Have you ever seen anything so full of splendor
Okay, so let me just say up front that I like Westworld.
It's got some of the best acting on television right now, and I'm very interested in the themes it wants to explore.
I just want to like it more.
Because it can be a frustrating show to watch for a lot of reasons
but with this video, I don't want to just snipe at the show's faults,
I also want to look at ways the show can improve and I think it's a good time to do
so considering the fact that the season 2 finale
basically leaves the door open for the show runners to completely reinvent the story they're telling.
That's your spoiler warning!
But first, here's what this video is not about: it's not about the show's
challenging narrative structure or its use of multiple timelines
or its love affair with plot twists. Those definitely matter and are a
little overdone this season I think, but they're also sort of woven into the basic appeal of the show.
They make the story difficult to engage with emotionally
but compelling as a puzzle that the viewer has to solve.
Basically, that criticism of the show is that it's too complicated.
My criticism is that the show is actually too simple because
Westworld is, at least in season two, very limited as an ensemble.
Ensemble Basics
So, an ensemble is any story that has multiple
protagonists. I've often cited John Truby's The Anatomy of Story on this channel because it's a book with a ton of great advice for how
to put together a screenplay. But it's written primarily as a way to write film screenplays and not all of those lessons are
transferable to television or at least they need some refinement
He's got a few words to say about ensembles, warning us that introducing more than one protagonist
decreases narrative drive, the pace of the story.
So, he's got a few suggestions on how to have several protagonists while also writing a story that feels like it's moving quickly
including: connecting the characters by making them all examples of a single subject or theme;
funneling the characters from many locations into one location; and making the hero of one storyline the opponent in
another storyline. And that's the one I want to talk about because Westworld does follow that guideline.
Dolores is opposed to the man in black, who is opposed to Maeve, who was opposed to Charlotte, who is opposed to Bernard,
who is opposed to Dolores, who is opposed to Akecheta, and both of them are opposed to Charlotte. I'd like to call this the
Structure of the Conflict. Each line of conflict here is a place where the show can mine
dramatic situations out of. And we've got a lot of conflict here, which is a good thing.
But it's the intensity of this conflict, the fact that most of these protagonists want to kill the other
protagonists, that causes two problems for the show: backpedaling and wheel spinning.
So, Maeve and the man in black are about to face off once and for all. Nearly two seasons of setup has prepared us for this
inevitable moment. One of them is going to kill the other. Even when Lawrence intervenes, it's still a question of which one will die.
She reminds Lawrence of how the man in black has treated him and suddenly we have three character archs hitting a crescendo at once.
This is great stuff! And then...
some random guys show up and stop the scene from happening. The same exact thing happens later with Dolores and Charlotte.
They are the two generals of their respective sides and everything in the scene points to Dolores killing Charlotte. She's about to act and then...
Some random guys show up and stop the scene from happening!
She's even about to do it a second time, when there's another interruption from her father,
which is at least more character motivated than the first interruption
but at that point the constant interruptions have become comical.
There's a word for this it's called: plotblocking, coined by Andrew Matthews in his essay on Stranger Things.
It's a phenomenon where the writers find an artificial excuse to stop something from happening
so that the story can be longer since, you know, TV has a lot of airtime to fill up and you can't play your big
cards too quickly. The scene in Stranger Things Matthews points to is this one:
when Jonathan finally finds proof that his mother isn't crazy, he rushes home to have that emotional reunion
we've been waiting for but his dad stops him. "Don't bother her right now. She's been through a lot."
Jonathan doesn't grow or change to overcome this obstacle.
He literally tells her later. What purpose can that serve other than to make us wait for what we want to see?
Dolores is prevented from killing Charlotte and then just does so later.
She actually has undergone a character change by that point
but there's nothing in the first scene that implies how she needs to change in order to successfully kill Charlotte,
she's just not interrupted this time. Maeve and the man in black are separated
but we can presume that there will eventually be a Round 2. This particular scene would have been better had it not followed Truby's
suggestion. Had it been some other character that Maeve was traumatized by,
someone not so vital to the rest of the plot, we could have had the catharsis of her defeating him here instead of an
unsatisfying stalemate. Matthews attributes this to the difference between film
storytelling and TV storytelling. Both Westworld and Stranger Things are TV reimagining of stories that began as
films, although not directly in the case of Stranger Things. That's a task
Matthews calls trying to stretch a twin sheet onto a king mattress. So, how can we avoid this pitfall?
Well, since the show was designed to be the next flagship show for HBO after Game of Thrones,
let's take a look at how
that story structure is it's conflict. And I think it's a fair comparison since Game of Thrones is
also about various factions fighting over control of a region. In Game of Thrones,
there is a clear divide between what we can call the macro-level
conflict of war between the various royal families and the micro-level conflict of the individual plot lines.
The Starks want to overthrow the Lannisters is a macro level conflict.
The Starks are in conflict with the Karstarks over how to defeat the Lannisters is a micro-level conflict or more broadly
macro-level conflicts are usually conflicts between enemies and
micro-level stories are between presumed allies with differences of opinion. The
macro-level
conflict provides the
motivation for a lot of the story but the characters that want to kill each other are kept far away from one another.
They're practically on different planets.
Martin is funneling
the characters together like Truby suggests
but he's only doing that at the end of the series, not at the end of every
installment, which helps him avoid a lot of the problems outlined here. And
because he's got so much conflict to work with on both the macro and micro levels,
he can drop a whole plotline by killing off a main character and still keep the story going. Westworld, on the other hand, relies almost
entirely on these 4 characters. It nearly writes out 3 of them this season
but all are revived in some way. The man in black
miraculously survives a gajillion
bullet wounds, Dolores is brought back in a new body and hints are given that Maeve will come back too. Unlike Game of Thrones,
Westworld doesn't know which parts of its story on the macro level it can lop off and still keep going.
The other lesson I wish this show would take from Game of Thrones is in how much conflict there is in the micro-level
stories.
Every protagonist is surrounded by allies, advisers and opponents that provide a deep well of drama to draw from.
Westworld usually follows these squabbles of two characters while they are walking somewhere. This is the second and more
important problem with how the show has structured its conflict because it leads to...
Wheel Spinning
A lot of West world scenes feel like scenes
we've already seen before on Westworld and while that may be a meta commentary on the robots living life on a loop,
repetition gets old quick in a story. Bernard will learn something on a computer,
realize he needs to go to a different computer to learn the next part of the story and then he goes to that computer,
realizes he needs to go to a different computer to learn the next part of the story and then he goes to that computer...Scenes
with the man in black involve him sitting around for a few minutes and then murdering everyone else in the scene.
Dolores likes to get real up and close with people while monologuing about free will. And then there's Maeve's storyline which,
yikes, she is the show's best character, but she spends half of the season doing nothing but walking as more and more
superfluous characters join her group. And then for three episodes, she's lying on an operation table.
The only conflict in that plot line is between Maeve and Sizemore.
Which is okay? Like it is a conflict with growth and character change
but it's also pretty
slight. Like the he was a coward and then he did something brave storyline shouldn't take ten episodes to tell. I mean
what about all of these other characters?
Why not tell a story that involves them as more than just
background noise. Or maybe have her find her daughter earlier on and have her deal with the interesting philosophical
dilemma of meeting her own replacement. Wheel spinning
happens in a story when writers have to find something for a character to do before actually arriving at the main story. And there's a
lot of wheel spinning in Westworld because the show doesn't have much interest in developing any of the characters outside of the main four or
five, but it also can't put them in a scene together or less they kill each other.
So, they all just wander around separately until the finale. Keeping them apart is fine
that's what I'm arguing for earlier, but the show needs more character centric drama between the characters who are allies to fill up that time.
So, I hope that when Westworld returns that it can keep the macro-level
conflict separate from each other in a way where they still influence one another in subtle ways instead of colliding in
unsatisfying standoffs and that it can add more gradations of conflict to each of the micro-level plot lines.
And I think if it did so it wouldn't have to rely so heavily on
obscurantist narrative tricks and could put more focus on telling stories that are compelling in their own right.
Westworld isn't yet the best show on television but it absolutely can be. My hope for every episode of the show
is that when it ends the only thing I can say is
Have you ever seen anything so full of splendor?
One of the most fascinating qualities of Westworld is how it manages to make the robot characters more
sympathetic than the human characters.
But there is one actual human character whose struggles I find pretty relatable, even though she's kind of a monster.
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