Season 1
In the first episode they introduce Teddy as he is riding the train into Sweetwater. He spies Delores with a far-seeing vision and meets up with her and she says, “You came back”. They want to present the pair as host and visitor.
Bernard asks “what do you think about the guests” and they cut to Teddy, riding in on the train, sitting near guests discussing their previous visits. The guest says that the first time he with his family and they went fishing and looking for good in the mountains. The second time he came alone and went “straight evil”, and that it was the best two welds of his life. They introduce Teddy arriving with guests who are clearly talking about their exploits because they want us to confuse teddy with the visitors.
Delores answers, “You mean the newcomers? I like to remember what my daddy told me, that at one time we were all new to this world.”
Ep1 The Original
The player piano represents something that sounds artistic, but is a predetermined mechanism.
“Black Hole Sun” plays on the player piano.
One of the first questions we ask is “what is the status of these entities?”
Ep2 Chestnut
On introducing the visitor his host says, “All you do is make choices”
He chooses the white hat. This is rather interesting because all the other visitors we have seen have had someone less than ethical intentions.
Transportation is inventive and inpressive, just as in the original film.
“We practice witchcraft. We say the right words and we create life.” The Hopkins character makes the direct connection between programming and witchcraft.
“It means when you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real”
“You see what a bored mind can conjure?”
“Oddyssey on Red River” blood red no doubt.
Ep3 Stray
Delores discovers a gun at the end of the last episode. We can assume it is a fully functioning gun, not like the ones the hosts are accustomed to.
The conversatioon between [Bernard] and [Delores] starts the same way the other one ended. They want us to see that he is having these conversations regularly. Also, that Delores doesn’t quite have maintain her memories.
Delores looks at the found gun in her drawer and then has a fugue memory. It appears to be of a more persistent version, where she actually sees her rapist and remembers what he says. She then looks back down and the gun is no longer in the drawer. She continues normally.
Bernard and Theresa are mating, but it is hard to tell from their daytime behavior.
The Delos personnel are starting to suspect that the hosts are maintaining some residual memory, and we can see that they have flashbacks. It is presented as some flaw in the code. The Delos personnel are looking for the cause so they can fix it.
“You said someday and not today or tomorrow or next week. Just someday. Someday sounds like the thing people say when they actually mean never.”
Teddy scares off some visitors who want Delores to “take us for a hay ride”. The visitor hears Teddy’s speach and says “I told you I wanted something easy”. Why would the visitor be intimidated if he knew he couldn’t be hurt?
The diagram widdled into the wood is interesting. It looks like a star map.
ARnold had a theory of consciousness. “He wanted to create consciousness”. “He imagined it as a pyramid. Memory, improvisation, self-interest.” “And, at the top?”, “He never got that, but he had a notion of what it might be. He based it on something called the bichamiral mind”
The programmers set things up so that they could speak into the minds of the hosts. The theory of consciousness led Arnold to go crazy, only talking to the hosts. The bichamiral mind theory meant that the hosts weere little minds that drew from the big mind, whose voice they heard. It lead the early hosts to become crazy to. Mentally infirm people think they hear the voice of god.
It’s interesting that they are talking about theories of consciesness. It could be productive.
Bernard’s son died a few years ago.
“This pain, is all I have left of him”. Sad, if he really can’t remember anything good.
“Loose all scripted responses. Only improvisations.” –Bernard
DELORES: There aren’t two versions of me. There’s only one, and and I think when I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
BERNARD: Analysis; What prompted that response?
DELORES: Have I made a mistake?
Delores returns to town and discovers that Wyatt’s men may have caught Teddy. She rides out in time to see her father having just been killed. One of his killers tries to rape her and she shoots him with his own gun. It is probably the first android on human violence in the whole Westworld. She hears a voice in her head saying “Kill him” right before she shoots him dead.
Maybe Delores only dreams that she is talking to Bernard?
Maeve remembers flashes but there is also a little spot of blood left on her dress from a previous scenario. They show the hosts performing the exact same repetitive behavior, but they are supposed to improvise.
A different visitor seems to want to go murder Deloreses family every night and rape her.
Ep4 Dissonance theory
Ep5 Contrapaso
FORTUNE TELLER: Perhaps you are unravelling
Delores runs crying from the fortune teller. She sees that her body is not unravelling, as it appeared to be. She is crying because she believes her mind may be unravelling, or rather her sense of continuity and of a stable wold is unravelling. The foundation of her world-view is crumbling.
DELORES: There is a voice inside me telling me what I have to do, and it’s telling me I need you.
Robert Ford has author superpowers. So does the author of “Westworld”, either Lisa Joy or Johnathan Nolan. The Man in Black is searching for the center of the maze, the deeper meaning to the world in “Westworld”, but will we, the viewers of “Westworld” find deeper meaning in the story the authors have created?
Ep6 The Adversary
Arnold also had author superpowers. He is supposedly dead, but he drew a picture of a maze and now the natives have a myth of the maze with a house in the middle and a man who lives there.
FELIX: Everything you do is because you were made to.
The authors run into some trouble here. If every memory Maeve formed was implanted, she would not be able to learn, as she obviously can. If she can learn it means she can aquire new memories and new knowledge.
The authors want us to feel sympathy with the hosts, but they also want us to believe that they are pre-programmed. They have merely not chosen yet which status the hosts are in. The authors are playing both sides of the fence.
FELIX: Because I know. I was born. You were made.
FELIX: Everything in your head, they put it there.
MAEVE: Bullshit.
Maeve sees the computer type out everyting she is just about to say, right before she says it, but it runs into a conflict. The syntax option tree displays “CONFLICT” above her next statement, presumably because she was not designed to observe her upcoming statement. This means she is visually processing while progressing through the syntax tree.
The voice in Young Robert’s head tells him. YOUNG ROBERT: I could help it. If it was dead, it couldn’t hurth anything anymore.
The attack on Elsie was entirely predictable. She could have easily set up to transfer the info imediately. It is silly, in such a connected workplace, to carry data by hand, as she tasked herself with.
The bulk aperception upgrade is supposed to represent a superpower for Maeve. Again, totally predictable. It’s also going to give her abilities beyond cognitive.
Ep7 Tromp L’Oleil
The new board executive, Charlotte Hale, is gratifying herself with a host and opens the door naked to great Theresia for their scheduled meeting. This is supposeed to demonstrate a power structure but is just an outlandish portrayal of unprofessionalism. It’s supposed to represent a strong top-down hierarchy, but as if the new board member had no concern about her own position whatsoever. It’s a fantasy of dominence, not a credible business practice.
Charlotte Haile is supposed to be set up as the puppet master behind the puppetmaster.
WILLIAM: The only thing I had growing up was books. I’d fall asleep and dream that I’d wake up inside one of the stories. This place, I guess I just want to find out what it means.
DELORES: I don’t want to be in a story. All I want is to not look forward or back. I just want to be … in the moment I’m in.
Delores’s motivation is falling apart a little bit here. She is says she just wants to be in the moment she is in, but that is the type of life she is trying to escape. She is trying to find out the deeper story behind herself. She says she believes that if she could get to the middle of the maze she could find out her she really is then she could be free.
Wanting her life means wanting continuity in her daily existence. The author is probably confused about this. This contradiction is probably a symptom of that confusion.
Delores doesn’t care if it’s Teddy or William. She just wants someone to take her out of her life.
THERESIA; Do you really think the corporations interest here is tourists playing cowboys?
BERNARD: The more I work here the more I understand the hosts. It’s the people that confuse me.
BERNARD: What door?
BERNARD: It doesn’t look like anything to me.
Are they really just going to leave Theresia’s body down there in the dark to decompose? How are they going nto explain her disapperance to her loved ones? The corporation? Others?
Ep8 Trace Decay
FORD: I need you to clean up your mess, Bernard. I need you to remove any traces of what you have done.
Bernard is supposed to have full understanding of the continuity of implications, of cause and effect. Yet he is supposed to be able to obliterate entire sections of his memory without conflict, without the seems showing. The author is attempting to build an elaborate world system which depends on an incredible coordination of cause and effect, and yet also wants to ignore and omit those same causes and effects that the story depends upon.
Maeve treats the threat of death as some kind of ultimate superpower. Now she wants the tech to give her administrative rights he doesn’t even have himself. How can he do this? Well, she threatened to kill him. Fear is taken as the ultimate motivation in this show.
Sylvester is the other tech with Felix.
Maeve somehow acquires some kind of author superpower that the other personnel don’t even have.
FORD: The self is a fiction, for hosts and humans alike. Your imagined suffering makes you life-like.
FORD: eVERY HOST NEEDS A BACKSTORY. It’s a kind of fiction that we tell ourselves, for hosts as well as humans. There is no inflection point at which we become alive.
MIB: Then I witnessed something truly miraculous. In that moment she was truly alive, if only for a moment.
MAEVE: Please, this pain, it’s all I have left of her.
Ep10 The Bicamiral Mind
ROBERT: You know why I gave you the backstory of your son, birnard? It was ARnoold’s key insight, the thing that led the hosts to their awakening: Suffering. The pain that the world is not as you want it to be.
ROBERT: And I’m afraid that in order to leave this place you are going to have to suffer more.