Don’t Try to Untangle Westworld; Embrace the Knots
Trust The Process.
So there it is.
After nine episodes, miles of Reddit threads, and a metric ton of think-pieces devoted to Westworld, all the mysteries of season one have been named, tagged, and categorized for future dissection. Westworld, more than any other premium network drama to debut this year, was built to be dissected. The TV-MA Lego set — Assembled for disassembly.
It should come as no surprise to Peak TV subscribers that the penultimate episode of the season is where fireworks explode all over the screen. It’s a tale as old as time or at least as old as 2010. Tentpole Peak TV shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and especially Game of Thrones, used the second-to-last block of time to build to the climax that the season will be remembered by, leaving the final episode to do the dishes and start building towards what the following season would accomplish.
Like so many of the twists and turns the collective pop culture consciousness experienced with Westworld this season, we were treated to the ol’ episode nine reveal dump and I’m pretty sure we all saw it coming. Imagine watching TV is a ten-year-old’s birthday party. Next to the cake is a pile of gifts. While the birthday boy or girl does not know what is under the wrapping paper, they do know they are about to get a boat load of presents. That’s Westworld’s ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’; maybe we didn’t see all of the twists coming, but we knew for sure we were getting them.
This is the way of TV. It has been foretold, and so it has come to pass. Quoth Premium Cable, “Nevermore.”
For the way we watch TV now, Westworld is the perfect show — built to be over-analyzed. The motivations of the characters, the precise placement of words in sentences, debating if knowing glances are camera tricks or allusions to a greater mystery, and who is or is not a robot are just some of the thoughts that automatically raced through my mind while watching each episode. The possibilities — or at least the gussied up acceptable Nolanverse versions of Shyamalanian twists — are endless.
Regardless, this show seems to have found its audience. For TV truthers and sleuthers, Westworld has filled the void left by Game of Thrones, The Night Of, and the maybe-they-will-or-maybe-they-won’t third installment of True Detective. Showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have served up a cocktail to quench the thirst of their theoryholic audience and in the process have given HBO the post-Thrones hit that Vinyl was not.
For what Westworld lacks in a clarity — the whole timeline thing is a seemingly obvious and completely unnecessary braid of storylines — it is over-delivering on theory generation. This show was MADE for internet culture to be sicced. This is the show Reddit needed to go mainstream in the same way that House of Cards was the perfect show for Netflix to deploy its binge model. These shows don’t need to be perfect to do their job perfectly, they just need to prove that the model can work. In both cases it has worked like a Host’s dream packed with electric sheep.
Unlike any of its contemporaries or predecessors point of the Westworld viewing experience is not to consume it, but to pull it apart in a post-watch haze and generate enough theories to have a few of them validated. The internet solved the show and I’m 90% sure that was the point.
With one episode left to go, I’m not sure what is a crazier twist for Westworld:
- The further blurring of the line between robots and humans
- That at no point in time do we know at what point in time we are
- That the internet produced these theories as early as episode two and now these theories are coming true
Cooking up theories about TV shows is the most satisfying part of throwing yourself into a series. For the modern Golden Age of television, ABC’s LOST was the genesis point of close-watching culture. LOST threw a lot of stuff at the wall and dared it’s audience to crack their knuckles and dig through the crates of their past media consumption while pushing their Google searches to the limit. What LOST did to the complete dismay of the internet was unthinkable — they asked their audience to consider a million questions and only receive answers to the ones that ‘mattered.’ They gave us the birthday gift we needed (a Sonicare toothbrush) and wrapped it up in the box of what we wanted (a PS4). Satisfying practicality when presented as a gift feels a lot like a missed opportunity in the moment.
The smudgy fingerprints of the LOST storytelling approach on the looking glass through which we’re viewing Westworld. Now that audiences are so accustomed to looking closely at every detail, the gasps formerly associated with seeing reveals have been replaced with either the comfort sounds of one’s theories being proved or the full body convulsion of realizing the show is doing what it wants as opposed to its audience.
Such is the case with the Bernard reveals of the last few weeks — first that he was a blissfully unaware of his host-ness and second that he was a robotic replica of Robert Ford’s (Anthony Hopkins) old partner, Arnold. Both of these reveals have been kicking around in theory form since the earliest episodes of this season. And of course, Arnold’s last name is Weber, making the name Bernard Lowe an anagram aka a twist hiding in plain sight aka so Nolanverse it hurts.
This begs the question — what is more satisfying in modern prestige television; being surprised or being right? People aren’t tuning into Westworld to watch a western. If that were the case, maybe HBO would have brought back Deadwood for a limited run as has been rumored about for the last decade. People are watching Westworld because the idea of robots gaining consciousness is fun, scary, and compelling. The Hosts are the reason to watch this show, and the pitfalls that come along with fancy puppets cutting their strings is worth tuning into for ten episodes.
Bernard the ‘person’ discovering that he was Bernard the ‘Host’ and challenging his Geppetto for independence was exactly where the show needed to go and sets up some interesting parallels for the full Host rebellion mission Maeve (Thandie Newton) has been plotting. That can’t end well for anyone, right? When your inside men have as much sense as the zombies Michonne used to drag around a few seasons ago on The Walking Dead, my guess is the rebellion ends in tears or the Host equivalent of such.
The deeper and deeper Bernard dug into his own memory under the watchful eye of Ford, we learned that this is not the first time he has stumbled upon his true nature. Time, even in Westworld where the timelines are a tangled mess, is a flat circle. Very little seems to surprise Ford the creator, which is an interesting thought when applied to both the Maeve and Delores storylines.
- Is this the first time a Host has tried to rise up?
- Has the Host we currently know as Maeve done this before?
- Is that why she was reassigned to the role of Madame from her previous life as grieving homesteader?
- Once this rebellion gets put down, is Ford going to take her out of rotation for good, or is this his version of William’s maze — his own way of challenging himself to uncover the true nature of the game?
Delores, other than probably being the Host for which the parent company of Westworld — Delos — is named, is going through her own guided awakening, albeit less visible to her, than what we’ve seen with Maeve. As we learned early on, The Man in Black (Ed Harris) is allowed to do whatever he wants in Westworld, regardless of how many times the real world threatens to pull him out e.g. a fan coming up to him to thank him for the work his company has done, Tessa Thompson’s character bringing up minutes from the last board meeting just seconds after nearly being hanged, etc. Would it be all that surprising if his muse is afforded an equal and opposite luxury? Delores’ struggle to stay fully present in her ‘life’ in Westworld is arguably just as trying as Maeve’s struggle to get out. In both cases, figuring things out in real time is preferred and each violent delight should produce an equally as violent end.
More than any of the other episode, ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier,’ went hard on summarizing the stakes of the season. It was a jarring amount of information wedged into sixty minutes. While yeah, it looked cool, and yeah we got some clarity on motivations, it raised just as many “huh’s?” as it did “aah’s.” Breaking from the penultimate episode cookbook, ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’ wasn’t spent tidying up the season allowing the finale to set the table for season two. Instead, episode ten will bring the season to a conclusion that we’ll just have to deal with, and I’m fine with that.
The real promise that Westworld has isn’t to give the audience another paid-cable drama we can feel cool for having watched; it’s an exercise in building a world for which we do not already own a template. Having earned some trust to deliver compelling questions and answers, season two will have a chance to breathe and push beyond the Delos version of The Wall.
We’re at the end of The Truman Show, and our boat is up against a staircase painted to look like miles upon miles of blue sky and ocean. The question of, “where does that staircase lead” is a fun one no matter the genre, channel, or platform.
I’m fine with pulling a Man in Black and journeying through The Maze, even if it is a maze I feel like I’ve attempted to navigate before. As long as the center of it is a doorway to a new room as opposed to a finish line, there is going to be something worth watching waiting for us on the other side.
