I had my concerns going in Westworld for a number of reasons. The original film is one of my favorites for the story it tries to tell, even though it probably does not hold up as well as many think. This series has also dealt with numerous delays and issues, so I was coming into it with some trepidation. So it great to find that not only is Westworld of of the best premieres a show has hand in years, but it could quite possibly be a masterpiece of a series.
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”
The show takes a hard right turn from the film choosing to tell its own story instead of remaking the original. This works beautifully as the setting of Westworld is what people remember most from the film. Well, that and Yul Brynner being a right badass. The show opens with Dolores (one of Westworld’s robot “Hosts”) sitting perfectly still as a fly crawls across her face. It’s an important scene/moment the bookends the entire episode, but the fly itself is also important as it helps show the true nature of these unfeeling robots.
The fly pops up a few times in the hour-long episode and helps the audience link just who is real and who isn’t. It a wonderful visual cue that isn’t overt, but let’s the audience subconsciously make certain associations about the characters. From this little opening scene the show beings in earnest in much the same way the film did. A group of travelers from the real world are heading into Westworld to take part in the grand vacation.
Everything falls onto the shoulders of Teddy (James Marsden) as he enters the town and sets off on his Westworld adventure. We know that he is returning to Westworld as he runs into Dolores and they immediately connect with her remembering him. The audience is left wondering what Teddy is playing at during these scenes as we know little about him or his past. Is he in love with the robot Dolores? Is he running away from something back home? Is him simply filthy rich? These questions and more pop up as the two ride off together.
As they head back to Dolores’ home the show turns things up another notch altogether. A group of gunmen have taken over the home and killed Dolores’ mother and father. Teddy kills the two men, but is too late to save Dolores’ parents. Westworld is an amusement park where the human visitors can kill the robots with special weapons that are in play. There are safety measures so that visitors can’t be hurt in any exchange. So when the man in black arrives the audience doesn’t know how to process things that are happening.
This gunslinger is dressed in all black and calls back to the main antagonist of the original film; a robot gone off the grid that was played by Yul Brynner. Everything about this man leads us to see him as the villain, but when Teddy guns him down after he tries to take Dolores, we find that bullets don’t hurt him. It’s a crazy and tense scene that has you questioning everything about this world.
Has this robot gone crazy? Is he actually a human? But then what of Teddy? What happens when two humans have a conflict in the simulation? Just when you try to begin the process of unraveling these mysteries our gunslinger shots Teddy, killing him. That’s right, the hero of this tale who we thought was a human guest, is actually a robot, and the bad guy is actually human. It’s a marvelous twist on the original premise that makes even hardcore Westworld fans start back at square one with regards to the story.
Westworld resets everyday with the robots all performing their assigned plot lines from the created script. But there is room to deviation as the guests can interrupt their current plot line. We see this as each day starts the same for Teddy (on the train into town) and Dolores (waking up and greeting her farther), but as we get deeper into the episode glitches begin to appear in the system.
It seems that the latest software update has caused a small portion of the robots to malfunction. This update is fairly standard but Ford (Anthony Hopkins) has injected some “reveries” into the code to make the robots seem more human. It turns out that these small bits of code are leading to a form of consciousness within the robots and it begins to have negative effects on the park. In one important scene we see Dolores’ dad finding a picture of the real world that was dropped my a guest. Where Dolores sees nothing special about the photo, her father begins to go crazy over it.
This is more than some simple program glitch and as he is taken in to evaluation we find that he is actually calling back old programming. It seems that he is pulling up memories of another character that he played in another world. New fans may miss this, but Westworld is named for a reason and there are other “Worlds” that visitors can enjoy. There is so much being thrown at the audience in the form of information, but so much of it comes subtly that you won’t figure/remember things until long after the show is over. The team behind the show have done a fantastic job of drawing the audience in, in a ways few show can.
As the episode comes to a close all the affected robots are brought in and decommissioned until further notice, but Dolores is sent back out into the world, even though she shows signs of problems. This is because she is, as the title suggest “The Original” and is the oldest serving robot in the park. She has be repaired and modified so many times that she is essentially an entirely new model. This of course will no doubt lead to issues as the glitch is pulling up past memories.
As all this is going on our gunsligner in black has been hunting robots looking for information about “going deeper” into the simulation.It’s unclear what he wants, but we do know that he is looking for the secrets that lie within Westworld. Before he rides off we see him scalp a robot and find some sort of maze like map on the inside of his skull. It’s weird, creepy, and does wonders to set this man up as a true monster.
Before the credits roll we get Dolores being sent back into the field to start a new programming day with a new father. Everything seems to be fixed with the Westworld robots, but just as we fade to black a fly lands on her neck and she kills it. We also see Teddy waking up on the train seemingly bursing the sport where is was shot the day before. We don’t know what all this means, but it sure look like she “felt” the fly and he remembers the bullet and thus are becoming something more than their original programming.
“Westworld is an incredible and provocative premiere for a show that has masterpiece written all over it.”
5/5
‘Superb’
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