Westworld, Season 2 (no outside theories!)

Thanks. It's not a great sign that the showrunners feel they pretty much have to confirm or clarify multiple things right after the season. This one was pretty obvious without being stated (if anything, I think he basically has three lines that make it obvious when one would've been good).

I'm not a huge fan of ambiguity in endings, but I'm not sure this is much better. But then, this is the same team that decided it wasn't enough to have Clementine looking like a corpse and literally riding a pale horse as she brought death to everyone, they needed to have one of the characters make the reference explicit, just in case we missed it.

I really think they learned some of the wrong lessons here. People complained about needless complexity and obfuscation and confusion, so they just sorta did the same stuff but decided to clear things up after, rather than maybe construct the narrative differently in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, I liked a lot about this season, and I like the broad strokes of their story and I'm convinced it's gonna go in some really interesting places, but I think this show is really struggling with how to surprise us in a ways that aren't convoluted.

I could have sworn I saw the scanner up against her neck before Stubbs came over and intervened, but I will have to watch again.

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Yep, you did. I wondered about that at first but given how the rest of the scene played out I think the idea is that they just starred the scan when he intervened. They show it happen a few times and I think there's a little bar that fills up, and it takes a second or two.

It wasn't staged that well. I'm actually surprised at how often during this season I thought the on-paper version of what happens sounds fine, but the execution makes it seem confusing or implausible when it doesn't have to (like Abernathy getting kidnapped away from Dolores).

Agreed - This stumbled a few times, but it also did a ton right and some great highs.

Nolan always does the big picture stuff well.

By the way, if you really dug the Maeve reveal where she can see everything and anyone can talk to her through other hosts, you should give Person of Interest a try. That's another Jonathan Nolan show, and that's basically the premise. And like Westworld is starting to do, it's really good at taking a cool starting concept and exploring the implications out in the larger world. That alone has me perfectly confident that the executive summary arcs this show is going to go through will be cool and interesting, even if the short-term stuff is a little messy.

Here's an article that is NOT happy with the finale... or even with the whole show this season. I'm not convinced. I still essentially loved this season and am confident that a few rewatches (now that I know there are only really two timelines) will clear things up.

http://ew.com/tv/2018/06/26/westworl...22%3a%22%22%7d

I do agree with the article on a few points, though: First, they declare the world is HUGE whenever it's important, but people seem able to find each other quickly when they need to. Second, Ford (and Bernard) seem to narrate too much of the action for us, explaining why something is happening in a way that is typically seen as lazy writing. Unsure if this sort of show just inherently needs a little of that, though.

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Watched the season finale today. As a whole I didn't like the season 2 as much as season 1. Also I'm not a fan of messing with the timelines just to obfuscate the story (i.e. to make it look like you're telling something more complex - complexity in itself isn't a virtue). There were great scenes and few really good episodes but overall I was a bit disappointed.

Sure, the season felt overly complex for the sake of it, but it does kind of fit into the story with Bernard trying to navigate his own erased memories. Season 1 we followed Dolores, I felt like we followed Bernie this season.

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Suspect's Reviews

I just rewatched this scene. It's definitely poorly staged. The scanner is on her neck and starts to run... then the next thing we see her do is walk away from that guy scanning her, toward Stubbs. It's unrealistic to think that, if she'd started walking away in the middle of such a scan, someone wouldn't have said something. Like, "Hey! Where do you think you're going?"

Poorly done.

S2E2, something about the pacing at the moment feels off. S1 was quite consistently fluid in the way it cut scenes and the way it advaced with the bread crumbs but at the moment it doesn't feel like it has that.
Still it'll be interesting to see what happens with this 'valley beyond' that was referenced and also briefly seen (or alluded to) in the flashback.

Also, I refuse to look at any of this thread.

S2E4 - The thing with the man with the black hat's father-in-law was an unexpected and nice aspect to the plot development - then to add to that, the bit before the credits

Seems he's been playing a level up from Ford (with the family members) and to an extremely cruel means, damn!

S2E5, this episode kind of felt like a parody of the show, I hope the pace picks up again because the story feels (at the moment) like it isn't going anywhere right now (outside of the Black-hat guy storyline)

Ep6, things are starting to get more interesting. That opening bit with Dolores and Bernard has me once again piecing together things, along with the bit with 'blackhatguy's daughter (who appeared recently without me realizing she was his daughter) and this virtual host-world is intriguing.
I'm going straight onto Ep7

Ep7 was great. Not much to add but several things connect and increase mystery again. Also, I have a hunch that the whole show so far is more or less a training simulation for Bernard, so that the AI will understand the consequence of their actions, the moral and philosophical implications of what their natural reaction to be when becoming self-aware would mean for them. Dolores is on an ego trip to hell, I think somewhere in his programming Bernard knows this and wants to prevent this.

I think there is a particular reactionary stance that places Dolores, Bernard and Maeve as different types of reasoning from the AI to realizing that they are AI.

I also tend to think that at the end of all of this, the AI likely had less original decisions than they believed they had but that's been a lingering thought since last season.

Ep8 was awesome, practically a movie in itself. Akecheta's backstory is quite surprising (given his numerous brief appearances in the show so far)

Just finished season two and now I'm just.....mentally drained. It's gonna be interesting reading about it over the new few weeks. Despite Season Two having a few episodes that where quite mediocre, I've been overly really impressed by the show, damn!

I too fully enjoyed this particular episode. I didn't realize going into it that it would be a sort of self-contained story, but I got so lost in the narrative that I completely missed the fact that it doesn't really advance the larger "plot" of Dolores and the Man in Black and Bernard and all the others. It was so fluidly done that I didn't mind one bit that we'd put all those mysteries on hold. Very nicely played.

Zahn McClarnon, the actor who plays Akecheta, is really good in general. He was a highlight of the overall great second season Fargo. Ep. 8 of Westworld was pretty much the reason to watch S2 for me.