bring back old gbs posted:

Still convinced The Maze is the Mesa Facility, and Meave is currently going through it.

^burtle posted:

Dolores was wearing the cowboy outfit she's had on with McPoyle when the MiB walks in, so if the two of them are the same guy, it is going to be a let down.

emanresu tnuocca posted:

There was a logo.

The big reveal relies on the fact that Old and Young William are portrayed by different actors and that nobody bothers to address Old William by his first name for 9 episodes. This is not super clever.

^burtle posted:

Dolores was wearing the cowboy outfit she's had on with McPoyle when the MiB walks in, so if the two of them are the same guy, it is going to be a let down.

Arglebargle III posted:

God I'm tired of this argument. Humanoid robots can substitute for labor much more flexibly than single-purpose robots, and they can use the installed capital base.

I'd like to see your robot assembly line shut down and go do temp work in a different industry, or see your robot tank do CPR.

Asema posted:

I mean she's retracing steps and also didn't have a blood soaked ripped shirt from where her stomach got gashed open so ???

GunnerJ posted:

If Dolores (a Host) killed Arnold very early, I can see why they'd want to completely scour any record of the whole thing.

eta: What I don't get is why they keep Dolores and Maeve around after their glitches that allow them to act in very unsafe ways become apparent.

Cojawfee posted:

People really need to rewatch the show and pay attention.

Caufman posted:

How the most recent Dolores got her hands on the shirt and trousers remains an open (but not that interesting) question.

ArmZ posted:

the real question is when does the westworld video game come out and do you get to play as ford?

Mike N Eich posted:

I think we have to regard Arnold as the true genius in the park, and Ford very much his inferior. That's why so little has changed in 30 years, and why the older models are still kicking around - Ford has never really bested Arnold, or learned much from him, other than making a duplicate Arnold to help him out.

tooterfish posted:

And you're coming at the argument from cross purposes again

Your assumption seems to be that non-humanoid robots have to be inflexible and designed for a single purpose. But "humanoid" isn't necessarily the only configuration a flexible general purpose labourer could take, never mind the most efficient one. Use your imagination.

Mahoning posted:

Yeah.

There's 3 different periods that Dolores is traveling in.

In one (~35 years ago) she is wearing her dress, traveling to the town and we've now learned that it is to meet with Arnold below the church.

In another (~30 years ago) she is wearing the cowboy outfit and is traveling with William. She travels to the old town (because she is remembering her first trip there) but it winds up being buried. In this time frame she (presumably) dies after being stabbed by Logan and running away from the Confederate camp.

In the last (present) time frame, she is also wearing the cowboy outfit. This is the one that confuses everyone. But if you rewatch the whole series and pay attention when Dolores is on screen, they often switch between present-Dolores and William-Dolores very subtly. When they switch though, the two different scenes are often lit very differently and Dolores is often alone in the present time frame. (in the town talking to the little girl who draws her the maze, standing among the crosses in the graveyard, at the river's edge where they encountered the ghost nation massacre, encountering the old once-buried town, etc.)

Throughout all of it, Dolores sees flashes of herself (often dead or dying), presumably showing us that she has done this (and failed) many times before. This is setting up that Dolores has been trying to find the maze in perpetuity since the William incident (or possibly earlier).

LinkesAuge posted:

In the end the human "design" is the result of thousands of years of real world testing

qbert posted:

My guess is she found them in Pariah. Her clothes not being bloody and showing no wounds from Logan's stab should be the most obvious clue it wasn't the same Delores that had just escaped their camp.

in_cahoots posted:

So I'm down with the multiple timelines, but I'm still unsure about the William=MiB theory. Last week, MiB basically said that killing Maeve and her daughter was the first "evil" thing he did in the park. How does that square with William's massacre this episode?

Abner Assington posted:

One thing that doesn't jive with that entirely is her wearing the dress in Sweetwater when she's daydreaming and Maeve comes over and tells her to get away from the entrance to the saloon and she drops the "these violent delights have violent ends" on her and makes her start to flip out, in the sense that there hasn't been anything to indicate that Maeve was the madam (or even around) that many years ago.

quote:

Most TV shows — heck, most stories — operate with a fairly straightforward dynamic: A character wants something or wants to do something. Don Draper wants to make a great ad pitch. Tony Soprano wants to stop his panic attacks. Michael Bluth wants simultaneously to put his family back together and to escape said family. Even a more experimental narrative will usually start from the place of a character with a recognizable goal, and then subvert our expectations from that point.

On Westworld, however, some of the characters have concrete goals — Maeve wants to escape Westworld, for instance — but because many of the characters are unaware of fairly basic facts about their existence, it’s hard to get too invested in, say, Teddy finding Dolores and saving her.

Instead, the characters with goals are those of us in the audience who want to know what’s going on, and the writers, who are working as hard as they can to keep information from us. Thus, Westworld is currently mostly a meta-narrative — a story about how we construct stories.

I have trouble imagining the show keeping this up for much longer. Indeed, the Dolores story, which was easily the most compelling in the first half of the season, is now mostly buried underneath the obfuscation of what’s happening during which timeline. There are probably versions of next week’s finale that finally drive me to drop the show — and versions that make me stand up and applaud its storytelling audacity.

More likely than not, I’ll end up somewhere in the middle. Westworld is a mystery show, like Twin Peaks or Lost, but where both of those earlier shows had most of the mysteries swirling around the characters, Westworld keeps developing mysteries within its characters.

Where Mad Men would keep vital parts of Don Draper’s backstory from the audience, he still knew them. He was still driven by them. But a character like Dolores is a mystery even to herself, an endless series of locked doors inside her own brain that she’s never quite sure how to open. And while that’s fun as a writing exercise, I don’t know how long the show can sustain it.

Consider the character of Bernard, who in three consecutive weeks has been revealed to be a Host (episode seven), someone who’s been rewritten many times (episode eight), and a figure built in the image of Arnold who has now “killed himself” so Ford can presumably rebuild him at some point (episode nine). Because this is so much story piled on top of one character, nearly all of it plays out in exposition, rather than via something with emotional followthrough.

It feels, for all the world, like the storytelling equivalent of computer programming — you see the code where the emotional attachment goes, but not the emotional attachment itself. That’s maddening, but also incredibly fascinating. Hence, I love it, and I hate it.

qbert posted:

What other explanation can possibly exist for how Delores' father found that picture of William's fiancee in the pilot other than the two timeline theory?

CapnAndy posted:

Do we have screencaps of the two pictures to prove they're the same or are people just remembering they looked alike?

GunnerJ posted:

I could be wrong, but this isn't how I remember the line. I thought that he said he wanted to try something "truly evil," which I take to mean that no matter what else he's done, killing even a synthbot child would be a test of his established moral boundaries.

Caufman posted:

He also can't tell the difference between a major or a general, which is worrisome from either a major or a general.

The Dave posted:

You're a let down.

qbert posted:

What other explanation can possibly exist for how Delores' father found that picture of William's fiancee in the pilot other than the two timeline theory?

Escobarbarian posted:

This show is really good and super loving frustrating at the same time. Just gonna paste this from Vox as it describes my feelings better than I could myself:


Plenty of great scenes in this ep though. I especially liked the Logan stuff. And anyone still denying multiple timelines after this ep is a lunatic

quote:

It feels, for all the world, like the storytelling equivalent of computer programming — you see the code where the emotional attachment goes, but not the emotional attachment itself.

qbert posted:

quote:

MAN IN BLACK (MIB): You want to know who I am? Who I really am? I'm a god. Titan of industry. Philanthropist. Family man. Married to a beautiful woman. Father to a beautiful daughter. I'm the good guy, Teddy. Then, last year my wife took the wrong pills, fell asleep in the bath. Tragic accident. 30 years of marriage, vanished. How do you say it, like a deep and distant dream. Then at the funeral, I tried to console my daughter. She pushed me away. Told me that my wife's death was no accident, that she killed herself because of me. And she said that every day with me had been sheer terror. Any point I could blow up or collapse, like some dark star.

TEDDY: Did you hurt them, too?

MIB: Never. They never saw anything like the man I am in here. But she knew anyway. She said if I stacked up all my good deeds it was just an elegant wall I built to hide what was inside from everyone. And from myself. I had to prove her wrong, so I came back here, because that's what this place does, right? It reveals your true self. At that time, I didn't join one of Ford's stories, I created my own, a test. A very simple one: I found a woman, an ordinary homesteader and her daughter. I wanted to see if I had it in me to do something truly evil. To see what I was truly made of. I killed her and her daughter, just to see what I felt. Then, just when I thought it was done, the woman refused to die.

TEDDY: You're a f---ing animal.

MIB: Well, an animal would've felt something. I felt nothing. And then something miraculous happened. In all my years coming here, I'd never seen anything like it. She was alive, truly alive, if only for a moment. And that was when the maze revealed itself to me.

TEDDY: The maze. What's that drat pattern have to do with this?

MIB: Everything. In Ford's game, even if I go to the outer edges you can't kill me. You can't even leave a lasting mark. But there's a deeper game here, Teddy: Arnold's game, and that game cuts deep.

Mike N Eich posted:

Ford has never really bested Arnold, or learned much from him, other than making a duplicate Arnold to help him out.

GunnerJ posted:

> It feels, for all the world, like the storytelling equivalent of computer programming — you see the code where the emotional attachment goes, but not the emotional attachment itself.

I am pretty sure this is one of the big themes of the show in a way?

CapnAndy posted:

Yeah, same photo.

I'm 99% sure that William is the Man in Black, then, but I just can't understand it. He goes to Westworld for the first time, has this transformative experience where the park is already revealing deeper levels to him, and falls in love with Dolores, and then... goes home, gets married, and spends 30 years doing the trite storylines? Really?

Here's the full backstory monologue for anyone else who wants to pick it apart:
"In all my years coming here, I'd never seen anything like it. She was alive, truly alive, if only for a moment. And that was when the maze revealed itself to me." -- I can't make that jibe with him being William. William has seen something like that and gotten hints of the maze.

qbert posted:

I think whatever goes down in the finale is going to disillusion William to the idea that the hosts were ever truly alive or that any of his self-discovery was "real". It could be as simple as Dolores dying and him visiting her later, only for her to have no memory of him or their experiences together.

qbert posted:

What other explanation can possibly exist for how Delores' father found that picture of William's fiancee in the pilot other than the two timeline theory?