>>3528Yeah, I also like Westworld overall. The 2nd and 3rd seasons
overall are bad to questionable IMO but the first season was some well done scifi. It's a good mix of raising questions about technology and society but also an interesting story. Honestly they could have ended the series there and it would have been fine. But I don't know maybe in retrospect the second season will be better, if they were setting up things that don't pay off for a while. It certainly has potential.
The bicameral mind thing was probably the best aspect of it IMO. I read the actual book years ago and the way they present Dolores' perspective is very in line with that idea of cognition, particularly the journey to consciousness. You don't often see scifi go out of its way to explore how differently AI would think from humans, except robots not having emotions or something basic like that. The rest of the philosophy was pretty shallow but that gives people a bunch of different jumping off points to go deeper, which is probably best for a TV show.
>I'm not some liberal redditor but I do have to say that Westworld season one was probably one of the best things TV will give us.Within capitalism, maybe. I still think The Wire is top TV though. That's pretty thoroughly exploring real politics and while you have cop protagonists they're not very sympathetic. Westworld has potential to be GOAT television but it has some glaring flaws like nobody understanding combat tactics and HBO-itis where you have to say fuck every other line.
>I also give them credit that they managed to do all this with the obvious ridiculous set-up with a theme park where people can play cowboy.Constantly grounding it in video game logic is probably what makes it work tbh. "What if video games, but in real life?" is extremely played out in internet humor, but the show is more asking what happens when people internalize video game logic and then apply it to "real" people because they're just NPCs to them.
>If they really tried to make it overcomplicated so the redditors didn't figure it out (and didn't they anyway?), then that's absolutely retarded and fan service done wrong.I don't think anybody predicted the major twists in season two, and unlike season one there was almost no foreshadowing or hinting at them. They also make little sense given the characters' motivations (more than one major twist happening because a character completely changed their mind about something at the last minute). Some of the convoluted plot does relate to the themes but it's handled in a needlessly obtuse way.
>I feel like the showrunners actually have some good ideas and plot lines, but for some reason have they have to do this narcissistic thing screenwriters often do, where they feel that they're smarter than their audience, so they have to write in an unnecessary twist.I think they flat out said they are writing for the audience that wants to figure out the puzzles, which tbh is kind of avant-garde these days. From what I've read they are pretty humble about not being able to fool people, since they didn't expect people to figure out any of season 1 and they figured out absolutely everything.
>The whole "actually, that guy was a robot all the time!" thing works once, but once you are pulling this off all the time you are lowering the stakes for audience investment, people actually being robots all the time obfuscates the actual difference between humans and robots.One of those reveals actually undercut a really great and subtle thematic development in season one about human perception vs robot surveillance.
I'm talking about Stubbs being aware of the romantic connection between Bernard and Theresa, despite all the digital evidence being deleted. Small moment but the theme is totally invalidated when it turns out he was a robot all along.
>They were hinting at some darker things going on, with rich people wanting to live forever in the mind of hostsThey did develop this somewhat. The conclusion was just silly with why it didn't work. I thought that they did have some great existential material with the various eschatological views, like humans wanting transhumanism and some hosts wanting to escape to an afterlife, and Dolores wanting to escape/destroy the park. They didn't develop it enough though, and gave way too much time to goofy plot twists.
>There are still some good episodesI agree, but the season as a whole was very weak. Shit, the episode focusing on Akecheta could have been a standalone short film, for how much of it happens prior to season 2's events.
>having robots tested by other robots who are controlled by other robotsThat's explicitly commentary on the nature of AI today, and how machine learning works. Nolan refers to it in one of the after-the-show things they're doing now. It's an example of rehabilitating season 2 for me. The epic bacon plot twists of
Bernard re-creating Dolores and vice versa reflect learning algorithms and the fact that humans don't really know what is happening under the hood with AI anymore. In the context of surveillance capitalism and big data, this is extremely relevant. A lot of people (me included) expect a big reveal this season to be that Rehoboam
is actually a very "dumb" AI and its decisions are terrible but it's too stupid to realize it and humans have no idea how the AI works but trust it because reasons (probably the thing about the part of the brain that makes you believe in god). And even if Serac is part of Rehoboam, he's definitely physical rather than a projection. They made a point of having him
shoot a guy in the last episode.
>I also heavily dislike what they're doing to Maeve, she is a great character and Thandie Newton is incredible to look at for her age, but they are giving her this stupid arc where she only wants to be reunited with her daughter in some form of digital heaven. This is stupid, if Maeve was really conscious she would know how the affection for her daughter was just a remnant from a former narrative, she comes over as a very rational voice of reason, so it's out of character to fall for that.I'm not sure Maeve is actually that motivated by going to robot heaven. That works in one episode to get her to the Forge, but it turns out to be a ploy to get information from her. After that, she seems more interested in escaping her current predicament than being with her "daughter." She was willing to an hero before she was offered salvation, and seemed to me like she was more accepting of that as a means of escape more than reunion.
Also, a big point of her character is that she chooses to care about her connections to other people/hosts, unlike Dolores. Dolores is individualistic, using people instrumentally to her benefit. She softened on this after
she drove Teddy to suicide and will probably change more after interacting with Caleb, the token good human. Maeve OTOH is constantly concerned about the others, even to a fault by letting the Shogun World hosts "freely" choose to stay in the park without really understanding the choice. This gets into a whole other thing, where it seems like they're making the major characters allegorical for major socialist tendencies (but that's a whole other post).
Caring about her daughter is one of her defining traits too. It's what causes her breakdown/transfer and her return to the park.
>Also, wouldn't that be like dying anyway? It would still all fade to black for me, right? Even though when there is now a copy of me.This question has been done to death.
<If all the parts of Theseus's ship have been replaced, is it still the same ship?
<Is it still Captain Kirk on the other side of the Star Trek transporter?
<Are you still you even though all the atoms in your body are different from the ones you had 7 years ago?
<When you lose consciousness to go to sleep is it the same you that wakes up?
It's like Angela says in I think the second episode - if you can't tell the difference does it matter? Pretty sure the show just takes that position for the sake of argument, the same way it does with human cognition being comica