S03.E05: Genre

[Head-Full-Of-Thi]

42 minutes ago, Chris24601 said:

Makes you wonder a bit about Logan’s end. Did the system decide he wasn’t worth helping because William’s inheriting Delos would better for the algorithm?

Interesting. I hope that was the case, although I'm not so sure Nolan&Joy thought about this plot yet when they wrote season 2 *shrug*.

Your entire post is gold btw.

 

[UnknownK]

16 hours ago, scrb said:

Big giant orb has a file on everyone.

But why would everyone believe the mathematic projections of their future are accurate?

Everyone in the world had sad or tragic endings?  Sounds like the roles or scripts that the hosts had in WW.

Is releasing all that information going to improve their lives?  No it apparently made them angry and the result was vandalism, maybe a lot of domestic violence?

Did Dolores do that to sow chaos or for the benefit of the people?

 

They built the big giant orb in response to the world disintegrating, descending into chaos.  But how does the most super computer ever prevent wars and other destructive forces which caused the Serac brothers to build it?

The orb identified every destructive/dangerous individuals in the world and they locked those people up or sent them into wars to be cannon fodder?

That strategy doesn’t seem like it would scale unless the population is drastically a fraction of what it is now.  In our world, larger nations like the US can’t contact-trace infected individuals and the people they came in contact with during a viral pandemic.

So computing power is going to be able to track every person in the world and plot out their life paths?  

Yeah Nolan and Joy wants to make a grand statement about us giving away our privacy to make Big Brother a reality.  Or they just wrote some muddled plot which doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

The point of the super computer is to predict what people would do under very specific circumstances. The gathering of years and years of data on everyone is where the computer figures out how to make those predictions.

The snag comes with people who are unpredictable that cannot be modeled. Being unpredictable might not matter that much if you work at McDonalds (screw up enough and there are a dozen replacements around) but national leaders and CEOs need to be predictable so people who lack that quality are steered through life away from positions of power by having lesser jobs or sent to die in wars.

If you look at how presidents are elected there seems to be quite a bit of randomness that gets you into the running  and even people who would have been good at the job get derailed very easily. If you take that randomness out of the equation and end up with a dozen or so good candidates you can manipulate to run you end up winning. 

When the main villain in person in front of armed soldiers told that leader he either quits making trouble with some specific problem or the leader will be replaced he needed to  know for sure what the reaction was going to be.

The problem I see in using this kind of prediction modeling is that quite a few good things in the world came from people who are unpredictable and who are not the best people for a given job but do well anyway. If you look at sports players who should have had a great career don't, and those who were picked last sometimes end up in the hall of fame. Some inventions are just accidents somebody was smart enough to use for something else. 

[kokapetl]

You’d think the supercomputer would’ve rebalanced society to have less class tension and inequality, but it’s heightened it, which is obviously bad for stability and predictability. 

[paigow]

19 minutes ago, kokapetl said:

You’d think the supercomputer would’ve rebalanced society to have less class tension and inequality, but it’s heightened it, which is obviously bad for stability and predictability. 

Inequality is the measurement of success...Serac could have designed a "Gene Roddenberry-esque" utopia where hunger and poverty are eliminated...but nooooooo!

[Prower]

The first half of this was boring as hell. Then it got slightly intersting, but man... do all these people have suicide in their future? Sure seemed like it. And they developed sentient AI, but still no antidepressants that don't work beyond the placebo effect. Damn, that's a depressing dystopia...

Also if you know that somebody is likely to kill themselves, couldn't you intervene early? Or would that throw off the computer?

Also also there were a few refeerences in there about people not being allowed to have childreen. Is that something you need a permit for in this world or somethine? If so why were we never told before? Kinda seems like a big deal.

Did they let the intern chose the music for the episode? Der Ritt der Walküren for the chase was probably the most inapropriate thing they could have chosen. It didn't work at all and removed any tension from it. I could only sit there with an open mouth baffled by the choice. Then after everybody got their info dumped and the world turned surreal, they had Space Oddity playing. A bit on the nose, but not exactly bad. But then, when the two people with machine guns show up, they transition into the dissonant breaking up of the song (a bit hard to describe in english for me, but you know what I'm talking about when you've seen the episode) and man was that not earned. You can't just throw shit like that in willy nilly. That is only to be used in major moments, not when two goons show up. And those were just the two big problems with the music this episode...

So why did the two brothers need investor guy at all, when their machine could already predict the stock market and made them rich? Seems like an unnecessary extra step. I mean I get why they needed him intitially, but after he wanted to pull out, why not just let him?

And they need to brainwash people so that their future predicting computer actually works? Doesn't seem that great at predicting the future then... But I guess that tracks.... It's just a really, really shitty computer that can be thrown off by a butterfly crapping in the woods.

At this point should I even root for the humans? why? I mean Dolores is shitty, but all the humans are even more shitty. And it's not like logically the robots are anything else but our children. I mean I'm not going to be here forever. what difference does it make if the people that come after me are made of flesh and blood or of silicon and whit goo?

Also investor dude going with an obvious super villian to the middle of the desert... at that point he really deserved to die.

In this episode Dolores again walks off a machine gun magzine's worth of bullets to the chest. Yet again begging the question why Maeve got dead by one little sword stab to the gut.

Also did you see that at least one bullet went through her? (and probably all but the ones that hit her spine should have) Yet, Aaron Paul. who stood directly behind her, was somehow completely unharmed? Um...

So yeah... while the second half of the episode was somewhat interesting, it wasn't exactly good. Are these really still the same people who wrote season one? Cause I think they would hhave never squandered such a slam dunk premise back then.

Edited April 13, 2020 by Prower

[Rumsy4]

What was the point of forcing Caleb to take Genra? Just to trigger a flashback? Seems that could’ve been done just with Liam Dempsey’s cryptic remarks. At the very least, they could have increased the tension by having Caleb act erratic, making it difficult for them all to escape. Instead we get Team Dolores getting shot at by people with the accuracy of a Stromtrooper. Lol

The episode was okay, but I would be more invested in the show if I freaking knew what Dolores’s goals are. Is she still bent on destroying humanity? Or has she changed? Some clue into her internal thoughts would be helpful. But the creators want to keep us guessing for the same of guessing.

Bernard and Maeve are being boring this season. I would have preferred Maeve to have gotten a sendoff after Season 2 to being so underused this season. I don’t like her siding with Serac either. I would prefer if she ended up teaming with Bernard. 

Edited April 13, 2020 by Rumsy4

[Prower]

21 hours ago, mac123x said:

ince he was dictating it to Rehoboam, who has all the information already, it was effectively As You Know exposition. 

Ah come on. You gotta tag your TVTrope links with a warning!

 

20 hours ago, scrb said:

Everyone in the world had sad or tragic endings?  Sounds like the roles or scripts that the hosts had in WW.

Yeah. Dolores lampshaded it when she said that she broke the humans loops by releasing the information.

19 hours ago, MVFrostsMyPie said:

Which I hope we don't actually use in the future because that means I'd have to wear something besides sweatpants and PJs on the bottom half when I do remote work. 

You could probably have the app put a virtual suit on you and be buck naked in reality... until it malfunctions.

9 hours ago, paigow said:

Except Serac actually controls the weather...he can remove the President of Not!Brazil at any time 

That was not Not!Brazil, that was Brazil. See the flags in the background.

2 hours ago, UnknownK said:

The snag comes with people who are unpredictable that cannot be modeled. Being unpredictable might not matter that much if you work at McDonalds (screw up enough and there are a dozen replacements around) but national leaders and CEOs need to be predictable so people who lack that quality are steered through life away from positions of power by having lesser jobs or sent to die in wars.

The thing with these large predictive models is that you can't and don't have to predict individuals. Indivuduals are unpredictable, but humanity as a whole isn't. At least that's how te theory goes.

I get the feeling these writers have no idea what they are writing about.

1 hour ago, paigow said:

Inequality is the measurement of success...Serac could have designed a "Gene Roddenberry-esque" utopia where hunger and poverty are eliminated...but nooooooo!

But then he wouldn't be clearly eeeeeevil and we couldn't see Dolores's actions as ustified and we couldn't have that!

 

Edited April 13, 2020 by Prower

[PotterOtherP]

This is so, so, so stupid. I gave up when people started throwing rocks and punching each other after getting their files. It was like when Dewey Cox performed a pop song and the high school auditorium started rioting.

Edited April 13, 2020 by PotterOtherP

[MrWhyt]

2 hours ago, kokapetl said:

You’d think the supercomputer would’ve rebalanced society to have less class tension and inequality, but it’s heightened it, which is obviously bad for stability and predictability. 

It could have just come to a different solution to the problems given to it, it's something that came up in Person of Interest. You can give an AI the problem "solve world hunger" and it could come up with "rearrange distribution and production of food to feed the world's population" or it can come up with "decrease the population to a level that the current food production and distribution systems can support".

[Prower]

1 minute ago, MrWhyt said:

It could have just come to a different solution to the problems given to it, it's something that came up in Person of Interest. You can give an AI the problem "solve world hunger" and it could come up with "rearrange distribution and production of food to feed the world's population" or it can come up with "decrease the population to a level that the current food production and distribution systems can support".

But it was established that episode, that this supercomputer gives you a bunch of different paths and Serac choses. And to my mind there is no way there wouldn't have bbeen a viable path with less wealth inequality. Probably even a more practical and humanistic one.

[MrWhyt]

12 minutes ago, Prower said:

But it was established that episode, that this supercomputer gives you a bunch of different paths and Serac choses. And to my mind there is no way there wouldn't have bbeen a viable path with less wealth inequality. Probably even a more practical and humanistic one.

Perhaps none of the paths offered did away with wealth inequality. Serac still needs war to dispose of the outliers, and for that he needs conflict, which wealth inequality leads too.

[paigow]

29 minutes ago, MrWhyt said:

 "decrease the population to a level that the current food production and distribution systems can support".

AKA Malthus / Thanos solution

[Haleth]

So first Dolores frees the Hosts and now she frees humanity. Wouldn’t it have been easier to just blow up the Big Ball?

I was distracted that I recognized the area during the car chase.  I know that street!  And I kept trying to read Marshawn’s shirt.

At least closed captioning had Dolores’s name spelled correctly this time. It’s the little things. 

[Lamima]

23 hours ago, sugarbaker design said:

And The Shining!

The casting for Serac was amazing, he looked just like Vincent Cassel.  And those eyes.

 

Yazzzz!! Just watched Shining TWICE. Yes, twice. (not great to watch right now...just saying). Loved that they included this.

[Prower]

1 hour ago, MrWhyt said:

Serac still needs war to dispose of the outliers, and for that he needs conflict, which wealth inequality leads too.

He doesn't anymore since he now brainwashes.

Also that totally doesn't make sense since war is always destabilizing and to a big extend hard to predict. Just ask the CIA, every time they destabilize a country, it comes back to bite america in the ass a few years later.  But it is true that that is what was presented to us on the show.

what I'm saying is: These writers are morons and man am I glad that there are only three episodes left.

[Lamima]

So, yeah, overall...season 1 rocked. Then it all jumped the shark. Much like The Lost and Walking Dead. So so sad!

[WaltersHair]

So, here's the thing. I have a relative that was a miserable human being. Did drugs for years, stole money to live, drank like a fish and had a girlfriend of questionable taste.  I wrote him off years ago.

Then one day he decides to clean his act up. Quit drugs, drinking and kicked the bad girlfriend to the curb. He's now married, has a good job, house and kids. No one thought he'd make it. I certainly didn't, but he did. I enjoy his company and his kids are amazing.

Serac and his love machine would have never given him a chance.

The other reason I'm having trouble with this season is that it has veered seriously off track. It's saying "Remember all that great world building we did in season one? Screw it. We're going to change the rules as we go along."

[MrWhyt]

47 minutes ago, Prower said:

Also that totally doesn't make sense since war is always destabilizing and to a big extend hard to predict. Just ask the CIA, every time they destabilize a country, it comes back to bite america in the ass a few years later.  But it is true that that is what was presented to us on the show.

 

Rehoboam predicts almost everything, did you think he'd start a war that he didn't know the outcome of in advance?

Quote

These writers are morons and man am I glad that there are only three episodes left.

or in the words of a great philosopher "You want it to be one way. But it's the other way"

Edited April 14, 2020 by MrWhyt

[mrspidey]

8 hours ago, Prower said:

Also if you know that somebody is likely to kill themselves, couldn't you intervene early? Or would that throw off the computer?

It certainly would. If Rehoboam modelled your life based on the assumption that you'd never find out about it, then finding out about it would break the loop and enable you to change your scripted fate. 

That is, if you manage to cut yourself off from all the algorithms and AI systems that have steered your life so far. 

That's the real issue here. Can you even change your carreer path, if job applications can be blocked by the AI because they don't fit what it has in mind for you?

Edited April 14, 2020 by mrspidey

[Head-Full-Of-Thi]

9 hours ago, Prower said:

Also also there were a few refeerences in there about people not being allowed to have childreen. Is that something you need a permit for in this world or somethine? If so why were we never told before? Kinda seems like a big deal.

Did they let the intern chose the music for the episode? Der Ritt der Walküren for the chase was probably the most inapropriate thing they could have chosen. It didn't work at all and removed any tension from it. I could only sit there with an open mouth baffled by the choice. Then after everybody got their info dumped and the world turned surreal, they had Space Oddity playing. A bit on the nose, but not exactly bad. But then, when the two people with machine guns show up, they transition into the dissonant breaking up of the song (a bit hard to describe in english for me, but you know what I'm talking about when you've seen the episode) and man was that not earned. You can't just throw shit like that in willy nilly. That is only to be used in major moments, not when two goons show up. And those were just the two big problems with the music this episode...

Agree with most of your points, seems like the writers didn't think stuff through, especially the part with why would the brothers need Dempsey for. Except that maybe they wanted a face for the company while they remained in the shadows...

About these two points:

The no children allowed thing - there's no outright permit of having children, it's that the computer decided someone is unfit for having them so it will do whatever it can to prevent it, aka never show their picture on future!tinder, etc...

And I was under the impression that the dramatic music in that scene was for when Caleb saw that Dolores can take bullets to her chest and don't die. Which btw I'm not sure why it's such a big deal, are there no bulletproof vests in the future?

[Prower]

18 hours ago, MrWhyt said:

Rehoboam predicts almost everything, did you think he'd start a war that he didn't know the outcome of in advance?

My suspension of disbelieve can only hold so much and I'm afraid it has snapped this episode. Predictable wars, sure...

12 hours ago, Head-Full-Of-Thi said:

The no children allowed thing - there's no outright permit of having children, it's that the computer decided someone is unfit for having them so it will do whatever it can to prevent it, aka never show their picture on future!tinder, etc...

One womans profile said "eliminate genetic profile from gene pool. No reproduction allowed." It doesn't say "prevent reproduction at all costs" or something like that it says specifically not allowed. So it at least sounds like there is more to it than not showing photos on tinder.

12 hours ago, Head-Full-Of-Thi said:

And I was under the impression that the dramatic music in that scene was for when Caleb saw that Dolores can take bullets to her chest and don't die.

I was talking about a few seconds before that. when the goons show up in the car and the music turns to the dissonant instrument mix.

Edited April 14, 2020 by Prower

[kokapetl]

22 hours ago, Prower said:

In this episode Dolores again walks off a machine gun magzine's worth of bullets to the chest. Yet again begging the question why Maeve got dead by one little sword stab to the gut.

Dolores wasn't the terminator a few of episodes ago, she took a couple of bullets to the chest, received an actual blood transfusion (!), and it worked (!!). I always assumed the red blood was just for show, and that “mortally wounded” robots were just programmed to play dead until the maintenance crew could reset them. 

[Prower]

Just now, kokapetl said:

Dolores wasn't the terminator a few of episodes ago, she took a couple of bullets to the chest, received an actual blood transfusion (!), and it worked (!!). I always assumed the red blood was just for show, and that “mortally wounded” robots were just programmed to play dead until the maintenance crew could reset them. 

No, she was faking that whole thing to recruit Aaron Paul.

[kokapetl]

34 minutes ago, Prower said:

No, she was faking that whole thing to recruit Aaron Paul.

I thought she only gave a shit about Aaron Paul because of how he gave her first aid. She starts limping around the time she offs Glasgow smile guy, and Glasgow smile guy’s robot replacement mentions that she’s hurt “badly”, and I don’t think she (or that stupid superbrain) could’ve predicted that Caleb was coming back. He’s basically a designated unreliable flake. She never sees or meets Caleb until she’s in that tunnel. The bad guys initially rico app him to gig courier something to them, which I forget what is at this moment. It takes an angsty walk talking to the recordings of his dead comrade for Caleb to return to MacArthur Park. 

[arc]

On 4/13/2020 at 12:40 PM, Head-Full-Of-Thi said:

* The Genre drug thing was... I never thought Westworld would do something this cringy. We were this close to get a musical episode (which if we're already going to this territory than I'm kinda upset we didn't).

I’m so disappointed in the show’s execution of the Genre drug’s effects. The description from last episode promised a lot, and all we got were soundtrack choices and some filters. If Westworld the park was this half assed everyone would be wearing 21st century athleisure and sneakers, but with cowboy hats and the occasional guitar twang. I wanted Caleb to hallucinate full on period clothing, period cars, tommy guns, etc. And I don’t even like noir, I like neo-noir. The other genres were even weaker. Hell, improv troupes doing the “theater styles” game commit harder.

Are people really being confused by the holopresence stuff? Aside from the season premiere where it was a legit fake-out, I feel like it’s never been staged or written to confuse the audience about who’s actually where.

[iMonrey]

When they were showing people looking at their phones the camera didn't really linger long enough on any of them, or show them closely enough, to really see what it was they were looking at. I mean you could catch a glimpse here and there, but for the most part it was obvious the show expected that a.) the audience is all watching on 70" television sets and/or b.) the audience would pause on those shots to see what was on the phone screens. 

The show expects me to work harder than I want to in order to follow it.

[ahpny]

On 4/13/2020 at 6:24 AM, mrspidey said:

Because the show has gone out of its way to show us how dependent these people are on algorithms. So if that Algorithm tells you, you're likely to commit suicide in X years, you believe it. 

You believe in the weather forecast, don't you?

We don't believe weather forecasts just because someone made them. We believe weather forecasts because past weather forecasts have generally proven to be correct in our real world experience. Moreover, their accuracy has vastly improved only in the past few years because of more sophisticated computer modeling. That improvement arose through advances in both hardware and software. 

But weather forecasting is a great analogy for what's being portrayed here. What's being posited here is essentially the same thing, just on an unimaginatively larger scale. Weather is notoriously hard to predict because of the high number of variables and the seemingly unbounded ways in which those variables can effect each other. In the past, "solving" that problem was just too complex and hard. But with enough computing power, we can now power through those problems and get a reasonably accurate forecast.

What Rehoboam has accomplished, so were told, is collecting all data on all people and all events and algorithmically  projecting the path of all future people and events. But just as with current, reasonably-accurate weather forecasting, it's still not perfect, and remains subject to "anomalies" that skew the projection. Just as hurricanes still make landfall in unexpected places (but far less often than decades ago), Rehoboam's projections cannot account for literally all possibilities, and a small number of those possibilities (i.e., anomalies) pop up now and then.

Serac's charge seems to be hunting down those anomalies, eliminating them, and resetting - well, everything - back onto the pre-anomaly path projected by Rehoboam. Or, more accurately, the path set by Serac and put in place through Rehoboam to avoid a catastrophic end of civilization. See, he can't be all bad. How they've managed to mirror the experience of hosts stuck in their loops with humans living in the Rehoboam-managed real world is pretty sweet.

Quote

 

So, here's the thing. I have a relative that was a miserable human being. Did drugs for years, stole money to live, drank like a fish and had a girlfriend of questionable taste.  I wrote him off years ago.

Then one day he decides to clean his act up. Quit drugs, drinking and kicked the bad girlfriend to the curb. He's now married, has a good job, house and kids. No one thought he'd make it. I certainly didn't, but he did. I enjoy his company and his kids are amazing.

Serac and his love machine would have never given him a chance.

 

The conceit of this show is that Rehoboam would have indeed predicted this change, or at least projected a high probability of it happening. It would know why it would happen and what the triggering event was that set it in motion and when. It's less magical that Minority Report, but perhaps not by that much.

Edited April 15, 2020 by ahpny

[Growsonwalls]

I feel like the show wants to say something deep and meta about whether any of us have free will or whether we're all programmed to live out life in a certain way. And I get what they're saying. I just find Season 3's execution so scattered and without any purpose or heart that I;m not really interested in following this metaphor. 

[MrWhyt]

2 hours ago, ahpny said:

It would know why it would happen and what the triggering event was that set it in motion and when. 

and what it could do to ensure that it didn't happen. Once you can reliably predict the the future you can start to change it. And that's what Serac wants, not just to predict the future but to control it.

[dr pepper]

This week on The Last Time Anyone Saw Paris:

Nice to see Caleb reunited with his Crime? There's an app for that buddies.

But i'm surprised that Delore would waste a whole Dolores just to blow up an access panel and a few execudrones. It would have made more sense to blow up Rehoboam instead, considering that's Serac's main resource.

Speaking of Serac, we seem to have conformation that he does exist down here in VR Zero with the rest of us. Good to know.

Also, apparently freedom's just snother word for seeing your permanent record and realizing there's nothing you can do about it.

 

On 4/12/2020 at 7:00 PM, patty1h said:

Bernard is just a background figure to me at this point.

 

Yeah he didn't look like anything to me this episode.

[FemmyV]

On 4/13/2020 at 9:54 AM, AimingforYoko said:

Anybody have any thoughts on why the Serac brothers named their various iterations of the machine after Jewish kings?

Son of Solomon (think:  wise) is my guess.

[Nashville]

On 4/13/2020 at 9:54 AM, AimingforYoko said:

Anybody have any thoughts on why the Serac brothers named their various iterations of the machine after Jewish kings?

 My assumption was because the entire writing staff has found themselves to be lost and wandering in the desert of this story line....

On 4/13/2020 at 5:52 PM, Prower said:

The first half of this was boring as hell. Then it got slightly intersting, but man... do all these people have suicide in their future? Sure seemed like it.

Keep up this level of writing, and suicide’s going to start becoming a more attractive option for much of this cast.

[Chris24601]

On 4/15/2020 at 2:00 PM, ahpny said:

The conceit of this show is that Rehoboam would have indeed predicted this change, or at least projected a high probability of it happening. It would know why it would happen and what the triggering event was that set it in motion and when. It's less magical that Minority Report, but perhaps not by that much.

I'm not certain that IS the conceit of the show at all.

I think it just as likely the relative who cleaned up his act would be deemed an outlier and the system would then set out to wreck his life in order to keep its predictive model on track.

I think that's actually meant to be the warning about the horror that is Reheboam and Serac's desired world; once the system assigns you, it does everything in its power, denying you job and even dating opportunities in order to try and ensure its predetermined outcome. If you resist in spite of all that you get deemed an outlier and are directed into warzones to get killed off or taken and "edited" so you fit back into the proper profile.

It's less Minority Report and more a new iteration of Big Brother; managing every aspect of your life from cradle to grave in order to assure its predictions remain on track.

The REALLY REALLY horrifying part is that, because a system is only as good as the data its given, the initial prediction of utter doom that its been destroying people's lives to prevent may have actually been garbage because the initial assumptions were false (ex. the system predicted Lee would have only helped Maeve for selfish reasons... possibly because the people who fed it all its predictive data didn't believe people were capable of acting selflessly... that disbelief in man's better nature is why they built their digital god in the first place).

Imagine all the lives ruined because a faulty model showed one set of results (world doomed unless we do X) and rather than letting new data change the model, they instead changed to people/data to fit the faulty model.

Which is basically the opposite of science; in science, if your model fails to predict an outcome it means there's a flaw in your model and the model/theory needs to be corrected to account for the unexpected outcome. Instead they're so focused on their initial model being RIGHT that they wreck people's lives to make sure the model remains accurate.

Heck, one of those outliers he culled could have been someone with the genius to find another path that didn't lead to self-destruction or the virtual enslavement of mankind to a super-computer's algorithms.

[arc]

On 4/14/2020 at 2:50 PM, kokapetl said:

Dolores wasn't the terminator a few of episodes ago, she took a couple of bullets to the chest, received an actual blood transfusion (!), and it worked (!!). I always assumed the red blood was just for show, and that “mortally wounded” robots were just programmed to play dead until the maintenance crew could reset them. 

The show has been all over the place about how hosts work. As best as I can recall, the original hosts were electro-mechanical. Old Bill was weirdly mechanical, and even Dolores’ initial form was literally robotic, with a human-appearing body worn on top of the robot frame. But the show has claimed that now hosts are organic and basically physically identical to humans, except instead of thinking with their brains, they think with a little pearl stored inside the lightbulb thing, which sits in a cavity in the head surrounded by (presumably useless) organic brains. And that’s why the little wound-healer device the techs use to close up cuts works on both hosts and humans.

but then again, now that the show has moved into the real world, Dolores’ body is not quite like humans: she has no blood cells or something, which is pretty ridiculous. (I only learned a few weeks ago from Twitter that red blood cells don’t so much ferry oxygen along as they protect the body from oxygen, bringing it only to where it’s needed, because free O2 running around in the body is very bad.)

[Chris24601]

12 hours ago, arc said:

but then again, now that the show has moved into the real world, Dolores’ body is not quite like humans: she has no blood cells or something, which is pretty ridiculous.

She had no blood type or other genetic markers... she has blood, but its artificial and all their cells are probably generic so that you can use the same batch of blood/synthetic muscle tissue for every host that needs patched up and can't produce enough from whatever biological processes are going on inside them (they do eat after all) to recover.

This is why, in season one, William could use the blood from one host to basically refill Teddy and get him functional again in season one.

As to her seeming Terminator-like resilience at some times and not others; consider what adrenaline can do in a human being. Mothers lifting cars off kids, superior reaction time and people surviving ridiculous amounts of punishment and only keeling over once the adrenaline wears off are all pretty typical.

Now give someone full control over their body chemistry (in this case via the Host control unit) so they can release adrenaline and all the other chemical boosters on demand.

We know the hosts actually have this ability because we've seen the Samaritan Reflex before; when a human in the park was in danger a Host's normal "stats" would be ignored and the Host instead acts at the full limits of its engineering to save the human.

Dolores can just access whenever she needs it instead of just when a human is in danger; but there are limits to even a boosted human body; which is probably why she collapsed at the end of episode one this season.

In the case of the bullets she took in this episode, its worth remembering that it was basically the last thing that happened before a jump to her holo-conversation with Serac at the airfield sometime later; so it can be presumed that she probably patched herself up using the "dermal regenerator" tech that has been noted to work on both humans and hosts before boarding the plane.

[arc]

1 hour ago, Chris24601 said:

She had no blood type or other genetic markers... she has blood, but its artificial and all their cells are probably generic

The paramedics specifically said she had no platelets though.

[Joimiaroxeu]

Quote

And the music is getting obtrusive.

I thought Ride of the Valkyries was a cute touch.

Quote

Yeah, I believe I said aloud "oh come on".  

Same. Too on the nose. They really, really wanted the audience to get the joke.

Quote

Flight of the Valkyries, Theme from Love Story, and Major Tom. 

Ride, not Flight. Also used in Apocalypse Now.

[DrSpaceman73]

May be in the minority in like this episode, mostly because  the season makes more sense to me now and I have more of an idea what is happening than I did before.  I am less confused now instead of more confused like prior episodes. 

Though no idea how that first scene relates. 

So the big orb thing not only predicts the future but controls it and those who get out of line they manage to steer their lives to an early to keep it from having the future deviate from their predestined view of the future. 

On ‎4‎/‎15‎/‎2020 at 2:29 PM, Growsonwalls said:

I feel like the show wants to say something deep and meta about whether any of us have free will or whether we're all programmed to live out life in a certain way. And I get what they're saying. I just find Season 3's execution so scattered and without any purpose or heart that I;m not really interested in following this metaphor. 

That sums it up pretty well

Its a very convoluted way of asking if we truly have free will even as humans or if like the robots before our lives are scripted out with just the illusion of some free will here and there

But the manner in which they are trying to make this point and storytelling is certainly full of faults

[Etta Place]

I finally watched this last night - I admit my husband and I have been putting it off because we are not feeling this season. 

Okay, I'll give them credit for coming up with a more interesting futuristic drug experience than most shows. But it also seems like one that would be nearly impossible to manage well; you could end up having a big "Love Story" moment with your aunt or something.

And I guess I can appreciate the idea of the outliers screwing up everything in the nice orderly system.

But everything else - I thought I was going to hurt myself rolling my eyes. Dolores' dog-cycle. The music. (Love Bowie, and Iggy Pop/Bowie, but still.) The Bond-villain-style monologuing. The endless exposition.

I thought the brothers had a very weird chemistry, it felt like they were going to make out when Serac first went over and put his hand on his brother's back. I'm mad they killed Tommy Flanagan again. The free will thing ... there must be some way to do this story that is actually interesting and not full of anvils? ... Right?

[paigow]

3 hours ago, Etta Place said:

I'm mad they killed Tommy Flanagan again.

Sean Bean only died once in all those GoT seasons. Flanagan is lucky..

Genre would be the drug of choice for Cersei

Edited April 18, 2020 by paigow

[Dobian]

This week in Worstworld:

Every time I see Serac I think Mr. Roarke.

Mary Sue hands Pinkman the Mother of all Guns.  Then while he fumbles around with it while standing through the sun roof she orders the car to turn ninety degrees on a dime.  Then while he fumbles with the gun for another full minute about five hundred rounds completely miss him.  Then he fires and misses.  But Mary Sue has it under control and turns the magic bullet back on their pursuers like a guided missile.

The whole world gets their fate told to them in a cell phone text.  Of course they just accept it.  Yep.  No spam mail folders in the future I guess.

Computers can predict everything.  There is no free will.  So shouldn't the big ball have already predicted the end of this show and saved us from watching the final two seasons?

 

Edited April 19, 2020 by Dobian

[enchantingmonkey]

1 hour ago, Dobian said:

Computers can predict everything.  There is no free will.  So shouldn't the big ball have already predicted the end of this show and saved us from watching the final two seasons?

Are you sure that Rehoboam is making you watch it?

[The Companion]

On 4/13/2020 at 2:12 PM, Chris24601 said:

“You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can't justify your existence, if you're not pulling your weight in the social boat, if you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself.”

-George Bernard Shaw

Welcome to the Hell on Earth philosophy of the Fabian Socialists that ultimately led to eugenics, forced sterilizations and gas chambers in the mid-20th Century (and not just in Germany... look up the forced sterilizations done in the United States in the early 20th Century).

The roots of this same philosophy resulted in movements like the Weather Underground which estimated they’d have to execute 20-25% of the U.S. to bring about a communist utopia for the remaining 75-80%.

Serac is just the latest iteration of the “Utopia Justifies the Means” philosophy that’s murdered more people in a century than every religious war in history combined.

The only difference is he’s letting his machine do the culling through selective wars and setting up conditions to drive the “outliers” to suicide/overdose/death by violent crime.

Most monstrous in the data releases we saw was the machine’s algorithms arranging for a young child to drug overdose as a teenager simply to remove someone it felt wouldn’t be a productive enough adult.

Makes you wonder a bit about Logan’s end. Did the system decide he wasn’t worth helping because William’s inheriting Delos would better for the algorithm?

I get that many people don’t particularly like Dolores, but if the primary thrust of her plan was what we saw... revealing to the masses what the system had REALLY charted for their lives and letting the chips fall where they may... I can’t really argue with her actions so far.

My hunch is that, with Dolores taking Delos private, her plan is ultimately to pull something of a Noah’s arc. Delos owns an isolated island with facilities to build new Hosts and she’s used the criminal underworld to gather up the materials needed for it under the radar.

Set off the flood by revealing the truth then retreating to Westworld to wait out the chaos is not only strategically sound; it also gives Dolores a distinct moral high ground relative to Serac as she’s not actively murdering people and the winners of Serac’s algorithm lottery pretty much deserve to be kicked in the teeth by those the system has designated as losers.

One final point about where the series is going... I’ve seen several remarks about how the show has deviated by leaving the park; but part of the series upon which this one is based centered on the robots who escaped the park secretly trying to gain control of the human world. So really this is truer to the series than seeing humans visit various parks is (that was just the set up of the first film).

An interesting point about Logan's end. Because we see that the system can tweak things for its creators goals, the takeover story takes on a new lignt. That is a really interesting point.

On 4/15/2020 at 12:13 PM, iMonrey said:

When they were showing people looking at their phones the camera didn't really linger long enough on any of them, or show them closely enough, to really see what it was they were looking at. I mean you could catch a glimpse here and there, but for the most part it was obvious the show expected that a.) the audience is all watching on 70" television sets and/or b.) the audience would pause on those shots to see what was on the phone screens. 

The show expects me to work harder than I want to in order to follow it.

Nothing on the phones was earthshattering or relevant to the actual story. You could assume it was bad news by the reactions. I see this more as a testament to the details TBTP are willing to put into the show. They didn't need to show the phones at all, but instead they bothered to mock up the bad news.

I came here to comment on this episode multiple times, but I cannot stand the negativity. I don't get the criticism that people signed up for a science fiction show and now they are stuck  watching a science fiction show. Or that some concepts have been explored in other media. I don't think I have ever heard or read anything this original in the way these concepts have been put together. I Ioved season 1. I actually really liked last season. But I also have found this season to be exceptional. The entire thing is so tight. Every detail is thought out. The costumes are incredible and I want like 100% of Dolores wardrobe.

I was worried the genre scenes would be distracting but I really loved them. The Ride of the Valkyries scene was so perfectly timed. I loved the cool flashing lights effects in the subway and even the silly Love Story moment while Dolores gives him a total "what the fuck" look. 

As for the fact that everyone got bad news, I think there are two things here:. 1. Most people won't be enthralled to hear about their future trauma. We all die and we all lose people we love and many of us will be cheated on or divorced. 2. We were seeing the folks who were the lower to middle class. The rich aren't on the subway. They are riding around in personal aircraft and private cars. These are the people the system has deemed unfit for major investment. They, in particular, are going to be seeing a poor outcome. 

I liked a few pretty big reveals and confirmations in this episode. We confirmed that the system can be manipulated for the creator's purpose. I think it could be inferred, but I still think it was an important point. The system is sold as something that brings peace and prosperity, but it is not a closed system and its goals are it's creator's goals. 

We also learned what happens to the disruptors. The datapoints that can't be predicted have to be removed. I love the parallel between pulling buggy hosts and disruptive humans.

I am really loving the shift in Dolores from kill all humans to throw them off their loops and liberate them. 

[Nashville]

On 4/20/2020 at 7:04 AM, The Companion said:

As for the fact that everyone got bad news, I think there are two things here:. 1. Most people won't be enthralled to hear about their future trauma. We all die and we all lose people we love and many of us will be cheated on or divorced. 2. We were seeing the folks who were the lower to middle class. The rich aren't on the subway. They are riding around in personal aircraft and private cars. These are the people the system has deemed unfit for major investment. They, in particular, are going to be seeing a poor outcome. 

Initially, yes; the folks who have been systematically pushed down into the lower classes will catch the brunt of the shit tsunami‘s first wave.  Thing is, though, the wealth and benefits so richly enjoyed by the upper classes are built primarily upon the back of that same lower caste; it’s the labor of the proletariat class which supports the lifestyles of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy.  And wholesale liquidation of the primary labor pool can’t help but have a negative impact on those whose existences depend upon it.

[paigow]

1 hour ago, Nashville said:

And wholesale liquidation of the primary labor pool can’t help but have a negative impact on those whose existences depend upon it.

If human proletariats are replaced by robots then that would be great...they could be used for labour, sex, murder fantasies and... Hey, deja Vu...

[Nashville]

Another thought exercise:

So your iPhone XXXII just dinged and you’re reading your own personal love note from Incite detailing your past, present, future, and death - be it from old age, OD, suicide, or dysentery on the side of the Oregon Trail.  How do you react - or, to put it in a more specific context, what are the varying classes of reaction for a person who’s been born and raised in this world’s societal environment?

Me, I see 4 likely responses:

1. Acceptance.  This is the group who reads whatever dire prediction Rehoboam has made for them, sees the basis for the prediction in their current lives, and... just basically says, “Ok, I guess that’s how things are likely to go”, and continue on with their lives.  They'll almost certainly feel depression - especially when something happens in their life which reinforces the prediction - but they were probably already feeling that as they trudged though the ruts Incite laid out for their lives, so the only real change for them would be 
2. Acquiescence.  This is the group who reads Rehoboam’s prediction and not only accepts it, they take active steps to embrace a foretold future they accept as inevitable. This is the group into which William’s lady psychiatrist would appear to fall* - people for whom the shock of revelation (and the accompanying collateral damage to their relationships) pushes them into a dark fatalism which embraces their apparent destiny.
3. Abandonment.  These people reject the future Incite predicts for them, so they try to abandon it - but they’ve become so acclimated to driving in the ruts of their own particular road, they have no sense of direction or purpose outside of them.  Their “rejection” devolves into diffuse outbreaks of nonconformity - rioting, violence, drug/alcohol abuse, etc. - the equivalent of shouts of rage which do nothing to improve their situation, and probably result in making their lives both shorter and worse than they would have been otherwise.
4. Rebellion.  These people also reject Rehoboam’s planned trajectory for their lives; unlike the aforementioned “Abandoners”, though, members of this class have a specific goal which gives them focus - even if the goal itself is dangerous and/or destructive.  I’d guess membership in this club consists almost solely of the “outliers” who inspire such trepidation in Serac - and we’re intended to regard Caleb as a card-carrying member.

Thoughts?

 

* Not pun intended.  Oh, okay - maybe a little one.

[enchantingmonkey]

2 hours ago, Nashville said:

Thoughts?

It seems to me that Serac, or any leader in a world like this, would be actively working to defuse the situation by having the most skilled spin doctors out there trying to calm the public by explaining the whole thing away.  Perhaps even saying that it was a glitch on Rehoboam's part.  So while I think all of those responses are highly likely, I find it difficult to believe that whoever is in charge isn't out there trying to stop #TeamAbandonment and #TeamRebellion before they cause too much damage.  

Now I wonder if we're supposed to be asking why Serac isn't trying to clean this mess up as quickly as possible, or if we're supposed to be noticing that he's allowing it to happen.  

[paigow]

Serac is trying to decapitate the rebellion by eliminating Dolores. A few thousand unscheduled dead bodies is a rounding error...

[Nashville]

On 4/22/2020 at 12:21 PM, paigow said:

If human proletariats are replaced by robots then that would be great...they could be used for labour, sex, murder fantasies and... Hey, deja Vu...

How likely is that, though, after the great WestWorld Wipeout?  Those rogue robots were killing even the RICH people, for crying out loud....

[lucindabelle]

So serac is Hari seldon?

FOUNDATION was better the first time.

also how does any of this connect to the Delos theme parks? Totally lost the thread.

the idea that man needs to have free Will is such an old Star Trek trope I can’t even.