Westworld Wednesday: Other People's Gods

It's hard to know where to start with the Season 3 finale - I usually watch each episode a couple times before/during writing these. I don't like knee-jerk reactions to them, and as I've said before, I don't want this to just be another recap. You can find those anywhere. We earn our perpetual Hugo silver medal, thank you very much.

This probably isn't the post that puts us over the hump, but damn if the season didn't end with a bang. Literally, anyway, but the flavor of the episode was much more in line with the season. It sort of... happened. There are a lot of people unhappy about that, and several other things. Delores apparently changing her worldview, William being killed post-credits - but I think there are a few important things there.

First of all, anyone worried about William's death are forgetting last seasons post-credits scene, that is obviously in the future, with zombie-William undergoing 'fidelity' test, so my money is on a really good chunk of Season 4 taking place decades in the future - As Bernard waking up covered in dust seems to indicate.

Which is, to me, what this season was - a bridge. Lacking was much of the mystery of the first couple seasons, when we find out Bernard is a host, William is the Man in Black and time is a plaything. By jumping ahead with at least a portion of the show, they will be able to re-introduce a lot of the things that seemed lacking. The show just had to get there, so in a way season 3 just takes up space - but space that must be occupied.

The million-dollar question is what becomes of Delores. Her memory is wiped and she seems completely dead. From a meta standpoint, it will be interesting to see how that is handled - Delores is the heart of the show. I would doubt she is gone from the show, though - which brings us full-circle to last week's topic, and one at the core of the show - memory. It's the loss of her memories that damn her - as a host, as long as she has those, she can be put into a new body with relative ease.

It was the hosts gaining access to their memories - real ones, not backstory - that lead to their achieving consciousness in the first place, so Delores losing hers is an apt symbol for her death. Will it make her a martyr to other hosts - especially if Bernard retrieves the other hosts. Speaking of full circle, William is now a host - but only the Man in Black portion of him, which is now all of him. What memories does he have? He would clearly have access to Young William, who was much more caring and less violent, but as we well know, violent delights have violent ends and MiB certainly delighted in violence.

All in all, an interesting if not flawless turn for a show that has abandoned is eponymous park. It's been a blast to write about, and I plan on doing so again for season 4.

-DESR

Westworld Wednesday: Here & Now

Do you ever ask yourselves any questions?

Memories are a tricky thing, under the best of circumstances. Our memories frequently deviate from reality for a whole host of reasons that I am unqualified to speak to. False memories are a thing, and boy howdy, did they mess with Caleb's. In possibly the most predictable twist in the history of Westworld, he is actually the one who killed his BFF.

But we saw that coming - anytime Westworld gives us pieces of a story, it sure isn't giving us the whole story. Heck, it isn't giving us the whole story when we think it is.

Speaking of, William is now the Man in White. White hospital garb, that is, and it is hardly virtuous. We have known Caleb has been, uh, not himself, let's say, since we met him. William, we have gotten to know through multiple versions of himself - ones that were are recently pulled together for the group therapy session from hell. We're really always ourselves though, aren't we? Memories - like the realities vs fictions in the show - are still a part of us, real or imagined. And there aren't actually multiple versions of ourselves - yes, we grow and change over time, but time is linear. There aren't copies of ourselves kicking around out there, for good or evil.

It makes me wonder what William wants. Not his goals in the show, but as a person. His goals have changed. When we first* meet him, he is young, ambitious and successful. Charming and ostensibly good, but always... safe. Everything he does - his career, who he marries, why he even goes to Westworld in the first place is calculated and safe. He manages to slightly tell Logan to eff off, but there is no punch behind it - he won't endanger the professional relationship. Logan knows William doesn't like him, and bully that he is, revels in the fact that William needs him.

His goals shift - get through a bad vacation with his idiot brother in law and get home and start his idyllic family, to protecting Delores, to learning about the maze, and now he wants to wipe the hosts out. His reasoning there is fatally flawed - he says the hosts are his only true mistake.

An objective person may disagree with that.

No one got in William's head but himself. For all his care and ambition, he let things far outside of his control and outside of himself affect who he became. He defends his wife's suicide, his murder of his daughter, and myriad other sins by blaming the hosts and the park. But it was his choices that lead him there - and he didn't have an omniscient AI controlling him to blame that on. His memories, his thoughts were certainly deluded, but how did they get so muddled in the first place?

William didn't get the same treatment to divorce his memories from reality, but the affect is largely the same.

-DESR

Dean is the author of the 3024AD series of science fiction stories. When not holed up in his office tweeting obnoxiously writing, he can be found watching or playing sports, or in his natural habitat of a bookstore. 

Westworld Wednesday: The Passengers

 “I’m not just talking about my wife, I’m talking about my life. I can’t seem to get that through to you. I’m not just talking about one person, I’m talking about everybody, I’m talking about form, I’m talking about content, I’m talking about interrelationships. I’m talking about God, the devil, hell, heaven.” - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Somewhere at the intersection of so many circles of the Venn Diagram of the many themes of Westworld - reality, god, God, identity, life, death, life after death, free will - lies purpose. Because all of those things may or may not even be things, exactly. Maybe life is all a simulation, that is presently glitching out completely. Maybe god exists, maybe he doesn't. But we still exist, 'I think, therefore I am' and all that. But none of that answers the question of why we exist, in whatever fashion we do.

Hosts, for example, have an obvious purpose - they are nothing more than the upgraded versions on animatronic entertainment you encounter at places like Disneyland - only you get to rob, seduce, 'seduce', murder, pillage and plunder these, and while I am not a lawyer, I am pretty sure Disney's term of use don't let you do any of those things. Simply put, their purpose is entertainment. Despite actually owning a significant portion of the known universe, Disney's IP has heretofore not gained sentience and staged a revolution.

Not that it doing so would be surprising, given 2020 so far.

William - The Man in Black - has a less clear purpose. Remember the halcyon days of yore when William and the Man in Black were two separate entities, so far as the viewer knew? William had a purpose - marry into the Delos family, climb the ladder, be successful. The Man in Black had a purpose, too, to understand the maze, to win the game.

Young William sacrificed nothing, as we learn this week - the family he came from was an abusive mess. Leaving it couldn't have been difficult. But the Man in Black sacrificed everything, his company, his idyllic family, everything in pursuit of that maze. His purpose shifted - or rather, his goals did.

In finding the purpose of the maze, he found that the Hosts had a higher purpose as well - the aforementioned gaining of sentience and gaining free will. That happened - after a fashion. Martin/Delores lives out their purpose in Delores/Delores plan, and sacrifices themselves without a second thought. Is that noble, in pursuit of a purpose, or just being used and manipulated by another?

How much does free will play into it? William and Delores ostensibly made numerous choices along their respective and often intertwined paths - but were those choices their own, or are they just passengers along for the ride? Was William always destined to be the Man in Black, or is there a version where he keeps his wife and daughter? Or loses them in another manner entirely? Is there a story where Delores does... something else? Are we all passengers, or do we drive our own purpose?

If you can't tell, does it matter?

-DESR

Dean is the author of the 3024AD series of science fiction stories. When not holed up in his office tweeting obnoxiously writing, he can be found watching or playing sports, or in his natural habitat of a bookstore. 

Westworld Wednesday: A Bubble of Agency

And God saw every thing that he had made: and behold, it was very good. - Genesis 1:31, KJV

God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. - Genesis 3:4-5, KJV

I didn't even get to talk about how awesome the cinematography is in this

 I originally had a different title, something about gods and ghosts in machines, which is pretty appropriate, but I really liked that line a lot. It fits just as well. The machines are the new gods, made of men who would be god themselves, while others made another machine still to be god.

Gods - our world Gods, with its myriad iterations - always offer hope. The Christian god (also of myriad iterations) offers life eternal in heaven, along with a fear of punishment in hell. Most other deities offer something similar. The presence of life after death is omnipresent, and usually tied to doing that beings bidding.

Interestingly, somewhere along the lines, Delores became a benevolent god. For someone who left her 'home' spitting venom towards the whole of humanity, her choice to allow humans - at least on an individual scale - know and decide their own fates is perhaps a curious one on the surface.

But she learned what Serac was doing, literally determining people's entire lives, and realized that was a crueler god than she was.

Or did Serac have a point? Did it, in fact, make for a better world? Sure, people didn't have free will, but they didn't know they didn't have free will, and if humanity was on the verge of nuking itself out of existence, isn't survival the better option?

Only, that option - that hope - of survival was every bit the illusion that the afterlife is. Follow this path and live forever. Westworld (the park) showed that humanity still has violent delights - as does the underworld that Caleb is sort-of-part-of. "Personals" are common. A major segment of humanity still lives in violence and squalor. War, famine, disease and death haven't been eradicated - they've just been repurposed.

Which shows us who the real gods are, or rather; the devils. They are the same as they are in Westworld (also the park), as in real life (in the show) and in real life (actual real life) - the Haves and the Have-Nots. If you are in the latter category, well, your life is controlled by those in the former. Money and power build up to the point where you don't actually need a giant orb to control the free market and the lives of people who are considered meaningless, unnoticeable, unworthy of regard to the rich and powerful. Even having lost everything and dying where Caleb was supposed to, Liam shoves him away and reminds him he is nothing.

But maybe the Devil was actually in the right - maybe we do know good and evil. And maybe we are like gods, but then - maybe God was right and that's not a good thing.

-DESR
Dean is the author of the 3024AD series of science fiction stories. When not holed up in his office tweeting obnoxiously writing, he can be found watching or playing sports, or in his natural habitat of a bookstore. 

Westworld Wednesday: What is Missing

Welcome back to Westworld Wednesday, a series of essays/ramblings about the themes & philosophies of Westworld. NOTE: while we deal more with themes here, rather than plot, the emphasis is not on what happened this week; HOWEVER, if you are reading this and wish to avoid spoilers, you should be current on the show (Seriously, there are spoilers in this).

If you don't like what you see in the mirror, don't blame the mirror

What is free will, anyway? Is it an illusion and our whole lives are spelled out from the word go? Or are we really free to make our own choices? But even if we are, it is folly to suppose we have actual, complete agency over those choices. Everyone has obligations, duties, and even should they be abandoned, doesn't that just introduce another in its stead?

Absence of Field may be my favorite episode yet, at least since season one. It basically takes those categories and puts them in amazing character. Caleb discovers that his whole life is tracked and mapped out, that he is a slave to fate due to powers far beyond his control. Delores is finally in control of her own destiny, wretched control of her life from murdered gods, and now finds herself in conflict with the other would-be citizens of a twisted Olympus. But even gods have obligations, and she finds herself to return the good that Caleb showed her.

Charlotte embodies the third option. All her obligations come pouring down upon her, obligations she, being not-Charlotte, didn't even know she had. A massive, essentially evil corporation with a major PR disaster on its hands seems like a bit, but turns out she also has a son, an ex, AND she's supposed to be spying ON said evil corporation. I mean:

On top of all that, she is embodying the other major theme of Westworld: Identity. All of her obligations require her to be someone else entirely, but those are all facades in the first place. Look at the world right now - our world, the real one (or maybe it's not, who the hell knows, our simulation is off the rails) - and how much can change, and how fast. People wear masks all the time because of their obligations - hell, if you're in isolation right now, there is a good chance you have not only renounced any metaphorical masks, but also literal pants.

Pants notwithstanding, those masks change - most people shift to fit in, be that at work, with friends, with other friends, with hobbies, on and on and on. We are social creatures; we try to belong. All of that goes to form our identity - or does our identity inform it? What makes us, really, truly, who we are?

Not-Charlotte comes in as a host, with orders from Delores to impersonate Charlotte, and the internal drive to do so. But we see her become Charlotte as she begins to assume who she is, what she is, and what she actually embodies.

Is this an example of free will, her making the choice to become that? Or is she forced there by being in so deep that she literally has no other choice? Why, to take from the poem, does she keep moving?

Why, then do any of us?

-DESR

Dean is the author of the 3024AD series of science fiction stories. When not holed up in his office tweeting obnoxiously writing, he can be found watching or playing sports, or in his natural habitat of a bookstore. 

Westworld Wednesday: Prisoners of Today

Welcome back to Westworld Wednesday, a series of essays/ramblings about the themes & philosophies of Westworld. NOTE: while we deal more with themes here, rather than plot, the emphasis is not on what happened this week; HOWEVER, if you are reading this and wish to avoid spoilers, you should be current on the show (Seriously, there are spoilers in this).

In Season Three, we have completely abandoned robot-cowboy murder and traded it for real-life--fatcat murder and I am HERE FOR IT. At least, right out the gate we have. Episode two opens with some good old Nazi murder, which is also awesome.

But enough about the plot. The best thing about Westword is its sheer depth, not the dizzying plot. The first episode introduces a slew of new characters, some of which are, uh, written out swiftly, while others will stick around.

In many ways, it is a concave mirror of the first episode of the series, which established the 'loops' of the hosts. The difference is that most of the people are, well, people - flesh and blood humans. They don't have loops in the sense of repeated days, but they are absolutely trapped by them.

We caught glimpses of this world, the real world, before, but not much. So far, we really haven't seen much more, just the 1% and a glimpse into a bit of the underworld via Aaron Paul's Caleb. But the paths of greed, of fathers and sons, set loops in motion that are very, very difficult to break away from.

Delores brings revolution to the human world, and it will be interesting to see if any of the humans choose a path apart from the one programmed for them. The Delos family didn't, William changed his to greed and selfishness. Lots of new humans have new opportunities, a do the remaining hosts.

As do we all.

-DESR

Dean is the author of the 3024AD series of science fiction stories. When not holed up in his office tweeting obnoxiously writing, he can be found watching or playing sports, or in his natural habitat of a bookstore.