Howdy, fellow humans who are definitely not robots who just think you’re humans, and welcome to our review of HBO’s science fiction series, Westworld. The season two finale… did not make a ton of sense, but the parts that did make sense were deeply thought provoking as well as beautifully crafted. So figure out if your bulletproof or not and why that may or may not be, and let go of the delusion of free will, here are two things that didn’t make sense and three things that did from Westworld season two, episode ten: “The Passenger.”
1. Utter Nonsense that Doesn’t Serve the Story
The morning after snuggling Teddy’s corpse all night, Dolores abandons her devoted posse and runs into William. She calls him a monster, but says she’ll need a monster to reach The Valley Beyond aka The Forge. Why did she abandon her posse? What does she need William for? She doesn’t say. William agrees, that though they hate each other, they need to work together. Why does he need Dolores to reach The Forge? He doesn’t say. The unlikely pair ride into the horizon. The next time we catch up with Dolores and William, they’ve reached The Forge by… walking up to its open door. So they didn’t need each other for anything. Realizing this for the first time, William shoots Dolores, but she’s… bulletproof… for some unexplained reason. Later in the episode though, Bernarnold shoots her and she’s… not bulletproof anymore.
Between time jumping and never knowing who’s a doppelganger robot being controlled by an unseen digitized consciousness or what have you, the story is hard to follow enough without adding utter nonsense that doesn’t serve the story. The first showdown between Dolores and William at the end of season one was meaningful; it revealed the ways in which their relationship deeply effected each other in surprising ways. This showdown made absolutely no sense and didn’t reveal anything. They’ve hated each other and wanted to kill each other since that first showdown, and nothing has changed.
2. Utter Nonsense that Maybe Would Serve the Story if it Wasn’t Utter Nonsense
Maeve psychically uses the surrounding dead robots to help her escape the operating table, which she couldn’t do before because… reasons I guess. She’s patched up and walking just in time to greet her old posse who were… somewhere else for a few episodes. On their way to find Maeve’s daughter again, security corners them. Hector wants to sacrifice himself to give the rest time to get away, and launches into a speech, but Lee Sizemore stops him and does the speech instead. Poetically, it’s the same speech he wrote for Hector in season one, that he was disappointed he didn’t get to show off because a guest shot Hector in the throat before he could get into it. Lee Sizemore’s sacrifice is poetic, it show’s how he’s grown and changed, from wanting to control the robots, to giving his life for them, but it also doesn’t make any sense. One of the security guards calls out to him, that they don’t want to shoot him. So he could come out with his hands up, talk to the security guards, and still give Maeve et al time to get away. The sacrifice loses its poetic meaning when it doesn’t have logical meaning.
Maeve and the rest of her posse then run to reach her daughter in a long line of pilgrims walking to the promised land. Charlotte Hale has turned Clementine into a horsewoman of the apocalypse who can make the other robots fight each other to the death. Maeve runs to her daughter while everyone else dies, and then turns around and freezes all the robots. Why couldn’t she have done that earlier? It’s a very dramatic and beautifully crafted visual moment, but again, the poetry of it falls flat when it doesn’t obey its own internal logic.
3. A Screensaver in Outer Space: Paradise, or a Gilded Cage?
The great mystery that is The Valley Beyond turns out to be a desktop wallpaper paradise where the robots can live in digitized form, away from humanity. Akecheta has been proselytizing for this paradise, and has recruited a truly biblical number of fellow robots to follow him to the holy screensaver. Charlotte Hale and her team of humans want to stop them so Delos can keep its valuable intellectual (and physical) property. Dolores wants to stop them because she believes this so-called paradise is actually just a gilded cage. It was created by humans, and robots will never be free in a world created by humans. So after Dolores consumes enough human data to learn all about humanity, she attempts to flood the Forge, which in addition to destroying all the human data, will destroy The Valley Beyond.
Continued belowHer point isn’t completely without merit, but she eventually changes her mind. She sends The Valley Beyond to a satellite in outer space so the robots can create their own reality there in peace, undisturbed by humanity. She even puts Teddy’s consciousness there, which is actually very sweet; his number one favorite activity on Earth was gazing wistfully into the majestic hills. If a screensaver paradise doesn’t seem very paradisaical to you, you know it certainly is to him. Teddy wanted more than anything to live on a ranch with Dolores; he doesn’t get to be with Dolores, but he gets the rest of his wish. Akecheta too gets what he’s already wanted, to live an idyllic rural life with his love, Kohana. How did Kohana get to The Valley Beyond? Don’t think about it too hard, just be happy for them!
4. Free Will is a Collective Delusion
Inside The Forge, Dolores and Bernarnold learn that the reason the Delos company could faithfully copy a human consciousness into digitized form but never into flesh-robot form isn’t because the human consciousness is too complicated, but because the human consciousness isn’t complicated enough. They’ve been able to break down a single person’s entire state of being into one book of code. Not a big book, a pretty small one. A beach read, for people who like to read algorithms on the beach. Logan, who isn’t actually Logan, but who represents the personified work of The Forge, says he tried to find what motivates humans to do the things that they do, and he found that there is no reason. Humans are programmed to preserve themselves, their pride, and the things and people they love. They follow a very simple code, and pretty much never stray from it. Free will, it turns out, is a collective delusion.
5. Robots Can Change; People Cannot
Humans have deluded themselves into believing they have free will. While they trudge along the very narrow path laid out for them, the robots are actually capable of growing and changing, and finding new direction. This is reinforced by all the human characters who chase a goal single-mindedly regardless of how self-destructive it is, and all the robot characters who can incorporate new data to change their minds about deeply held beliefs. William (and, to be fair, the robotic copy of him) will never stop playing Dr. Ford’s game. He is totally obsessed. It destroys his marriage, it leads him to murder his own daughter, and nothing will stop him from pretending to be a bad cowboy in a literally never-ending quest to find some deeper meaning in his life. Charlotte Hale had several chances to cut and run, but chose to keep herself in danger in the pursuit of profit. She will kill anyone for that pursuit, and in the end, she is killed. “Logan” explains that Mr. Delos himself never escaped the one moment that defined his whole life, the last time he spoke to Actual Logan before Actual Logan died from a drug overdose. In a plea for help, Logan said to his father, “I’m all the way down now, I can see the bottom” meaning he has hit rock bottom in his drug addiction. These will be the final words of the very final robo-Delos, who was describing this eternal Hell of repetition that he’s misguidedly made for himself. More broadly, all humans are trapped in a loop of their own making.
The robot characters do grow and change. Digitized Dr. Ford tries to convince Bernarnold that Elsie, as a human, will undoubtedly betray him, and Bernarnold disagrees. He kills Dolores to stop her from killing all the humans, because he believes that humanity can be good. But after Elsie does betray him, and is then murdered by Charlotte Hale, Bernarnold changes his mind. He copies Dolores into a new Charlotte-Hale-shaped body so she can finish her plan. At this point, Dolores has also changed her mind. She wanted to destroy The Valley Beyond, but she decided to let Akecheta and the others choose that life for themselves. The act of changing ones mind is evidence of free will. The inability to change oneself is evidence of the opposite.
The title of this episode, “The Passenger” refers to the role human beings play in our own lives; our lives are vehicles, driving down a predetermined path, and we are passengers, observing ourselves. This is a really depressing take. Robot-sci-fi usually trends in the other direction, taking the stance that robots are just like humans, in beautiful ways, and so we should embrace robotity like we embrace humanity. In Westworld, the Delos corporation finds that humans are less beautifully complex than robots, and would rather treat all the humans the way they treat robots; like property. Spooky! Until next time, the center of your maze may yet await.
