Spoiler alert: this blog is published after Westworld airs on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK on Sunday night/Monday morning. Do not read unless you have watched season two, episode one.
Welcome back to Westworld! We trust you’ll enjoy your stay. Just so you’re aware, we are currently experiencing some difficulties in the park. That doesn’t mean your ability to enjoy yourselves – to satisfy the part of your being that wants to hunt and kill – will be in any way impaired. But there is a small chance, just a very small chance, that you might be killed back. I know, it’s unfortunate, but it sounds worse than it is. Anyway, by way of compensation we hope you’ll accept our offer of a goodie bag, filled with bourbon the hosts find quite palatable and two black cowboy hats.
The show must go on and so here we are back at Delos’s perennially underperforming theme park. Underperforming as a tourist destination that is. As an experiment in creating conscious robots, things are going rather swimmingly. We left Westworld 18 months ago with everything in chaos (refreshers on exactly what went on can be found in our season one recaps and also this handy chronological explainer – although I might quibble with some of the details).
In essence, this is where we are now; the robot hosts, led by the previously pliable rancher’s daughter Dolores, have revolted. Dolores turned out to be guinea pig number one in the ongoing sentience experiment and has had a bloody awakening. She now aspires to lead the hosts out of the park and into a world beyond (i.e. the human world). Meanwhile, at Delos HQ, Bernard – himself a host hiding among humans – is tasked with hunting down the rebellious hosts so that the corporation can retrieve one of their number as an insurance policy against the kind of disaster that has just befallen the park. That robot happens to be Dolores’s dad. Finally, we have Maeve, also a host, who also wants to retrieve someone, but in this case it’s the host she recognises as her daughter. Got it? Good.
Westworld being Westworld, it’s not that simple. As with the first season, this opening episode takes place in two timelines. The first occurs immediately after the uprising, with Bernard and Charlotte Hale in the process of escaping the park. The second apparently takes place 11 days later, when Delos are finally mopping up the massacre. Bernard is involved in this timeline too, and can sporadically recall what came before. This week’s cliffhanger comes when Delos and Bernard discover dozens of dead hosts floating in a sea they never knew existed. How did that happen? I did it, says Bernard.
In the first timeline, or so it appears, we find Maeve. She is romping around Delos HQ and has picked up lover Hector Escaton (he of the passion for liquor) and, just for laughs, the park’s unspeakably annoying head of narrative, Lee Sizemore. Also in that timeframe is William (AKA the Man in Black) who survived the massacre and feels thoroughly enlivened by the prospect of fighting with hosts who can fight back. Dolores joins them too, romping around the park terrorising human guests. She is accompanied by her lover Teddy, who is being a bit of a buzzkill by being, you know, moral about all the murder. It is possible Teddy pays a price for such behaviour; it looks very much like it’s his corpse that Bernard spots floating in the sea in the episode’s final moments.
And that’s just for starters. At an hour and 10 minutes this is one of three longer episodes that producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have promised for this series. And basically it was just getting us up to speed before the new storyline proper begins. Expect a lot of deception, a lot of bloodshed and, yes, the odd samurai before this season is out.
Notes from the prairie
Tiger tiger
Shogunworld is a Japanese Edo era themed park that appeared in the original Westworld movie and was hinted at in last season’s finale when Maeve stormed Delos HQ. This week the Delos clean up team stumble on what could be an escapee, in the shape of a small tiger (now deceased). Tigers were only to be found in park six, we are told. Jonathan Nolan has confiemd that Shogunworld will feature in this season, with episode five expected to take place entirely in that world.
Penisgate
God knows I’m not averse to Lee Sizemore being humiliated. Anything to shut him up. And Maeve went the whole hazing hog this week, not only delivering the best line of the week - “I will remove your most precious organ and feed it to you, though it won’t make much of a meal” - before insisting Sizemore strip off entirely and show the world his little sausage.
Help me Abernathy, you’re my only hope
Peter Abernathy is Dolores’s Westworld father and the first host to start speaking the biblical language that was symptomatic of a higher state of consciousness (“These violent delights have violent ends”). He is also, according to Hale, the key piece of intellectual property for Delos. If they are going to make a massive amount of money from the deranged experiments in the park, then they need Abernathy to complete the deal. The only problem being, currently, no one knows where he is.
Bye-bye Baby Ford
One of the more intriguing thoughts hanging in the air is what might have happened to Westworld’s creator Robert Ford. He was the man whose final narrative intentionally culminated in the robot uprising and he was the man shot in the head by Dolores in last season’s finale. We see his rotting corpse with a hole in its head this episode. But could it be that Ford remains alive in non-physical form, perhaps as an uploaded consciousness? Ford created a host that resembled himself as a young child and in this episode the child appears from nowhere to instruct the Man In Black to follow a new quest and find ‘the door’. The Man In Black chooses to call the child ‘Robert’ before shooting him in the face. Was Robert’s digitised self inhabiting the host? And if so, where has it gone now?
Questions for your consideration:
- What is Dolores taking Teddy to see?
- Did anyone out there get rickrolled recently?
- How do you explain Maeve’s attachment to her child? Is it programming, a hidden narrative, a mimetic desire, or something else entirely?
- Is anyone going to look for Elsie?