Game on for new Westworld season

Opinion

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This article was published 20/04/2018 (2194 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Westworld unrolls its much-anticipated second season on HBO Canada on Sunday night, and last season’s “violent delights” are now heading toward some very “violent ends.”

Showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan take us back to the high-tech theme park where robot hosts, some of whom are becoming increasingly self-aware, have been submitted to unending amounts of pain and degradation, playing out “narratives” crafted by the park’s creators for the amusement of wealthy human guests.

The series itself is about narratives — such twisty timelines and tortuous plot turns, so much coded information that conceals as much as it reveals. Nolan and Joy excel at the kind of post-Lost puzzle-box tricks that encourage internet speculation, Reddit rabbit holes and elaborate, worked-over fan theories. Slate TV critic Willa Paskin has referred to Westworld as a new genre: “the TV show as multiplayer game.”

https://youtu.be/sjVqDg32_8s

This year the showrunners promised to post a video laying out the plot of season 2 for anyone who wanted to finally crack the secret at the dark heart of the Westworld maze. “It’s a new age, and a new world in terms of the relationship between the folks making shows and the community watching them,” they suggested.

The 25-minute video opens with park programmer Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) wandering through a hellish landscape, groping toward memory: “The deeper he goes, the closer he gets to the meaning behind it,” the voiceover says.

Oh, it’s all very tantalizing, but the Big Reveal turns out to be a Big Rickroll. Literally, a Rickroll, as Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), no longer in the chaste blue dress she wears as a robot homesteader but in contemporary civvies, delivers a particularly plaintive version of Never Gonna Give You Up. The video runs out the rest of the 25 minutes with footage of a nice, non-robotic dog sitting at a piano.

(At least I think it’s a non-robotic dog. You can never quite tell with Westworld.)

Game on, then, as showrunners and fans brace for more tussling over a season that is sometimes intriguing but often just irritating in the unrelenting opacity of its plot. Last season ended with park creators promising new and even more intense experiences for their increasingly jaded guests. In season 2, the showrunners also seem to be amping things up with more violence, more gore and, especially, more Reddit-baiting inscrutabilities.

The premise of the Westworld park, set out in season 1, is to let guests — mostly wealthy white men — live “without limits, without judgment, without consequences.” Season 2 promises a bloody reckoning. There will be consequences — and then some. There will also be tigers, samurai warriors and geisha girls!

Dolores has finally broken into self-determining self-consciousness, and her newfound freedom expresses itself, a bit paradoxically, in a will to dominate. As the leader of a robot revolution, she’s humourless, remorseless and unstoppable, kind of like Yul Brynner from the original 1973 movie but with more hair.

Much more fun is the magnificent Thandie Newton as Maeve, the former madam at the Sweetwater saloon who has come back to the park to search for her daughter. She, at least, has been programmed with a sense of irony.

The Man in Black (Ed Harris) continues to pursue his enigmatic ends, and we get a murky new subplot with the introduction of James Delos (Scottish character actor Peter Mullan), the rapacious capitalist behind the sinister Delos Corporation, with its paramilitary security forces and secret labs.

Once again, the series walks a wobbly line between offering viewers the same kind of sex-and-violence escapism that the Westworld theme park offers it guests, while making a stab at sentient self-awareness with themes of determinism and free will, memory and identity, the legacy of colonialism and the murky ethics of AI.

The series is stylish, superficially clever and often compulsively watchable. It’s also chilly, kind of silly and, needlessly, ridiculously confusing.

In this new era of prestige TV, there is a sense that clarity is for dopes, clarity is for people who just want to watch Friends reruns. But Westworld could maybe use a bit more clarity. Sometimes a complex, multi-layered and ambiguous narrative is deep. Sometimes it’s just a way to cover over lack of depth.

Characters keep asking questions: Who am I? What do I really want? What is the real purpose of Westworld? What does it all mean? And Dolores keeps saying, “I know everything,” without actually telling us anything at all.

As we head deeper into the second series of Westworld, we’ll see if we finally get some profound answers — or just a season-long Rickroll.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca