arc

The robot one? I thought that was a flashback Bernard was having. One that was actually Dolores and Arnold, but Bernard is partially Arnold.

Boy, I love Westworld, but Jonathan Nolan saying "in terms of influences, very much thinking about The Matrix, but the slightly lo-fi version... you don't need Zion, you don't need to plug in everyone like a battery. We've already done it. We've already created the Matrix invisibly within our own world, like an overlay." (emphasis mine) ... yeah, that was the point of the Matrix!!!!!!!! What an absolute galaxy brain take to say something like "our show is influenced by the Matrix but what if it had something to say about the real world we live in".

If you're missing basic stuff like how the show made it clear he was a pedophile and what the device was, I don't know if you're paying enough attention to be criticizing it. She straight up said the device was his camera jammer and that he was the guy Nathan was talking about from Thursday. A guy who grooms kids like that and lies about it to a kid's mom and has a camera jammer is not a good dude. He probably picked a secluded area away from passers-by for his own evil ends. Bernard's marble/pearl is flecked with red, indicating he's partly human. Unlike regular host pearls, which apparently are just grey and black. Then again, why in the world would robots know what their pearls look like? She doesn't have Charlotte's memories easily accessible to her or she would have known the secret code to contact Serac right away, as well as knowing real!Charlotte was a mole for Serac. But she did say she felt like real!Charlotte was trying to break free. Maybe that's just the dissociation of being in charge of a body she doesn't recognize. Kinda like how in Altered Carbon people's minds can be placed into new bodies and sometimes doing so too often can damage the psyche. But depending on how the host bodies are made -- and the claim that modern host bodies are as organic as human bodies (minus platelets and hormones like adrenaline or cortisol, which is another wildly lunatic idea) -- maybe host!Charlotte was literally cloned/fast-grown/molecularly duplicated. And if it was the latter, then host!Charlotte has a brain similar to real!Charlotte, with the memories and mind intact, but the pearl and lightbulb are driving the body. (I guess we'll have to ignore that doing so means there's a big hole in the host brain to make room for the lightbulb.) Anyways, in which case this makes it a kind of homage to Get Out as well.

ep 9: I understand Yessika's passion but her fight against Mama Fina's in the food tour still seems extremely short-sighted to me. The restaurant was behind in its rent and in danger of eviction. If they appeal to the gentrifiers that's not great but if they don't and close, who's gonna replace Mama Fina's? That landlord Rob is 100% gonna get a gentrifier (or gentefier) business in there anyways. ep 10: ... yeah, like if Rob sells the property to a lady who wants to make it a pop-up food joint. I liked that Javier compromised on his principles and made some decent money as a mariachi for once. And I also kinda like and respect the show that it was too little too late and he'd still be moving to Bakersfield and giving up his dream, but ouch.

Hah, I was right about the RICO app seeming like GTA Online!!! Also, that link has a transcript of what Jonathan Nolan said in the post-episode BTS about what the app is and what "personals" are: "kidnap and murder, the heavy shit". Also also, there's an interesting theory of what the season's giant twist would be. It's interesting. Kinda hope it's not true but if it is, I hope that any potential season 4 stops trying to outwit the viewers.

Charlotte Hale was a real human, who got duplicated by Delos in general and Bernard specifically. Then he put Dolores’ mind in the Charlotte host dupe. Since Dolores now has her own body back, presumably someone else is now driving the Charlotte host. Probably a Westworld host we already know, given how much Dolores hates humans and also how it seems like human minds can’t be reliably copied and pasted into host bodies. (Weird post-credits scene from the s2 finale aside) Martin was also a real human, and apparently rich enough to visit Westworld, which means he got copied by the Delos host-clone project, which explains how they were able to build a duplicate. Again, presumably the host version is being driven by a Dolores ally or underling, rather than a copy of the original Martin.

The RICO app makes me think of GTA Online, not that I've ever played it. But my friend who does play basically makes me think it's an MMO game where you do crime jobs for fun. I'll be very pleasantly surprised if the Rehoboam inventor doesn't turn out to be a secret host or otherwise from Robert Ford or Arnold Weber. Also, there's almost no way anyone would stick your super duper God computer in the ground floor lobby of a skyscraper in Los Angeles. One, the power draw would be high and tech companies in the real world often locate their datacenters in remote areas for temperature issues and cheaper electricity. Two, anarchists would want to blow it up. Also, three, you'd definitely want to have redundant backups spread around the world. Or maybe Rehoboam is decentralized and already lives in multiple giant computer eggs.

Wait but he put together really professional glass cage by himself but his apartment’s secret hiding place is a crummy hole in the wall???????

This is indeed what happened! CTV Comedy Channel is running them two eps per week, and so it’s on the CTV Comedy Channel app instead of the main CTV app. Go figure.

Penn Badgley on the twist he didn’t see coming in s2 despite knowing ahead of time about the big twist: https://tvline.com/2019/12/27/you-recap-season-2-episode-10-finale-explained-love-secret/

Joe’s gotta start responding to people

A big industrial meat grinder can do bones. A home one definitely can't -- well, maybe chicken bones but not big animals. Anavrin's is probably somewhere in the middle as far as grinding power and durability goes. (source: 30 seconds of searching on youtube and google)

Y'all are comparing this show to Dexter, which I vaguely know about but never watched. I kinda see a little Hannibal in it, esp with the way Joe disposed of Jasper's body, intercut with Love's stress-baking. So I'd love it if season 3 has an amoral or evil psych who knows everything Love and Joe have done and has their own agenda somehow. (also, I should confess that I haven't watched the first season yet, I just dove into the second and read up on the first as necessary.) The other show this really resonates with is Barry, esp as both are killers trying on some level to make a better life for themselves in Los Angeles, with some kind of spiritual redemption. Barry is more obviously closed off from his own dark side, where I see Joe as both knowing about his dark side while also being in deep denial of it. Yet Barry doesn't use voiceover at all. I mean yeah but also how TF does he even afford the rent on that cavernous storage locker? And how did he build a new cage from scratch? Or did he move the old one from NY? How? (doing the latter would at least explain how the cage is so damn pristine and well-built but Joe just knocked a hole in the wall of his apartment for a closer secret hiding place.) last thing: shout-out to the Popeye's I remember in LA in a neighborhood apparently sketchy enough that the employees were in their own kind of big glass cage and cash and food were passed through a box exactly like the one Joe has for his cage. ETA: Love jumped really fast to thinking Joe was implicitly accusing her of poisoning the muffins. More fuel for the theory that she poisoned her husband.

If "nothing on this planet can breach those doors" maybe Mando shoulda engaged those ground security protocols back in the second episode and then the Jawas would never have managed to stripped his ship down. (That said, at least this episode there was a little more justification for why Mando tends to park so damn far away from his final destination.)

The big problem is that the procedure is almost definitely lethal so you can’t put important people in it but whoever comes out on the other end will have godlike powers and cannot be constrained by ordinary levers one uses to control, say, fighter jet pilots or KGB assassins, so you definitely can’t put condemned criminals in it either.