This post discusses “Virtù e Fortuna,” the third episode of the second season of “Westworld,” in substantial detail.
The key marketing hook for the Westworld park, at least as we’ve seen in “Westworld” so far, has been the promise that the guests can do anything. They can have sex with robots. They can kill robots without consequence. They can try on new identities that aren’t available to them back home, and behave in ways that might have consequences for their relationships with actual human beings they might have to see over and over. Certainly, we’ve seen a few milder approaches to the park, including the family with a young son Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) encountered in the first season who were carefully sticking to the milder areas around Sweetwater. But for the most part, visitors to the park were looking to go off-script.
And when the park’s androids became self-aware, the first concern that some of them experienced was whether any of their reactions and decisions were actually their own, or whether they were still playing out narratives that had been written for them. Maeve (Thandie Newton) initially planned to break out of the park, despite being told that the desire was something that had been programmed for her; her decision to go back into the crucible of her torment to look for her daughter was her first authentic choice.
There’s a lot happening in “Virtù e Fortuna,” the third episode of the second season of “Westworld.” And while I found myself relatively bored by the flashiest bits of the hour — namely, Dolores’s ongoing attempts to consolidate power in the name of her android revolution — the best parts of the episode are undoubtedly the ones that play with these questions: How far do the park’s visitors actually want to go off-script? How much are the park’s writers processing authentic emotions through the scripts that they write? And what stories will the androids write for themselves with their jumbled bits of backstory?
The series’ opening visit to another park set in the British Raj seems like a bit of a diversion, if a luscious one. But it does a nice job of exploring the knife-edge distinction between having space to transgress and having your experience get entirely out of control.
As a man and woman we haven’t met before banter their way into bed, what initially seems to characterize her is a desire for real adventure, rather than experience that has been merely manufactured for her. “If you’re one of them, you don’t know what you want. You just do as your told,” she tells him, testing whether he’s human. “For a lot of people, that is half the fun,” he explains. “Not for me,” she insists, before shooting him to test whether he’s a robot or real. At least when it comes to whom she goes to bed with, she actually wants to seduce someone. It’s the demonstration of her own power and appeal that she’s after, rather than a mere gratification of fantasy.
But when they head out on a Bengal hunt and discover a massacre at base camp, she’s quick to reckon that this is no “new twist in the narrative,” as her companion originally thinks.
The show doesn’t dwell on it, but there’s something very interesting in the gender dynamics at work here. There’s an enormous difference between being able to do whatever you want in one of the parks and being in a situation where anything can happen to you.
The men who visit the parks may be able to live out specific dreams there, but as we’ve seen so far, they’re often already so rich and powerful that the parks are merely an extension of the power they possess in day-to-day life to behave largely as they please. Women, by contrast, no matter their social standing, grow up aware that many unpleasant things can happen to them because of their gender: Being rich doesn’t protect you from rape, for example. It makes sense that the woman in this vignette would be quicker to recognize the park’s potential to become a nightmare instead of a fantasyland.
For the hosts, the narratives function as a supercharged version of a question that plenty of humans face: Are our decisions truly our own, or are they conditioned? One of the best parts of the second season of “Westworld” has been the decision to team up the androids Maeve and Hector (Rodrigo Santoro) with the human writer Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), a trio that has given us some of the show’s funniest moments as well as a novel way to explore that question. Last season, Maeve was melancholy and glitching, Hector was a machismo cliche and Lee was an abrasive, manipulative jerk, but in their new configuration, Maeve is arch and Lee is revealing new vulnerabilities.
“You two were designed to be alone. Yes, there’s some attraction, but you’d never have an actual relationship,” Lee grumbles in this episode at the sight of Maeve and Hector canoodling, lecturing Hector: “You’re in love with Isabella!” Hector shrugs him off, “Not so much anymore.” But even as Maeve and Hector believe they’ve broken their loop, Lee gets back at them, quoting the narration he wrote for Hector, which Hector has merely repurposed.
Maeve is sharp enough to intuit that Lee’s investment in the narrative is more personal than mere creative pride. “She left me,” Lee confesses of his own Isabella. “Said my lifestyle lacked stability.” Killing her off and giving Hector a grand obsession with her was a way for Lee to process his own feelings, writing a story that reflected the weight of his emotions if not the actual circumstances in which they came to pass.
That’s the thing about Westworld: The loops and narratives that govern the park absolutely deny the androids their autonomy, especially when the story lines leave them at the mercy of unscrupulous humans. But the story lines are powerful because they come from real emotions, like Lee’s, and because they provide language and a framework that both the androids and human guests use to make sense of their feelings and experiences. Stories can be a replacement for a life. But as Joan Didion put it, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. For the hosts, becoming conscious isn’t merely a matter of throwing off the tyranny of narrative. It’s a matter of finding new stories to tell, just as the human guests have come to the park to write new stories about themselves.