If you were to ask me what a solid representation of the perfect show would be I’d immediately answer you that show would be Westworld…but I’d immediately add a caveat.
“But only the first season. Everything after that is an atrocity.”
Season 4 has just released the first disappointing episode of its season. It is time to look at what happened with something that started so beautifully.
Westworld was originally written by Michael Chrichton and centers around a concept he’s rather famous for; theme parks gone wrong. As his novel Jurrasic Park, Westworld is a park that doesn’t just allow its users to walk through hokey streets and eat sub-par chicken tendies at western-themed restaurants. This place isn’t for kids. Here, you can do almost anything.
Anything.
The white-hat gunslinger can take you on an epic adventure through deep canyons, sweeping brushland and jungle to defeat evil bandits. To find ancient treasure hoards of gold, you can embark on treasure hunting.
But you also have the option to commit atrocities that are as horrific and horrible as any human being has ever seen. This is stuff that would land you multiple life sentences in the real world. Everything is permitted because the evil you commit isn’t being done to real things. All of life, from humans to animals, is possible with very real robots. They can be attacked, tortured, killed, or even raped.
No matter what you do to them, they’ll get picked up by park staff, repaired, cleaned up, and put back into the park. The robots (known as “hosts”) won’t know about what happened to them the previous day. Their memories wipe, and they relive the same day over and over again like hyper-advanced animatronics as if they didn’t experience life-ruining trauma just hours ago.
Just like Jurrasic Park’s, however, the hosts start going berserk. Strange behavior begins to emerge from the hosts. The mystery of the hosts soon emerges, and you start to wonder about the reality of yourself.
The first season of Westworld’s Season 1 is brilliantly written and superbly performed. It has a tightly-woven story that keeps its secrets from everyone. Anthony Hopkins plays a sort of terrifying but fascinating Walt Disney character and you can never tell if he’s the villain or the good guy. Thandiwe Newton steals every scene she’s in, and Ed Harris plays his best role yet in this show.
It’s a show that makes you think about everything, and search for answers in every detail. It makes you ask questions about yourself and your nature as a human.It’s some of the most genius television I’ve ever watched and it will go down as one of my personal all-time favorite things put to a screen.
By the time it ends, you’re fully satisfied with the conclusion despite the fact that it could be considered dark. It could be considered a cliffhanger by some, but it’s so well earned that the end could have been there. That would have been fine. Perhaps it was the right place to end. The show then begins to toss aside everything that was interesting or magical about it.
Is it possible to end such an extraordinary show? Modernity, in a single word.
Westworld premiered in 2016. This means that it was created before mainstream culture really hit Hollywood. It allowed women to play victims and men to become heroes. Stories were not limited by a narrow political message. The show allowed the telling of a story with a deeper meaning than current political themes.
The next seasons were marked by awakening. All of the women were extraordinarily strong, while most men were either delusional, weak, weak or dumb. Character arcs of amazing characters became boring, and season 2 hit the height of absurdity when one of the main characters shot his daughter on an episode that aired on father’s day. It only got worse during season 3, when the show’s already inflated feminism went into overdrive, and all the women characters became do-it-all badasses while the male characters were hardly relevant to the story at all except as random plot devices.
Dolores, and Maeve are the two main characters. They don’t have any story arcs after season 1. They’re powerful and they only get more powerful. Dolores does have a change of heart, and reveals that she wants anything with a conscious mind to be free, but it’s hardly earned. It’s the same problem many modern movies and television shows have. The woman can’t be the evil one, she’s just secretly a good person and you didn’t even know it! Surprise! Expectations subverted
Also, I’m pretty sure season 3 directly ripped off “iRobot.”
In the hands of more steadfast writers who wouldn’t bend to modern political sentiments, we might have gotten additional seasons that really carried the show into deeper territory, and explored its themes even more. It possibly could have roped in some other existential questions that arise naturally from these concepts, but that’s not what we got.
We ended up with a confusing, inconsistent mess of plot threads trying to promote a tired message. It’s a show made with nothing but filler where the first season was an absolute masterpiece of introspection, intrigue, and philosophy about the nature of consciousness.
This show focused on larger concepts, while the times reduced it to female power fantasies.
As it stands, the fourth season doesn’t look like it’s going to be any better.
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