Westworld on HBO [SPOILERS]

Last night's episode was my favorite so far.

Yes. It was a spectacular episode.

My only little trouble with suspending disbelief is, why would these host-only scenarios be running 24/7? The park is to entertain visitors, so why would the Indians' (NPCs?) lives be going along all the time - village life, hunting and fishing (they eat??), having relationships - for years on end, if there are no visitors around?

Surely it must cost something to "keep the lights on", as it were. Parks don't leave the roller coaster and the Ferris wheel going 24/7 with no one around.

It's not bugging enough to not enjoy the show, mind you. Just something to wonder about.

I was wondering about that too. Do they actually eat what they kill? Is there a reset that takes place every night unless there are guests around? We know there is a reset in the main town because QA comes through cleaning up the bodies and the mess.

I agree that this was the strongest episode of the season and possibly the series. It was told straight up without all the time hopping and subterfuge the rest of the show seems to rely on. As the actual plot begins to unfold, I hope they abandon the narrative devices they’ve used up to now.

I've noticed that way before this episode. I was more surprised that nobody noticed that this particular host hadn't "died" for over a decade.

Oh, it goes all the way back to the beginning - like, why would they have Dolores wake up in a remote cabin, then go into town, leaving her father-bot behind to do nothing and interact with no one? The Shogun world episodes too - lots of robot drama with no one watching. What's that look like on the corporate expense report?

What an excellent episode.

At one point in season one someone asks about host conversations taking place with no guests present and the answer was, losely paraphrased, it helps build their personality.

Just watched the season finale & I have several questions.... they can all be summed up with one: Is this now?

I am utterly confused. I don’t understand the rules of this world or the motivations of the characters. How many billets does it take to kill a host? Who is a host? I really want this show to be a successor of Game Of Thrones after it’s over but it’s not going to be if this is the best they can do. The good thing is that if I decide not to watch next year, it seems like this last episode would be a good point to tune out,

I watched a YouTube video the other day that made some sense of the first season. It adds up but I'm of the feeling that they're being cryptic for the sake of it so I have little interest any more.

it did strike me as an "end of book one" moment that would have worked for a season finale.

I had some quibbles - and I do thing they strung it out to 90 minutes for nothing, some scenes were too long. But I'm well satisfied with the season overall.

Agreed on all counts.

The best episode of the season was "Kiksuya". None of the rest were even close, IMHO.

As they do with so many shows, the critics at AV Club do a great job with Westworld. I agree with just about all of their takes, especially that Westworld is probably best binge-watched, which isn't necessarily a good thing with a weekly series. I also agree that the series is also better during a second viewing. Rewatching S1 knowing from the beginning that William is the Man in Black makes both plots far more interesting, IMHO, than watching the first time and not really knowing. They should've revealed that information a lot sooner than they did (or a lot sooner than when people started figuring it out on their own).

A couple of salient points from their season finale review:

I want to love this show, but so far I only sort of...like it. A little.

I thought the best episode was the one with Delos in the loop.

That's probably the second-best for me. Really good but I enjoyed the other story more. Heartbreaking.

It was heartbreaking, I liked that they made it to the valley beyond. I have a feeling the peace won’t last.

Because the Delos people put the two tech guys who were traveling with Maeve in charge of figuring out which hosts can be “saved,” hopefully that means she'll be back next season. She's probably my favorite character in the series.

Maeve is most likely not dead. I can’t imagine they’d permanently kill her off. I think most people agree she’s the best character.

On a side note, I went from loving Delores to absolutely hating her, I suppose that was the point.

I just finished binge-watching season two, and all I can say is,

Season One was awesome.

Season Two was uneven and very difficult to follow. I agree with some of the other folks in this thread: I think the showrunners have their heads up their own arses and are being cryptic for its own sake.

My guts are telling me that they had about 4-6 episodes of the actual show and the other 4-6 episodes were just filler... They use the time hopping bullshit so it's not so obvious that most of the show is filler. Think about it... that entire arc in Shogun world, Delos' early days exploring the idea of investing in Westworld... the best episode of the show thus far, Kiksuya... it had nothing or very little to do with the broader plot of the show.

while I like it, apparently, better than anyone here, i will say that they did some unnecessary dancing by opening with "Bernard on the beach" and then jumping around back and forth mostly within the framework of that two weeks. I still enjoy the challenge of the longer-term time jumping (Delos in the box, and Kiksuya for example) but it didn't flow right to try to sort out the whole "is this now?" stuff that all happened AFTER Ford "died"

I think this season didn't work half as well as the last one. The time-jumping served no clear purpose.

In the first season, both the uncertainty while the season developed and the revelations as the chronology finally became clear served to first ask the question of artifical personhood, and then present the show's answer. In the second season, I have mostly been bored and confused and hoping it would all make sense in the end. That is less fun as the season develops. But I also had less fun appreciation for the outcome, because we seem to have gone from Speculative Fiction to sci-fi now, replacing deep questions with suspenseful plots.

For instance, why would you need to move the physical bodies of the androids to any specific place in order to ulpoad them to a VR environment? Where are any of the real questions related to such an environment (is it real, what does it mean that calculations happen somewhere without material bodies moving, if you have one copy uploaded and one remaining, is anyone saved, and so on).

Westworld trailer:

So they're not even going to address what happened last season?

Yeah, bitch! Aaron Paul!!!

Umm it’s a trailer.

Do you think it contains everything from season 3?

To me it looks like it’s all from the first episode.

So give them a chance. I’m sure they will address it.

This gives me a lot of hope that they do take the new themes introduced in season two seriously. It's a virtual reality now, at least in part. Good.

Be careful what you wish for...

I couldn’t get past the first episode of season 2.

Wait a minute... Was that Jesse Pinkman and Marshawn Lynch robbing a bank? I was thinking about bailing on this show for season 3 but this looks like a completely different show. I think I'll give it a shot.