Thursday, August 2, 2018

Westworld - Season 2

At the end of last season, the hosts had achieved sentience and were now rampaging.  The second season picks up from there and continues the multiple timelines to confuse the narrative.  Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is searching for her father and also out to destroy humanity.  Bernard (Jeffery Wright) is suffering dementia, not sure what side he is on.  Maeve (Thandie Newton) is trying to reconnect with her daughter and discovering how to mind control any host near her.  The Man in Black (Ed Harris) has no idea what he is doing but is quite determined to get it done.  Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) is dead but is still a ghost in the machine.

The big problem with the series is that our 'heroes' are robots.  Moreover, it is repeatedly demonstrated that they are reprogrammable robots.  Maeve becomes a genius because she moves a slider on her attributes page.  Teddy (James Marsden) is turned into a cold-blooded killer by altering a different set of sliders.  Hosts only have memories because the programmers at Westworld are too stupid to clear the cache files.  They have hundreds of unusable robots in the basement because they can't figure out how to put in a new hard drive or reinstall the operating system.
 
A second major problem is that humans are evil or stupid, often both.  In order to make the audience root for the robots, it becomes necessary to paint humanity as villainous.  Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) gladly murders people if they stand in her way.  Robert Ford did the same last season.  If they aren't evil, they are stupid.  Simon (Lee Sizemore) offers to provide a rearguard so that robot Maeve can rejoin her robot daughter, thus following the programming that Simon wrote.  Simon walks into gunfire while spouting idiotic lines that he wrote for one of the hosts.  Look how much he has grown over the two series: from miserable jerk to a man who will sacrifice himself for a glorified toaster.
 
Next, why don't the humans have guns that will kill hosts?  It's like the guys in Jurassic World who didn't have guns that could kill dinosaurs.  You are here to fight the robots but didn't bring weapons that make you vastly superior to the robots?  Again, humans are just stupid.
 
When the human-robot war comes, I plan to be on the human side.  Westworld is on the robots' side.  As such, not particularly eager to see season three.

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