Westworld

Overall, I'd give this show a C.

It's well produced, EXCEEDINGLY well acted (special mention to Jeffrey Wright, Thandie Newton, Anthony Hopkins, and Evan Rachel Wood), and has many interesting aspects (like tits). The plot is fucking stupid though. Take out the twists, and the jumping around in the timelines and it's far less interesting and mysterious. If the plot to a story doesn't hold up when you put the story back into chronological order, there's something missing IMO.

After this season, we're basically left with a combination of robot apocalypse + body snatchers/they could look like us/mimic tropes. All tropes which I typically typically hate and find incredibly lazy writing. It's just been done to death.

I mean, lets assume the robots can achieve consciousness and then get out of the park without blowing up. Then what? How do they deal with little things like:

-modern weapons like tanks, jet fighters, aircraft carriers, flamethrowers, nukes, EMPs(!).... etc etc etc. Let alone future weapons.
-Security forces that can hit the broad side of a barn (/facepalm. Even original trilogy Imperial Storm Troopers were watching that finale thinking, "At least we'd get some shots off, even if we'd miss.")
-7 BILLION humans. Short of unleashing the worlds nukes, which would fuck them too, it's going to be very hard to kill EVERYONE.
-Tech designed to identify them next to humans. Xrays, whatever.
-How do they reproduce themselves? None of those fuckers knows how to produce more robots or how to code themselves.
-They're not like super strong or super fast compared to humans, a bit stronger yes, but not like terminators or something. Their main advantage is looking like us, but that goes away vs teams of hunters looking for hosts.
-Do they feel pain all the time or no? It seems like they were immune to pain as the plot demanded them to no-sell being shot or hit or whatever.

You could go on and on with this sort of criticism of course, which is kind of the point: It's just not that compelling of a story, and so improbable and easy to poke holes into that it just falls apart.


I was hoping there might be a hint of something more than another robot apocalypse story, something like uploading human consciousness into hosts to achieve immortality and the repercussions of that maybe, but I'm not seeing it.

The other main problem I have with the show going forward is that humans are now without question the bad guys. It seems we're supposed to root for the hosts to win, even though the people watching the show are you know, humans. It's like rooting for the Borg, or Skynet, or Agent Smith. I don't give a fuck about hosts or what happens to them, even if they are some new life form or something. All you'd have to do to a host to wipe away any pain they're feeling from being in "Murder and Rape and Horses the MMO" is flip a switch in their head to turn off their ability to feel pain or violation. I also don't buy that shit about "reveries" in the code. It's not like computers are some big mystery, you can find any data that's in there, no matter what it is. But there's magic code in there that can't be erased and always mysteriously reappears!

I'll probably watch a bit of next season to see where they might go with things, but overall I'm just disappointed in the plot direction they're taking.


TL;DR: When the naked titties you see the most of in a show are 44yr old titties, you're doing something wrong.