke btw?

noir affectation + forbidden habit that is still relatable

if it didn't smell horrible, stain everything, make you look like a melted candle and cause long-term health problems, it'd be great

all things that replicants don't care about and fictional cigarettes don't cause

They fixed all that stuff in the future

Notice we haven't see anyone vaping

The Einger: Our Craziest ‘Westworld’ Theories

I like Jason Concepcion's theory that the characters are modeled on Bartle's MUD player taxonomy. But I thought you guys would appreciate this:

Alison Herman: My craziest, most out-there Westworld theory is that … I refuse to have a Westworld theory. I do not believe there is anything to theorize about. What we see is genuinely what we get. Take that, Reddit!

Hear me out: Like so many lab rats, we’ve been trained to associate Nolan projects with batshit-crazy reveals. Add in J.J. “I Gave a TED Talk About How Much I Like Mysteries” Abrams and you’ve got a rock-solid case for the logic that most of the internet, including this question, is following, i.e., that something big is coming down the pipeline, and it’s our job to find out what it is. But what if Abrams and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy Nolan are one step ahead of us? What if they’ve gone so far into twist territory that they’ve come out the other side? What if the twist is that there is no twist, and the most out-there speculation you can make is that there is no speculation to make?

they only dropped episode 2 early because of the debate, I guess

was kind of hoping I could watch it earlier this weekend

Man, Elsie (the lady host-technician) really hates her, uh, work environment

The first time they shot that scene, instead of explaining what the bicameral theory of the mind is, Jeffrey Wright just belched. Should've stuck with the first take.

if I wrote this: Anthony Hopkins is the robot created by Arnold, Arnold is hiding in the park and the map is his

Let it be said that I kind of want to give the third episode a hug for blowing up most of my hypotheses and making me just look forward to whatever happens next. Damn the guns of Chekhov! I'm kind of genuinely worried about a couple of these people now!

Anthony Hopkins' character streamed bone tomahawk

~on TCM, of course~

OK goddamnit, I'm in for the season.

$40,000 a day huh?

lol Sufjan

There's still been no real anchoring time evident has there? I mean only times have been relative. Ed Harris storyline already being 30 years old, Anthony Hopkins having set the park up a certain amount of time ago. So could be 30 years or upwards away from now, just needs a time line where life like seeming androids are invented and computer memory has somewhat advanced.

Otherwise main points of technology are that hand held device related to the office landscape.

So still wonderig when it is actually set, though not sure how relevant to the story that is

Hoping the Julian Jaynes allusions are going to be a recurring theme!

uh, was that the smoke monster I heard?

they named it Arnold

fantheory where westworld is secretly revealed to be a prequel to lost and the island is the ruins of a theme park gone wrong

My theory is that westworld is just an adjunct to Wally world

going back a bit, i thought it was pretty clearly telegraphed that the boy Ford talks to in the desert is himself as a child (both British, both costumed in white shirts and black pants; the talk about the remark "both" their fathers made about boredom). not sure why he would make a host of himself

the fact that we don't get to see "arnold" in flashback suggests to me that arnold either doesn't actually exist, or that arnold is someone we've already been introduced to.

i'm a little puzzled about dolores' disappearing-reappearing gun.

she's glitching, for sure

tbh i have had those days

I saw that as rapidly flipping back and forth between the memories of all the variations on that scenario that she's lived through.

Super into this btw, which I did not expect.

did not expect to hear "Pissed up in SE1" on the piano roll this week.. the show is constantly bringing a smile to my face. will Wyatt's crew hurt the new guest? was Teddy tortured, or....?

really weird feelings about the implied rape revenge dynamic going on here

This is pretty neat

http://www.polygon.com/tv/2016/10/17/13306082/westworld-dolores-bioware-npc

This season is going to be one long MIB origin story.

I scanned this thread a bit before watching the first episode and was waiting for Michael Ian Black to show up.

I was waiting for Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones

what the hell maze game

Good to know that in the future bucket wheel loader technology hasn't changed one bit.

Also we seem to have gotten an answer to a question I had about whether 100% of the life in the park was artificial - Ford says he and Arnold were responsible for every blade of grass - but how does the ecosystem work then?

it was rhetorical

Does Delos have other themed parks juxtaposed to Westworld in this? The space they have seems vast as it is.

In the movie there were other theme parks--one of them Ancient Rome--but nu-WW runners say this isn't the case here (though they have lied before)

I'm currently a host in Midwestworld. We're self-aware that this is a simulation but it's mundane enough that I just kind of deal with it.

I don't think it was rhetorical. I think the ecosystem really is supposed to be fully self-contained and artificial.

going back a bit, i thought it was pretty clearly telegraphed that the boy Ford talks to in the desert is himself as a child (both British, both costumed in white shirts and black pants; the talk about the remark "both" their fathers made about boredom)

patron sailer completely otm, think this is meant to be clear

i didn't pick that up at all.

this is holding my interest but i'm kind of planning on it getting ropy and stupid pretty quickly here. i feel like it's doling out its secrets in irritatingly small pieces but i guess that's the form innit.

it's unclear to me in a not-pleasing way exactly what kind of diagnostic alerts and real-time monitoring the managers have. you'd think if there was a set procedure for dealing with hosts that start to have strange ideas, then something like thandie newton discovering her earlier drawings of hazmat men would set off alarm bells.

otoh i like the idea that the software for fake-consiousness is so complex that they are stuck w/ using the conversational 'interface' and limited logs to figure out what they host was 'thinking'

i don't think the show has really captured what a game-player's mentality is, the good guy dork and evil brosexual are a snooze. there's something about a double consciousness that doesn't have much to do with "morality" -- wanting to really enjoy and get into 'character' as part of an immersive experience, but at the same time level up, acquire shit, maximize your time, see the outer limits of the design, fuck with the rules, etc. the show is def too self-serious to be all that insightful about how ppl behave in sims and what that might mean.

the scene between hopkins and the danish manager was pretty tense and unsettling but idk corporate conflict between R&D and bean-counters is not usuall so operatic. it all seemed a little unprofessional if u ask me.

The quest to find Wyatt
- Secret origin of nice guy gunslinger who previously had no real backstory
- Black hat's quest finds tattooed snake woman who is searching for Wyatt
- Wyatt has some demon cult, the native americans have figures of the WW technicians that resemble Hopi kachina dolls and some backstory that they view them as walking between worlds

The quick cut from the revelation snake lady's plan is to bust into the prison to black hat being on the prison transport was something I didn't quite catch originally. A prison break always happens but it's triggered early (with the exploding cigar gag!)

"Where are you from?" "Same as you, don't you remember?"
camera pans down to little girl's sketch in the dirt of the maze pattern
orion's belt -- it's not orion's belt, but the lines and dots look like they could be laid over the maze as a map with waypoints

"a world where you can do anything you want -- except die"
who is it that really can't die? the guests can't be killed, but the hosts are repaired, repurposed, or put in storage

desert hills aren't 100% safe regardless what the robots are supposed to do. maybe the guy just tripped or drowned or something.

I hope for a multi-season mystery of what happened to arnold, then they reveal he accidentally tripped and hit his head on a rock. Or maybe it was auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Arnold is Dolores you guys

Can't spell Dolores Abernathy without A R N O L D

I hope for a multi-season mystery of why in the name of fuck they leave the bullets inside the hosts sometimes. Maybe they'll leave it completely unanswered!

Didn't get how a request for explosive use was communicated. & is that something that happens every time a guest improvises an apparently spontaneous plan with danger involved.

Just caught one of the story moderators or whatever the HQ job is called responding to the call & giving ok.

I guess that was just to communicate that THEY ARE WATCHING EVERYTHING

But I guess they are NOT ACTUALLY WATCHING EVERTYTHING if Thandie Newton can bury all those pictures without being noticed

Is taht down to her being a host not a guest. & they've only been expecting hosts to follow pre-programmed storylines that they know the parameters of for the main part.
BUt looks like AI is becoming stronger even if it is just old programmes corroding and running into each other which isn't a way I thought those things worked. Certainly not to take on a life of their own.
But maybe I'm thinking of things in a more binary way than things will turn out to be. But I thought that was still the basic model idea for programming anyway.

They're not watching everything, just the guests.

That's not true. It's also been shown that they watch the hosts to check if they're deviating from their loops. The logistics of running the park seem all over the place though, bascially whatever's required to fit the (show's) plot

last week stumble, this week faceplant. four episodes i told u

WW has the feel of one of those quickly vanished post-Lost shows from a few years ago (like Alcatraz) but one that sat in development and had a lot of money and stars thrown at it

Was brusque scando business woman scratching her nose while mentioning that she was sitting in the same chair she sat in when she visited with her parents meant to be a hint that she's a robot

What if all the guests and staff are robots and all the hosts are human

or something

This feels a lot better than those post-Lost shows (not just because of the $$$ and actors)

I guess they didn't have the awesome feature of making us guess if x is a robot or not

But, yeah, the early maze conversation between ERW and Jeffery Wright did push the limits of "I'm going to be pointlessly vague about this to maintain suspense"

If you're interested, Vincenzo Natali has posted a handful of his storyboards for the recent episode on twitter: https://twitter.com/Vincenzo_Natali/status/790859254517395458

xp but also killed the suspense by sketching a lot of the mystery out immediately, it's already on action thriller rails

they are p meta upfront gamey about the rails tho so maybe there has to a deeper level to this etc zzz

That's not true. It's also been shown that they watch the hosts to check if they're deviating from their loops

That mostly seems to be the dumb QA team seeing if a robot has literally wandered off, not running brain diagnostics or anything.

I hope for a multi-season mystery of why in the name of fuck they leave the bullets inside the hosts sometimes.

Tbf they did have that little voice-over implying that the techs were rushed because QA wanted her back out right away.

At least they're making stabs at plausibility.

i like this show mainly because I like the actors and the set pieces but there are some annoying internal inconsistencies that don't make sense like, what is a day for the hosts vs what is a day for the guests? don't the hosts wake up every morning and repeat the same thing? then why don't the guests see the hosts acting out the same shit daily? and when do they clear the robot bodies away and clean them up? etc.

show is hella dumb but watching anyway

well yeah sex robots

like, there seemed to be a point where evan rachel wood is with Bernard that happens in the middle of the night when she's apparently also with dude from House of Cards by the campfire. Did they just come take her out of the scene? doesn't that screw with the sense of reality for the guests?

show is hella dumb but watching anyway

― Spottie, Wednesday, October 26, 2016 6:08 PM (eight minutes ago)

same

drink every time a new character is naked when they're introduced

finally caught up to this. i'm a vote for this show is fantastic.

OK that last bit with Ford + Dolores was fantastic

the beardo douchebag technician is even lazier than the black hat douchebag wannabe Delos-owner, though

Good to know our clockmaker god carries a pocketwatch in his vest THPPBT

oh shit actual goosebumps

this show just earned everything it's asked of me.

Given the Lynchian nature of some of the sequences in this ep, I think my idea that we're watching a couple of different timelines in the history of the park might still end up being the case - but as above, I don't care anymore. This is getting really good.

yeah this was an excellent episode, and the trailer for what's to come is rather exciting (thandie newton in a jumpsuit leading a swarm of armed invaders into the HQ)

Also this episode made it pretty clear - to me, anyway - that the park operators and hosts have more in common than they do with the guests, including that most of the park techs joke about being recycled or whatever as a means to stave off the anxiety that they might be a "host" themselves.

And did I miss it earlier or is the same technology used to repair and clean the hosts the reason why illness and disease have been eradicated in the "real world?" Has that been made explicit?

i thought this ep was pretty bad! gratuitous in its presentation, tedious in characterization, parsimonious in the various 'mysteries'

still hooked tho :/ fuckin hbo

the douchebag & dork nonbuddies are so uninteresting and unconvincing

This is the first episode where I really got in tune with Dork Nonbuddy (that is his name now, thanks): He put a lot of work into his "hmm, maybe I should shoot this robot that is choking my new BiL" look, and then again when it was time for the "why do I care so much about what you think, robot girl?" look, and then like four more times when he had to chew it up with no lines. I officially care about what happens to this guy that barely talks! That's good TV.

Dudes name is McPoyle always will be

his motivation is "i am a good man," but if there's any commentary on videogamers here it ought to just be "i don't have much interest in sex robots, also i'd like to see what the good-guy quest lines are on my first run through but my friend keeps capping the npcs, it's so annoying"

among repeat players you'd see the userbase coalescing into types if not factions: scuzzbags who just like to kill and fuck, push the limits of pvp violence and trolling; true LARPer types who get really committed to their character and the immersion of it (whether as hero or villain); and completionist/a-press weirdos who want to experience every last thing, map out the underlying rules/patterns and explore every weird glitch.

And those bathroom gamers who are secretly shitting by the hitching posts

are you a gamer, goole

I'm watching a few more of these, just started ep 4. I find the trick is to tune out the dialogue pretty much completely whenever one person has been speaking for more than 5 seconds. And simply finding other things to do during everything set outside of the park, in the control room or whatever, cause the "as you know gentlemen" is off the fucking charts in this thing

why is borgen even in this

meta commentary about emmy chasing in this latest 'sode

and the allure of turner network television syndication

lol

Cast
Main cast
Evan Rachel Wood as Dolores Abernathy, as the oldest host; she is a Western girl who discovers her entire life is an elaborately constructed lie.[4] Her aesthetic drew influences from Andrew Wyeth's painting Christina's World as well as Lewis Carroll's Alice.[5]
Thandie Newton as Maeve Millay, a host; she is the beautiful and sharp madam of Westworld.[6]
Jeffrey Wright as Bernard Lowe, head of the Westworld Programming Division and creator of artificial people, as well as the current manifestation of Nyarlathotep, who was called from beyond the darkness to unleash the inscrutable nightmare of maddening hellfire and mind-numbing insanity.[7]

I bet my kid can pronounce Nyarlathotep though

Basically I'm waiting for S1 to end and come out on DVD before I dive in.

man I really hope the McPoyle = Man in Black theory isn't true

all of the conversations of Anthony Hopkins, etc, seem to indicate we're seeing things that are happening contemporaneously and not two different time periods so uhhh idk how that could be the case

the main pieces of "evidence" seem to be the different versions of the Westworld logo in certain scenes and the fact that McPoyle and friend haven't interacted with many of the main characters other than Dolores. There's a lot more evidence that points to it not being true but that hasn't stopped the fanboys tying themselves in knots about it (and the show was created by a Nolan brother...)

spoiler: it's actually named for the guy who created it, Mr. West

"Wake up, Mr. West!"

"...or may I call you 007?"

kanye in wild wild west instead of will smith

The two-timeline thing doesn't really make sense, as the hosts they're interacting with seem to behave identically to the ones in all the other scenes

yeah. Especially given the MIB's speech this week about how different the old robots were and the grizzled prospector dude that Anthony Hopkins hangs out with

also Dolores' glitching is consistent w/ her scenes with Wright and Hopkins

Seemed odd that Dolores had interacted with Arnold 35 years earlier. Would have thought technology would have moved faster than that and the idea of continuance of memory wouldn't continue from unit to replacement.

Also wondered about weight of a unit/robot. Presumably has to feel close to human for a pleasure unit to feel right.

Haven't seen the show or checked in with this thread, but thinking of diving in and watching. How's it holding up so far? Promising? House of cards?

OK, episode one was pretty good, especially from a storytelling standpoint. Some of the (over) acting, especially of the humans, was questionable, and dialogue was dubious, but it's already pretty rich and deep and can go all sorts of places beyond its Blade Runner origins. Looking forward to episode two!

Keep it up! It gets really good in four and five

Seems like there's a good chance this series will become Lost after a while and stop making any kind of coherent sense whatsoever.

I thought you were my friend.

People once thought a ship made of iron would sink, so I could be wrong about this.

no doubt in my mind a series brought to you by the brain of jonathan nolan is going to turn into some bullshit before long

This is really addictive but not exactly satisfying so far. Hoping it learned some lessons on how NOT to do things from LOST. Will keep watching. Definitely a lot of potential.

a lot of this is v on-the-nose and i understand why ppl wouldn't like it but the obviousness doesn't bother me the tone is v evocative and the whole simulacra somehow turns out to have not entirely lost its appeal to me

I assumed with the park being an ongoing business that the robots wouldn't be that massively old so wondering how Dolores can have interacted with Arnold 3 decades earlier. Had thought the robots were about 10 years old at oldest and still then surprised taht robotic technology wouldn't be in a constant flux of updates. Also not sure to what extent an individual unit is being updated instead of totally replaced. I know that several different stories have been programmed into them over time but not sure about length of time. 35 years does seem longer than i would have thought for a working piece of technology to be kept going. Would think that there would need to be standards kept up for any public entertainment/interaction with technology with frequent inspections and insurance requirements etc.

Has there been speculation that there's more than one Dolores? One out there in the park being menaced by guys in hats, and another having deep conversations at HQ?

She sees herself in the Day of the Dead parade, or was that a hallucination like in the Tarot card scene. Lawrence seems to have been fixed so fast I thought maybe they have two Lawrences. Maeve appears to be on the repair table twice, a few minutes apart.

But on the other hand Bernard tells "his" conversation-Dolores that she needs to get back before she's missed.

Maybe we're meant to wonder exactly this. Maybe there will be a big reveal of an entire warehouse of Doloreses.

If there is more than one Dolores are they sharing memory/consciousness? Still not fully getting to waht level any of these things has an identity.

Was Dolores in parade a glitch memory of an earlier event?
& is everything on soe form of loop anyway. Or was that some brand new story.

Very weird if it is just a bunch of entities on some form of performance loop or at least one with restricted variables responding to being brought together. There is a high level of surveillance but is everything running on the idea of if certain criteria met then follow this path of behaviour until next criteria is met near binary programming. Not sure to what extent the moderators are hands on.

Yeah I think by "loop," Dolores more or less just comes out of the store and drops the condensed milk every X days, unless something happens to disrupt that loop (whether a guest intervention or a ripple from some other event). Then she has to go with the flow of that disruption. I gather that in normal operation (pre-episode 1) this was working fine, with the handlers only intervening occasionally. The reason the series focuses on the "now is the time when things start to go wornggg" is that it's more interesting than smooth sailing.

Nobody ever made a TV show called "everything is fine and everyone is making good decisions."

(Though I confess I'd probably watch a show like that, I know no one will make it, wah.)

i'd probably watch a show that was just guests fucking around in the park tbh. ultimate Let's Play.

Dollhouse was the same way. There were interesting bits of problem-solving and each mission was its own little world; that was plenty diverting enough for a half-dozen episodes in the mode of a procedural. But of course, to generate the overarching conflict narrative they always hurry to introduce the equivalent of OMG-the-AI-has-achieved-consciousness, OMG-the-robots-are-developing-autonomy.

Same storytelling formula shapes almost every sci-fi thing, because television is a perpetual motion machine and no one can ever just be happy and nothing can just keep going. You're not going to see Romeo and Juliet living in a nice brick house with some cute kids.

In the first episode they imply management has much grander ambitions than entertainment. I assume this is explored?

season 2 a robot runs for president

the twist: the other candidate is also a robot

don't blame me, I voted for the good robot

This is really addictive but not exactly satisfying so far. Hoping it learned some lessons on how NOT to do things from LOST. Will keep watching. Definitely a lot of potential.

― circa1916, Monday, October 31, 2016

Yeah it's all very *hmm mysterious* but 5 eps in there's still very little sense of goals or stakes. Nothing we're hoping for on a character's behalf, nothing that could be snatched away to dash those hopes... Establishing stakes and objectives and honest to god characters was something that LOST actually did quite effectively right from the start.

Just watched first ep of this. Cannot WAIT for the rest. In it converge many of my wheelhouse genres: wake up / start again movies like Run Lola Run, Edge of Tomorrow etc; the pathos of sentient AI a la Akta Manniskor i.e. Humans; and just general pulp SF and OH MAN is this some pulp. I like how almost every line of dialogue between Birgitte and the storyline guy has a gratuitous "fucking" in there. "There's someone on the FUCKING phone for you." None of the setup around the company who makes Westworld is believable in the slightest - yes, sure, you have horses walking around on immaculately vacuumed, spotlit carpets, you have principals taking enormous, company-risking decisions on a whim - Jeffrey Wright is terrible and his character appears to be an idiot - but all of it somehow doesn't dent my fondness for it. Probably because all the "in-world" stuff is so delicious, Ed Harris is fantastic (and tho I haven't seen E2 yet he seems like an obvious candidate to be the actual good guy?). I mean in REALITY (??) obviously the factory cranking out people/horses etc is piling them up in musty, sawdust-covered outbuildings like cordwood, rather than placing them delicately on wheeled stools in moodily-lit antechambers. I guess that's "atmosphere". Anyway I'd expire of happiness to see an Akta Manniskor crossover episode. Get Thandie Newton in one of these:

http://skreened.com/render-product/n/o/j/nojnawzsyazafagagqdc/image.skreened-t-shirt.camo-green.w460h520b3z1.jpg

In the 2nd ep we learn that Thandie's bot is getting long in the tooth, can't keep up. Ominously, her guest satisfaction metrics are down. The "assholes in Narrative" made her more aggressive, but our young troubleshooter says all Thandie needs is to be more in sync with the guests, more aware of their desires. Well yes, but - how? A number of plots suggest themselves - can Thandie be made to figure out this sort of thing on her own? Can she be taught it? Will she fail, and take out her frustrations on her masters? But the troubleshooter just goes "bump up her acuity and perception by 1.5" - oh well that was easy. Westworld is RIDDLED with moments like this. Constantly fumbling around with the basic rules of itself.

idk I think the main conflict there actually is "can she start to do things outside the confines of the park before her performance is so bad they just shelve her"

xpost to Tracer, yeah, basically my thoughts exactly after the first ep. It's such a rich concept that there are a lot of places it can go, despite the (inevitable) shitty stuff getting in the way of telling a good story. Not least on that front the notion this can sustain a multi-season arc, but whatevs, maybe it can, let's see where it's going.

mh I don't think I've gotten that far yet

Basically everything "in-world" is terrific and the rest of it is basically there for me to wonder who is going to have sex with who, next

Hahaha lol is anyone actually as potty-mouthed as the company employees are on this show? (Apart from 11-year-olds away at summer camp, that is?)

"We'll be fucked if these poor assholes ever learn how to fucking dream"

Alright alright, easy fella..

depends on the job and workplace

I usually only talk like that around my family, eh

OK I'm bingeing this

I wish they'd GET ON with Ed Harris and His Deal! Maybe i'm spoiled by this modern golden era of Too Much Story but this dutiful checking in with each member of the cast.. pushing each one ahead two spaces... is making me antsy. It's like a Parcheesi player who gets all his pieces out right away and makes them each take turns advancing toward home. (I feel this way about The Water Knife too, which I'm reading right now) Sometimes you just gotta TAKE A PIECE ALL THE WAY!

Also.. what about these storylines? These "subtleties" that make people come back again and again? What stories do we actual see? We knows there's whores OK, there's alcohol, there's bounties, some gunfights... and that's it! It's as if they'd taken the already cartoonishly foreshortened collection of wild west activities in Red Dead Redemption and made it even less varied.

it's a spaghetti western with robots you can fuck i mean

xpost Water Knife is awesome, would make a great HBO series.

The first episode had a family on a family adventure. Does this come up more, kids in the park? Anyway, the storyline stuff is just lazy writer shorthand I think for their programming, because yeah, if the "story" is you just head into the hills and shoot a bad guy, or listen to/repeat the same dialogue again and again, how often would you want to pay for that? (Obviously Ed Harris for one has something else in mind.) Though is Disneyworld any less "scripted," in a sense? Regardless, no wonder Crichton went with dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, because a zoo where wild animals and instinct and random chaos leads to disaster takes less set-up and thinking.

And yeah, the gratuitous profanity was like watching (listening to?) some bad English as a second language b-movie where in lieu of good dialogue they just sprinkle in a lot of tough guy/gal cursing. But still, I'm cool with the premise so far. The robot stuff is spooky and haunting, but I'm a sucker for that. (Ex-Machina was robbed of ... something. People taking it seriously?)

xpost Sorry I don't mean in the show; I mean in the park they've built. I don't see the evidence of what Hopkins was saying to hotshot narrative douche-bloke.

I love the fact that nobody at the company seems to have the slightest clue how anything works, the entire enterprise with all its risk and danger and complexity is "one line of code" away from wreaking all havoc on everyone

NB The most generous spin I can put on the effacing of race politics in the park is that OF COURSE they'd whitewash historical race politics in a game for the idle rich

-- START LOOP 1 --

Jeffrey Beardbreath: "Sir, the hosts have been remembering fragments from previous loops"

Anthony Oldman: "Yes.. well... keep me up to date on that"

Birgitte Danesker: "Jeffrey you'd better get your fucking shit straight, you ass-hole!"

Jeffrey: "Give me a break mom"

Ed Harris kills someone else

-- END LOOP 1 --

etc

Speaking of the idle rich, an inordinate number of them appear to not be interested in playing any sort of game or immersing themselves in any sort of past or story, they just want to walk into the Mariposa bar and start slaughtering strangers pell-mell which seems like.. I dunno not the most interesting way to blow 20 Gs

i'm saying

Is everyone on ludes on this show? I swear to god somebody could tell Jeffrey/Bernard his house was on fire and he'd be like "interesting"

feel like they've written all the office people to talk as if they're holding back some secret about what they're up to but haven't figured out what that is yet.

Blond tattoo badass is the greatest

well I figured the dark secret was that they fuck the robots but that's apparently not allowed for the most part

lol at robot corpsefucker guy

Odd choice to use the full Gran Turismo V opening credits for each episode but I guess it works?

Seems to have found its feet but I better not have to wait around another 3 or 4 goddamn episodes to find out what that map is

Yeah the opening credits sequence is really shit, especially considering the amount of time they have been pissing about with this project for.

sorry to be dimm but how did Dolores find the gun in the dirt.. and then in her drawer (which it instantly disappeared from).. and then in the haystack?

Some people like to keep a gun hidden in every room

When she finds the gun it's evident that she's hearing a voice in her head telling her where to look. At that point we may suspect it's Bernard's voice; we are later led to believe it's Arnold's. But it can't have been buried by Arnold - it was just in the dirt and not wrapped in anything (which would be bad for a gun in any case, but it certainly wasn't there for 34 years). Perhaps Ford or Bernard planted it there.

It does seem to disappear in the drawer, and it definitely appears suddenly in her hand in the barn. She didn't draw it from a pocket or root around in the hay. I'm not sure about this, but it may also be the gun that happens to be in her hand quite suddenly in Pariah when she and William are escaping from the Confederados.

One explanation: Ford, at least, can freeze hosts. Maybe someone paused the action, buried the gun. Later, that someone paused Dolores to remove it from the drawer. Then later paused the action and placed the gun in her hand so that she could shoot whatsisface.

I just want to say I love the opening titles

Maybe they'll do more with this later but... For a park in which robot sex is such a major selling point you'd think there'd be some fantasy option in-between having sex with prostitutes (which is probably something these rich guys do in the real world already) and raping a ranch maiden.

There is: they can bonk the blonde who meets William at the train and shows him the wardrobe room.

I agree that the scarcity of women other than hos is noticeable, but then that may have been true of yr Old West as well.

don't forget the, er, "varied" (t0tes boring) delights of Pariah

all the imaginative shortcomings of the park i chalk up to shortcomings of the clientele: they have focus-grouped the shit out of this place and yes, that is in fact the only sort of desired sex that is statistically significant

by the way, anybody else slightly dreading meeting "the board"?

I think it's more likely that the producers, having set themselves up for the parcheesi strategy narrative you described above, don't have time to introduce other imaginative sexy stuff that isn't part of the stories we're already following. There's not that much time to do world-building with other guests in the park, like "Marti" the gunslinger lady in Ep 3 or the family in Ep 1, the drunk guy who shoots Teddy in Ep 4 or the dorks who approach the MIB in Ep 5 (I think)

There was one lady guest in an early episode that went off with a hostess. & there seemed to be others on the train.

I wonder how long William and Logan are gonna be there for. Other guests seem to do like a weekend or a few days and then get back to their lives (presumably fairly busy, because rich). If they're an Executive VP and part-owner of a thriving business, their storyline can't last multiple seasons. Ed in Black supposedly has an active foundation and presumably a profit-making business of some sort, yet he's spent most of his time for 30 years wearing a fucking cowboy hat and carving up robots for fun.

We watched "The Truman Show" the other week with the kids, and something occurred to me. Truman starts getting suspicious when things start going wrong in his simulated world, but ... who the fuck would watch a 24/7 hugely rated reality show where nothing ever changes, and everything/everyone is more or less the same day in, day out? That's the dead-end of a "scripted" (within the show) WestWorld: a park like that would only be appealing, not just for repeat business but also first-timers, if things went off-script and allowed for surprises at least once in a while. Otherwise it might as well be the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride. (Insert "Jurassic Park" quote here.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKK4KmDlj8U

Truman Show was good in first season

when it was called "Baby Cam" and everyone felt really bad about themselves for watching

when dolores finds the gun in the dirt, then in her drawer, etc., i am pretty sure she is remembering finding the gun there in the past.

the dead-end of a "scripted" (within the show) WestWorld: a park like that would only be appealing, not just for repeat business but also first-timers, if things went off-script and allowed for surprises at least once in a while. Otherwise it might as well be the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride

Yeah but you can't fuck the pirates of the Caribbean

Not officially anyway

Disneyworld: After Hours.

Anyway, that gets back to the aforementioned sticking point that the only reason someone would presumably prefer a lifelike robot prostitute to a real prostitute is that they can kill and abuse them. But it's crazy to think WestWorld is a park that courts families but look out, don't cross the river, that is where rich psychopaths fuck and torture and kill hookers, like, I dunno, the "Hostel" films. For that matter, why the hell would families with kids even give a shit about WestWorld? Why would a kid give a crap if there were lifelike robots and fake horses walking around acting all wild west, which is as easy to simulate in the real world as, well, they do on the show? Save the cash and go to some living farm or colonial Williamsburg or something.

Hmm, wonder if I'm soon going to have more problems with this show than I first assumed. I'll give it a couple more eps, for sure.

We don't know what the real world is like yet. Obviously despite massive advances in medicine, children still die. People still smoke and drink. There is VR, so not only could people go to a Colonial Williamsburg, they could go on the holodeck, but they still choose Delos Destinations, and sometimes the kids come along. Vegas.

If the "real world" has effectively cured all disease, what did Ed in Black's foundation save that dweeb's sister's life from?

children still die

at least in robo-backstories they do

Bernard's roboticalness is totally a red herring you guys

Maybe the world is all run by humans, and this whole simulation is a way for them to study human behavior!

The big reveal is that the hosts were the real humans all along, and the HQ/processing/behavior control stuff was the simulation. Bernard and Ford and Elsie and them were the 'bots. Guests paid to be minor functionaries in the storyline of the unraveling of a purported robot theme park that is simultaneously being filmed for an elaborate reality show that has the premise "what if there were a wild west theme park staffed by androids."

But that's a false ending and it's actually all been engineered by hyperintelligent and insanely wealthy horses, who view it as a fun vacation because they're ironically nostalgic for the time in which horsekind was enslaved. You know, those quaintly barbaric times prior to the Equine Revolutions of 2092.

Maybe they are all robots programmed by super smart horses to think they're humans who are actually robots, coerced by implant or false instinct to build this elaborate theme park under the guise of it being for the "humans" when in fact it's for their benefit of the horses, who wanted a wild west town to run around in "like the good old days," before they were supplanted by cars, but lacked the thumbs and tools to get such a thing built.

super smart horses

These are really just a few cats taped together

They still need someone to do the coding for them, hence the robot people.

I have binge watched this and it's really catchy (although I could do with less violence, especially Harris : could someone take away his crazy knife !?).
the Lost parallel seems obvious, especially with the hatch/maze and suggested upthread, I suppose what's left of Arnold will be there (re-incarnated in a cyborg or something).
also, I don't think there's been a discussion about the idea that he or some hosts plan to destroy the park or something (I think it was said in the latest ep) ?
as for wyatt, it's not clear who/what he is but apparently he's a guest as he and his gang couldn't be shot by the hosts when they attacked them. but it's weird since it's Anthony Hopkins who apparently added this story in Marsden's program...
and about the park HQ controlling everything, beside the fact they didn't notice the drawings, as noted, apparently, they didn't notice the change in Dolores being able to shoot/kill other hosts (including a fly !) although the boss of HQ said she wanted to have a report on anything different...
anyway, so many questions...

homosexual II, you're right, it's actually much more plausible that (over the course of several loops) someone put the gun where she'd find it, let her hide it in the drawer, then removed it from the drawer and put it in the hay.

OTOH there's a part of me that wants to see this series reimagined in Colonial Williamfburg. You get a powdered wig and a musket, and you can either fuck a tavern wench or flirt with treason against the Crown whilst debating molasses imports in the House of Burgesses.

As a young Virginian I heard Colonial Williamsburg was hiring for a town drunk, and I thought: I've found my life's ambition. But it was not to be, alas.

Soderbergh is (maybe) making the Sot-Weed Factor as a 12-parter :D

I think it's amazing how watchable this show is despite having practically zero plot or compelling characters

Haha yes

indeed !
although I guess you're supposed to like Bernard (lost his son, tries to free/raise Dolores, seems to be a decent person...) and maybe Dork (facing his evil bro in law, saving the damsel in distress...).
but they're both so boring !
then there's Dolores who seems to be at the center of the story.

and regarding the character you have to hate, it's obviously between Logan and MIB !

Maybe you are supposed to like Bernard but in the context of a theme park where robot sex abuse is thoroughly 'OK' it is more than a little creepy that every time he does a deep dive into Dolores' psyche he always forbids her from telling anyone about it. 'Let's just keep this between you and me' gggghhhuuu

Speaking of which, it is a little weird how paranoid Bernard is about her telling anyone. She's a robot. If he says 'don't tell anyone' she won't. There isn't any grey area. So why's he so worried about it?

yeah. and it's not even like there's something really wrong in their conversations which would make it scandalous if anyone else knew.
I mean, it's not very different from what Ford does "officially" with various hosts.

Good point!

Dystopias be needing a Chosen Damsel, with a hidden nougaty center of badassness.

Anybody who knows their Shailene Woodley from their Hailee Steinfeld knows this. Dolores, Katniss, Bella from Twilight, whatserface from Divergent, River Tam.

Do I need to point out that the given name of the title character in Lolita is Dolores?

Arnold, Ford, Bernard, Ed in Black, and William McDork are all creeping on Dolores and projecting their own personal bullshit on her, almost bukkake-style. Ick.

I feel like they could be quietly phasing out that Bernard guy, like he could just not be in any more episodes and nobody would care. Borgen too - was she even in this last episode? Feel like I haven't seen her since her dinner with Hopkins in the holodeck or whatever that was, but I haven't really been paying too much attention. Did evil BiL expect there to be actual nitroglycerin in a theme park ride? idk this show is dumb as shit, unless at some point a character says "this narrative is dumb as shit", in which case it's TOTALLY CLEVER

ahah. I hadn't even thought about the obvious reason for fake nitro ! that said, MIB did have some explosives (which required an authorization from HQ... so I guess it wasn't REAL explosives ?).

also, what made MIB realize Lawrence was useless finally, after dragging him along for so long ?

bc he saw teddy who was an obv NPC upgrade

Originally MiB was amusing himself by sadistically torturing Lawrence; clearly he's interacted with him before. When the daughter provided clues about the maze, MiB may have figured he was on the right track. He used Lawrence's blood to revive Teddy (rather than waiting for the staff to fix him up and send him back out). That would have reset the storyline, I guess, which MiB would not have wanted to wait through now that he is on the scent of the maze. Sidenote: are all hosts the same blood type? Inquiring minds want to know.

Speaking of which, it is a little weird how paranoid Bernard is about her telling anyone. She's a robot. If he says 'don't tell anyone' she won't. There isn't any grey area. So why's he so worried about it?

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Friday, November 4, 2016 6:41 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he could be suspicious that a) the bots are able to communicate/infect each other with ideas inadvertently (a concept which the show seems to have left alone for a couple episodes now? after thandie got it?) or

b) some other person, staff or not, could be talking to her or running code on her or w/e

idk if the show is meant to be clear about this, but i think the bots recognize the corporate hierarchy? they respond to hopkins like he's some kind of wizard, but the rest of them have to have these clunky formal conversations.

Well, from what I understood, initially, MIB went after Lawrence for a very specific reason, after scalping the indian. Obviously he knew Lawrence had something special regarding the maze, it wasn't just about the simple pleasure of torturing (what an interesting sentence !).
This is why I wonder why he suddenly decided he didn't need him anymore (although he still kept him with him even after his daughter gave him some info about the maze). I don't remember clearly the scene when he sends the boy for some water cos he decided to kill Lawrence to save Teddy. I missed a detail, I guess.

Do u think the presumably very educated and expensive robot experts who have to rebuild the murdered robots at the end of the day also have to clean the ~body fluids~ out of them, or are there lower paid/more downtrodden employees who do this off-screen before that

it is strange how everyone in this show is either a dumbass or a robot, but maybe after six anxiety-inducing seasons of Game of Thrones it's nice to just watch some idiots hurtle towards catastrophe without having any other stake in it idk

xp Dolores has been shown to be able to lie to Bernard

xxposts : eheh, yeah I thought about the blood type issue too but forgetting they're robots I just thought "that's pretty silly, how does he know they're the same blood type..." !

well, about the lying thing, clearly, if she can lie to other people because he asks her to, she obviously can lie to him if someone else - Ford or.. Arnold - asks her to !

Had thought the robots were about 10 years old at oldest and still then surprised taht robotic technology wouldn't be in a constant flux of updates.

i think the answer to this was alluded to in the latest episode: when MIB mentioned that he opened up a host and it was beautiful inside. he was disappointed when they decided to go with the human-like technology for the hosts. it would seem that robotics technology continues to evolve and improve while human-bio-robotics has been perfected

also makes me wonder that if the human-bio-robotics is a perfect facsimile, then maybe the programming tech could be used on actual humans too?

Would be surprised if anything was ever permanently perfected. Thought everything was open to improvement unless laws and strictures were passed preventing it.

also makes me wonder that if the human-bio-robotics is a perfect facsimile, then maybe the programming tech could be used on actual humans too?

isn't it what the tech guy trying to revive the bird is all about ?

Wait, does Dolores lie to Bernard?

As I recall it, she lied to Ford - that is, she told Ford she hasn't spoken to Arnold in 34 years. Then she said something to the air along the lines of "I didn't tell him anything; he doesn't suspect."

What I take from this is that Arnold, before dying, conferred immortality upon himself by effectively uploading his brain into the cloud. He transferred his consciousness into the host-hivemind so that he can continue to manipulate events from beyond the grave. Arnold knew that the corporation would keep retiring and replacing individual 'bots, so he knew he wouldn't be able to live on if he only infected one host.

Note that Dolores is one of the oldest, but her original daddy had also been pretty well-used, in a variety of storylines. So he'd be a very good vector for transmission of the Arnoldvirus. Arnold MADE HIMSELF CONTAGIOUS, y'all.

oh wait, I think you're right, she lied to Ford, not to Bernard.

A friend of mine is very hyped about the "Ed Harris and dork guy are the same person" theory, citing Lawrence popping up very quickly and far away for the dork's story 'after' being killed by Harris. also Harris talking about how he saved the company at some point in the past (which i don't fully remember), and the brother-in-law talking about getting in on the company 'now'. i was not convinced, but it's looking more likely?

also i do not know anyone's character name in this show except for Dolores, had to look up the wiki when you all were talking about "Ford" and "Logan".

regarding names, same here : I had to look up on hbo's website first !
as for MIB being the dork, I doubt it (unless they change the latter's character dramatically in the next episodes/seasons). at this point I have a hard time imagining him raping Dolores (even if it's years later) !

also i do not know anyone's character name in this show except for Dolores, had to look up the wiki when you all were talking about "Ford" and "Logan".

lol ikr

if ed harris = dork and this show is taking place in 2 periods decades apart i am officially out, fuck that

isn't it what the tech guy trying to revive the bird is all about ?

yeah that's what i was thinking

If anybody is the same guy as another guy, look at Knee-Pants Kid, not the adults.

Knee-Pants Kid is either a simulacrum of Young Ford or of Arnold

if ed harris = dork and this show is taking place in 2 periods decades apart i am officially out, fuck that

pretty sure this isn't the case

I'll see this to the end but I'll be very surprised at myself if I bother to look at a second season

if ed harris = dork and this show is taking place in 2 periods decades apart i am officially out, fuck that

woah glitch in the matrix

I said Bernard when I meant Ford earlier

but the fact that she said "he doesn't know" in reference to Ford suggestss Bernard's "have you ever lied to me/don't tell anybody about this" stuff isn't going to do him much good either

I dunno about Ed Harris/dork being the same guy but those stories are definitely taking place in two different time periods

we do not see the MIB rape dolores. We see him get out a knife. I am pretty sure he was modifying her or something, or checking for maze clues.

those stories are definitely taking place in two different time periods

different days or weeks maybe? the daily resetting of the bots gives them a lot of outs on this...

my basic assumption is that like vg npcs the bots have short hourly/daily routines but if a guest gets involved with them in a longer narrative then they go off on that for the duration.

i haven't really put together what happened with 'lawrence' tho, seeing him pop up in badguytown read like it was meant to mean something but idgi

I had thought that was just pre-hanging Lawrence? Earlier in his routine before he'd been caught by the law? No? Keep in mind it was like 1am and I had imbibed a fair bit

Like, Lawrence gets Mad-Maxed for his blood, the park crew comes and fixes him up and then sets him back at the beginning of his loop, then our heroes run into him

those stories are definitely taking place in two different time periods

They have set up enough things so that if McPoyle does turn out be young MIB it won't be a shock: MIB having familiarity with the robots we see McPoyle interacting with, McPoyle learning that WW may be going under financially/MIB being given anything he wants (investor who saved the park?)

this neatly sums up the evidence for multiple timelines

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLli7Gc1ZBU

in any case, the show is definitely going out of its way to misdirect the viewer.

man i have some kind of allergy to ropy-ass theorizing and the marshaling of 'evidence' thereto. a mystery is a different thing than doing a puzzle!

try being into twin peaks rn :-/

Is it misdirecting or just leaving everything vague, a la Stranger Things, which ended its first season with a "well, that happened" indifference.

Eh for better or worse this show seems to be a puzzle box/theory-generating machine by design so AFAIC it's fair game to over-analyze and speculate about it.

re:misdirection: well, having Dolores fall into McPoyle's camp seemingly as a result of some recently recovered memory or whatever made it seem like the two stories were happening concurrently, but that could be some fucking-around-with-us stuff

yes i think you're right, don't mean to sound snappish

my preferred mode of engagement is to let those kind of thoughts spin out in the moment in a cloud of wonder and not commit them to youtube

I prefer to swish an ep around in my mouth for a few seconds and then spit it out into a cup

spreading the resultant paste, etc

I'm liking this series precisely for the fact that it is, for once, NOT driven by the "what happens next" strategy of engagement. It's actually a show that stays focused on its big ideas, themes, and a willingness to own up to its own artifice. It does a good job of being frank about the fact that its drama is all manufactured and manipulated, yet showing how the viewers of the show (us )are willing, like the "guests" in the simulation to be swept up in its fiction. It's a meta narrative about narrative. Like Blade Runner, it uses the idea of artificial people to bring virtual reality (virtual experience) into the physical world. And like any good story about virtual reality, it reminds us how much we define our own lives by self-imposed beliefs and arbitrary rules. So far, good stuff.

Thoughts on Fiction

Why don't the cartoon cat brothers just dial Maeve down to stupid obedience town when they have the controls right there? I can tolerate / justify a LOT of plot holes in my speculative fiction teevee, but seriously, if you got privs, just make her dumb again! Was this explained earlier and I didn't catch it?

they're dumb fuck-ups

^^^was wondering the same thing

also, why was she naked again?? also also if she was in a position to make demands, why didn't she just demand they max out her stats across the board

xp

they told her she could be anything she wanted, so she became....really excellent at bulk apperception but not like hand to hand combat, cmon maeve

wonder if she'll find out that bulk apperception is a blessing + a curse when she starts taking zoloft to deal w/ her existential crisis induced dyspnea

dear god if I ever wake up on a table with those two I'ma be like DIAL ME BACK DOWN TO CLETUS

*Spoiler*Guys I got an advance copy of next week's ep and you won't believe the identity of "Arnold":

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/d9/2b/a4/d92ba4064b56613cf7c609ba36d873d8.jpg

http://venividivici.us/sites/default/files/angolo-arnold-happydays.gif

i checked out on this episode. the moment of the whiny writer picking up the guest was the sloppiest hackiest writing i've seen in an HBO show like ever. couldn't get thru it. i'll probably go back but eh.

bu then it turns out she's not a guest right?

idk man i turned it off!

well so you missed the payoff! (i mean it wasn't much of a payoff but maybe not quite as bad as drunken scripter hits on cute guest)

the actor is so bad he makes the whole scene bad; i don't really think it was the writing

just going to discreetly mention that peter chung up there ^ is the creator and director of Aeon Flux icymi

i don't know why, but no matter how bad the acting is, or how obviously the characters get pushed around like chess pieces, i don't mind. there's something earnest and generous and sprawling about the show; it is Going For It, hurtling forward with conviction to god knows where. but probably my good faith is ultimately secured by a few really unshakeably great actors - thandie newton, ed harris. they keep me grounded, they keep the whole thing from flying away.

i liked seeing the resort/bar area of the park

No one noticed the Yul Brynner model on the Lower level?

Thumbs in pockets etc

beyond the "Motion Picture Soundtrack" sequence I found this one a snooze

No one noticed the Yul Brynner model on the Lower level?

― calstars, Monday, November 7, 2016 7:38 PM (seven minutes ago)

Yes, loved this.

I thought I saw a Marti the female gunslinger model too. Thought she was a guest.

unexpectedly fun episode imo. p okay with it being portentous nonsense on rails if it keeps up at this silly clip

guessing/hoping it's the securitybro that grabs her at the end and they can resume being xander and riley

Does all the surface apparent vastness of the park have sub levels to it? I was surprised by Bernard being able to take a lift into the place where he found the family. Since I thought it was way away from where other events were happening.
Not sure how centralised the maintenance area where they're fixing broken robots is , seemed to be a single multilevel building from what i've seen elsewhere. Including the trip that Tandie Newton took with the tech guy.

Also I thought the bird thing was a robot but one that the tech didn't have direct permission to be working on. & it seemed that protocol was to stick as close to documented procedure as possible. Since he was working on his own projects in company time he was going against the protocol. But I guess it was only to herald the idea that this was going to be the guy that could be manipulated into upgrading Tandie against protocol.

& the bird and teh pleasure droids have had me wondering how heavy an individual unit is. Would think that making a machine taht was capable of human like movement would mean the workings had to weigh something. & a pleasure droid would feel all wrong if the weight was wrong.

I read or heard somewhere that thsi was supposed to be 200 years in the future but not sure if I've come across anything else to support that. It hasn't been announced in the actual show or anything has it?

Do wonder what the story is on population in the world of this show. how the park could be as large as it appears to be if the population is still growing.
& presumably the only people we're seeing in this are the wealthy elite plus the technicians for the park.

The swimming pool/bar where the writer meets the company executive girl. Is that employee only area where staff are allowed to relax between shifts or is there part of the park that isn't themed?

...

Finding it odd that if Arnold or Ford wanted to hide the family based on Ford's he'd do so next to a liftshaft point. Unless there are a lot of them around and not everybody has access to the interconnecting routes.

Also had previously thought of the surface as mainly accessed from the surface. Presuming that surface area genuinely is surface area.

only two episodes in but this is ... pretty good? Still a little skeptical of any show that's built around a central "mystery". Also some of the meta-commentary stuff about exploitative entertainment is a pretty heavy-handed, would prefer it if they stuff to things like character development. Am encouraged by the involvement of some of my favorite people, at least (McPoyle actor + Charles Yu!)

Was so thrilled to see Tessa Thompson introduced that I didn't notice if that scene was badly written :)

This show lost me episodes 3-5, but came back strong this week and I'm very, very excited to see how they plan to end it. For my money it's just badly conceived as a serial but will probably end brilliantly, fingers crossed

It's funny because the show aspires to be a smart, deep-thinking show, but once you start thinking about it, it crumbles. But in the moment, the show is super watchable and entertaining. I look forward to it every week.

you know how disneyland/world has a bunch of secret doors and elevators all over the park to the staff has access? it's like that. you know how dl/world has a bunch of land that isn't being used right now where old rides were? it's like that.

dear god if I ever wake up on a table with those two I'ma be like DIAL ME BACK DOWN TO CLETUS

irl lol

srsly

in my layperson opinion I'm fine with all kinds of unexplained plot devices, trailing off, and the occasional inconsistency as long as I'm entertained

the shows that go on for years after they lost any reason for existing, that's another matter

like if there are random areas in the basement of the admin facility where weird things are happening, or if there's an access portal to the park in an older area that has shady shit nearby, I'm not going to rant about how all these things would be monitored and someone should have noticed

this is definitely not a show where I care about technological verisimilitude or realistic mechanics

at least not yet! I hated how BSG established a bunch of stuff (cylons can't reproduce, etc.) and then just violated them willy nilly. internal consistency is *kinda* important...

yeah if we find out that the intelligence level doesn't top out at 20 but at 21, I am out!

The stuff with Maeve and the two techs, all I could think about was rolling up D&D characters.

Thandiebot was pretty good at understanding 2216 tech for someone programmed to think they grew up in the 19th century

the x-y skills grid was very similar to some of the aptitude test visualizations I've seen

well i did finish this ep, my ill will pushed back down below the 'won't watch again' line i guess

rly feel like there needs to be some character with some humor or cynicism or idk un-ponderous attitude to what's going on. no gallows humor anywhere? a huge entertainment conglomerate running a valley full of fuckbots and rich people larping? how is this not hilarious? everyone is in the same spooky register as the confused and unhappy robots. i don't buy it! the two surgical techs at least were at least kind of gross but they've been swept up in the ~mystery~ now too

the scene between wright, hopkins and the secret robot family struck me as the real worst. wright was given nothing human to say. "i find this troubling" MY FRIEND YOU NEED SOME COUCH TIME THIS IS TEXTBOOK DISTURBED. "these robots are safe" BUDDY YOUR DADBOT JUST ATTACKED ME AND DIDN'T RESPOND etc

and why wasn't harris more psyched in that soldier camp sequence -- the 'wyatt' plotline and teddy going ham are genuinely new content, right? that has to be exciting after decades of this shit. new dlc man!

the English writer is probably meant to be the "funny" character

you've gotta bring your own humor to this one, folks

Westworld, from the mind of Dr. West, noted robofuckologist, has created the ultimate theme park for aspiring robot fuckers

(what it says about me idk but) i can't get over what isn't there. there's no demonstration of the JOY of escapism, either of having access to a simulated world with so much technical genius put into it, or of being able to take part in an archetypical american adventure story. there's no disney element, no jurassic park. are all these people paying to enter... an hbo series?

the family with a kid who encountered the littlest robot seemed to be having fun on the trail

the people just screwing around in town (figuratively and literally) seem to be having fun, along with the guy who just randomly shot the leader of the pillaging gang and saved the day

the main focus seems to be on the newer story which is about self-discovery and self-actualization. that whole track seems less about disney-style theme park times and more of an interactive sitting in a yurt experience

of course, the guy crafting this has his own self-discovery cabin built by his shady, dead partner that is inhabited by... his own family, as they were when he was a kid. it seems like it's built to goad Hopkins' character into letting loose some sort of inner demons

along with the guy who just randomly shot the leader of the pillaging gang and saved the day

ha i was going to mention this guy. yeah he seemed to be enjoying himself.

I have some of the same quibble - that you're like one third of the way into the first episode when OMG THINGS ARE GOING ASTRAY. The viewer barely gets a chance to see the steady state, so the impact of ASTRAY is minimized.

But as I said this is pretty normal with this type of entertainment; Jurassic Park movies did the same shit. You're just on the cusp of grasping why it's an interesting park when things start to unravel.

Jurassic Park didn't even get to open :(

but when the pirates of the carribean breaks down... the pirates don't fuck the people

I was a little disappointed by the latest episode.
I can't tell why exactly but most of the storylines weren't very interesting to me.
And as El Tomboto said upthread, the two guys not being able to deal with Maeve is pretty silly as they're supposed to be able to... control her (which they do when she asks them) !
I didn't really understand the leverage she had over them in the negotiation, though.
the MIB/Wyatt part was just a useless big gunfight. ok.
the Elsie/Theresa/Bernard/conspiracy thing is important, I guess.
the hidden hosts family/dog thing is also important, I suppose.
oh, and yeah, the writer dickhead is really bad !
also, nothing about Dolores in this one.

(maybe there should be a spoiler alert in the title of the thread !)

westworld? more like WORSTworld, amirite

Vestworld: where Anthony Hopkins is never not wearing a vest

https://twitter.com/jfreewright/status/797253311854444544

lmao

lol if you thought Simon Quarterman's crappy writer was bad just wait till you see Tessa Thompson's mean girl

ok for real how many times has "Bernard" gotten "fired" though

the board knows what this place is for

btw we can have a meeting now it's fine

god that last scene was soooo tedious and drawn-out, doesn't bode well for further attempts at that sort of thing

I thought it was some of the best acting Jeffrey Wright's gotten to do so far! And Anthony Hopkins being horrifying. It was certainly more fun than that confederates & ghost nation nonsense.

it's fun following along at home and ending every one of hopkins' lines with "clariiiiissssse"

my god this show is bad, what a spectacle

the sexy young executive, the most obvious reveal ever

at least bernard being a bot excuses his terrible dead child storyline

I GUESS

You have to check for hopkins' storyline tropes to find the bots

And escape (watching) westworld

Game of Thrones credit sequence: mechanical mapworld comes into being before your eyes.

Vinyl credit sequence: an LP comes liquidly into being before your eyes.

Westworld credit sequence: various biobots come liquidly into being before your eyes.

The Crown credit sequence: molten metal liquidly becomes a crown before your eyes.

I think we've found the MMteens' dominant visual cliché. It's the new teal & orange.

i like the credit sequence. it's not about the 3D printing eye candy, it's about the piano. when the bot fingers first touch the piano it represents the hosts impersonating culture and speech and creativity. it's music that already existed (like a narrative/storyline in the park), and now they're reproducing it. then there's that shot where it reveals that it's a player piano, and then bot hands lift off the keyboard slowly while it continues playing, followed by the shot of the player piano roll. that's alluding to the growing sentience of the hosts, the knowledge of what's under the hood and their true roles in the theme park: the music is already written and will be played regardless, they're just window dressing to make it seem more "real", etc etc

i guess all of that is obvious but i still think it makes for a more interesting credit sequence then, say, house of cards

despite all that i'm really starting to dread watching this show. everyone around me loves it and were blown away by the last episode and i can't even force myself to like it on the Lost level right now.

better intro sequence would just be the video for All is Full of Love, straight up, no edits, with "WESTWORLD" tacked on at the end

Do we think that Ford was building a host Theresa down there in the basement?

o god probably

we do think that, to the degree that we can be arsed to think about this show at all

I've watched the first two episodes of this. It's good, but boy is it slow... Not the plot or the action but just... I dunno, I found myself getting itchy and/or tired of waiting for it to move on. Does it pick up?

it picks up and gets very bad

I'm still into it. I cannot explain why in any convincing way. Maybe I'm just a sucker for AI stories.

entertaining and dimwitted; i thought the big twist was pretty well executed.

funny how the nature of HBO shows is such that murder (OH SORRY SPOILERS) seems like really low stakes in a conflict.

what used to set HBO apart was how well its shows dramatized people struggling as individuals in a particular organization with its own rules and prerogatives (the mob, cops/gangs, a lawless town). even the Leftovers was at its best when in that mode (how do we live together in a world with different rules). WW is more concerned with 'mystery' in a basic sense, tune in next week etc

wright is so good, can't take any objections here

boy william really went for it didn't he. what a dope.

Karl - I respect your deep metaphorical reading: What I don't get is: why would they 3d print a fucking piano? Why not just use one of the like thousands of existing pianos?

I get why you make a personbot; those are needed because otherwise you'd have all kinds of consent problems, what with the frequency with which guests want to fuck and/or kill them. Reproducibility, reparability, comparative disposability. It's nice that they make horsebots too, for some of the same reasons. Birds? Uh, well, sure, make birdbots too, what the hell.

If piano strings are so scarce in the distant future that they need to extrude/spray them out of high-tech nozzles, fine, I guess. But is that also how they get chairs, wood, glass, whiskey, guns? At some point wouldn't it make more sense just to buy and have actual stuff?

idk if there are thousands of existing faux-1800s player pianos

If you wanted an exact replica of a 19th century piano w/o wear and tear you could just punch the details into the printer instead of hauling some antique shop piano into space or wherever

They have wood and they have metal. Someone could make a piano the usual way.

Can't wait for the Westworld character who's the equivalent of Arthur Dent complaining that the replicator can't make tea that tastes like tea

why would they 3d print a fucking piano? Why not just use one of the like thousands of existing pianos?

my one remaining wish for this world, this westworld, is that they resolve this mystery at the very end of the last episode of the series, just before dramatically cutting to the final credits, with no music.

knowledge of pianomaking vanished during a data back-up in 2076

You know, this whole "Arnold and I built the park together" thing... two dudes, or one dude and his robotic apprentice?

"arnold is what i call me left ball mate" --anthony hopkins, final line final ep west world

imo arnold was real and anthony hopkins is the left ball

fiiiiiiinally caught up to this show after spending the whole run being 1-2 episodes behind (also apparently HBO Go starts hosting episodes the actual minute they finish airing on TV?? who knew!!). The real winner of this show are (were) Bernard's impeccable suits.

is there a real bernard somewhere? you think HR could have looked this up. am i dumb for asking? yes.

true bernard is stylin xp (love jeffery wright generally altogether)

OK what the hell this got renewed for a second season. WHAT IS THE SECOND SEASON GOING TO BE ABOUT

a new expansion pack

only three episodes left in the season!

at this rate we need a second season to figure out the other half of what's going on other than minor corporate shenanigans and an off-kilter android designer

did I miss something or are we still technically up in the air about whether Elsie is alive

no clue as yet

this show is lowkey bad but also immensely entertaining

idk I have seen what else ppl watch on tv and this isn't that bad

like are you going to watch two episodes of "how i met your mother" or like an episode of "orange is the new black" and unflinchingly say you better spent your time

I'd say some highbrow elitist thing about reading a book but I have read (or at least started) some really bad books

The real winner of this show are (were) Bernard's impeccable suits.

OTM

had this same conversation

feel like this show is spectacularly bad in a way that a lesser show cldnt hope to achieve

anthony hopkins performance feels like a protest against the show itself

so... what happened to Elsie?

i hope it ends with the protagonist finding philly at the edge of the park and becoming a mcpoyle bro

i mean, i like watching it very much, hence lowkey bad rather than high. the dialogue is often objectively bad, and the seriousness with which it takes itself is both truly not made for these hyperironic days and at times difficult to easily swallow

so I guess Bernard is an Arnold-bot then

i was stoked on the mystery of the first couple eps but after that it just seemed like they were all "lets do everything in the world all at once"

i was pumped about the show early on but i have to admit that when there were oldtimey piano covers of johnny cash, rolling stones, AND soundgarden in the first episode i got a really bad feeling

ha good call

they had nine inch nails in episode 5 and that basically made me forgive all this show's faults tho

lol elmo, I just asked about Elsie, too

I think the implication so far is that Elsie got taken out by Bernard and he doesn't consciously remember it because it's bad

maybe elsie got taken by a diff faction, feels right

something about the physical laws of danger don't make sense to me (read: shit is incoherent)

the confederados shot a gatling gun at the train, shredding the car walls. but presumably guest william is supposed to be impervious to those bullets; maybe thumped a little but not seriously injured. eh ok. we saw one of the bullets (pulled out of maeve) and it had some kind of odd screw shape? is that meant to signify "tech here" and everything gets handwaved after? i guess i'd appreciate if the show didn't stretch it too much past that...

MIB setting off some minor explosions was presented as something special; something approved from the office for a preferred customer. but then later on we've got a lot of shit blowing up for everyone, nbd.

as a commentary on video games it's got a glaring oversight: missions where you're totally ok but have to protect a vulnerable NPC (MIB with teddy, william with dolores) are annoying as hell and no fun at all. i would expect a player to want to know if a storyline has graduated a character into special or semi-protected status, so you don't feel cheated if they get shot unexpectedly! esp after trekking days into the desert with them...

yes i do feel like a chump for putting this much thought into it

itsnotthatdeep.jpg

idk, bullets deform when they hit things

Anyone read any Jonathan Hickman comics? This is starting to remind me of that. No characters, no free will, just a very sophisticated diagram. I'm still enjoying it though.

That said Bernard being a toaster and Anthony Hopkins being EVIL are about the least mindfucky twists I could imagine

the best show on tv right now is Ash vs Evil Dead btw.

also, what happened to Marti (Bojana Novakovic) ?

gave up on this

It's still fun but it's definitely petered out, expectations lowered etc.

Bernard at the end perfectly captured hoe I felt at 3am last Tuesday

This took a turn toward 90s NBC fodder in ep 6 but I'm still hooked

Wonder if Bernard's wife was just cg and ai or if she is a bot locked in a room somewherr.

MIB setting off some minor explosions was presented as something special; something approved from the office for a preferred customer. but then later on we've got a lot of shit blowing up for everyone, nbd.

He was disrupting the scripted storyline. They had to trigger pyrotechnic effects that weren't already in the storyline. The other explosions are all planned, built in to the environment, expressly designed so as to never risk harm to guests.

the confederados shot a gatling gun at the train, shredding the car walls. but presumably guest william is supposed to be impervious to those bullets; maybe thumped a little but not seriously injured.

Hey, this is why you "print" a piano instead of just building one, why everything is constructed to purpose from synthetic components. Ford and his hosts/employees can have complete control over how things react to stimuli, whether they pop squibs and die, allow a bullet to pass through and hit a host, or stop it so it doesn't hit a guest. The behavior of the cover in a firefight is variable, just like hosts have different scripts to respond to the attitude of guests.

QED BLAM

man y'all are harsh on this show

OK, I haven't been following this thread at all, because we literally just finished the second episode, and I doubt I can convince my wife to keep going without good reason. The acting, particularly the (what I assume to be) humans is just so bad, and the dialogue is worse - or should I say, "The fucking dialogue is fucking worse, fuck, what the fuck?!" And there are just so many (not good) questions we have about the very setup, let alone mystery or motive or why the fucking company is fucking lit and decorated like a fucking dark, bleak bomb shelter, fuck!

So, if we stick with it will we be rewarded, or are the first couple of eps kind of what you see is what you get?

Rewarded is a strong word, but I do think that the show improved a lot in episodes three and four, once a lot of the exposition is out of the way.

This is more of a turn-my-brain-off, popcorn chomping type of show for me. I appreciate that it's trying to be profound/intelligent, but it's mainly a fun watch, nothing revolutionary.

ok that british dude is really embarrassing but he goes away for a while, and I just chalked the interior design up to like well obviously this is several decades into the future and idk I guess this was just architecture/design trends then idk

Josh, I was mostly annoyed until ep 4. Then I got into it and mostly just enjoy the dumb parts for what they are

the show is an excellent companion piece to this thread

I lolled at the lines they gave Raising Hope tech when she was sleuthing in spooky room:
What the fuck
shit

Hey, a lot of thought went into those lines. Imagine if she'd instead said

What the shit

Fuck

?

What the shit-fuck, fuck!

I can't tell if it's supposed to be funny or not. Like, are we in a future where half the lexicon is profanity? Because it is so ridiculous.

this show is all kinds of inconsistent but I don't care, I still find it very enjoyable. except I do fall asleep in the middle of every episode for five-ten minutes.

also apparently HBO Go starts hosting episodes the actual minute they finish airing on TV?? who knew!!

btw they are available immediately, like right when the show airs

and even before it airs if you live on the west coast

I thought their offices are pretty nice for being a concrete building embedded into a plateau

Then again I feel like the characters swear a lot less than I do, so I might be the counter-Josh

gbx, I mentioned to Stevie D that if Go/Now are the same, they appear the minute the show starts airing, not at the end. So 9PM on the east coast

the show is an excellent companion piece to this thread

― tried Blue Apron and we died (Sufjan Grafton), Monday, November 14, 2016 10:41 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol pt taken

I'm glad we all decided early on that the show is bad in many ways, that way we can concentrate on important things like piano printers rather than groaning about the level of quality dipping each week

I don't think it has been dipping

I meant how we typically talk about these shows-- Wow, this is great. Episode three is not so good. I'm done with this show. Wait it's good again. Now it's bad.

My spouse is my barometer. She had literally never heard of WestWorld when we watched the first episode, which intrigued her. She was further intrigued by friends who really like the show, so she was eager to watch episode 2, but she has enough problems with it (and was pretty bored with it) that I have to decide whether it's worth lobbying her to keep watching. Obviously I can keep watching on my own, but I'm not sure about that, either.I try to stick with these shows to some extent, riding the creative ups and downs, because lots of shows take some time to find their rhythm, whether it's a season or a couple of seasons. Some shows start out with a bang then fade. Some start out so-so then improve. Tracking the ebb and flow becomes part of the viewing process, but when pervasive issues don't go away and when I start to believe either the show has no interest in fixing them, or doesn't how to fix them, or compounds them through lazy shortcuts, that's usually when I question my investment.

I was heartened by WestWorld, which passed one of my arbitrary personal tests: that is, it explicitly addressed a question I asked my wife early on, namely, why do the robots interact and make small talk, etc., when no-one is watching them? I love when stuff like that happens, because it shows they're asking these questions themselves. On the other hand, so many issues. Why would they want guests massacring dozens of robots when one assumes they're expensive to fix and replace? How can a guest tell a robot from a person and avoiding hurting them or being hurt by them? Why, of all the scenarios, the wild west, if it's mostly just about killing or having sex with people and you can do that anywhere? And wouldn't you have to be some sort of serious psychopath to want to pay big money to do that at all? Why is there only one writer on staff, and a jerk-writer, at that? So many questions. No doubt some will be answered and some will be revealed as more serious flaws. Or not!

(Also, I like to fucking nitpick, it's fucking fun, fuck!)

Sometimes I get bummed out that these high profile shows can't keep it together and think, alas, all is lost (or all is "Lost" haha), but then I see Better Call Saul (as good as anything), or Veep (consistently funny), or whatever, and I regain hope. That book came out recently listing the best TV shows ever made, and I know Deadwood was up there. I thought it was a masterpiece at the time but was worried about revising it, lest it not live up. But I started at the beginning again and, yep, still good. Makes me want to rewatch The Shield and Battlestar Galactica, too (problems with the latter aside).

on one hand i understand everyone's criticisms of the show - the hammy acting, the melodramatic story beats, the lazy expository dialogue

otoh i still love watching it so fuck all ya'all giddyup

first season of deadwood is still fire

That said Bernard being a toaster and Anthony Hopkins being EVIL are about the least mindfucky twists I could imagine

― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, November 14, 2016 11:15 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol yes. they made such a meal of it too, never has my policy of reading a book during boring speeches been more appreciated than with hopkins at the end of this

going along with the general consensus here, it's funny how this keeps you watching without giving a shit about any of it. like, in another show the trick of not featuring a main protagonist for a whole episode (dolores last time, ed harris this time) would be tantalizing but I find it hard to imagine anyone being like "omg what's going on with the train thing I need to know". They could never go back to the man in black quest and I'd miss ed harris but that's about it

lol if you thought Simon Quarterman's crappy writer was bad just wait till you see Tessa Thompson's mean girl

― El Tomboto, Monday, November 14, 2016 2:38 AM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm too, eeeesh

Ed Harris really has developed a malevolent scrotum of a face, hasn't he?

I just watched the latest ep. it's better than the previous one but still disappointing somehow (although there were BIG things happening).
The Bernard/host thing was totally expected but I was surprised they killed Theresa already.
Since they also "killed" Bernard, in a way, they lost two main characters in one episode !
also, the new management woman is terrible as a intelligent/ruthless/sexy/powerful caricature.
and I don't really like the Maeve storyline. Actually, as said by many in this thread, I don't really care about any character (maybe Dolores, a little) but I still enjoy the show, although with diminishing returns (which makes me wonder about how long they can sustain this).
Thinking about it, I wonder if my initial enjoyment didn't come from my binge watching of the first 5 eps in a row. all the novelty and information might have made it better than it is since watching the two latest episodes on their own was quite disappointing...

Think there have been too many big things happening too quickly, would have preferred them to set out the internal logic with a few more stories set in the BAU westworld than unravelling straight away. Does make you wonder how they'd manage to keep it together the past 30-odd years. Saying that, still enjoying the ride for now.

Yeah, for a show about the western world, there's not a lot set in the west in the latest eps. It feels like most of the show is about the company politics/mysteries now. Maybe that's one of the things I miss.

yeah i love the concept of this show, and it felt to me like someone involved had almost certainly been to see punchdrunk's immersive theatre shows in nyc or london - too many similarities to be a coincidence. that piqued my interest a bit but ultimately the characters aren't strong enough. the rebellion by the maeve character doesn't actually interest or please me - i don't want the characters to escape, i want them to go on a journey in their world, the allure of the robot world to the humans is probably more interesting than the reverse.

her name is maeve, who knew

Starting to feel like the reveal about Bernard is just the bodysnatcher version of "black dude dies first"

I mean, I struggle to see how it makes the character more interesting. Unless we have a season 2 of Jeffrey Wright in aged makeup, playing Arnold. Hope not/hope so?

oh and it's supposed to be forbidden for the staff to have intercourse with the hosts but I guess the new management woman is above the rules !
(Theresa also but she didn't know she was doing a host...)

what was his character before? he had chats with dolores, was sleeping with borgen, acted like a robot... maybe he will do stuff now

regarding Bernard, there's also the question that a host is not supposed to be able to understand/know about the real world and the westworld. so how can he work and deal with other hosts knowing they're just hosts, not humans ?
and if it's possible for him, then it's no big deal if Maeve and other hosts can understand the divide between reality and the park...

he can know about robots, he's not supposed to know that he is a robot

hum. it seemed the hosts weren't supposed to be able to understand there was another reality and therefore that robots existed at all.

Well that's surely because they are "hosts" in a realistic Wild West theme park, this one has been designed (secretly) for a different purpose

ie Bernard is only being asked to accept one "reality", he doesn't live in the fake one

No guys all robots are programmed to think they are Cowboys there is no other way

Is this not tied in with what Maeve asked to have turned up. The thing that allows one to grasp how concepts interrelate?

yeah, I suppose.
and regarding Maeve, that means she can never be "switched of" now, right ?
like when the guys came in the saloon to take her friend.

that said, even Bernard couldn't understand/see some things related to his host status while Maeve could.

I'm betting on a finale in which Hopkins pulls a Mithradates and has the robots kill all the humans in the park

what's his big project under construction ? I don't remember the hints and clues.

also, the new management woman is terrible as a intelligent/ruthless/sexy/powerful caricature.

we weren't sure but it sounded like she used the term "blood sacrifice" and hopkins used the term as well at the end of the episode which suggests... i guess either that she is also a droid or that they're in cahoots?

Or he has every inch of the park bugged.

xpost
hum. if she's also a robot, it would explain why she's allowed to have sex with a host !
but at this point, would it really matter or interest anyone to learn another supposedly human is actually a robot ?

Yeah the

It's established that they've got good cameras, but with convenient spottiness of coverage - what is noticed and what isn't noticed is always exactly what the writers require. So Bearded Tech Dude can tell someone's been messing with the settings, but can't tell who. Bernard can have long soulful chats with Dolores with no one apparently knowing. Elsie can see who did what to the transmitter, but she's apparently unworried about anybody noticing her wide-ranging snoopage. Everything can be done remote by tablet except for the things that can't; everything can be dialed up in the browser history except for the things that can't; etc.

The system's capabilities expand and contract in response to what's convenient for the narrative at that moment. It's like one big CSI:Whatever where you can always "enhance" a photo unless there's a detail needs to be obscured for writerly convenience. You can get anything off of the wiped hard drive except for the One Missing Piece.

One can see all this machinery in action and still find it dumb popcorny fun.

oops forget 'yeah the"

No guys all robots are programmed to think they are Cowboys there is no other way

― duped and used by my worst Miss U (President Keyes), Thursday, November 17, 2016 7:13 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bernard actually got into robotics because his son died after an accident involving a horse on their ranch

Presumably everything Bernard has been doing (e.g. chatting with Dolores) have been at Anthony Hopkins' instigation, not some personal project of his own?

This really fell off after episode 1, or at least the super-stylised production values stopped holding my attention when it began to get repetitive and the plot inched forward, if at all, at snail's pace. I think stretches of both eps 4 and 5 actually sent me to sleep? And then ep 6 brought it back in a pretty huge and unexpected way for me, easily the first time I was actually gripped by the story. This is entirely down to Maeve's self-actualisation - she's probably the only character I'm invested in. I love how her reaction to all the new info is to process it like a robot and determine a course of action based on that, even when it might seem she's reacting like a human on the surface (eg tears for Clementine's lobotomy). Thandie Newton is MVP in this show by a million miles.

I'm pretty bored with most scenes in the park, especially the shoot-em-up scenes which feel so rote, especially when you know how little's at stake. Feel like half this season has been given over to cycling pointlessly through these narratives. Becoming rapidly uninvested in Dolores, whose self-actualisation seems to have stalled, at least compared to Maeve's. William is a completely boring void of nothing. It's hard to sustain a character seven episodes in when all they've given us is vaguely worried looks.

There's literally nothing about the Man In Black storyline that holds any interest for me, the problem isn't that the show's piling up ridiculous mysteries à la Lost, it's that it's piling up boring mysteries. What is the Man In Black searching for? I don't care bc I don't care about him bc he's total cardboard. I guess the video game parallel is intentional but they're not emotionally compelling either. And every single interaction with hosts is just devoid of any reason to care, sort of like the show's hoist itself on its own clever conceit. (Even though the logic of Westworld collapses as soon as you poke at it, like the magic bullets than all humans are safe from.)

The action in the control centre with the humans (OR ARE THEY etc) is more interesting for sure, even if it can be a bit silly. Intrigued that we're not being led to root for either Ford or the board at this point - Elsie (if still alive) seems to be the only human presented as on the side of good and truth so far?

I was wondering whether Charlotte was a bot based on her relaxed attitude to nudity and Ford echoing her "blood sacrifice" line. Did Ford imply this is like a game he and the board play regularly? They try to unseat him, he sees through them and...kills someone? This doesn't make much sense.

Def on board with the theory that Bernard is (made in the image of) Arnold and the scenes of him testing Dolores were actually Arnold. There's some possibly interesting anagram stuff going on with their names too.

the bernarnold theory

Arnerdb?

I think the "blood sacrifice" line was first meant as a metaphor (We're going to fire Bernard) and later as literal (Bernard is going to splatter your head on a wall.)

he said the blood sacrifice thing cuz he was using the Hector sex bot as a spy on the board woman just like he used Bernard sex bot to get the Teresa specs to make her into a robot. the fact that this wasn't clear was either really bad writing or they are trying too hard.

or both!

http://io9.gizmodo.com/new-footage-solves-one-mystery-of-how-westworlds-park-a-1789095775

This might be the movie that Knudsen had to get back for, it's out now in France:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5247544/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_4

Danish, English, French YOU'RE JUST SHOWING OFF NOW SIDSE BABETT KNUDSEN

i'm not gonna lie i fell asleep at least once during that last ep

Holy fuck, it appears Sky have hijacked the official website in that it won't load in the UK but redirects to the Sky Atlantic's Westworld page. Fuck this show

https://www.discoverwestworld.com/#

in France it goes here: http://fans.ocs.fr/westworld-series-ocs-ambitieux-subversif-delirant/

If you're trying to check out the website and have a look at the map, you think they'd realise there's a fair chance you're already watching the show

the problem isn't that the show's piling up ridiculous mysteries à la Lost, it's that it's piling up boring mysteries.

I pretty much agree with this. So I still enjoy watching the show but it's not really exciting. Just fun. And maybe less and less...

I like Dolores' plot. A robot falling in love is not original or surprising, but inevitably something they have to explore in this show, and I like that they're kinda doing it in a classic silver screen love story kind of way. I was hoping that the western setting would also allow for some classic western sub plots. As for the shoot-outs it was all fun and games at first but we see now that guests can get in genuine danger and be killed by hosts, if not by the bullets, so there's more to it than before.

yeah, I like Dolores's plot, so far (although her lovers are pretty boring. I mean, Teddy and William...) : the hidden gun, the hidden conversations with Bernard/Arnold, her quest to whatever she'll find...

General derision here and my wife's apparent firm "no" means I won't be traveling back to WestWorld any time soon, but I thought this was funny:

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/now-that-the-election-is-over-i-have-some-questions-about-westworld

Holy fuck, it appears Sky have hijacked the official website in that it won't load in the UK but redirects to the Sky Atlantic's Westworld page. Fuck this show

https://www.discoverwestworld.com/#

― groovypanda, Friday, November 18, 2016 8:48 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I just got something about the site not being available in the territory I'm in. Though I did get the Delos page.

Lol... it would be amazing if the agency that created the website somehow sold the rights per territory

Maybe it was wrapped up in some "ancillary content" bit of the contract that only HBO paid for.. I dunno, scratching my head over that

if u hold down the shift key the website will send u a garbled transmission from anthony hopkins, here is the map

http://i.imgur.com/aoRlE8e.jpg

oh that seems to be missing the main towns

there u go, had to figure out how to take a screenshot w/o using the shift key lol

http://i.imgur.com/8GYgHxJ.jpg

so the story is basically going south ?
the part where nobody ever came back is the "under construction" area, I suppose ?

came back from...

i think under construction is where hopkins is building his new thing

maybe that's not exclusive and the reason why it's a "no go zone" ?
otherwhise where would the "no go zone" be since they were in the ghost nation area ?

Oddly just rechecked that Westworld site and it partially loaded but then just went to a black page saying that 'I'm Sorry Destination westworld isn't available in the country you're in'. Thought it would just go to a 404 message or something, if it wasn't going to load.

Not sure what the story is on distribution over here so wonder if there is any chance somebody might pick up the website for the area.

Sounded from the comment earlier that Sky were redirecting elsewhere from the URL, I'm assuming that would be UK. I couldn't tell if what i'm getting is just Ireland or outside the US and related. But would think a site like taht would be promotional material that they would want to have widely available.

ya hopkins new thing and the place no one ever came back from being the same place wld make sense, tho i got the impression they were looking out over the part labeled canyons (cause there were canyons)

tho iirc there was something abt hopkins building a canyon too

but there was a river between them and the "no go zone" and if I understand the map correctly there would be a river between the south west of ghost nation and the "under construction" area...

Lecter's canyon-building project is in the Under Construction zone and you see the gigantic earth-eater approaching the agave plantation hacienda.

The place Bernard goes and finds the cozy Devonshire cottage with Lecter's family may be in that zone but it's not clear - a tech tells Bernard merely that it's an area reserved for future storylines. The theater where Elsie goes to find the transmitter is merely said to be in an abandoned area. The three flavors of off-limits (under construction, reserved, and abandoned) may be the same or different, once assumes.

there's no thread for it but if you're getting tired of this then Insecure on HBO is really good!!

another interesting thing is that the "under construction" goes over the sea !
Waterworld !
http://aws-cf.caradisiac.com/prod/mesimages/96143/waterworld.jpg

some1 just watch the original movie and report back with the answers to all the mysteries

i have seen it but i dont remember

there's no thread for it but if you're getting tired of this then Insecure on HBO is really good!!

― goole, Friday, November 18, 2016 10:47 AM (forty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

looks good ty!

http://i.imgur.com/GzdbTHU.jpg makes you think...

I feel like Reddit-style plot-sleuthing over Westworld says more about the scripts' incoherence than the actual mysteries

FUTUREWORLD
it me

xp imo it says more about the habitual delving into scripts as some airtight explanation of a complete fictional world and not just a show you watch and enjoy

I'm all in favor of people doing so in favor of making their own homegrown Westworld tabletop rpg or slash fiction or w/e but when it's just in the service of endless avclub-style "is this a good show" thinkpieces I die inside

at least the people who are probably on tumblr trying to figure out if it's ethical to fuck a robot horse have a goal in mind

sexyrobothorsepics

otm

Oh, yeah, it's just fun to speculate. I have no illusion that the creators have a grand and unbreakable master plan so that errybody is like "wait, this bush needs to be two inches to the left to line up with the maps and schematics that we released online that are, like, totally canon." This mode of thinking is sub-Galaxy Quest, but it's a fun distraction in a time where some of us need such.

FUTUREWORLD
it me

― mh 😏, Friday, November 18, 2016 10:40 AM (two hours ago)

lol

seems dumb that the robots' only override is a vocal command. what if it's loud outside?

can i just say that "where nothing can possibly go worng!" is probably the best tagline of all time

agreed