‘Westworld’ and the cost of mystery
NOVEMBER 24TH, 2016 — POST 318
The following will contain spoilers for Westworld Season 1 up to and including Episode 8. Seriously, I don’t want to ruin it for you.
When the image of the maze was first seen tattooed to the inside of a hosts scalp, I was hooked. An indication of a rabbit hole whose depths were not only incomprehensibly expansive but perilous, the maze as a recurring icon in Westworld held a metaphorical weight for the show as a whole. “There is always more going on, always deeper and richer layers at play than that which is observable,” the image of the maze explains to the viewer. The maze’s radial lines signal an ever-potent desire to uncover what lies at its centre. “We’re heading somewhere,” the maze says. Despite the mystery, the confusion, the often inscrutability of Westworld, dear audience, it will all be worth the weight.
Episode 8 of Westworld, entitled ‘Trace Decay’, deploys a fleet of life rafts to an audience that has intentionally been left drowning in an ocean of obfuscation. Lights were hung on the walls of the metaphorical maze to suggest at the multiple timelines we’ve been witnessing, the backstory of the Mystery Personified™ Man in Black, as well as the fate of one of the park’s employees we last saw in the cliffhanger at the end of Episode 6. With two episodes remaining in the season — and with current reports suggesting it won’t return until 2018 — we’re destined to head into small and medium scale clarity of the events of Season 1, presumably with large scale mystery present enough to carry an audience into Season 2.
The ways in which we were provided answers in ‘Trace Decay’, however, hint that perhaps we’ve been left in the dark too long, that time spent hiding eats into time available for revealing. The revealing in Episode 8 on the whole feels clunky due to it being rushed. Most notable is The Man in Black’s backstory, a confession of his past, of his “wound”, of what in the park is personally attractive to him. It felt odd that a character so defined by his mystery could just come out and as directly to the audience as he did to his captor Teddy.
Part of his confession illuminates the mystery of Maeve’s own backstory, the previous assignment in the park that came to violent ends, violent ends that have spurred her own arc. Just as we had begun to learn the machinations of the park through her, a single expositional monologue allows us to leapfrog her knowledge. The fate of Elsie — the Westworld employee who we last left being captured by an unknown figure — is too explained away inelegantly in a momentary flashback. These expositional eruptions speak to the pressure that mystery builds up inside a story system — too much obscurity for too long makes clarity escape from the seams without grace or finesse.
There’s an indication that Westworld’s creators know it. Every clunky reveal in ‘Trace Decay’ is served with a liberal and frantic application of mystery band aids. The word “Arnold” — the largest mystery in the show — gets bandied about with reckless abandon during The Man in Black’s monologue and in the sequence between Ford and Bernard that contains the revelation of Elsie. In the flashback that The Man in Black’s confession carries us to — a flashback of the same moment Maeve can’t shake — we’re again greeted by the image of the maze, as if the show is performing rudimentary sleight of hand to avert attention from the inelegant reveal. Deploying “Arnold” and the maze in such a way is beginning to transform their connotation from actual, in-the-world happenings we should care to find out about to some nebulous mystery dust that is inscrutable for inscrutable’s sake.
Any story that wants to trade in the push-pull of mystery and clarity has to contend with the appropriate allocation of time to either. But I’m beginning to feel that Westworld has indulged too much in ensconcing the audience in a rich mystery we all love. Now that it’s time to give clarity the show seems to be stumbling. Now that it’s time to hand us the tools to escape the maze, I’m fearing the entire toolbox is about to be upended in a huff and the halls of the maze illuminated with the green light of ‘EXIT’ signs.
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