He’s eventually inspected by Ford and Lowe and gives a chilling speech from Shakespeare’s King Lear: “I shall have such revenges on you both - the things I will do what they are yet I know not but they will be the terrors of the Earth.” It’s worth pausing to reflect on an astonishing performance here by Louis Herthum - his Abernathy is utterly magnetic as his character is pulled apart by the programmers, and I couldn’t pull my eyes away. Delores insists it “doesn’t look like anything to me,” but he can’t let it go. He finds a photo of a woman in front of a modern city - something which has obviously been left by a past guest - and this sparks a major meltdown in him.
It’s revealed that the update might be causing cliches in the Hosts and we see a perfect example of this involving Delores’s ‘father’ Peter Abernathy. Portraying mystery is always a tough trick to carry off, but Hopkins is outstanding and his motivations will be a major factor over the next few episodes. He’s chatting to an old and obviously earlier Host, which moves and behaves much more like a robot. He goes to see Dr Ford - Anthony Hopkins’ enigmatic leader - in a sub-basement stocked with creepily turned off Hosts. It’s clinical - the Hosts are referred to as ‘livestock’ and are treated as such.ĭr Bernard Lowe - played by the ever-brilliant Jeffrey Wright - is concerned about the latest Host update, which is causing the robots to express shockingly accurate human responses. Much like Game of Thrones, there’s a voyeurism throughout Westworld, but unlike Thrones, the nudity doesn’t feel titillating. People in clinical white plastic suits work on robo-horses and naked Hosts alike. When we finally get to peek behind the curtain of this theme park it’s no less captivating. These ‘Groundhog Day’ moments, the resetting of the narrative loops, run throughout the pilot the human guests interrupt or slightly change the familiar moments, but the Hosts always reset eventually. The scene cuts from the reflection of the barn door closing in Teddy’s dead eye, to Delores waking up back in her bed as if nothing has happened. It’s raw, uncomfortable television that’s hard to look away from, but that’s one of the reasons it’s so powerful.Īt this point, I’m not even 15 minutes into the first episode of Westworld and it’s already establishing some impressive groundwork. In the space of a couple of minutes we discover the big reveal, that Teddy is not a guest but a Host, that the white hats don’t always win the fights and, of course, we get a nod to the original unstoppable gunslinger.
It’s this sequence that establishes much of what is astounding about Westworld.
Of course, making the gunslinger human would be another unexpected twist given the iconic nature of Yul Brynner’s character from the original movie, but for now we just don’t know. My guess is the Board of Directors rep who Ford says has already been sent to the park is the loathsome Logan (he earlier commented about his company increasing its investment in the park), though in our Sirius XM Westworld radio show chat this week, embedded below, my co-host Jeff Jensen offers a different intriguing theory.The main question remains, is The Man in Black guest or Host? The hints right now point towards the former - the bullets from other Hosts don’t hit him as a voice states “you can’t hurt the newcomers,” he exhibits human-like psychopathic tendencies, he appears to have sexual urges, he clearly remembers doing this kind of thing time and time again “for 30 years”. Last week I speculated that in addition to the obvious potential culprit (Bernard) maybe its Cullen or Lee Sizemore (who’s been absent the past two episodes), who are both at odds with Ford and perhaps want to cause a park disaster to remove him from power. Even if all this is true, however, what’s still unclear is who is waking up the hosts on their own (assuming the MiB scenes are not some kind of flashback prequel to everything else we’re seeing).
After 30 years of coming to the park, the MiB wants to play Westworld on Hard Mode, where the hosts can shoot back for real - thus his comments about setting the hosts free and how this time he’s never going to leave the park.
It was likely put into place by Arnold before he died and may have even caused his death. (Note: I haven’t seen any episodes beyond this one, so this is pure speculation based on what’s aired.) The Maze is some way to unlock the hosts and set them free so they can operate unrestricted. So skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to potentially feel spoiled. Okay, so I think we’re at a point where we’ve been given so many hints about the MiB and The Maze and the Board that we should try to assemble them into some kind of working theory about what’s going on.