We’re Not Afraid to Say It: Westworld Kinda Sucked

Expectations for Westworld could not have been higher.  With Game of Thrones winding down into its final few seasons, HBO was looking for a flagship drama and Westworld looked like a hit.  The show had a stellar cast, great writers, and looked amazing in the previews.   Jonathan Nolan was writing the scripts, Anthony Hopkins was starring, and the show promised the combination of thoughtful writing, visceral violence and salacious (and gratuitous) sex scenes that other HBO shows have provided.  It would be Deadwood with robots, or Game of Thrones with cowboys instead of dragons.  We anticipated it would be the best show of the year.  We forgot, however, that this is 2016, and in 2016 everything – from No Man’s Sky to every movie featuring Batman – kinda sucks.  Westworld didn’t stand a chance.

Sometimes I feel like 90% of my day is spent staring meaningfully off into the distance.

Westworld didn’t talk long to start to fill us with doubts.  We watched the first episode with great interest.  How does a show about a futuristic world of cowboy robots start?  Well, with a violent sexual assault, of course.  Well, to be fair, the first episode does introduce you to a world of high tech robots and human tourists who visit the old west for exorbitant sums of money.  All of this  seems reasonable until you start to think about it.  I mean, people usually visit theme parks during the day but sleep in comfortable hotels at night; no one visits Disney World hoping to sleep in the park.  And, seriously, this park sure goes through a lot of trouble to provide people an authentic Western experience.  Paid actors could probably provide a similar experience without much trouble.  Developing life-like robots with state of the art AI seems like overkill.  For example, people are willing to take photos with human actors dressed as a life-sized Mickey Mouse at Disney World; no one has suggested trying to actually genetically manufacture a six foot tall mouse to make the Disney World experience more authentic.

Hey I stole this wall from the Game of Thrones set.

The benefit of the robots is that park visitors can do anything they want to do to the robot characters.  When you think about it, though, you only really need a robot for sex and violence.  You might need sexbots for the saloon, but the violence could probably be simulated pretty easily with actors.  Wait, you might think, all that horseback riding and fighting is pretty dangerous, human actors might get hurt where robots can just be fixed.  That’s all true, but those same risks exist for the human visitors as well.  The robots really don’t take any risks the humans don’t also take.  You really only need robots for humans who want to rape and mutilate the robot characters, which the park almost seems designed to  prompt you to do.  If you paid $40,000 to visit a place where you could just kill everybody without consequences, wouldn’t you almost feel obligated to do so?  The presence of the robots seems designed to bring out the worst in people; whereas a park staffed with humans would require guests to behave like humans.  The other disadvantage of robots is that there’s always the chance that the robots might start killing everyone (and they repeatedly do).  Confusingly, when the robots do inevitably turn homicidal, the guards turn out to be well equipped with weapons that are completely worthless against robots.  The extensive security forces at Westworld are almost comically unprepared for the most obvious outcome of creating robots trained to shoot and fight against human visitors.

He’s a super rich guy with lots of power in the real world who spends all of his time smacking around cowboy robots in fantasy land. Humanity’s future looks bright.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW] Then there was the big reveal that one of the central figures at the park was a robot himself.  But he wasn’t just any robot, he was built to look exactly like Anthony Hopkins’ dead partner, down to having his dead partner’s memories.  This immediately raised an obvious question: does no one recognize the dead partner’s apparently reanimated corpse back at work?  No no, the show assures us, all records of the dead partner had been completely erased (given Nolan’s involvement, perhaps with Bane’s contraption?) which is utterly impossible even today with today’s social media.  A famous person with an elite education working alongside one of the world’s most famous people at the world’s most famous park cannot simply disappear.  There would be school records, newspaper headlines, childhood friends, family friends, and medical records.  Given all this, WHY would Hopkin’s character take this risk?  If you want to build a robot with your partner’s personality, why build a robot who looked exactly like his partner?  Even if you recreate his personality, why give him his partner’s appearance?  His discovery would be inevitable.  The reveal was surprising, but – again – it’s another plot point that makes less and less sense the more you think about it. [END SPOILERS]

Hey you look familiar. Didn’t you used to work here and, like, didn’t you die twenty years ago?

This is the problem with the whole show; the show only works if you don’t think about it too much.  The more you think about it, the more you realize that you could develop a park that offers 90% of what Westworld does with real actors at a fraction of the price (heck, we have these parks today).  That’s not how science fiction should work; you shouldn’t have to stop thinking in order to enjoy it.  Science fiction should encourage thinking about the future and considering how humanity and technology are evolving.  Westworld doesn’t work like that.  It’s more interested in surprising us with characters who are secretly robots or who turn out to be older versions of other characters.  Whatever profound questions the show could ask get buried in all of this.  It’s really a shame; there’s so much talented acting going on (go Thandie Newton!!) amidst all of this silliness.  Maybe next season will be better; meanwhile, I can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t be considerably cheaper just to produce another season of Deadwood, a show that also provided everything that Westworld does at a fraction of the price.