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. This episode brings us more horrifying behavior from the scariest humans in the park, Dr. Ford and Charlotte Hale. We also get the opportunity to think deeply about the roles memory and suffering play in our own sense of humanity. There will be heavy plot spoilers for episode eight only. So contemplate the authenticity of pain itself, and pray the Ford thy soul don’t take, here are five thoughts on Westworld season one, episode eight: “Trace Decay.”
1. A Tale of Two Creeps
This episode begins with Dr. Ford instructing Bernard to cover up the murder of Theresa Cullen. Dr. Ford tells Bernard to clean up “his” mess, even though Dr. Ford is the one responsible, controlling everything Bernard does. He said it was worth killing Theresa to maintain his “dominion” over Westworld. Nothing says “mad-with-power” quite like the word “dominion.” Dr. Ford has said in a previous episode that the robots of Westworld interpret their programming as the voice of God. Since he is the one doing the programming, that would make Dr. Ford God. It’s so telling that Dr. Ford believes in his own power so strongly that it’s worth murdering people to maintain his power, and in the same breath he blames Theresa’s murder on Bernard, who actually cared deeply for Theresa. Dr. Ford revels in his power, but refuses to take responsibility for it. Dr. Ford has Bernard make it look like Theresa fell into a ravine while trying to transmit data from the park to a satellite. It’s an effective lie because we know that Theresa was, in fact, attempting to smuggle data out of the park. Dr. Ford also reveals that Theresa’s team reprogrammed Clementine, getting Bernard his job back.
Charlotte Hale sees through the charade, but she can’t risk revealing that it was she who directed Theresa to have Clementine reprogrammed. Though she does later admit to Lee Sizemore the head writer, that Theresa was acting on the board’s behest when she died. Charlotte Hale then has Lee Sizemore reprogram Peter Abernathy, who used to be Dolores’ father, and uploads the stolen data into his brain, to smuggle the data out of the park through him. So now we know it wasn’t Theresa acting alone to smuggle data, but that she was following Charlotte Hale’s directions. The question is, why does Charlotte Hale need to smuggle anything? She’s in charge, everyone defers to her, why can’t she just tell everyone she’s taking Peter Abernathy? Like Dr. Ford, Charlotte Hale revels in her own power, but she doesn’t seem to understand her power. She doesn’t take responsibility for putting Theresa in harm’s way, and while she strongly suspects (correctly) that Dr. Ford murdered Theresa, she won’t risk her own mysterious agenda to hold Dr. Ford accountable and protect her other employees. Dr. Ford and Charlotte Hale both work through people they deem lesser, Dr. Ford through Bernard, and Charlotte Hale through Theresa and now Lee Sizemore. Dr. Ford and Charlotte Hale are two sides of the same creepy power-crazed coin.
2. Memory, Suffering, the Robotity of it All
Bernard, newly aware of his robotity, asks Dr. Ford if his pain is real. Dr. Ford tells Bernard he doesn’t believe there is a difference between human pain and robot pain. There is no “threshold at which we become more than the sum of our parts. […] We cannot define consciousness because it doesn’t exist.” It’s not that robots are like humans, it’s that humans are like robots. Human pain exists in the mind the same way that robot pain does. Bernard’s programmed backstory is no less “real” than any human past – the self is a story we tell ourselves with our memories. Still, the show goes out of its way to tell us that robot memory is different from human memory. When Maeve asks Felix and Sylvester about her flashbacks with her old daughter, Felix tells her that, unlike humans, robots recall memories perfectly. When a robot remembers something, they relive it. We see Dolores experience this too when she fetches water for a young dying Confederado and she sees herself dead in the water; she’s experiencing this flashback, reliving her memory. If memories define humanity, and the robots have perfect memory, does that make the robots more human than the humans? Dr. Ford says Bernard’s sad feelings are beautiful, like a work of art, but even more beautiful is the ability to turn them off, to erase memories, and the sad feelings that come with them. This opinion further exposes Dr. Ford’s cognitive dissonance, because we know he programmed “reveries” into the robots, allowing them to relive memories that have been deleted. He grants and erases the memories of his robots to suit his own ends, all the while insisting that he does it for them. The Ford giveth, and the Ford taketh away.
Continued belowIn addition to memory, Dr. Ford believes suffering is key to making the robots “real.” All robots have a cornerstone, a tragic backstory that causes them to suffer. Contrast him to Dolores, when she convinces William they should stay to help the young dying Confederado, she asks, “What kind of people would we be if we just let him suffer?” Dr. Ford thinks that making the robots suffer makes them more human. Dolores thinks that making the robots suffer only makes Dr. Ford less human.
3. Who is the Man in Black?
Teddy, who is also an older-model robot experiencing flashbacks, flashes back to a time the Man in Black attacked him and Dolores. So Teddy knocks out the Man in Black and ties him up. When he awakes, Teddy interrogates him, asking who he is. For the first time we get to know a little more about the Man in Black. He’s a philanthropist. He had a wife and daughter, but his wife died, after taking the wrong pills and falling asleep in the bathtub. His daughter, however, blames him for her mother’s death. She believes her mother committed suicide to escape him. After his daughter confronted him at the funeral, the Man in Black returned to Westworld to find his true self. He murdered Maeve and her daughter, just to see if he felt anything, and he felt nothing. Teddy calls him an animal, and the Man in Black replies that an animal would have felt something. We learn through Maeve’s flashback that this is the event that got her reassigned. After the Man in Black killed her daughter, her cognition fragmented, and no programmer could calm her until Dr. Ford erased her daughter from her memory entirely. It was then that she was reassigned to the brothel.
The Man in Black is a villain, similar to Dr. Ford and Charlotte Hale in that he has a great deal of power, he revels in it, but he doesn’t take responsibility for it. When confronted by his daughter, he responds by searching for himself. He doesn’t mention putting any effort into fixing his relationship with her. He is completely focused on his journey to find himself. Likewise, William follows Dolores on her journey to find the maze, but is purely interested in what his relationship with her says about his own journey to find himself.
4. Who is Wyatt?
We’ve heard a lot about Wyatt, but not a lot about Wyatt. That is to say, we’ve heard his name mentioned many times, but people always say the same thing: he’s a bad guy who enjoys murdering people. This episode, Lee Sizemore tells us Wyatt is the main villain in Dr. Ford’s new narrative, and that robots all over the park are already hyping him up for the guests. So this explains why we’ve been hearing so many robots talk about him. Even though we are constantly reminded that everything the Westworld robots say and do has been written by humans, including Maeve’s rebellion, it’s still so easy to get caught up in their stories, just like the guests do, and forget that their stories are meticulously contrived, that Wyatt is neither a “real” or a mystical being; he’s an idea for a robot.
On their journey to find the notorious Wyatt, the Man in Black and Teddy save a woman who says she was attacked by Wyatt and his men. They are also attacked by a large horned man, impervious to bullets, but not impervious to an old fashioned axe-to-the-head. After Teddy interrogates the Man in Black about who he is, the woman unexpectedly stabs Teddy and tells him it’s time he came back into the fold, that Wyatt will need him soon. This whole episode sheds new light on Teddy’s previous encounter with Ghost Nation; they weren’t Ghost Nation at all, they were part of Wyatt’s team. They weren’t self-aware robots either, they were purposely designed to be the extra terrifying new villains. The guest whom Teddy guided at the time, had she stayed with him, would not have been hurt by these robots. Instead, she would have discovered Wyatt well before the Man in Black.
5. Maeve Takes the Wheel
She’s been a programmed mother, a programmed madame, and now for the first time, Maeve is taking control of her own destiny, and it’s off to a rocky and violent start. After discovering Sylvester planned to to betray her, she stabs his throat, and then directs Felix to cauterize his wound. She doesn’t want to kill him, and it’s not clear if that’s because she won’t kill unnecessarily, or because a murder would draw too much attention to her. It’s not exactly self-defense, but he did intend to kill her, and he absolutely would not have shown her the same mercy she showed him, given the opportunity. Back in the park, Maeve tests her new power to control the other robots around her. At first she’s just having fun, scoring free drinks from the bar, and sending the new Clementine away. (We get the feeling that New Clementine’s presence is, understandably, unnerving to Maeve). This part is fun to watch, because while Westworld guests get to live out their cowboy fantasies, Maeve gets this opportunity to live an even cooler fantasy, becoming the narrator of her own story, as well as the stories of all the robots around her. Tragically, in the midst of a flashback, believing that she is facing the Man in Black, she accidentally stabs New Clementine, and orders another robot to shoot indiscriminately into the crowd to get away. Of course, there’s nowhere for Maeve to actually “get away.” She’s quickly apprehended by the “Shades” in hazmat suits. We don’t get to see what happens next, but she’s in great danger of blowing her cover and undoing all the progress she’s made. Maeve’s response to her newfound power begs us to recall the oft-repeated line, “These violent delights have violent ends.” As someone who has experienced brutal violence every day of her existence, violence is the solution she turns to, both consciously and subconsciously.
What defines the human experience? Westworld, and, I would argue, all art, is at its best when it digs deeply into this question. This episode in particular asks us to consider if suffering defines the human experience, in a few interesting ways. The Man in Black is a human who spends a great deal of time interacting only with robots. He struggles to feel any kind of emotion, but when he sees Maeve at her most intense moment of suffering, he believes she has become “truly alive.” The Westworld robots are all given tragic backstories in the belief that tragedy will make them more “lifelike,” but Dr. Ford repeatedly uses Bernard’s tragic backstory as a means to control him, to make him more subservient, more robotic. So despite what the creators of Westworld-the-park believe, Westworld-the-show shows us that suffering has as great a role to play in robotity as it does in humanity.
