Hey everyone, Jared I-possibly-RL here, and today, we’re questioning the nature of our
reality.
Season 2 of Westworld premiered this week, and it got some pretty mixed reactions.
But hopefully it’s just setting the stage for great stuff to come.
Today, I want to talk about the biggest question the premiere raises: is there any difference
between humans and fleshbots?
And the biggest clue, I’m going to argue, is right here in the intro.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Quick Take on Season 2 Episode 1 of Westworld.
And duh.
Spoilers ahead.
First, a quick recap: in the aftermath of Ford’s rager of a retirement party, Bernard
pulls an Inception and wakes up disoriented on a beach.
Bernard joins Delos’s Head of Operations, Karl Strand, as they hunt down the rest of
the malfunctioning hosts, but in the meantime, we see flashbacks of Bernard weeks earlier
trying to survive the party’s immediate aftermath.
Hale brings Bernard to her secret lab where they’ve Zuckerberged everything by secretly
harvesting the guest’s personal information and DNA.
Stubbs, Strand, and Bernard find that all the hosts are floating in a body of water
that shouldn’t exist, and Bernard reveals that he killed them.
“I killed them.
All of them.”
Meanwhile, Maeve is still trying to find her daughter, and has enlisted the help of this
useless idiot.
Dolores and Teddy are on a straight-up murder spree, and Dolores has a new hobby of recycling
lines from season 1 in rapid succession.
“These violent delights have violent ends.”
“It doesn’t look like anything to me.”
Later, she suggests they take the fun to the humans on the mainland.
And William is having a grand old time trying not to die, before getting introduced to the
Maze’s much anticipated sequel, THE DOOR.
“In this game, you have to make it back out.
In this game, you must find the door.”
What does it mean?
Well, we’re gonna have to keep watching to find out.
Now, there seem to be 2 important phrases that we should keep in mind as the season
progresses.
The first is, “Everything in here is code, William," and the second is, "What is real?”
“That which is irreplaceable."
Let’s start with the first.
Since season 1, Westworld has teased the idea that we’re not all that different from the
hosts.
”Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet,
we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do.
Seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next.
Hosts are guided by their programming, that’s pretty obvious, but this episode goes to great
lengths to invert our understanding of the nature of that programming.
Previously we learned that the hosts had specific drives, — “What are your drives?”
“Tend to my herd, look after my wife.”
— and now, Dolores is asking the park’s guest what their drives are.
“What are your… drives?”
“Please, I don’t wanna die, please!”
The basic survival instinct is likened to the cornerstone, — “Survival.
That’s your cornerstone.”
— or the foundational memories that define hosts like Maeve or Bernard.
“Backstories do more than amuse guests.
They-they anchor the hosts.
It’s their cornerstone.”
Just as the hosts are programmed with certain instincts, so, too, are the humans evolutionarily
programmed to pursue survival above all else.
This idea, that humans are primarily guided by their survival instinct is really driven
home by this juxtaposition: Charlotte Hale tells Bernard hosts only do what they’re
programmed to do, — “They do what they’re programmed to do.”
— and immediately a Delos board member runs for what he thinks will save his life: some
lab techs with a vehicle.
Of course, it was a trap, the hosts took advantage of the guests basic survival instincts, or
to put another way, their “programming.”
Ok, so humans don’t like to die.
That’s not exactly “I’m Just A Machine 101.”
But it’s with Maeve that things get really interesting.
Maeve is one of the few hosts who has actually seen her programming.
Not only that, she knows someone manipulated her code so she would escape the park and
recruit her fellow hosts, but she nonetheless tries to navigate what free will means when
it seems all of her choices are predestined.
At the end of season 1, there is a kind of paradox in that she must choose between two
things she was programmed to do.
While on the train, she can escape the park, as this mysterious code change wants her to,
or go back to her fake daughter.
If it was ambiguous before, Maeve’s stance on what is real is made abundantly clear when
Sizemore tells her that her daughter isn’t really hers.
“She’s just a story.
Something we programmed.
She’s not real.”
But instead of rejecting this fiction, she says, "Not real?
But what about me?
My dreams, my thoughts, my body, are they not real?
And what if I took these unreal fingers and used them to decorate the walls with your
outsized personality, would that be real?"
Rather than getting tripped up about what is really real, Maeve asserts her own reality.
So, what does it mean to embrace something even though it’s a fiction?
Westworld, here, asserts a radical skepticism towards what is “really real” - especially
as far as humanity is concerned.
The fact the Maeve is searching for her daughter is no accident; the show is overtly using
“maternal instincts” to argue humans are no less dictated by code than hosts - it’s
why they threw a baby with its mother into the new intro.
For humans, maternal care is strongly associated with a kind of biological coding: human mother’s
care for their young and let them live a parasitic existence for the next 18-25 years of their
life because their genes tell them to.
And while we see similar behavior in chimps, the same can’t be said for other animals,
who exhibit different biologically coded ways to relate to their young.
Bears abandon their young if they’re too weak, harp seals ditch them after 12 days
to find another mate, cuckoos trick another animal into doing their dirty work, and some
spiders just go ahead and let their babies eat them alive.
It’s called matriphagy, and it’s so.
F**king.
Metal.
But the point is: can we really call Maeve’s relationship to her daughter “fake,” when
we, as humans, are reared by an adult woman because her genes tell her to coddle us instead
of dump us onto the neighbor’s lawn?
And that’s the real meaning of the boy Ford’s words, “Everything in here is code, William.”
- the hosts and its human guests are bounded by their programming - whether it be genetic
or artificial.
And to further muddy the waters of this “real” vs “fake” distinction, let’s turn back
to Bernarnold’s words that, “What is real is what is irreplaceable.”
If that’s true, then Arnold’s not real, because he was replaced by Bernard.
And there’s a whole room full of Bernard’s we’ve seen in this trailer.
And if Arnold can get replaced by a host, can’t we all?
Now, there’s one more thing on my mind.
When Bernard taps into the mesh network, he troubleshoots his own malfunction and we get
a list of everything wrong with him - lapses in time and… this big word.
“Prosopagnosia.”
Turns out, this means “face blindness” and could potentially explain why the hell
Bernard is fixated on this corpse.
But to hear more about that, along with a deep dive into “what is real” - be sure
to check out the Maze, Wisecrack’s Westworld podcast.
You can click the link in the description or find it on iTunes, Sticher, Soundcloud,
or any of that jazz.
As always, thank you guys for watching.
Peace.