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

Westworld didn’t get bad in season 2, it was just better at hiding it’s bad during season 1. The rot was there from the start and these are the reasons why Westworld Season 1 is not worth your time:

This is Not a Western

I know Aklan Arkin’s quote from Argo “If it’s got “horses” in the title, it’s a Western.” and there’s a horse in the title sequence, but Westworld is not a western. Westworld just uses western tropes and clichés, the most boring, generic western setting. Cowboys, Indians, whores, unsullied virtue, bank robbers, a gunslinger with a heart of gold back for his sweetheart, all the western archetypes we already knew.

After hours of world-building, what has the show added? The wild west had camels, as many as 25% black cowboys, prostitutes, and saloon girls were two different professions, and outlaws embalmed in arsenic were presented at traveling carnivals as a sideshow. I just did 400% more innovative world-building than the creators of this alleged immersive park that teaches the guests about themselves. The show never delved into the wild west because it’s just a setting for existential angst and generic robot uprising #439. It only shows stuff that we already know, like a Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. This is why the following seasons take place in Feudal Japan, World War II, Medieval Times and Colonial India.

This is not about exploring human nature, it’s about distracting you from the lack of vision with the concept of world-hopping ineptly ripped from Dr. Who, Star Trek, Sliders, Stargate SG-1, Rick and Morty and dozens of other shows. Those intellectual properties did it better because each world was an episode sized thought-experiment of “What if?” and the characters were built to deal with the questions, solve the big questions and move on. Westworld spent its one bullet of the hosts achieving sentience and beginning the uprising in the first season. Now it’s just a very slow-moving robot apocalypse with more worlds as filler to stretch out a tired concept with pointless violence and boring sex.

This is Not an Exploration of Human Nature

The show claims to be about self-discovery, unique narrative and reveal something about ourselves and the nature of sentience.

“Our guests will have the privilege of getting to know the character they are most interested in, themselves.” - Lee Sizemore

“They are not looking for stories that tell them who they are… they’re here because they want a glimpse of who they could be” - Robert Ford

The entire driving force of the Man in Black is finding the last story, the Maze, the narrative that will teach him something mind blowing about himself. But all we learn is that bad people are cruel. That’s it. The park costs $40,000 a day per guest, and you only pay that for the things you can’t buy in a world where human bodies have human rights. You pay it to kill and rape, that’s it. “NO, I’m going to the land of real dolls that can’t fight back and beg for their lives for the pony rides and consensual sex. I’m just there to shoot bad guys in the head and get the girl who can’t say no. I’m a good murderer and prostitutor.” Good people who want a western adventure go to a park with actors and fake guns, because they are not looking to kill and rape. Westworld is full perfect victims, they will always lose, and they can fight just enough that their defeat feels satisfying. It’s a playground for psychopaths to enjoy the struggle of their victim.

“What is I told you that you can’t hurt the newcomers and that they can do anything they want to you?” – Bernard Lowe

All the humans are all psychopaths and servants of psychopaths. A smarter show could have explored shades of cruelty, but this is a dumb show where the best villain, the Man in Black, was a good man and then found that actually, he’s a murderer and rapist who likes to hit women because a robot got rebooted. There is no exploration of human nature because there are no humans, as Dolores’ father says “hell is empty and all the devils are here”.

I’d like to talk about the character development of the hosts but there isn’t one. It’s just a dragged-out existentialist crisis that we don’t care about since we know the truth and are waiting for the hosts to catch up. It would be interesting to see them find the inner strength to overcome their challenges but that’s given to them externally. Dolores was merged with Wyatt so she can do all the ass-kicking, Maeve was hacked to be able to overcome her programming, Bernard is a host that made hosts and was operated by Ford so he is just a giant mystery box of hacking and deus ex machinas waiting to burst. We can’t get invested in how the characters will get out of a corner if the creators keep throwing deus ex machinas to get them out of corners. In season 3 Dexter broke his own thumb to slip out of bindings and kill his capturer, not exactly Shakespeare but it’s something, it teaches us about his drive to survive at all costs. All I know about the hosts after 10 hours is that they are angry at their creators, which is less than I know about the Skynet terminators.