A gorgeous lady-robot is programmed to endure rape and butchery by guests at an Old West theme park. (Her name "Dolores" is apt.) After a few hundred iterations of this program, Dolores tires of her serial rape and murder and takes out her frustration on the humans who have come to the park to exploit her. Along the way, it turns out that all (or at least) most of the other human staff at the Old West park are, unbeknownst to them, also sophisticated automatons. This is essentially the plot of the first year of episodes of West World. I have omitted about a dozen subplots too intricate to follow and essentially pointless. My assessment of the show's first season was that it had promise but that the narrative was attenuated by meaningless digressions chiefly intended to spin a three-hour premise into a 13 hours series. As she began killing sadistic, if hapless, guests at the park, Dolores remarks: "These violent delights have violent ends."
Season Two was awful. No one could understand the plot. The motivations of the characters were wholly inexplicable. Everyone raced around the park killing everyone else, but since all the characters were robots, they were generally resurrected shortly after their demise merely to be killed again. In my view, Season Two of West World was one of the worst TV shows ever aired, pretentious, sadistically violent, with a narrative constructed with chewing gum and duct tape, so sloppy as to be unwatchable. I made my way through the series to its bitter, gory end and didn't understand half of what was happening -- I even slept through some of the interminable and pointless massacres.
Season Three starts with an unpromising first episode. A low-level human (I think) criminal witnesses bad guys trying to once again slaughter Dolores. The West World theme park premise has now been abandoned in favor of a glistening modern skyscraper world which may or may not be a Matrix-style simulation: it looks too empty and vacuously flawless to be real. A lot of conspiratorial whispering among the big muckety-mucks of the simulation industry suggested that the show was about to slide down the rabbit-hole that devoured season two. But, in fact, the second episode was better and, even, fairly compelling -- the robots, it seemed, have planted a feisty automaton among the top executives of the company that runs the West World (and Nazi World and Raj World among how many other theme parks we don't know) franchise. It's pretty clear that her agenda is to take revenge for all the misery inflicted upon the robots and coordinate the destruction of the firm with a big robot uprising, something the show has been promising for about 25 episodes and not really delivering.
The third episode was even better and I hope it presages the trend for the show. The fierce Dolores is badly wounded (although these robots can't really be destroyed -- a laser welder is just used to suture up their injuries). The low-level crook, Caleb, has rescued the wounded Dolores and is whisking her to safety when a bunch of bad guys deputized to destroy the "skin-jobs" or replicants as they were called in Bladerunner, the real source for this film. (The film's ostensible source, Michael Crichton's efficient and lurid novel made into a wonderful low-budget action film starring Yul Brynner as the rogue robot has been left far behind -- and not for the better. The Tv series is infinitely more ambitious and vastly more pretentious but rarely provides the concentrated B-movie thrills in original material -- which was, also, one should note, the source for the first Terminator movie.) As is her wont, Dolores revives notwithstanding an awful abdominal wound, kills all the humans except her rescuer, Caleb. Later, Dolores shows an uncanny knowledge of Caleb's miserable past -- his mother was a schizophrenic who simply abandoned him one afternoon in a diner downtown. She and Caleb walk onto a huge pier more or less redolent of Chris Marker's famous short film Le Jetee. Caleb wants to know why Dolores is recruiting him for her robot uprising. She shows him Big Data's file: he has a social status rating of 2.2, limited employment opportunities, and one of the notes says "Marriage not recommended; children forbidden." "No one will invest in me," Caleb says sorrowfully. "That's because they (Big Data) knows the outcome. By not investing in you, they achieve that outcome." But Caleb persists in the quixotic notion that he has free will and that he's the captain of his own destiny. Dolores remarks that she and Caleb are alike: she was programmed to have no free will. Caleb says: "I was born in a cage and they want to keep me in a cage." And, so, Dolores the lady killer-robot, and Caleb, the working-class hero (in all of the senses of John Lennon's revolutionary song) agree to work together to bring down the tyrannical power of the owners of the sadistic amusement park and Big Dat which are one in the same. (The big reveal at the end of Season Two was that the simulation-parks existed so that Big Data could perfect its collection of data on the consumer public -- the parks were, in effect, spying on the guests so that their most private predilections, as indulged in the parks, could be accessed, converted into data, and transformed into a means for absolute social control.) This is pretty promising stuff and stirring enough -- I felt an icy chill down my spine as Dolores and Caleb made common cause -- and I hope that the show follows down this pathway and finally delivers the apocalyptic and cathartic robot- revolution promised from the outset with beleagured working stiffs (the working poor) and the robots joining together to destroy the elite managers, the Lords of Metropolis as it were. Dolores, after all, is not so different from the femme fatale lady robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis who stirs up the workers in their subterranean Bauhaus dormitories to revolt against the technocrats who run the city. This was thrilling material in Lang's movie and it promises to be thrilling in West World if the show can only steer clear of the Scylla and Charybdis imperiling the series: hopeless vapid pretension on the one hand and narrative confusion on the other.
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