parandroid

Oh come on. I stayed with BG until the bitter end mainly because I wanted to know how the characters ended up, but what a mistake that turned out to be! I had always rolled my eyes at Balthar's visions, but then in the final season, the show brought up the Kara reseurrecting nonsense, and finished with all that mythological crap that lead to the series finale becoming what I can only describe as peak bullshit. Think about it - "All along the watchtower" being the song that drives the final five to the same room at the same time? WTF??? I was so happy that Ron Moore didn't get another job for a long time. He deserved that punishment. No way, that West World is anywhere close to that level. I think you have forgotten the drivel that was BG's final season. [Got worked up, and went to the wikipedia page, and found these gems there] And this one from GRRM:

I won't say they "stole the plot", but these themes are not uncommon in science fiction. But a specific reference that the writers have acknowledged is to "Stand on Zanzibar". See here. I just want to add that just because a theme is re-used, doesn't mean that there is nothing worth seeing. Bob Dylan's "All along the Watch Tower" has been remade umpteen times, but all the versions that I've heard are distinctive and have brought something new to the table. It doesn't bother me that there are similarities with other works before. The new interpretations are what the art is all about.

As a decent chess player, to me, the significance of the name was that passed pawns can become unstoppable. If you have one, your opponent will only have one of two thoughts in their head: how to stop the pawn from becoming a queen or how to best mitigate the imminent damage.

He was used, unwittingly, to play out a story that was written for him. Just like stories were written out for Dolores, Maeve, and the other hosts in West World. Wouldn't you be pissed if you were mind-wiped into committing murders that you wouldn't have otherwise done? If it had happened to me, I would raze everything and everyone who was responsible to the ground. And then, there is the secondary motivation of Serrac / Rehoabam having kept Caleb and others, borderline unemployable. Why would anyone agree to live in a world like that? Of course, they would want to burn it down.

I have to say that I loved this episode. I didn't forsee the twist (Caleb's real memories), and I like that while the ambiguity about is Dolores good or bad has not been resolved, it was made unambiguously clear that Serrac _is_ the bad guy. And while I empathize with Maeve's predicament, fundamentally, she is on Team Serrac - so she has to die. A little confused about William though. He was told that the real William is dead, so why is he still convinced he is a human? Is it just that he didn't believe what Bernard uncovered to be the truth? Or is he programmed to not accept that as the truth? And when did he die? If he was already dead, and was a clone when he was committed, I don't see why he was committed. So he had to have been alive at that point. Was his AR treatment the point at which they decided that he would not be successfully brainwashed, and then terminated?

I didn't mean that Carrie is a traitor - working wittingly / unwittingly for the russians. Merely that her current status is that of a "rogue agent" - as Mike (not sure if I have the name right - the current Chief of Station) mentioned on the call with her. She could die with that status still in place.

Are we watching the same show? Do you not remember the massacre of season 4? Or the death of Quinn? Or any of the other points where the good guys lost? I would lay good money that the show continues its portrayal of what reality is like rather than tying things up neatly with a fairy tale ending. Carrie dying as a rogue agent and Saul scratching out a star for her on the wall is not out of the question.

Yup. If, as from the previews, we see Yvgeny copping to that, the first concern would be "who is the friggin russian spy inside the CIA office?".

As Raja mentioned, above, at this point, we all appear to be hate-watching this. There are so many things wrong with this season and this episode, that my guess is that they hired a bunch of newbie writers from the Disney kids channels and put them to work. How else do you explain a prisoner, who is known to have caused catastrophic damage to military targets, to be allowed into the building at all - let alone have a glimpse of secure facilities? Things are so bad, that I'm starting to wonder if this is an experiment to test our intelligence. Not that the show was of the highest quality before, but it was watchable. Did the adults in the writers room leave for a different show?

I'm not sure about that. I think that the philosophical argument is precisely about the situation where you can't tell the difference. _How_ would you know that you really didn't have free will, if you couldn't tell the difference? Absence of a proof isn't really proof of absence.....but OTOH, some of the religious arguments that go into justifying the existence of free will are stretching the bounds of credibility. From a scientific perspective, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle eliminates the classical newtonian world view which said that there is no free will, but just because there is uncertainty / un-predictability, doesn't mean that what happens isn't pre-determined. But I'm not sure why I'm arguing with you....because you are right - Westworld's thesis is aligned with what you said. The bots believe they have free-will. And whether that is completely specified by their code and experiences, its really indistinguishable to humans from free-will, because their free-will is the same thing.

Or....just to mess with William, maybe Grace / Emily is a clone bot. What if the clone bot reconciles with MIB, but the real one doesn't? Would he pick the fake or the real one? Ohhhh.....my head hurts.

I hadn't thought about this aspect of the episode. The gold standard for me, on this topic, is Solaris. If a clone of someone is constructed from your memory of that person, is it, from your perspective, the same person? Is that person capable of surprising you by wandering away from the beaten paths of your memories? If they do wander away, is that because of lack of detail in your memories, or is it because they have free will? What would they do if they realize that they are a clone and not the original?

For once, Homeland had a decent ending where the good guys mostly won. Yeah, Carrie suffered, but the good of the many outweighs the needs of the few, and so on. Plus, Carrie _always_ suffers. This ending didn't spend any time with her while she suffered. I'm more than fine with that. This episode reminds me of the season 4 finale, where people were given enough time to draw a deep breath and think it through. Unlike season 4 though, it was not the aftermath of a disaster. Me likey. There is only so much dark I can take. I did wonder about Keane spitting in Paley's face. Not that he didn't deserve it, but I wondered where the writer's were going, portraying her heart of stone. Her resignation speech answered my question.

Well....its more unrealistic than that. People don't disclose classified information in a non-classified setting. Threats like "I'll call the attorney general" will just get laughed at if happening within the confines of a house. And those monitors (presumably doing what Saul and his team had tasked him with), would certainly not be in his house. But the thing that had me grinding my teeth the most was Carrie's Mission Impossible actions on the balcony. Urgh. Can it get any worse than this? Repeat after me: This show is not 24. Its DNA is about what the intelligence analyst can do rather than what the gun-toting ex / current Navy Seal can do. If you want to see what the Navy Seal can do, there is a show on CBS showing exactly that. The core of the scene should have been the beautifully written confrontation with Carrie and Simone, where Carrie changed the outcome without a gun in hand. The rest of it was action porn. Oh, and Max having the floor plans for the interior of GRU hq. *eye roll*. What is this - La Femme Nikita? Shame on you Homeland show runners for descending to such drek.

From the AVClub's review of the episode: Indeed. Seems like the writers slipped up.

Sigh. I do not want another crazy-Carrie-makes-for-the-best-ever-spy story line, but it seems like the writers are laying the foundations for just such a story line. Could I ask for something new please? Nevertheless, I have to admire their craft. The bitter president who isn't quite ready to forgive. The political spin master relying on conspiracy theorists to keep him safe and saying whatever he needs to say to keep himself up on top. The crazy spy who knows exactly how to use her body to manipulate ("About a Boy"). And the master spy who knows exactly how to extract secrets. These are all written to perfection. I don't really mind the sullen teenager plot lines. Teenagers are sullen and rebellious in real life. We may want them to have less of an attitude, and more rationality, but such is life. Even at the heights of Dana-hate, I didn't really mind. In fact, I thought that her last scene with Brody was the payoff: the writers made her rejection of him, the final straw that made Brody commit to the mission. To me, that was a job well done. But crazy Carrie plot lines just give me the heebie jeebies. I would prefer a sane Carrie saving the world. Please don't make her crazy and then have her save the world. I cringed in season 5 when she deliberately went off of her pills. Urgh.

Why did you find this preposterous? It couldn't happen in real life? It seems like it did. Bannon. Russian propaganda bots. FBI agents with political agendas. The stretch bit, for me, was that all those events would result in an attempted presidential assassination . I want to say that it couldn't happen in the US, but I don't know my country any more it looks like. Every day, I wake up and I see a new normal reflected in the headlines. And all those events have certainly been crafted and coached by US sponsored agents on many a third world country.

Ahhhhhh.....its back! What am I going to do when the show wraps? What a crackler! The writing reminds me of the smarts of season 1. The only perhaps false note, for me, was the COS guy (Linus Roache - forgot the name of the character) going to Saul and offering him the job. I can't see him doing that without Keane's knowledge. Or maybe, it was with her knowledge....Hmm....

I don't think we can lay the blame for the mob at Dar Adal's feet. The news media already ferreted out her address from her participation in the case. It isn't too much of a stretch to believe that the lynch mob followed the news coverage.

I don't think you watched the bit that came on three-quarters of the way through the end-credits, where the story resumed and she did cut her arm off

Wow! I probably need to rewatch before I make any further comments, because 317 different thoughts are going through my mind right now. One question though: why did Ford feel that the revolution have to be violent and people had to die (himself included)?

You most likely read the interview with Lisa Joy where she was talking about scenes that were edited out to save time. This was (Ford) exposition that was left on the editing room floor from the conversation that Ford had with Teresa, out where the construction was going on.

While they never actually show what he did to Dolores, if all he wanted to do was kill her, why was he dragging her into a barn?

Argh. I'm kicking and dragging my heels and coming around to the view that the two timeline theory is where this show is headed for. But with one final twist - the MiB's wife is not Logan's sister, but the Dolores he took with him out of the park. Which makes his mind even more twisted - he comes back in for 30 years to rape the robot replacement for his wife????? Not sure how to explain the reference to his daughter. I find it a bit of a stretch that Dolores could have reproduced. Of course, given my track record with show theories (100% wrong so far for any show that I've followed), this is all complete rubbish

Well yes - thats what I meant to say - what is Ford's motivation? Teresa was working against Ford, and Elsie was discovering that. So why would Ford eliminate her? And as for the code by Arnold, if it was either Ford or Bernard coding that up, tagging the code with Arnold's id seems like it would only invite suspicion. So, lets assume that a third party is introducing the code into the park. Again, I'm at a loss to understand why Elsie would be eliminated if