Kreniigh

Apropos of nothing but this conversation making me think about Quark for the first time in ages. Let's hope for Daryl's sake no one named Hannah joins the group.

"... Two days out is almost an entire season on this show.

Wasting rifle ammo on a carnival game, and potentially making every nearby zombie head straight for you (why didn't that happen?). Sitting in rubble and laughing after falling through a roof instead of looking around for zombies. Staying in a car (and jumping into the trunk!) long enough for it to get surrounded, when there's plenty of time to chop the nearby zombies and run. Climbing up onto a Ferris wheel for no good reason, when you could easily fall and OOPS. Choosing to eat RTEs when there's plenty of more-edible canned food. The stupid hurts. Well, at least they're not so stupid that they think 20 is less than 10.

Around the fifth episode there was a reference to a "bicameral system" that was used in the park years ago to transmit radio commands, which would be experienced as auditory hallucinations by hosts. In Jaynes's real life theory, the voices experienced by the bicameral mind are not gods (as people once believed, according to Jaynes) or radio transmissions (as here), but the brain communicating to itself. So whoever named this system in Westworld was being ironic. The reference to The Creation of Adam contains the idea that, again, what is presumed to be 'God' is actually the brain talking to the self. And at the end we get the reveal that at last some of Dolores's voices were not outside her, but her own mind. So the radio system is the surface meaning of the painting, while the reality at Dolores's awakening is the 'brain' interpretation. So, is the 'bicameral' radio system just a red herring? A convenient way to explain the basic concept? Is it even used in the plot at all?

Yeah, but why would the Demogorgon have the slightest idea what a bear trap was, what it would do and how it would be triggered? To it, the bear trap was just a thing on the floor, just like it is for actual bears. Well, my point was that not everything in the real world is reflected in the Upside Down, and there's no rhyme or reason for it. All the real-world trees are reflected when Nancy crosses over, but the fort in the woods has nothing around it. Joyce paints letters on the wall and Mike immediately sees them on the other side; what if she had drawn them on a sheet of paper instead, and then carried the paper from room to room? Why are there houses but no cars? If there is a plan, it might be something along the lines of: The Upside Down is a purely mental plane and doesn't really exist until someone observes it, and then only things that are significant to the observer are there.

The ground rules of the Upside Down are going to need some clarification. For example, a hastily thrown up bunch of Christmas lights and an alphabet painted on the wall are visible to someone in the UD immediately, but not a bear trap? Things get moved around all the time in the real world but they only seem to have presence in the UD if they are important to the plot.

(late to the party) I'm baffled by the villians' plan in this one. Lure the Prime Minister to remote Siberia, and have General Shadow assassinate him -- which, come on, he only brought like 2 bodyguards, why not just shoot them all? Do you only get the power of the Prime Minister if you personally kill the previous one? -- and this is a "coup" exactly how? It's not like they had a lot of time to set up loyalists throughout the government to seize power when the General declares himself Prime Minister. I think Putin can rest easy knowing that this episode is not going to give his opposition any brilliant ideas. And echoing the sentiment that "sorry, your cover has been blown, so now you can't work for this secret agency that does not officially exist" is weak tea.