Five weeks ago, I reviewed the first half of creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s HBO show, “Westworld.” I alluded to the ability of the show to give us a storyline filled with science fiction tropes while never allowing it to feel slow, uninteresting, or boring. I mentioned that the show is able to generate questions and complications without burying them so far deep that it seems to viewers they may be left unanswered.
This past week the first season finale took place, and it did an impeccable job of clearing up confusions viewers had been experiencing since the first episode, while still maintaining many different possibilities for storylines to expand in the next season.
The overarching puzzle I mentioned in my last review — the moral problem of having androids interact with humans in such a complex way — does not disappear in episodes 6 through 10. What does change about this puzzle however, is the way we see android-human interaction take place.
We no longer see humans controlling every action of every android, and it seems the human-like machines begin to have “minds of their own” in larger quantities every single episode.
I posed the possibility in my first review that perhaps the creator of the park, Robert Ford (Sir Anthony Hopkins), could be causing these strange things to happen within the Westworld park. As the season continues, this possibility becomes more probable.
Ford is proven to be behind some of the weird, and even highly problematic and psychopathic occurrences in Westworld. But beyond Ford being identified as the sole “God” within the show — the one causing trouble within the park — other characters are introduced that could also be responsible for strange things occurring.
One character, Arnold, is introduced as having been a co-creator of the park with Ford. When he learned what the park could do to negatively impact human, as well as android lives, he could not come to terms with himself and he designed a way to kill himself within the park using park resources. Arnold is already dead by the time we as viewers begin watching “Westworld.”
Although it is a mystery exactly who Arnold is at the beginning of the show, the last few episodes bring an answer to this question.
We get the feeling that Arnold’s demented suicide and dark feelings about the park could have been the origins of strange things occurring with the androids within the park, since he is one of the people who programmed these androids and brought them to life. Arnold’s final words are ones we as viewers realize we’ve heard before through the mouth of Delores: “These violent delights have violent ends.” This seems to confirm that Arnold’s death left some lasting impact on the “brains” of the androids he worked with.
This creates an entirely new space for storylines to emerge.
The same way the show creates layers on layers of storyline, we see a meta-narrative within the show reiterate this. The Man In Black now has a much larger role as we start to learn more about his character. His investment in the park, sparked by years and years of playing the loop of Westworld, becomes thoroughly caught up in finding deeper meaning in the park — one that he believes Arnold designed years before.
This brings in a new sub-plot: While the Man In Black tries to find the center of “the maze” that is Westworld, hoping it will bring him deeper meaning, we begin to understand that Arnold’s “maze” was not designed for the human players who possess “violent delights,” but for the hosts of the park, the androids, who will end these delights with “violent ends.”
The season ends with an uprising of androids defending themselves against the human desire to experience “violent delights” by raping, pillaging, and killing these very human-like machines. Although plot-based questions are answered admirably well in episodes 6 through 10, viewers are still left haunted by the much larger ethical questions created by the show: When do humans and machines blend too closely and become one? When does it stop being okay to use violent measures on machines, when they look, feel, breathe, and think the way humans do?
Things to look out for in the season to come will be conceptual twists different from those seen this season. Rather than looking at the human/android interactions, we can look forward to more android/android interactions, and android/machine/weapon interactions. We can expect the show to be highly based on the idea of artificial intelligence, and the obstacle of machines transcending the barriers we as humans program them with.
The verdict: This season of “Westworld” might be over, but I won’t stop thinking about the questions it’s sparked until the next season presents more.
Reach Opinion Editor Rebecca Gross at arts@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @becsgross
