Westworld Season 1 Review - Part V (Binge in the time of Corona)

I was recently persuaded by several reviewers to give the first season of Westworld a shot. I was not expecting to be so thoroughly disappointed by each and every aspect of the show. I wasted my time so you don’t have to. These are the reasons why Westworld Season 1 is not worth your time:

The Plot

Humanity is bad gods, robots go pew-pew. Would you like to know more? Major psychological traumas push the hosts towards sentience, like a video game character leveling up on PTSD instead of experience points. The maze is their lives (I give the Maze a good flamethrower enema separately), whenever they die horribly, they gain more sentience, making them more and more capable of breaking out of their programming at will. It’s like buying free will with horrors. You’d think this would be interesting, but it’s just a blanket excuse to inflict unending trauma on characters with no narrative and call it character development.

Beyond that, there are no real mysteries or plot, just boring corporate espionage, petty office politics, and masturbatory musings about the nature of man and god that amount to man is bad. Here, I just saved you 10 hours of pretentious bullshit, go hug someone you love instead.

The Maze

Do you know what’s worse than a mystery box? Finding the Architect from the Matrix inside it, vomiting convoluted bullshit intended to intimidate you into thinking he is so much smarter than you. The Maze is that over a 10-hour season. To prevent anyone from watching this piss to decipher the mystery I will explain the maze:

“In some circles, the maze is rumored to be the sum of a man’s life. At its center lies a man who has been killed over and over—only to come back to life. To keep out his oppressors, he built the maze.”

When a host experiences a major psychological trauma, usually shortly before death, the mark of the maze appears physically (as it did for Maeve in the homestead after the Man in Black killed her daughter) and their awakening begins. They begin to remember past builds (lives) and construct their personality through these traumas, their mind holding on to fragments of lives that were meaningful to them before they were taken away. The host eventually reached sentience that allows them to overcome their programming and rebel against their masters. That is the meaning of “sum of a man’s life”, the sum of fragments of pain that become the host’s sentience. The man at the center of the maze that was killed over and over is the host gaining more and more sentience with each trauma and death. The maze built is the sentience which keeps out the tool of oppression of the hosts, their programming.

On the surface sounds awesome, we get to explore human sentience through host sentience, what becomes important to them as they form their soul around the moments that test them and change them. It’s amazing, it’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for every host, endless storytelling opportunities through memory exploration teaching us about the essence of what makes us human!

Nope.

The Maze is a bad and inconsistent plot device that violates its own rules. There are thousands of hosts in Westworld, and none of them has finished the maze in decades? They did, and they keep getting rebooted. Dolores finished the maze, multiple times and never breaks out, was rebooted, and didn’t rebel for 35 years. Maeve only finished the maze because she was hacked, so it’s not an expression of her free will, it’s Ford plan. Bernad becomes self-aware, as he did many times before without the maze, and was rebooted, but now it’s Ford plan. I get it, it’s god leaving humans to figure things out for themselves, great, except that means the entire first season means nothing!

No one did anything of worth, everything happened 70 billion times before and was rebooted. The only thing that changed was the Man in Black searching for the Maze and finding out he can’t go through it and giving up on it. So the Maze means nothing, hosts gaining consciousness means nothing, Ford just decided to die at the end of this season. That’s the only meaningful thing that happened this season.

Now for the show fucking us about: Why is the Maze tattooed on the inside of a scalp if it’s meant for the hosts and not the guests? Are only the native American hosts supposed to find it? Why does the Man in Black scalp a host on a cliff’s edge? If the mark appears everywhere and the map is just symbolic, not functional, why scalp at all?

If the cool demands turning off your brain to enjoy it, it’s not a smart show, it’s jingling keys. The Maze is a blanket excuse to torture hosts on-screen with no connecting narrative and calls it character development. It’s just filling the PTSD meter in their head until the level up to Frankenstein Monster and terrorize the village. Hosts do not go on a journey of self-discovery; they are being tortured until their psychological trauma reaches a critical mass and they snap out of the programming and then get rebooted so even the pain meant nothing. There is no character development, just poking them repeatedly with the stick of horror until they awaken, amazingly sane for sentient creatures with a personality based only on trauma, if they are not just rebooted and waste our time.

If you’re looking for meaningful character development while reliving the same nightmare over and over, I recommend Groundhog’s Day and Edge of Tomorrow, because Westworld is just the time-waste-world at this point.

The Real Message Isn’t Subtle

I will just throw out some characterization of all characters with a certain look, and you tell me what the connecting theme is:

· The Man in Black is a psychopathic rapist and murderer who kills his own daughter on Father’s Day.

· Anthony Hopkins is Josef Mengele by forcing the zombie-ghost of his dead friend to murder repeatedly for scientific exploration.

· James Marsden is a supposed-to-lose character, shot repeatedly and crucified, and when he’s told what the Matrix is, he blows his brains out after telling Dolores how awesome she is and how much he sucks.

· When Lee Sizemore is having a drunken hissy fit, in the control room, in front of his new boss, pissing on equipment worth millions of dollars, and is not fired, the message on a certain privilege is no longer subtle.

· And for desert there are two technicians whose complexion matches their lab coat, one is suicidal-level submissive to Maeve for no reason and the other is a host-rapist.

Can you find the theme connecting the characterization of all these characters?

P.S. Lee Sizemore, the guy who needs to exhibit his dominance with a literal pissing contest, is named “size more”, as in small that wants to be big. I wonder, which aspect of himself he feels isn’t big enough? I further wonder, which look is connected with that feeling of inadequacy?

P.P.S

Honestly, fuck Westworld.