BWW Recap: Violent Delights Have Violent Ends in WESTWORLD

"Every hero has a choice." That's not exactly the tagline of HBO's new drama Westworld, but it should be. Westworld explores mankind at it's core and what our choices say about us. It explores the depths and depravity of humanity, our culture, and our pleasures. What do our choices and our desires say? What is entertainment and why is it so often riddled with sex, violence, and most frequently sexual violence? While we constantly hide behind the separation between fiction and reality, the perverted, exploitative, and gratuitous demand for inclusion of what we generally condemn as morally wrong in our society to be present and pronounced in our media is undoubtable, and HBO as a network is frequently one of our biggest culprits. But, perhaps that is why Westworld works so brilliantly.

While it shares a billing on HBO's current lineup with shows like Game of Thrones, a show that is being handed Emmys and applauded as the number one show in television and is constantly critiqued for it's unnecessary and gratuitous sexual violence, that succession makes the commentary present in Westworld that much more effective. In what is possibly a brilliant move on HBO's part to attempt to step away from its reputation as the network where you are bound to see superfluous strip downs written into actress and extra contracts alike and gore, Westworld still includes those mandates but decides to make use of the repute to its advantage by actually saying something about it.

Westworld was always an interest from the start of its conception and development at HBO with a stunning cast of veteran actors and heaps of production issues and setbacks. Taking three years from its initial development to even reach our screens, a length of time virtually unheard of for a television show, especially one on a major network like HBO, Westworld had buzz about it before it ever actually took off. With Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy at the helm, along with J.J. Abrams, Westworld is perhaps the biggest production both in content and story that HBO has ever attempted and, like a similarly wary outlook on Mad Max: Fury Road after hearing the hardships of production, Westworld steps above and beyond it's struggles to be something more than perhaps the network and it's creators originally intended.

Westworld's pilot titled "The Original" introduces us to the futuristic theme park of the series' namesake where the wealthy can spend a great deal of money for a completely immersive vacation experience in the old West. Created by Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the park has evolved over the years to become a mammoth of entertainment to upkeep and constantly evolve. With numbers such as 1,400 guests in the park at a time and a plethora of hosts (the androids that interact with the guests to involve them in preplanned and preprogrammed narratives), "Westworld" is colossal.

We are first introduced to one of the hosts in the park, Dolores Abernathy (portrayed absolutely brilliantly by Evan Rachel Wood), and though she feels detached, distant, and replies to questions being posed to her by workers maintaining the park like a machine, there is still a speckle of life shining in her eyes. As she is asked if she ever "questioned the nature of [her] reality," and replies no, we are forced to suspect that she might be lying and all of that is about to change.

We see that Dolores is an optimist, or rather she's programmed to be. She sees all the good in the cruel world that she is forced to live within. Every day for Dolores is the same day, but she doesn't know that. She is first and foremost living for the good of the guests, not herself. She wakes up every morning, greets her father, and goes into town. It is there that her day may change should she interact with a guest, or a newcomer as the hosts call them. Dolores is asked what she thinks of the newcomers and she replies that "at one point or another, we were all new to this world...looking for a place to be free." What Dolores doesn't know that despite the fact that she was programed to want freedom, to look for the good in people, she was also programmed to never reach it. What does it say to create life or the shadow of life, fill it with the concepts of wants, desires, and conscience, but then deny it from ever reaching fulfillment?

The park exists for the guests. The hosts exist for the guests. Beings like Dolores exist for the guests. The guests can do whatever they want in the park. They come there to spend exuberant amounts of money to live out their fantasies, and in some cases the most depraved ones. While some guests simply enjoy going along for THE RIDE that the narratives offer, almost as involved spectators, others use Westworld as a platform to live out their nefarious desires that they wouldn't be able to live out in the real world without retribution. The Man in Black (Ed Harris), one of Westworld's oldest and most frequent guests, is point and case. He arrives at the park for a return trip where he's convinced that after exploring all of Westworld's narratives, there must be something more. He's searching for the answer to one final puzzle, an easter egg, that he believes was placed within the park by its creators. On his quest, however, he doesn't hesitate to rejoice in the violence the theme park encourages and because he's a most valued customer, the controllers don't question it either. He passes by Dolores, his interference changing her narrative for the night, after she weeps over the death of her parents, an act that frequently occurs should certain narratives play out. This action has nothing to do with his mission and it is clear that he enjoys the violence. He delights in it. He kills Teddy (James Marsden), another host in the park who is a gunslinger in love with Dolores. Teddy attempts to save Dolores from The Man in Black's sinister plans, but he is unable to pull the trigger. Guests can kill as many hosts as they want but it is impossible for the hosts to ever retaliate or hurt the guests. Thus morality is once again a question. These hosts are not just programed to feel, but to feel for each other, yet they are unable to protect each other from the true horror of their worlds; the guests. The Man in Black kills Teddy without question and drags Dolores off, claiming "I didn't pay all this money because I wanted it easy. I want you to fight." He knows what he's doing and enjoys it. He pays for it. What kind of society allows this level of depravity to play out for entertainment? Well that's the question, isn't it? Just look at the other shows on this very network. We do it all the time. Westworld only maximizes our fulfillment methods. The Man in Black continues on his violent mission as he tortures and scalps another host, enjoying the slow nature of this torment, and discovers a pattern under the scalp resembling a labyrinth. He has found his puzzle, and continues on his path of discovering what is deeper, beyond the surface of the park.

The park itself is maintained and composed of different levels and interests. At the heart of it all is the guests and their enjoyment. However, the people that work to fulfill that enjoyment work behind the scenes. There is the management run by Theresa Cullen (Borgen's Sidse Babett Knudsen) who is there protecting the interest of the shareholders. When the new update begins to indicate a possible critical problem for the park's hosts, the likes of which they have not seen in thirty years, Cullen wants to pull all the updated hosts. However, Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), the man in charge of narrative, frustratingly tells her no, that it would disrupt so many narratives and break the illusion for the guests if they pulled the ten percent of the hosts that were updated. We get to see Sizmore in all of his Hunger Games gamemaker-esque fashion when he solves the problem by doing what he does best and simply editing one of the saloon heists to be twice as bloody, allowing them to pull and examine all updated hosts so they can decommission the faulty ones without taking away from the guests.

At the heart of the park is the creators and managers of the hosts themselves, the original developer Dr. Robert Ford and Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright). They relish in the creation of the imitation of life. They marvel at humanity in general and see all they've done and accomplished as progress. In fact, to Ford, progress has reached its peak. Humanity can now cure any disease, prolong life, and create imitation so real that it is hard to even distinguish as such. Thus, Ford has begun to rejoice in what he calls reveries that he begins adding to the hosts, additions that might be the source of the newest problems with the update. These reveries are small things, gestures, that most wouldn't even notice but help further mimic humanity by occasionally delving into the android's subconsciousness or past to make them seem more real; to make the guests "fall in love with them." However, if the hosts can now recall and refer, if they begin to remember, then is that life? Is that consciousness? Bernard says it's the reveries that have created the park's latest problem with hosts breaking down, going off script, and occasionally reverting back to or recalling traits from their previous roles, almost like previous lives lived. However, despite the question that perhaps in their recollection they are more than just imitation, the hosts are treated almost like a new iPhone update. When there's a bug, they either roll them back or fix them, and when it can't be fixed, they recall them.

To the guests it's a fantasy, to management it's a business, to Bernard and Ford it's a dream and an art, but to the hosts, it's their lives.

The hosts are literally called livestock and that is exactly how they are treated. Herded into a room when they are not needed and placed outside for presentation when they are the best of the best to exploit. Dolores says, when Teddy questions the logistics of a cattle drive, that there is one leading cattle, the "judas steer," that is directed and where that steer goes others will follow. Dolores is the oldest host in the park, and their pride and joy. She is clearly their "judas steer," but what happens when the judas steer goes off course?

That steer might just run off course sooner than expected. Dolores' father finds a photograph of a woman in Times Square that one of the guests must have dropped, buried in the dirt in their field. He begins to question the nature of his reality through this photo, despite Dolores' insistence that the photograph "looked like nothing," to her. Her father, however, breaks down. Before he his pulled in for examination, decommissioned, and replaced, he still fulfills his preprogrammed drive: to protect Dolores. He tells her that "hell is empty and all the devils are here," warning her that she must leave. "These violent delights have violent ends," he quotes and perhaps they do, for there is no better way to describe Westworld. It's a fantasy turned business where people relish in violent delights, but as her father said, they will only bring upon violent ends.

Thus, Westworld begins. In a spectacular set up that tells us enough but not too much, and leaves us wanting more. It's clear that those at the helm of this series are experienced in grandeur narrative storytelling. Westworld is a feat that had it's producers worried, but it succeeds. It's The Matrix meets I, Robot meets The Hunger Games if it had to be labeled, but it extends beyond its influences. Its Westworld. As the series takes a real look into not just the frequently asked question we've been exploring about AI and it's level of consciousness and humanity, but the questions of human nature itself and our entertainment. Perhaps it is a little to ironic or facetious that a series posing such questions exists on a platform like HBO, or perhaps that is its genius.

Photo Credit: HBO

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