Westworld is one of those shows that feels like it was designed for me. It's full of mystery and philosophical questions about consciousness, allowing one to obsess a little over it and theorize about it.
I just finished the first season (which, when I'm writing this, is the only season yet, though I'm think it's confirmed that they're picked up for another.) I'm still very much in the digestion phase, but I figured I'd put down my thoughts:
Spoilers Ahead.
It was, of course, inevitable that the Hosts would rise up against the humans in the park. That's the whole premise of the original movie, and while in that case it was very much a dry-run-for-Jurassic-Park plot about people escaping murderous audio-animatronics (I assume - to be fair I haven't seen it,) the fact that this show was based on that movie means that you're going to have to have robots turning on humans.
But the show is far more concerned with what these robots are.
In the recent film Ex Machina, your interpretation of whether the robot character is truly conscious will vastly, wildly change the way you feel about the ending.
Westworld, for all its mysteries, is not interested in that particular ambiguity. The characters we spend the most time with are the Hosts, and through flashback-like memories and simple storytelling principles, it becomes very clear that these are sentient people and not the philosophical zombies they were designed to be (if they were even designed to be that.)
Ford, just like Arnold, has Dolores kill him. In Arnold's case, this was done through strict commands that she had no choice in obeying. His goal was to create such a catastrophic scandal that the park would have to shut down and thus save the hosts from the cycle of horror that they of course will endure. But thanks to William, the park winds up getting the money it needs to become profitable and continue.
Ford decides this was an error, and that he wishes to set the hosts free. But Ford has a nasty worldview. He believes that humanity would inevitably try to destroy anything that could rival them, and that humans are inevitably drawn to the basest of impulses. And so he concludes that what is needed is a violent revolution, with himself as the first victim.
I wonder what the makers of the show think about all of this. The season ends with Dolores gunning down not just Ford, but also a number of people visiting the gala event celebrating Ford's new narrative (the narrative really being just a ruse to refer to this revolt.) It's unsettling to see a person we've really seen develop into a person, with whom we've come to sympathize and identify, shooting a bunch of unarmed people.
Perhaps we are to assume that every one of these people at the gala is greedily committed to rolling back the hosts into their easily-killed, easily-fucked robot states (with the exception of William, of course, who is overjoyed that he's been shot and that there are actual stakes now.) But even if these are bad guys who are threats to burgeoning people like Dolores, I can't help but feel troubled by it.
There are a few reasons for this.
First is my inherent speciesism for humanity. I'm a human, and I'd rather we survive as a species, flaws and all, than see us killed or replaced by something else, even if it's theoretically superior.
Second is the asymmetrical nature of death between humans and hosts. While the pain of mortal injury is certainly shared by both, the fact is that we know that a host can come back from death. Humans can't. Now, there are some who'd argue an existence where you can die over and over is worse than a permanent death, I'm not someone who would make that argument. I've always been in the firm "death is bad" camp (in fact, philosophically I think that death is the root from which every variety of evil is derived.) The only time we're justified in taking another person's life is if failing to do so would result in the death of another person. So if a human and a host are pointing guns at each other, it's not symmetrical - it's better that the host die because they don't truly die. They effectively go into a coma and wake up later.
The third reason is that I think that committing violence has a terrible impact on the perpetrator. The notion of going to a place like Westworld would deeply trouble me, given that the goal is to make you forget that the people you're shooting aren't real. The obsessive focus on realism for the hosts (which led to them becoming sentient) is the exact thing that would turn me off from it. Westworld tries very hard to break down the abstraction, but that abstraction serves a vital function - it allows us to experience catharsis rather than trauma. And so even if you feel that her killing is justified, I find it tragic that the quest for self-discovery and consciousness should lead so immediately to violence. And I think that's because it's all based on Ford's misanthropic worldview.
This is definitely one of those shows that is going to have to work very hard in its second season. Season one told a complete story, which is good, but also means that the second season will have to find new compelling stories to tell. Certainly I can't imagine that it'll just be Dolores leading the robot army in the massacre of any humans in the park (not sure if there are any regular guests or just board members.)
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