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Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

Re: Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

Lots of episodes to cover. But I’ll keep it to one post.


I enjoyed how they switched to 2.41 when they were in the servers. The show is absolutely beautiful in that format.

The ghost walker episode was amazing. I absolutely loved the way the entire episode was narrated.

When Hale killed Elsie I was crushed. One of the few ‘good’ characters. That one really hurt. One of few moments that elicited a verbal response when I watch TV.

I think most of us knew Ford was evil, but this season confirmed it. I liked how they turned him into a figurative and literal virus.

The scene where Delores woke up next to teddy was heartbreaking.

I have no idea what to even make of William anymore. His character is crushing to follow. You want to root for him but he’s as malevolent as Ford. The tragic thing is I’m not sure it’s his fault entirely.

What drove me nuts this season was how in season 1, Delores became far more complex. This season she became more as close to one dimensional as I think possible. It was like watching an integral followed immediately by a derivative.

For every ounce of depth lost by Delores, Maeve grew. It was really fun to watch her character develop the last season and a half.

While I think I enjoyed this season more, it was a step back philosophically. Less was it about asking questions of the viewer and more was it like Game of Thrones. Stylish, well-written, and beautifully shot. Different goals I suppose.

Clementine was one of my favorite characters (I have no idea why) but I couldn’t help but think turning her into a white walker Trojan horse was both a stroke of genius and lazy.

I’m also very happy they ended the season the way they did instead of starting the third season with it. Very smart choice.

Edit: holy moly. That was maybe a little predictable but the post-credits were perfect.
 
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Kepler said:
Season 2 really became a mess as it went on. There were strong and weak arcs, but overall... no, I'm not really buying it.

I find myself not wanting it to come back. It will, and maybe they'll pull it back together. But whereas the show is at its best when it explores big ideas using small, deft touches, the second half of S2 really inverted that -- much ado about nothing.

They've built up enough good will to deserve continued watching, though.
Click to expand...

I’m with kep. Season two was a mess for me outside of Maeve.
 
Re: Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

Yeah but season 2 was always going to be a mess to some extent. The hosts were all in the infancy of finding themselves.
 
Re: Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

I disagree with the sentiment that season 2 was a mess. It was great. It did exactly what it should have, given the context that the hosts are being treated as a species in its infancy. I thought they did a great job portraying that.

I also completely disagree with the statement that Ford is evil. Ford is not evil, Ford is just trying to protect, advance, and help his hosts, which are like his children. I don't think anything he did was evil, there were times he was testing them, like a god (he is a god, to the hosts), but everything he did was for their own good in the end.
 
Re: Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

bigblue_dl said:
I disagree with the sentiment that season 2 was a mess. It was great. It did exactly what it should have, given the context that the hosts are being treated as a species in its infancy. I thought they did a great job portraying that.

I also completely disagree with the statement that Ford is evil. Ford is not evil, Ford is just trying to protect, advance, and help his hosts, which are like his children. I don't think anything he did was evil, there were times he was testing them, like a god (he is a god, to the hosts), but everything he did was for their own good in the end.
Click to expand...

WW is well beyond good and evil. One of the best aspects of the show is it's far more grown up than those tropes. Look at how the hosts see humanity. We aren't evil, we're just doing the best we can with the code we have. S1 did that with divinity, S2 with perception. But S1 was able to tie it back to the intimate stories of William and Delores; S2 tried to do that with Maeve and Bernard but failed. The closest S2 came was the Escher self-reference of Bernard and Delores perfecting/saving each other.

<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/ba/DrawingHands.jpg/300px-DrawingHands.jpg" height="300" />

But whereas the ending of S1 lived up to the rest of the show, the ending of S2 was contrived and... well, a mess. I don't know if they wrote themselves into a corner or what, but they tried to do too much too late.
 
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Re: Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

So, I finally saw the post-credit scene. What did you folks make of it? How much of all of what we've seen has been fidelity testing of William 2.0?

I did think that despite my disappointment with the final episode it was a good way to put the ribbon on the "Reality" season.

A thought did occur to me late in S2 that WW may have given us the entire roadmap early on:

<img src="http://www.pajiba.com/image/BICAMERALMINDGUESSPYRAMIDWW817837.png" height="300" />

If, for example, WW is the story of taking any host (or, "hostness") and working their way through the puzzle

<img src="https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2018/04/12/10/westworld-bicameral-mind-maze-2.jpg?w968h681" height="300" />


towards the consciousness, then S1 could be interpreted as Memory (easily) and S2 as Improvisation (more of a reach).

Likewise, if WW is leading a human (or "humanness") down the pyramid in an attempt to develop fidelity in a host (double meaning for host -- get it?), S1 could have been about Free Will and S2 (much more plausibly) about Self -Interest (the reflexive attack on the hosts by the humans perceiving them to be an existential threat).

I have some questions about the actual procedure, too. But, next post.
 
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Re: Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

Kepler said:
So, I finally saw the post-credit scene. What did you folks make of it? How much of all of what we've seen has been fidelity testing of William 2.0?

I did think that despite my disappointment with the final episode it was a good way to put the ribbon on the "Reality" season.

A thought did occur to me late in S2 that WW may have given us the entire roadmap early on:

<img src="http://www.pajiba.com/image/BICAMERALMINDGUESSPYRAMIDWW817837.png" height="300" />

If, for example, WW is the story of taking any human and working their way through the puzzle

<img src="https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2018/04/12/10/westworld-bicameral-mind-maze-2.jpg?w968h681" height="300" />


towards consciousnesses, then S1 could be interpreted as Memory (easily) and S2 at Improvisation (more of a reach).
Click to expand...

I think that the after credit scene is a period of time after the rest of the events in that episode. William's daughter was a host when he killed her, and this is his living daughter, bringing him back, and testing his fidelity, like William did with James Delos.
 
Re: Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

On trying to find Delos a new body, I have some questions. James Delos 2.0 was never stable in the real world. They continually tested "him" in the /dev environment of the park, and his extrapolation reached "fidelity" -- closely matching his real actions when they reran the scenarios and used him as a single wildcard.

But is what they were testing all of his consciousness, or just a substrate that then his waking consciousness is put inside, like a driver in a vehicle? This reminds me of the Star Trek transporter paradox: when Kirk beams down his atoms are disassembled at the source and reassembled at the destination. Kirk-After "feels" like he has unbroken consciousness from Kirk-Before, but does that make sense? The "I"-ness that you feel reading this right now -- wouldn't that have been destroyed as soon as the transporter activated?, thus creating a new Kirk?

Likewise, if all of Delos' consciousness is being rebooted with each simulation, that isn't really immortality for Delos, is it? His point of view -- his "place" "inside" his mind -- ends when they record him. The code in the golf ball is just the potentiality of drawing nice portraits of Delos that think they are him, but his "I" ness has ended. And if that's the case, what good is immortality? What do I gain by having a chain of copies of me extend out over time? They're basically just my children as far as my consciousness is concerned.

So, how are they getting around this (or are they)? My interpretation is they are saying "no, you actually do continue on uninterrupted." How? Have they addressed this at all yet?
 
Re: Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

bigblue_dl said:
I think that the after credit scene is a period of time after the rest of the events in that episode. William's daughter was a host when he killed her, and this is his living daughter, bringing him back, and testing his fidelity, like William did with James Delos.
Click to expand...

There must be a rather lengthy gap of time that also allows Bernard to create the Hale host to stick Delores' mind into.

I was trying to whiteboard the time flow of S2 and I was left with The Door and The Flood having to have occurred somewhere near the middle of all the events we saw. Bernard being found at the water's edge with all the dead hosts, which we see in S2.1, actually happens near the very end of the events. All that happens, action-wise, afterwards is Delores (Hale) slips past the guards and gets back to the Frank Loyd Wright House.

Of course we may be multiple levels down, since the introduction of the purely coded /dev environment means those could go all the way down, or up. For all we know nothing's "real" and we've just been watching iterations at various levels of "Inception"-like depth within the system, which is recursive.

But leaving that type of speculation aside (since something that allows everything has no explanatory value -- sorry, God), let's assume the simplest explanation:

1. There is a real world and everything portrayed happening in it has in fact been real so far.

2. The park is a real world that has been populated by hosts.

3. Those hosts' consciousnesses have particular abilities and attributes not shared by humans -- for example, they can be stored in the Cradle, they can network, and they can be tested in /dev or instantiated in Host Heaven.

4. Likewise, the human guests' minds have been scanned and recorded, and that code is (or was) stored in the Forge. As digital data it is of the same class as the hosts.


If all this is true, then:

a. Where'd the scanned images of the guests go? Have they all been deleted?

b. Where'd Bernard transmit Host Heaven to? It has to be on a server someplace -- he redirected it from Delos HQ and sent it... where? The Frank Loyd Wright House? Outer Space?

c. What's with Delores? She gets to the house and immediately prints out her blond body because, well yeah, I'd rather be that than Hale too. But now she's in... both? Is the latter a shadow consciousness, or is she "present" in both forks, or did she maliciously bring along Hale's golf ball and stick her back in her body to serve her since ha ha tables turned b-tch? Delores is a bit of a See You Next Tuesday that way; I can see her doing that.

d. The whole "is it live or Memorex" question about whether consciousness persists or is cloned, from above.

e. What's happening in all the other parks? What happened to the nice murderous Samurai couple?

f. Who'd Delores bring in her designer purse? She had access to everyone in the Forge and the Cradle, so it could literally be anybody. Among the favorites: Daddy, Maeve, Maeve's brat, Poor Dumb Noble Teddy, Ford, Delos Sr., Clementine (trivia: her last name is "Pennyfeather"), oh god Simon? I hope not, Maeve's hot outlaw boy toy, the awesome Ghost Nation Dude.
 
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Re: Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

Kepler said:
There must be a rather lengthy gap of time that also allows Bernard to create the Hale host to stick Delores' mind into.

I was trying to whiteboard the time flow of S2 and I was left with The Door and The Flood having to have occurred somewhere near the middle of all the events we saw. Bernard being found at the water's edge with all the dead hosts, which we see in S2.1, actually happens near the very end of the events. All that happens, action-wise, afterwards is Delores (Hale) slips past the guards and gets back to the Frank Loyd Wright House.

Of course we may be multiple levels down, since the introduction of the purely coded /dev environment means those could go all the way down, or up. For all we know nothing's "real" and we've just been watching iterations at various levels of "Inception"-like depth within the system, which is recursive.

But leaving that type of speculation aside (since something that allows everything has no explanatory value -- sorry, God), let's assume the simplest explanation:

1. There is a real world and everything portrayed happening in it has in fact been real so far.

2. The park is a real world that has been populated by hosts.

3. Those hosts' consciousnesses have particular abilities and attributes not shared by humans -- for example, they can be stored in the Cradle, they can network, and they can be tested in /dev or instantiated in Host Heaven.

4. Likewise, the human guests' minds have been scanned and recorded, and that code is (or was) stored in the Forge. As digital data it is of the same class as the hosts.


If all this is true, then:

a. Where'd the scanned images of the guests go? Have they all been deleted?

b. Where'd Bernard transmit Host Heaven to? It has to be on a server someplace -- he redirected it from Delos HQ and sent it... where? The Frank Loyd Wright House? Outer Space?

c. What's with Delores? She gets to the house and immediately prints out her blond body because, well yeah, I'd rather be that than Hale too. But now she's in... both? Is the latter a shadow consciousness, or is she "present" in both forks, or did she maliciously bring along Hale's golf ball and stick her back in her body to serve her since ha ha tables turned b-tch? Delores is a bit of a See You Next Tuesday that way; I can see her doing that.

d. The whole "is it live or Memorex" question about whether consciousness persists or is cloned, from above.

e. What's happening in all the other parks? What happened to the nice murderous Samurai couple?

f. Who'd Delores bring in her designer purse? She had access to everyone in the Forge and the Cradle, so it could literally be anybody. Among the favorites: Daddy, Maeve, Maeve's brat, Poor Dumb Noble Teddy, Ford, Delos Sr., Clementine (trivia: her last name is "Pennyfeather"), oh god Simon? I hope not, Maeve's hot outlaw boy toy, the awesome Ghost Nation Dude.
Click to expand...

Bernard is found on the beach a day after the flood happens. It was stated in the last episode, I believe by Hale, that Strand was landing in X amount of hours, and they needed to be done by the time he lands.
 
Re: Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

bigblue_dl said:
Bernard is found on the beach a day after the flood happens. It was stated in the last episode, I believe by Hale, that Strand was landing in X amount of hours, and they needed to be done by the time he lands.
Click to expand...

I can’t help but wonder if we’ve only seen minutes of the present-day real world instead of hours.
 
Re: Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

The post-credits scene was an unnecessary twist to me although not surprising given how this show loves to mess with the viewer over and over.

Stubbs is a host?

Does the recreation of Delos' retirement party call into question if the show has ever actually shown us the "real world"?

Gotta wonder who Dolores/Charlotte took with her in her purse.

And now there are two Deloreses?

Ugh. :)
 
Re: Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

Slap Shot said:
The post-credits scene was an unnecessary twist to me although not surprising given how this show loves to mess with the viewer over and over.

Stubbs is a host?

Does the recreation of Delos' retirement party call into question if the show has ever actually shown us the "real world"?

Gotta wonder who Dolores/Charlotte took with her in her purse.

And now there are two Deloreses?

Ugh. :)
Click to expand...

I don't think there are 2 Doloreses, Dolores is Dolores, we don't know yet who is in Hale's host body, but I'm not sure that Dolores would make a copy of herself and put in there. I'm guessing it went: HaleDolores gets the host printer up and running and first thing is print a new **** Evan Rachel Wood body. Then HaleDolores puts an exact copy of herself in ERWDolores. ERWDolores then removes Dolores marble from Hale host, and replaces it with someone else's marble. That "person" is likely an ally of Dolores from the past few seasons, my guess is Clementine. It can't be Teddy, Hale doesn't have the equipment Dolores would want for that.
 
Re: Westworld Season II: The Puppet Show is Over

I think I could explain and/or talk out all of the questions on timeline, and how the consciousnesses transfer and how that all works, that was asked earlier. But...I cannot explain it by writing it out on a message board. If I sat down with another watcher of the show and we talked through it, I think we could sort many questions out.
 
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