BLUE SKY WORKSHOP
BLUE SKY WORKSHOP
Season 2 of Westworld just finished up. The best show on TV if you ask me. Anyway, here are some of my random thoughts for season 2.
Glad to see that several hosts made into the real world. It would have been crazy disappointing if none of them made it to the the real world. If the hosts were all stuck in the park or in the simulation, that would have been bad.
Thankfully, Dolores, Hale(?) and Bernard are in the real and are starting the robot revolution.
Ford had been planning this uprising for 35 years. He would have done a better job of planning the hosts exit. So here are my thoughts on the various aspects of the hosts exit.
The Valley Beyond escape story made sense mostly. However, I think Ford would have planned to copy the simulation off site from the beginning rather than have Dolores doing it on a whim. And then stating that the Valley Beyond is unreachable is silly. The code has to be running on servers somewhere. That is hardly unreachable. Sure you can't see the simulation run since it is encrypted. However, you would see that this programming is running and eating up does of disk space and CPU, etc.. Someone has to maintain the servers after all.
Team Maeve getting wiped out was lame. Maeve goes down after 2 or 3 bullets but Dolores is the freaking Terminator? Really? Also, QA, who can't shoot straight all season, can suddenly pick off Maeve from a crowd of hosts at 200 yards? With submachine guns? Really? Finally Maeve's Jedi power could easily change the commands in all the hosts, not just freeze them. How about she sends them after the QA team? This part of the finale is swiss cheese and disappointing. They all may have left in Hale's purse, but I just felt like the hosts, and Ford, would be smarter about all of this.
Logically, from the beginning of the season, this seemed like the best way for the hosts to leave the park. Create replacement host bodies of human guests. Give the human's algorithm to a host mind to play that part, and then walk out of the park! So it feels like the hosts almost "stumbled" upon this idea? Dolores even says that Ford knew they would never get out of the park as themselves. The host's weren't given a choice. It was the Valley Beyond or nothing. I'm pretty sure all of Team Maeve would choose the real world over a simulation. Anyway, I'm just glad a couple made it to the real.
Now Dolores offing Hale with her host Hale body was one of the best parts of season 2. Yay! The awful person finally got what she deserved.
Season 2, Episode 8, Kiksuya was the best episodes of the season. Maybe the best episode of the whole show. If you want to understand what it is like to be a robot slave, this episode explains it in one shot. I'm disappointed we will not be seeing more of Akecheta.
We got the entire backstory on the Man in Black and what was really going on the park. Really well written and told. Also, the Emily story line was compelling and tragic.
Maeve's story line was great until she got captured in episode 7. Then it almost felt like the whole thread didn't get the ending it deserved. The Sizemore story was great, but the rest of Team Maeve were poorly treated by the the last 3 episodes.
Anthony Hopkins is a great actor and he created a very complicated character in Ford. On the one hand he is like a Father to the hosts. But when it comes to humans, he is a ruthless killer. Totally believable as a slightly crazy tech genius trying to save his and Arnold's creation. I hope Bernard remembers a Ford host.
What was the point of this? Upon reflection is was an absolute waste of time. It did not move the story forward in any way. You could have had QA pick up Dadbernathy directly and head right to the Mesa.
None of the hosts seem to have an actual plan for leaving the park. Well maybe Dolores, but she was not sharing. Her eventual exit seems like luck.