AudienceofOne

I mean I once managed to kill a cactus so I spent that whole sequence wondering how many harvests they'd screwed up before they finally got it right.

The funny thing about his comment was me rolling my eyes earlier at Echo suddenly being a semi-automatic weapons expert. This show has always done this thing where a person is exposed to a new thing (here's a weapon, this is how Grounders fight) and within one or two episodes they're super experts. Oh God, not me. What a convoluted mess. The SPIRAL that is INSIDE YOU represents NUMBERS that power the MACHINES that lifts the BRIDGE that takes people from Sanctum but sends them to somewhere else and it's the Beta planet and the armoured soldiers send their prisoners there and there's a TIME DILATION and everyone loses their memories but then regains them and how many episodes is this season supposed to be??? It's like they're so lost for ideas that they just throw as many things into the pot as possible. It is possible they are angling for a time reset, which would be a crappy ending. Yep. They've got it the wrong way around.

I had this realisation during this episode that she's such an amazing actor with such gravitas but that we simply don't write parts for an actor like her in any other show. I don't know what her career will be like post-100 and that's super depressing. Not to make a negative statement on the other actors because many of them are quite good, but I think she's by far the best on the show right now. She is her character on a fundamental level. But he wasn't even on the other planet. He was this weird annoying retcon that popped up last season when things were already ridiculously overcrowded. Oh Sheidheda? Yeah, he's something we've been worried about for DECADES. Never heard of him before? We just never mentioned him. These writers have one fatal flaw. They use contrived action as a lazy writing prop to keep momentum. Given a moment to reflect and make things real they instead ram a new point of conflict in. It's why the show is too busy and too convoluted.

"Charlotte" was and is Dolores. The idea they're exploring here is that if you put "you" in a completely different life you would be changed by that life to the point where you're a completely different person. She was burned in the accident but not killed. She's still Charlores. It's just that the experience of losing the family she'd come to care for has changed her radically. Like almost everything this season, it works thematically. But the execution was terrible. Mostly because she's just assuming that Dolores is responsible for the explosion when she has no evidence of that at all. It's simply bad writing.

I pretty well checked out of this episode the minute they spent so much of it with Maeve killing imaginary Nazis for no reason. It's mindless and done solely because someone thinks it's cool to see a WOC kill Nazis while ignoring the fact she's currently enslaved to one. I can't believe I'm saying this of these writers after the first two seasons but they really haven't thought this shit through.

Since there was no reason for her and Maeve to be on different teams in the first place, her going to such lengths to "convince" her fell completely flat. Maeve's issue was never her choice to be on the wrong team, it was the fact she was stuck following somebody else's program for three seasons. Her blathering to Dolores about how she had to stop Dolores from creating a world full of Dolores copies - where did she even get that from? At the same time she's criticising her for creating versions of herself to die. These two things contradict each other! It's almost like she never had an actual motivation this season but was just a way for the writers to misdirect the audience and deliver exposition. This season was extremely good thematically but the writing was not very good. Execution matters too.

And then they woke up and it was all one of the AI's simulations... And the final scene is a flashcard that says, "Simulation rejected, load simulation 58Xb705" and it's just that for the next 10 seasons.

I don't know why anybody's doing anything except Dolores. She at least has a motivation even if they're still trying to drag out her arc by having her speak cryptically all the damn time. These shows always end up victims of their own success by trying to drag it out long past its use by date. I have no idea why Maeve and Dolores are fighting each other. The person Maeve should be pissed at is Serac since he's essentially enslaved her again. Somebody decided it'd be cool to have two hot chicks in leather fighting each other and that's just so damn sexist that the show's ostensible feminism is falling flat. Even Dolores is like, "why are you doing this?" and Maeve is just "I don't know, let me blow your arm off though, that'll make a cool visual". Dolores created versions of herself that she let die. That's literally the opposite of somebody who only cares about her own survival. So Maeve's "revelation" that Dolores was willing to sacrifice herself at this juncture made Maeve look like an idiot. And the last person who should be looking like an idiot is Maeve. Seriously, this was NOT a good episode. It was almost juvenile.

This episode was self-indulgent, that is all. I hate it when American shows get extended beyond the length of their own story and they are forced to resort to filler and then every episode becomes the product of somebody's "wouldn't it be cool if" brain fart. Wouldn't it be cool if we did Westworld as different genres? So cool, man. Let's do that! That will kill an hour.

Halfway through this season my initial assessment hasn't changed. Thematically on point, execution AWFUL.

So I'm the only one who thinks that Charlotte has a copy of Delores in her? This episode was way better than Maeve being stuck in the same rat maze over and over again. The theme that the "real" world is simply a more complex version of Westworld really works for me. Also in terms of structural disadvantage, Caleb's storyline is extremely apropos. If society decides that you're not worthy of resources then you end up in a self-fulfilling prophecy. So this show is still capable of making apropos societal allusions when it wants to. This episode gave me more hope for the rest of the season.

I don't really know what to say, I thought this was much weaker thematically than the first episode and just consisted of Maeve replaying her role in previous seasons. Maeve believes she's powerful and the ultimate badass but is just fulfilling the programming dictates of somebody else. We already know this so I don't know why we needed to see it again. Also can't she get a new plotline? It's depressing seeing a badass WOC being stuck retreading the same ground and I don't get what the show is trying to say by making it happen again - other than the fascist subtext of "we're all just machines in someone else's story", which it made already. And didn't require actual fucking Nazis to do it. The show feels like it's spinning its wheels, filling an episode count in preparation for an inevitable season 4. I'm not impressed.

Thematically, this episode was good. Really good. If we accept that Westworld is just humanity in a microcosm then the idea that the real world is just Westword but kind of bigger, more complex, and messier is a good one. Thematically it worked - we even have actual human beings freaking out over the idea it might all be a simulation and various people speculating that life is a rigged game. So far, so Westworld. Even without the Westworld. But... and it's a big but... the execution was meh. Caleb declaring he "wanted someone real" before Dolores literally fell into his arms? Nazis? Clumsy dialogue about building supercomputers to replace God? Maybe this is a simulation written by a hack writer.

My imminent blog post will be entitled 'Not With a Bang But With a Whimper'

For a show that prides itself on whatever "new narrative" it thought it was telling, half the female characters gave birth to something and the other one disappeared (what did happen to Kady?).