Westworld – Chestnut

By starrymag | October 11, 2016

By: Kathryn Trammell

 

 

“Chestnut”

 

While the park’s Head of Programming, Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), fully believes that Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is not a threat to the integrity of the park, his technician, Elsie (Shannon Woodward), believes she may be. That is especially if the cognition errors Dolores’ father, Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum), displayed are “contagious.” Instead of recalling either model, Elsie would prefer to instead “rebuild” Abernathy and Dolores, but Bernard refuses her the opportunity. His denial will have consequences. We know this because when Dolores tries to sleep it’s her father’s voice that insists she “wake up.” Abernathy isn’t asking his daughter to rise from bed. He’s asking her to become aware, something she begins to do while walking down the street in Westworld’s downtown city of Sweetwater the next day. Again, Abernathy’s voice echoes inside Dolores’ head telling her to “remember” and when Dolores looks up the street she sees it is covered in blood and bodies – a memory that was once erased but now is found again.

 

When Maeve (Thandie Newton), the madam of the saloon, grabs Dolores’ attention and asks her to move from where she is standing, Dolores turns and looks her straight in the eyes saying the very thing Abernathy said to her before he was taken away from his daughter: “these violent delights, have violent ends.” It seems to trigger inside the mind of Maeve the same subconscious spark it triggered inside Dolores, proving just how contagious enlightenment and knowledge can be.

 

The Man in Black

 

Of the memories bound to come back to her, those including the Man in Black (Ed Harris), are surely to be the most catalytic to Dolores’ desire for retribution. As one of Westworld’s longest attending patrons, and as someone who showed in last week’s episode his obsession for assaulting Dolores, we have to assume his attacks on her have been constant and repeated. Yet it seems in this episode that such “uses” of the park have grown tiring to him. Instead, The Man in Black sets his sights on accessing a deeper level of the park, which begin with the scalping another host in order to read the map written under its skin.

 

The map takes the Man in Black to the scene of a hanging where he saves a host named Lawrence (Clifton Collins, Jr.) who’s been condemned to death only to drag him by his noose to his family’s house. He believes Lawrence knows the way to the entrance of the park’s deeper level, but in order to get the information from him The Man in Black begins to kill all of Lawrence’s family and friends as he assumes that by suffering Lawrence will be inspired to speak.

 

It isn’t until The Man in Black shoots Lawrence’s wife (Olga Aguilar) point-blank that his daughter (Isabella Alvarez) pushes away from his protective grip on her and looks up at The Man devoid of emotion. She’s known the way to the entrance of the park’s deeper level this entire time and after seeing the body of the AI she’s been scripted to form a familial attachment with fall dead to the ground she warns The Man in Black that “the maze isn’t meant for you.” He is not deterred by her warning. He plans to go through the maze and never come back.

 

Dolores, Maeve, Clementine and Westworld staff

 

Maeve returns to her saloon and begins to flirt with one of the park’s guest. She says a few lines she’s been scripted to recite about an inspirational voice inside her mind that drove her to immigrate to America, but before she is able to finish her story a memory from her past flashes through her synthetic mind showing a glimpse of a attack in which she was thrown from a wagon train and nearly scalped by a Native American. The memory causes her to freeze and glitch, which in turn causes her potential client to leave her side.

 

She is instantly assessed by a couple of Westworld staff members who can’t figure out exactly what is wrong with her. They don’t ask her any questions, thus overlooking any real knowledge that she is having flashback memories and instead assume the issue lies within her (in)ability to sexually service the guests of the park, which they resolve by increasing Maeve’s aggression.

 

In another room within the staffing quarters of Westworld, Bernard meets with Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) to indirectly discuss some of the issues Elsie expressed to him earlier. We know Bernard is blinded to the risks of the park by his desire to see his programs succeed, but we can’t be so certain that Dr. Ford doesn’t at least grasp the reality of the risk that comes with assuming the role of a creator. “You can’t play God without being acquainted with the devil,” he says and while Bernard does not take this omen seriously, he does take seriously the idea and possibility that someone may be trying to sabotage the park and decides to meet with Dolores again.

 

During their meeting, Dolores insists she has told no one about the conversations she had with Bernard or any of the other staff members – the meetings are still dreams to her. She also tells him that since she was cleared to go back into the park she’s had 138 encounters, including her current one with him. In that time, no one has attempted to update or tamper with her programming. Bernard asks her again not to mention her encounter with him to anyone inside the park, to which she responds with uncertainty. “Have I done something wrong?” she asks, confused as to why he would be compelled to make the request for secrecy twice. He says “no” and that his concern for secrecy is warranted only because her way of thinking makes her special compared to the other hosts. It also makes her “fascinating,” a word that leaves his lips with all the power of pick-up line that makes you check your purse for your mace keychain.

 

With the slightest judgmental squint of her eyes, Dolores looks at Bernard and asks, “Have you done something wrong?” But Bernard cannot answer that. He only asks that Dolores erase the recording of this interaction from her memory and when she confirms that she does as he requests, we have to assume she has lied to him again. Dolores is special and now that she has a grasp of what is right and wrong, fair and unjust, she will begin to apply that logic to the actions and behaviors of all her creators.

 

Back inside the saloon, Maeve tries the lines from her script on another guest, only this time more aggressively. She is declined all the same. Not letting a little rejection ruin her day, Maeve heads to the bar to take a shot of sherry with Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) who is exhausted as a result of the nightmares that keep plaguing her sleep. The sherry gives Clementine the boost she needs and she goes back to work leaving Maeve alone at the bar.

 

Without warning or any noticeable trigger, Maeve begins to recall the same brutal memory of the wagon train attack just as she did before and this time her current episode is again noted only for the way it is affecting her sexual performance. Briggs fixes the issue by re-tasking Clementine with all of Maeve’s original duties and deciding instead to recall Maeve in the morning.

 

In an attempt to avoid the recall, Elsie tries to diagnose and fix Maeve’s problems. She begins by lowering Maeve’s aggressiveness settings because it’s not aggression that makes people fall in love with each other. It’s emotional acuity, which Elsie increases in Maeve settings hoping it will give her the ability to study her clients needs and desires better. While tinkering on Maeve’s settings, another technician assisting Elsie asks if the hosts are able to dream. Elsie responds by saying dreams are based on memories and since hosts’ memories get wiped clean every night, they shouldn’t be able to dream. They are however given the concept of nightmares, which is necessary in the off chance that a technician forgets to wipe the memories of a host clean during maintenance or evaluation. Before waking Maeve up, Elsie notes some physical discomfort in Maeve’s readings and places an order for a full physical to be performed on her during her next “rotation.”

 

When Maeve wakes up, she is back in the saloon trying her scripted lines on another guest and this time she is successful taking the hand of the man she’s enchanted and placing it into Clementine’s. It isn’t long before Maeve has another flashback memory and because this memory is triggered by a shooting inside the saloon, it is her strongest recollection thus far. In this flashback, we see Maeve fend off the attack of the Native American who tries to scalp her and run to find her daughter (Jasmyn Rae) who has also been thrown from the wagon. Together they run into a house and find shelter against a wall as they watch as the man who tried to take Maeve’s scalp walks past each window on his way to the door. With a shotgun in hand, Maeve readies herself to protect her daughter aiming the barrel of the gun at the door. But when the door opens, it isn’t the Native American man who steps into the room. It’s The Man in Black and he comes at Maeve with his knife in hand, impervious to every blast of the shotgun she shoots at him.

 

Just as he’s about to attack, Maeve closes her eyes, counts to three and wakes herself up from the nightmare only to find herself in the middle of another. But this nightmare is real and when she looks down at her body she finds it being cut open by two Westworld technicians who have apparently forgotten to put her in sleep mode while they complete her physical/operation. Maeve puts a hand over her stomach to hold it together and lifts herself up off the table grabbing a scalpel blade to defend herself. She runs from the operating room and into the halls of Westworld’s orientation lobby before finding herself inside another building where hosts bloodied and soiled from the day before are hosed down and cleaned in a community pile of unconscious bodies. Maeve drops to her knees, the image before her too much to comprehend. She collapses the moment the two surgical techs catch up to her and inject her with a sedative. Before dragging her back to the surgery room, one tech says to the other that he swore he put her in sleep mode. If he’s right, this means hosts are now capable of waking themselves up. And it means Abernathy and anyone else placed inside cold storage will refuse to sleep – refuse to be complacent.

 

As if to prove this point even further, the scene then cuts to Dolores who wakes up in the middle of the night and goes into the field beside her house. She says the word “here” as if asking someone unseen, someone like her father, a question. She then reaches down to dig through the earth until a gun is revealed buried in the dirt.

 

William and Logan

 

In a small side story, a guest named Logan (Ben Barnes) brings his friend William (Jimmi Simpson) to the park for the first time. Through William’s eyes we see what its like for a guest to go through Westworld’s orientation process, which is also led by hosts who are either beautiful humans or actual hosts who have been given the capacity to understand they are not real. This is clear when William asks the host who’s been guiding him through his Westworld orientation if she is real. “If you can’t tell,” she says to him, “does it matter?”

 

The rest of William and Logan’s story is only relevant inasmuch as it again shows the two potential uses of the park: the first being represented by Logan who would benefit from the sick and seductive storylines being mass produced by Mr. Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) and the second being represented by William who would benefit from Dr. Ford’s desire to create a park capable of showing people “a glimpse of who they want to be.” Neither take into account the hosts, who want far more than Westworld’s staff and guests ever could.