Westworld season 1: news and episode reviews

HBO’s Westworld isn’t quite the best show on TV, but it may be the most interesting.

The premise is irresistible: Robots that look exactly like people have been created and used to staff a futuristic theme park modeled on the Wild West. For a mere $40,000, guests are allowed to treat the robots however they like — including having sex with them and “murdering” them — and they can’t be harmed in return.

What makes you you?

Is it the things you like? The feelings you feel? The thoughts you have? Or is it something more ephemeral — something religion might dub the “soul,” the part of yourself that is hidden away and untouchable to everyone but God?

Near the end of Westworld’s first season, Host designer Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), recently revealed to be a Host himself, tearfully asks the park director, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), how Ford could so casually force Bernard to murder someone — Bernard’s own lover, no less. But Ford is past the pretense that he needs a reason. He calmly replies, “One man’s life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought, for the dominion I should acquire.”

It’s a quote from Frankenstein — the creation story of the mechanized age — and it’s proof positive that Westworld is more concerned with myth than mystery. Sure, the big twists of the series’ first season have been fun, but given its leisurely pace and the way it has telegraphed most of the big reveals, those moments tend to only be surprises to the characters themselves. In a mystery, that’s a disappointment; in a myth, that’s business as usual.

If Westworld can be described as “about” any one thing in particular — which is a dangerous game to play, because the show is trying to encompass a great number of themes — it’s about the nature of consciousness.

Indeed, the show has come up with a sort of simple equation for how consciousness is formed, one that is played out, again and again, in “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” the first season’s penultimate episode. Pain leads to trauma. Trauma leads to memory. And memory leads to consciousness.

NOTE: Spoilers for episode seven of Westworld follow.

HBO’s Westworld is taut and tantalizing, a gripping and gorgeous sci-fi puzzle box of a series with a stellar cast and a meticulously designed world that feels at once real and unreal. It’s uneven at times, but it’s also a perfect show to become obsessed with because of the questions it raises, the depth of detail it suggests, and the mysteries it hints at (and sometimes even resolves). Even in its lesser moments, Westworld always leaves viewers wanting more.

“It doesn’t look like anything to me.”

The phrase that’s haunted Westworld since the beginning has become weightier with every passing episode, as Hosts blankly stare at images and objects that should shatter their realities, if only Ford hadn’t programmed them otherwise. At first, this response was a simple way to show how the android Hosts only see and understand what they’re supposed to; if you show them a picture of a modern railway, for example, they wouldn’t see anything at all.

Think of Westworld as the Garden of Eden. Think of the Hosts contained within it as hundreds upon hundreds of possible Adams and possible Eves. And think of the biblical Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as the code locked up inside of those possible Adams and possible Eves, forever twisting toward sentience.

Do you think, in that scenario, that Ford is God or the Snake?

With Westworld, HBO has pulled off quite a feat: It made an orgy boring.

A solid chunk of this week’s Westworld featured an ongoing bout of group sex. Anonymous bodies — belonging to park guests and the cyborgs that exist to sexually service them — writhed around in the background while our heroes negotiated with El Lazo, a formidable new villain.

It’s hard to know where to start with Westworld. Like the maze some of its characters are trying to find, there are no clear ways in, no easy answers. We don’t even know if they’re looking for what lies at the center or the exit.

For now, it’s mostly just about the dizzying journey, round and round until something gives. In the first four episodes, this is simultaneously exhilarating and frustrating. In “Contrapasso,” though, a hint of something more concrete finally emerges from Westworld’s many-layered mysteries.

I know the impulse is to try to say what HBO’s Westworld is “about,” four episodes in. I know that because I’ve fought the impulse myself.

The truth is, we have no idea what it’s about yet. And maybe we shouldn’t expect to know. It could be that Westworld is more like a painting than a photograph, and the show is just applying strokes to the canvas right now; we have to wait a while before we see what the picture is. I hope that’s the case. After all, there are a lot of ideas swirling around in the show right now, many of which don’t seem to cohere with one another. And a lot happens in this episode.

What is Westworld about?

I don’t mean that in a plot sense. In “The Stray,“ the show’s third episode, the multitude of storylines I discussed last week continue to pile atop each other in a way that either works for you or makes you wish the show would calm down for three seconds. (The Man in Black mostly sits out this episode, so at least it feels slightly less busy.)

Beneath the scalp of one of Westworld’s robotic Hosts, the Man in Black (the always malevolent Ed Harris) has found a strange maze. He’s convinced it’s a clue that will lead him deeper into what he calls “the game,” to the truth buried at its center, and as he slaughters his way through Host after Host in Westworld’s second episode, “Chestnut,“ he seems to be getting closer and closer. Maybe he has a point.

Within the confines of this Wild West theme park, he says, everything makes sense. All of the little details add up. Everything has meaning. So of course he would expect this maze to lead him to some sort of final reckoning, the answer he’s been seeking for years. (As one of the park’s most frequent guests, he’s become such a fixture of the place — and therefore one of its biggest benefactors — that staff keeps out of his way. “That gentleman gets whatever he wants,” one says.)

Westworld asks which is more frightening — robots or humans?

To understand the difference between HBO’s new Westworld series and the 1973 science fiction film on which it is based, it’s worth looking at what Isaac Asimov once said about robots in fiction.

“The Original,“ the pilot of HBO’s new sci-fi drama Westworld, is a really solid piece of television. (I may have my misgivings about where the series goes from here, but that’s another matter.)

The pilot neatly sets up the show’s conflicts and introduces a bunch of characters who live in two separate worlds (the Wild West theme park Westworld, populated with robots who recreate the park’s setting, and the behind-the-scenes humans who keep the park running). Plus, it tells a more or less self-contained tale of the park workers dealing with a glitch in the system by finding a way to clear the park of malfunctioning robots without alarming customers or causing them to call for returns.