Setting The Stage For The Season Finale, ‘Westworld’ Reveals Its Cornerstone (TV REVIEW)

[rating=9.00] “The Well-Tempered Clavier”

As the ninth episode of Westworld’s first season loomed heavy on the horizon all throughout the week, us viewers wondered if the show would be taking after the Game of Thrones-style approach, where all the heartbreaking, world-ending events hit. While plenty was revealed, interconnecting everything that’s been laid out since the pilot episode, it was mostly a substantial amount of exposition that seemed to ready us for next week’s finale.

“You said this place was a game. Last night I finally understood how to play it.”

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A few weeks back, when the Man in Black was rejuvenating Teddy with Lawrence’s blood, he lamented about how years back he took one of the Westworld hosts apart, describing what was inside as a “million tiny little perfect pieces.” It was hard not to come back to his revelation during William’s story this week. The first was when his brother-in-law (to be), Logan, tries to snap William out of his obsession with Delores by gutting her in front of him, showing off all the circuitry and mechanics firing away within.

The second, much more sobering moment was when Logan wakes up the next morning surrounded by a sea of brutally disassembled hosts. William, having let Delores escape, suddenly has a much different look in his eye, as he tells Logan that he understands the game, while seemingly beginning to understand something about himself as well.

Delores, while she’s off on her own, roams through her own programming, and fragmented memories, struggling with the very nature of her existence, and that of the world that she lives in. The manner that Delores’ key moments of awakening were layered between Ford’s monologue about his late partner’s desire to create actual consciousness, to say nothing of the voice Delores keeps hearing, implies that there’s much more to her than simply being the oldest host in Westworld.

“It was always empty. Like everything in this world.”

Maeve’s storyline seemed woefully underdeveloped, though considering the revelations we were dealt it’s more than a little understandable. Still, she’s continued down her army-building, world-burning path now that she has unlimited access to her code, as well as the code of other hosts. Starting off the episode, she shows her new Neo-like powers over all other machines by not only seeing Bernard for what he is, but hacking control over him so she can continue to get what she wants, which seems to be an all-host army to take Westworld back from the humans that maintain it. You know, classic theme park robot-who-gains-sentience stuff.

Of course, the upside of Maeve’s story is the reckless abandoned that she’s willing to have sex with fellow host Hector with an imminent death closing in fast. These week, which had her kicking over a lantern inside a tent, setting the whole thing ablaze, will go down as one of the show’s iconic moments.

“The maze isn’t meant for you.”

The Man in Black’s quest to find Arnold’s maze continues to face setbacks, this time with Wyatt’s love interest stabbing Teddy with an arrow last week, then finishing the job this week by killing him (yet again), and knocking the park’s most notorious guest out cold. When he comes to, he finds a noose around his neck, strung up around a tree, and tied to his horse. After freeing himself with his knife — still lodged in Teddy’s torso — he’s visited by none other than Charlotte.

It’s another moment where we see the Man in Black’s vacation interrupted, but this time we’re clued into his true relationship with the park. Charlotte tells him of Theresa’s murder, as well as her intention to force Ford from the company. Him being looped into this conversations, during his vacation no less, confirm that he’s a major player in the Delos corporation, which explains the park’s ‘look-the-other-way’ approach to his playing, as well as his years-long obsession with finding Arnold’s maze.

“The piano doesn’t murder the player if it doesn’t like the music.”

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As ominous and occasionally terrifying as Ford has acted throughout the first season, his motivations are hard to argue with. He sees Westworld as his creation, and will go to substantial lengths to keep creative control. For more than three decades, Ford’s entire existence has been the park and everything that goes along inside it. Still, his methodology doesn’t so much border on cruelty as it’s been proven to embrace it whole-heartedly.

The tragedies that Ford creates, however he does solely to make a more convincing host for the park’s guests, anchoring these artificial lifeforms to real, human suffering as a kind of necessity. “The human mind,” Ford tells Bernard, “is not some golden benchmark glimmering on some green and distant hill. No, it is a foul, petulant corruption.” Even he admits he falls into those all-too-human traps of trying to change the past, only he does so through his own maniacal world-building, with an iron grip on the fail-safes of the narrative that were so unyielding it would make Joseph Stalin envious.

The Restworld

— The photograph that set off the host playing Delores’ father in the pilot episode is finally revealed, belonging to William’s fiance/Logan’s sister. This lends a bit more relevance to the increasingly-likely theory that the show is two distinct timelines

— When Stubbs goes searching for Elsie inside the park and encounters a handful of ghost natives, they seem immune to the standard voice commands to override their system. While I first thought these anomalies were the result of Arnold’s long-dormant code intended to sabotage the park, it’s worth not ruling out the possibility that Ford’s been building his own army throughout the theme park.

— Now that Bernard’s connection to Arnold has finally been brought to light, there’s still the matter of Arnold’s hidden game, not to mention the rogue coding that seems to be the only thing that’s one step ahead of Ford. Factoring in Delores’ odyssey, along with the repeated scenes of her conferences with Bernard in the early episodes could mean that there’s a third timeline in play here, one that pre-dates everything else on the show, where it’s Arnold himself conversing with Delores about the nature of her existence. Which now seem like they may very likely have played a role in Arnold’s death at Delores’ hand.

— Finally, just to finally put this out there after all these weeks, it’s likely no coincidence that the Anthony Hopkins’ character is named after the American industrialist most widely credited with the utter dehumanization of the blue-collar workforce.

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