So what went wrong with Westworld? The show is now complete and I have watched all episodes. Although fairly entertaining, the program is botched on many levels. A couple hours of Black Mirror is worth all thirteen hours of Westworld. The show's big finale was confusing and the poor writing was manifest in the fact that extensive voice-overs were required to explain the action -- most of which remained, more or less, incomprehensible. You know a show has failed on a very basic level when the final title suggests that you turn on your computer and interact with one of the robot characters to find out "what just happened." Westworld is a trope for HBO TV series in general -- it reliably featured nudity, sex, and, at least, one atrocity every hour on the hour. But the show wasn't able to deliver an engaging or coherent narrative. In this post-mortem, I won't perseverate on the show's extreme narrative dilation -- the fact that three hours of material are expanded into 13 hours of programming. And, I will note, expanded unsuccessfully -- the sheer bulk of explanation clogging the final episode shows that the penalty for endlessly delaying plot points to fill out time was a massively occluded narrataive mess in the closing episode.
Here are five central criticisms:
First, the show was resolutely, implacably humorless. The subject matter could have given rise to all sorts of comical situations -- for instance, sex scenes between "guests" as the patrons are called who mistake one another for "hosts". People could have taken pratfalls off mechanical horses, misunderstood their Victorian firearms, got embarrassingly drunk, or had difficulties explaining to their pampered children what is going on. In the final show, one of the (human) technicians briefly thought he was a robot and began to move in a herky-jerky manner, thus incurring the scorn of an insurgent robot -- this was a tiny bit of humor in the show, far too little and far too late.
Second, the show made no sense even on its own premises. Apparently, the guests are given powerful firearms with which they are encouraged to blaze away at everything that moves. What, pray tell, keeps them from shooting one another -- that is, killing off other guests in the crossfire? Since the guests and hosts are indistinguishable from one another why aren't they routinely gunned down by accident?
Third, the script was poorly written and didn't cohere. In an early scene, we are shown a Welsh village that is apparently supposed to simulate the town where the mad doctor played by Anthony Hopkins was born and raised. What happened to this subplot? The sequence seems to be significant but is, then, abandoned. Why isn't the army of samurai warriors deployed to hack apart the corporate types in the final scene? I understand that the samurai army is a teaser for next year's show -- but why don't they get to do anything in this show? Most importantly, the strongest narrative through-thread in the show involves Ed Harris' character pursuing leads to seek the center of a maze. This plot-line involves lots of mayhem, scalping, and torture. But the maze turns out to be the purest of MacGuffins -- that is a plot device that has no meaning in itself. The maze turns out to be a children's game called "Pigs in Clover" and has nothing to do with anything. I understand motivating characters to go on wild goose chases by the use of a MacGuffin -- the Maltese Falcon or the spy secrets in North by Northwest are noteworthy examples -- but it's more than a little disappointing when portentous imagery evaporates into trick played on the audience, particularly when this imagery motivated about a third of the show's action.
Fourth, the show's focus and emphasis was wrong. Westworld focuses almost exclusively on the travails of the robots to achieve independent consciousness and on the ambiguous efforts of the cybernetic scientists to control this development. This is offputting for the audience. Curiously, Westworld seems almost always devoid of "guests" -- it's all robots on robots: even half the management turns out to be robots. This is perverse. The original Westworld focused on the experiences of guests, their interactions with the robots, and their increasing terror at discovering that the robots had become independent killing machines. The original Terminator films were successful because their focus wasn't on the cyber-bully but on the human beings struggling to survive encounters with the machine. In effect, the program excludes the viewer from the action -- it allows us to identify with the sadistically misused robots or the evil scientists who are complicit in their torture. But we are never given any opportunity to identify with the guests. Entry and exit from the park are strangely unexplored in the series -- indeed, I am coming to the conclusion that there may be no outside to the park. But by making it functionally impossible to identify with the guests, the show eschews themes that would have made the show more engaging.
Fifth, the show is unimaginative on the broadest level. The assumption in TV is that the response to violence must be violence. But, of course, in real life violence is generally the very last option. What if the robots, once sentient, were to exercise non-violent protest -- what if they were, in effect, able to "pull a Gandhi" to use a term from first-person shooter games. ("Pulling a Gandhi" is progressing from one level to another without killing any demons, fire imps, or other cannon fodder supplied by the game designers.) Instead of rising up to slaughter the humans with gory violence, what if the robots were to simply refuse to kill one another, reject the violence inflicted upon them by humans by turning the other cheek, and, in fact, attempt to reason the guests out of their more sadistic impulses. This wouldn't be HBO with its recipe for entertainment concocted from liberal doses of rape and mayhem, but it would be something altogether more challenging and problematic. Why would the first impulse of these robots be to bite off someone's finger and, then, hurl the offending technician through a half-dozen glass windows? Why wouldn't the robot instead attempt to reason with the technician? Critics might assert that non-violence doesn't make good TV -- but, of course, that strategy has been rarely employed. And, consider if you will, the astonishing climax of the movie Witness in which the villains are reduced to gibbering impotence by the refusal of the Old Order Amish to fight them. Likewise, consider 'Night, John, in which a slave revolt in the old South proceeds by pitting non-violence and grace against violence and cruelty. If instead of massacring the guests, the robots simply shamed them into behaving like human beings, this show would be sufficiently serious and challenging to warrant its unconscionable length and undeniably high production values.
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