Westworld – The Original

By starrymag | October 5, 2016

By: Kathryn Trammell

 

“Westworld” begins inside a room sterile and devoid of life despite it containing what looks like human in every way but is not. We know the woman (Evan Rachel Wood) sitting naked on the stool before us isn’t human because she doesn’t flinch like a human would when a fly lands on her cheek, walks across the bridge of her nose and into her eye as if it were walking across a glass surface. When a voice asks her if she is scared, we hear her in a voiceover admit to being “terrified.” However, the way she says it – with no emotion – indicates otherwise. When the man then asks her, “Do you ever question the nature of your reality?” Dolores says, “No,” before waking up hours later from the dream that he’s convinced her she’s experiencing. Although Dolores is no longer inside that dark sterile room, instead inside her bedroom on her family’s ranch, we see her stretch and look out the window as her voice explains her existence as one that chooses to see the beauty in the world where others choose to only see its ugliness. We can’t help but worry that this ideal is threatened by foreshadowing, and that her outlook on like will be tested by all the ugliness life has to offer.

 

That ugliness appears to be carried into Westworld by train, where a man named Teddy (James Marsden) watches the picturesque landscape pass by his window while the passengers around him discuss their favorite ways to play the simulation that their train is taking them to. They are the “Newcomers” – the humans who pay to play inside Westworld’s seemingly endless parameters while characters like Dolores are confined to a cage of false existence serving every delight and depravity the Newcomers pay to receive.

 

When the train stops at the Westworld station, Teddy walks into town and then into a saloon before the sheriff of Westworld (Brian Howe) is able to convince him to join a search party for Hector Escaton (Rodrigo Santoro), their archetypical western bandit. Inside the saloon, Teddy orders a rye whiskey and turns down the affections of a couple of prostitutes (Thandie Newton and Angela Sarafyan) because he’d “rather earn a woman’s affection than to pay for it,” especially when that woman is Dolores who he sees walking out of a store across the street.

 

As Teddy follows her to her horse, we hear the voice of the man from the beginning of the episode ask Dolores if she’s ever noticed inconsistencies or repetitions in her world. She says that “all lives have routines” and that hers is no different. At this point, she drops a tin onto the ground just as Teddy meets her in the street where he picks it up and hands it back to her suggesting the meeting between these two is one of those many routines. She tells him that she is surprised he came back, but he only responds to this by saying he promised he would. We aren’t too certain about the depth and nature of their relationship just yet because while she does allow him to escort her home yet doesn’t allow him to kiss her as they watch her family’s herd follow behind the “Judas steer” on its way back to her ranch.

 

By the time they reach her home, night has fallen bringing the danger that was foreshadowed not even ten minutes ago straight to Dolores’ home. As gunshots emanate from Dolores’ house, Teddy rides ahead to address whatever danger has come to Dolores’s family, but he is too late. Two men have already killed her father (Louis Herthum) and mother, something both men pay for with their own lives when Teddy pulls his gun from his holster. Dolores runs forward dropping to her knees and clutching onto and crying over her father’s body as the Godlike voiceover from before asking her what she would do if she ever found that she was wrong. He says, “There were no chance encounters. That you and everyone you know are made to gratify the desire of people who pay to visit your world.” But we never hear her explain how she might react because as she continues to wail over her father’s body, a man in a dark suit (Ed Harris) approaches her and speaks to her as if he has known her and her family for years. He insults her dead father, causing Dolores to aim her daddy’s gun at The Man in Black, but he smacks it from her hands before bringing the same hand back hard across her face.

 

Dolores isn’t the only person The Man in Black seems to know because when Teddy walks out if her house to confront him, The Man in Black calls Teddy by name when he asks him if he’s learned any new tricks. Better yet, he gives Teddy the option to demonstrate his new tricks by offering him the first draw. When Teddy fires a bullet straight through his chest, The Man in Black does not bleed and does not stagger backwards. He does not die. Because he cannot die.

 

This is because Newcomers are impervious to injury or death, which means that when The Man in Black fires a bullet of his own into Teddy’s chest killing him, this makes Teddy a part of the Westworld program, too. He might have ridden into town on the Newcomer train, but he exists the same as Dolores does – to fill the desires of every human who pays to enter their world. And if killing Teddy wasn’t enough to prove this very fact, The Man in Black goes one step further when he drags Dolores into the barn to rape her. But despite all of the ugliness we’ve just seen her undergo, we hear Dolores’ voice from the omniscient conversation she been having since the episode began that she could never think differently of the Newcomers who are there to use her. “Every new person I meet reminds me of how lucky I am to be alive,” she says, “and how beautiful this world can be.”

 

This is unfortunate because the world she lives in is a fabrication, which is made evident the next morning when she and Teddy wake up the same way they did the day before. Thus, it is revealed that their lives exist on a loop and that everything they do and say follows a script. As the camera zooms out of their world, we see just how in depth the Westworld simulation is as the camera navigates through rooms and corridors filled with AI life-forms in various stages of synthetic creation until at last we land in a room with one of the human-presenting AIs (Angela Sarafyan) who portrays a prostitute from the saloon.

 

Opposite her is Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), the man whose voice we heard speaking to Dolores throughout the beginning of the episode and Westworld’s head of programming. The AI, Clementine, has been brought to him because a code he updated into her system has made her begin to act as if she has subconscious memories. These memories express themselves in very simple gestures that the creator of the code, Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins), calls “reveries.” For Clementine, that reverie comes in the form of touching the tip of her finger to the edge of her mouth as if remembering a kiss and the gesture is enough to transfix the technician (Shannon Woodward) sitting across from her. The technician questions why the reveries are allowed to exist if the memory of each AI is purged at the end of their story’s cycle. Bernard reasons that it’s Ford’s way of making the AI’s that much more human and when he leaves the room to answer a call from Westworld’s operations leader, the technician leans forward to kiss Clementine as though she wants to be the reason for her reverie.

 

Inside the simulation room where the entire Westworld Park is on display in a 3D holograph, operations leader Teresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen) tells him that there’s been a report of a disturbance in “cold storage,” which is located in a sublevel of the park. Jumping at the chance to investigate, a very militant-looking man named Stubbs who is standing at Teresa’s side offers to take his team into cold storage to find and assess this disturbance. Stubbs’ (Luke Hemsworth) enthusiasm for handling an issue that one of Westworld’s hosts might have potentially caused prompts Bernard to remind everyone that hosts cannot harm guests – its not a part of their code. But just as Malcolm warned Dr. Hammond that life will find a way, so too does Stubbs warn Bernard that children will eventually rebel against their parents.

 

Once they arrive to the appropriate Westworld sublevel, both Stubbs and Bernard enter cold storage – a room filled with inactive AI bodies, only to discover that the disturbance that was reported is coming from Dr. Ford himself. He has found his way into cold storage to have a chat with Westworld’s second oldest host. Dr. Ford gives the host a command that pauses his program and turns to acknowledge Bernard as he enters the room, which looks like it may have been used to embalm bodies at some point in time. Ford reminisces about the original hosts like the one sitting across from him and how easily they used to break down and “give themselves away” by glitching and repeating themselves to the guests at his park. It’s a far cry from where the hosts are now, but when Bernard calls Ford’s progress “remarkable” Ford doesn’t seem so sure if it’s the right word to use for what he’s created.

 

Back in Westworld, the program runs as usual, and while each host’s storyline adapts to follow a slightly different one from the day before, according to its new set of guests one issue seems to be getting worse. The same update that gave hosts reverie gestures is also making some hosts glitch and repeat themselves the way they did when Westworld was first created, but when Teresa asks how problematic the bugs in this new update might be Bernard again assures her that of the ten percent of hosts who’ve recently received the update, none have faults in their core codes. The park might need to pull the updated hosts for a day or two to clean out the bugs, but the update does not make the hosts dangerous or harmful to the guests. They “literally couldn’t hurt a fly” Bernard says to Teresa. And although he might have bought himself some time to run a few diagnostics, Teresa still demands to be kept abreast of any strange developments especially those that involve hosts going off-script.

 

Within Westworld, Dolores stands beside a river painting as a family of guests approach. She offers to show their son how to feed a slice of apple to a wild horse and when she smiles down at the boy he says to her with awe, “You’re one of them. You’re not real.” Dolores laughs off his comment and heads home to meet up with her father before the sun sets. When she arrives, he greets her in a way atypical to his usual fatherly optimism and instead shows her something he found on their ranch buried in the dirt. It’s a photograph of a woman who looks like she’s standing in the middle of Times Square, but neither Peter nor Dolores can even comprehend the lights, the cars and the modernity that the photo reveals. While Dolores again refuses to acknowledge the signs of their false existence, her father cannot and he stays up all night staring at the picture until the significance behind it overwhelms his code with meaning causing him to break down, both emotionally and mechanically. “Hell is empty,” he warns Dolores the following morning as his mouth twitches and trembles and his eye fill with tears. “And all the devils are here.”

 

It’s an appropriate omen, especially considering the latest occurrence of a host going off-script ended in a bloodbath that would never have happened if the host hadn’t been seeking revenge for one of his previous deaths, which he obviously remembered. Bernard still insists the updates can be fixed and that the codes will continue to keep guests safe, but Teresa isn’t as easily convinced this time. The integrity of the Westworld’s script and the safety of the guests is her number one priority, which is why she announces an immediate recall of all updated hosts and a plan to create a temporary storyline to account for those missing from the script while they are being fixed.

 

The new script, which involves a spectacularly choreographed Western shootout to a symphonic version of “Paint It Black”, leads all defective hosts into town where they are rounded up by Westworld’s technicians to have their level of defectiveness diagnosed. Only one model gives technicians cause for concern and it’s Dolores, who sits in the same room, marred by the same smears of blood as she was when we were first introduced to her at the beginning of the episode. We’ve come full circle, except this time its Stubbs who’s leading her interrogation. When he orders a technician to bring her back online, her programmed consciousness wakes up in a panic.

 

Unable to communicate with her while she is moments from hyperventilating, Stubbs gives the command to the technician controlling her to suppress Dolores’ emotional affect allowing only her cognition to remain communicative. Like Bernard did, Stubbs leads her to believe the current interrogation is a dream, asking her many of the same questions we heard Bernard ask her throughout the episode. Her answers; however, reveal none of the darkness and code corruption being demonstrated by her father in another room down the hall. This is because when her father is asked a series of questions that make him contemplate his own existence, Peter stutters and trembles as his mind fills with the programmed thoughts of his daughter. What isn’t programmed is his fear for her safety and his desire to protect his daughter from the ugliness she fails to see around her, which began the moment he began to ask himself the questions he wasn’t allowed to. When asked about his new “itinerary” – the one that will help him protect his daughter – Peter responds by saying that he wants to meet his maker.

 

As he says this, Peter looks up into the eyes of Dr. Ford and smiles wickedly before quoting an array threats that John Dunn, Gertrude Stein and Shakespeare wrote best. Peter Abernathy, Dolores’ father, has never once been programmed with a script that included words like this, but a character the host portrayed more than ten years prior to Peter did, suggesting Ford’s newest update has allowed Peter to access memories far deeper than he was ever meant to.

 

Before Stubbs is able to release Dolores back into Westworld, he needs to know what exactly her father said to her before he shut down. Dolores, still devoid of emotion and only running on cognition, says the words “these violent delights have violent ends” alluding to the fate suffered by both Romeo and Juliet when their love and lust got them killed. And when Stubbs asks her two final questions – if she would ever lie to “us” or ever harm a living being – Dolores answers “no” before being returned back to her bed while the host that has played her father for the past ten years is locked up inside cold storage.

 

Maybe it’s because she’s the oldest host in the park or maybe it’s because she preaches the kind of blind optimism that ugly worlds need to hear sometimes, but Stubbs’ greatest downfall is believing Dolores. When she steps out onto her porch the very next morning and kills the fly that lands on her neck, we know she was lying the entire time.