Westworld (NO SPOILERS)
Discussion
I really wanted to enjoy this show and this second series. But the whole thing never felt like it got going or had a clear path. Someone a few posts back on here said that before they got a s3 green light the show would have ended here.
If that’s true , The whole story is being made up on the hoof and explains why it’s all over the place.
For me the good:
-Hopkins
-Mullen
- production value/scenery/best hd picture quality sky have shown
The bad
- self indulgent plot
- unlikeable characters
- over reliance on the good points above making up for the filler episodes and poor story telling.
It should have just ended here.
If that’s true , The whole story is being made up on the hoof and explains why it’s all over the place.
For me the good:
-Hopkins
-Mullen
- production value/scenery/best hd picture quality sky have shown
The bad
- self indulgent plot
- unlikeable characters
- over reliance on the good points above making up for the filler episodes and poor story telling.
It should have just ended here.
Certainly were a lot of characters that I just didn't like.
Lee somehow had a personality change and got rather besotted with Maeve, completely going against everything he'd said up to that point.
Delores went from sweet in S1 to awakening, to going seriously mardy and deranged in S2.
Hale. Horrible from day 1 like all the Delos employees introduced in S2 (and most in S1).
The 2 techs that had been patching up Maeve all the time in S1 were barely used in S2 - almost seemed pointless them being there.
The free will debate did nothing for me - felt like "trying to be clever while not actually being very clever".
Some interesting twists and I did enjoy some of S2 quite a bit, especially the last 3 or 4 episodes - but so much that was great in S1 just wasn't there in S2.
Lee somehow had a personality change and got rather besotted with Maeve, completely going against everything he'd said up to that point.
Delores went from sweet in S1 to awakening, to going seriously mardy and deranged in S2.
Hale. Horrible from day 1 like all the Delos employees introduced in S2 (and most in S1).
The 2 techs that had been patching up Maeve all the time in S1 were barely used in S2 - almost seemed pointless them being there.
The free will debate did nothing for me - felt like "trying to be clever while not actually being very clever".
Some interesting twists and I did enjoy some of S2 quite a bit, especially the last 3 or 4 episodes - but so much that was great in S1 just wasn't there in S2.
FredClogs said:
Well I got to the end. I think I'll leave it there, not at all impressed other than it looks and sounds amazing. Too many riddles and clever inferences, the free will debate was just pointless 6th form mental masturbation and its really lacking in a decent fiction narrative, don't care for any of the characters, human or robot.
Meh.
I was always on the edge of my seat waiting for the ultimate climax. That never happened. So I’ve got up and left. Meh.
griffin dai said:
I’ll rewatch Banshee tonight to make me feel better.
Good call. Halb said:
Don't see how they can be hosts, unless Delores has been carting around all the balls from their endings. We know it can't be the one from the cradle, and Teddy. And it's not Clem. Who else was there? PLus they were sparkly balls, that means a guest?
I'll need to re-watch but I was under the impression that redball = guest and blackball = host 
Flip Martian said:
Certainly were a lot of characters that I just didn't like.
Lee somehow had a personality change and got rather besotted with Maeve, completely going against everything he'd said up to that point.
Delores went from sweet in S1 to awakening, to going seriously mardy and deranged in S2.
Hale. Horrible from day 1 like all the Delos employees introduced in S2 (and most in S1).
The 2 techs that had been patching up Maeve all the time in S1 were barely used in S2 - almost seemed pointless them being there.
The free will debate did nothing for me - felt like "trying to be clever while not actually being very clever".
Some interesting twists and I did enjoy some of S2 quite a bit, especially the last 3 or 4 episodes - but so much that was great in S1 just wasn't there in S2.
Agreed, I spent interim time between S1 and S2 googling and talking about westworld, right up until the second-ish episode and lost almost all interest.Lee somehow had a personality change and got rather besotted with Maeve, completely going against everything he'd said up to that point.
Delores went from sweet in S1 to awakening, to going seriously mardy and deranged in S2.
Hale. Horrible from day 1 like all the Delos employees introduced in S2 (and most in S1).
The 2 techs that had been patching up Maeve all the time in S1 were barely used in S2 - almost seemed pointless them being there.
The free will debate did nothing for me - felt like "trying to be clever while not actually being very clever".
Some interesting twists and I did enjoy some of S2 quite a bit, especially the last 3 or 4 episodes - but so much that was great in S1 just wasn't there in S2.
Some really crap bits for me....
Inept security guys - 4 armed soldiers outgunned by old guy with a six shooter on horse back!
Cowboy hat scanners f
k right off, so all these guests fking one another, as that's the key activity right, all keep their hats on...okay!Where did all he hosts get beamed to, in f
king space?Tiny f
king snooker balls hold all the information, yet they need a massive underwater server farm? Delores learning nothing at all...she learned to hate and kill, in fact skynet was more alive
Maeve learned that in order to save her daughter she'd kill her and digitally resurrect her, and teddy and the Indian guys wife....so not really alive at all then? Given maeve had super ford powers why not just f
king back everyone up over the network, after all they're all floating around in space anyway???And given all this consciousness, none of the f
king hosts made any decent conscious decisions...Delores killed everyone
Maeve backed up her daughter
All the others killed one another
They somehow turned the first seasons of humanity appearing in machines, into 1240 lines of code which results in every f
ker simply killing everyone else!They turned life into death...really f
king inspiring!Go watch Ex-machina for everything unfortunately westworld tries and fails to deliver...
I hate them all!
Indeed, the last 5 minutes where Bernard explained his ability to "imagine" Ford although he'd deleted the code as some analogy to the idea of AI emerging a consciousness was pants, the ability to render false memory or imagine is not indicative of consciousness at all., neither is moral quandary.
Exmachina is a far superior and shorter story along these lines.
Exmachina is a far superior and shorter story along these lines.
I think the closest human decision in the whole show is the programming story guy at the end, sacrificing himself for maeve, pointless, irrational, out of character, unwarranted, not needed, crap decision and perfectly human....
Delores did none of this...
None of the hosts made very many of these choices and none more and one or two...
Delores could have teamed up with MIB
Maeve should have sent her daughter out
As it is, skynets managed to sneak its killer into the outside world with a glitching Bernard terminator to stop it....
It's fun, the production values are high, but it's not half as smart as it thinks it is!
The scene at the end of ex-machina where after killing her master and leaving a potential witness to her longed after freedom alive to tell on her is masterful...why not kill the human who falls in love with her.....that's the only sensible thing to do.....but she doesn't...
Not one smidgen that anywhere in westworld s2
Delores did none of this...
None of the hosts made very many of these choices and none more and one or two...
Delores could have teamed up with MIB
Maeve should have sent her daughter out
As it is, skynets managed to sneak its killer into the outside world with a glitching Bernard terminator to stop it....
It's fun, the production values are high, but it's not half as smart as it thinks it is!
The scene at the end of ex-machina where after killing her master and leaving a potential witness to her longed after freedom alive to tell on her is masterful...why not kill the human who falls in love with her.....that's the only sensible thing to do.....but she doesn't...
Not one smidgen that anywhere in westworld s2
I was disappointed with this season because I was convinced this season would focus on the other worlds, Roman, Japan etc, and see how some of the guests tried to survive the rogue hosts. The last couple of episodes from Season 1 were very good, and assumed these would be a tantalising taster of what's to come.
But no - the brakes were put on hard...
But no - the brakes were put on hard...
Halb said:
I guess that would depend on what sort of show it was. The film was a basic, robots go mad, let's escape. The show is more, robots come alive. who do we wanna root for?
That's why the series was so disappointing, there was no one left to root for, i couldn't have cared less by the end. Had it ended with a show down between Maeve and Delores (as i thought it might) perhaps I'd have bought in, but no.Halb said:
The cradle was for hosts, with that gone, no more back ups. The forge was for humans.
Pretty sure there were host copies in the Forge too, you could see that there was a Sweetwater in there complete with usual characters and 'robot heaven' for the hosts was initially running on the Forge's hardware.I haven't given up on it yet. But...
Season One was a well made cleverly structured story filled with detail, with a plot that developed and progressed as it went. Interesting characters and concepts and lots of soundtrack that added to the story.
Season Two was still well made, had one or two new interesting characters, one or two interesting concepts and some bits of it were brilliant. But it dumped a lot of the stuff that was the backbone of Season One, and the story was needlessly confusing well beyond the point of misdirection.
It felt like most of the season was a slave to the structure of what they wanted to do (basically build the season like Bernard's unstructured unordered memory) and then tried to fit the story in afterwards. So we had quite a lot of good bits but they remained just bits rather than building a whole. Plus the concept was just taken too far and it was made too fragmented.
It also felt like they were too keen to move away from the whole concept of the park and the things in it without any real clue of where we'd go. Given time that could have worked but it feels like they did it at least a season too soon.
Maybe there's scope to recover but I'm not sure we'll ever get back to what we used to have.
Season One was a well made cleverly structured story filled with detail, with a plot that developed and progressed as it went. Interesting characters and concepts and lots of soundtrack that added to the story.
Season Two was still well made, had one or two new interesting characters, one or two interesting concepts and some bits of it were brilliant. But it dumped a lot of the stuff that was the backbone of Season One, and the story was needlessly confusing well beyond the point of misdirection.
It felt like most of the season was a slave to the structure of what they wanted to do (basically build the season like Bernard's unstructured unordered memory) and then tried to fit the story in afterwards. So we had quite a lot of good bits but they remained just bits rather than building a whole. Plus the concept was just taken too far and it was made too fragmented.
It also felt like they were too keen to move away from the whole concept of the park and the things in it without any real clue of where we'd go. Given time that could have worked but it feels like they did it at least a season too soon.
Maybe there's scope to recover but I'm not sure we'll ever get back to what we used to have.
I am disappointed that 2 whole seasons in and there is still no reason to care about any of the host characters. They are all replaceable. There is nothing intrincally valuable about any of them. It seems likely Maeve will be back for example.
I’m really surprised the show hasn’t dealt with this in some way.
The whole finale was disappointing.
I’m really surprised the show hasn’t dealt with this in some way.
The whole finale was disappointing.
Halb said:
there is a certain, element missing, and it's probably why it's not doing as well as HBO hoped, they still don't have a GoT replacement.
So far HBO seem to be putting a brave face on the viewing figures. But I wouldnt bank on a s4. The knock on impact will be several GOT spin offs. Wait, GOT world?
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