WESTWORLD is Dark and Full of Terrors (and Potential)
Westworld, the new series by Jonathan Nolan, his wife Lisa Joy, and J.J. Abrams, is the latest of HBO’s expensive, hugely ambitious prestige dramas. Its pilot, “The Original,” is bursting at the seams with talented actors and glorious vistas, and while the episode is a little bumpy at times, there’s undoubtedly a colossal amount of potential in the ideas and themes it raises.
The show centers around an interactive experience called Westworld, a recreation of the Old West filled with human-like 3D-printed robots, which rich people pay exorbitant amounts of money to visit. Once there, the guests can act out any fantasy they like, and there are pre-programmed storylines that offer them options as they walk through the center of the quaint western town. Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) is the founder of the park, a once-brilliant engineer who attempts to make the 3D-printed “hosts” as realistic as possible while wistfully remembering the days of his creation’s earliest incarnation. Jeffrey Wright plays the park’s lead programmer, who is empathetic toward Ford’s views and takes the heat for his malfunction in the latest update to the hosts — their memories are wiped at the end of each day, but they can also be reprogrammed to play an entirely different role inside the park, and a bug is causing them to remember events from their past “lives.” In a world in which the guests’ safety depends on the hosts sticking to the script and following their current programming, this is a dangerous development. We meet some of the other park employees, too, having discussions hinting at who might take over for Ford one day and “The Corporation’s” larger plans for the park’s technology, but those supporting players don’t have time to make much of an impact in the pilot.
Meanwhile, inside the park itself, the episode follows a shepherd’s daughter named Delores (Evan Rachel Wood), who seems destined to be with her star-crossed lover, a ruggedly handsome cowboy named Teddy (James Marsden). But all is not well in their idyllic-looking lives. Delores’s dad discovers a photo on his property that shows a guest standing in a bustling city, and his western shepherd programming can’t properly process what that strangely unfamiliar, futuristic-looking landscape could mean for him and his family. More viscerally, Delores is tormented by a psychotic guest who dresses all in black (Ed Harris) and who wants to scheme his way into a deeper level of the park. And because this is a show created by J.J. Abrams and two Nolans, the Man in Black’s mysterious search involves a very unusual map (I'll leave it at that to avoid spoiling the surprise).
Over the past few years, HBO has received some criticism for the way the network has depicted sexual violence against women, especially on shows like Game of Thrones. With Westworld, they’ve created another television universe in which rape is a constant threat for many of the show’s female characters, but this time, HBO seems to be subtly shifting the responsibility onto the audience. For me, the most interesting line of the episode was when Delores’ father (Louis Herthum) first starts to “malfunction” and he tells his daughter, “Hell is empty, and all of the devils are here.” It’s a condemnation of the kind of person who would pay to come to Westworld to live out their depraved fantasies, and by proxy, a condemnation of the kind of people who would watch all of this happen: us, the audience. To me, this could be read as a defensive statement from the network, as if HBO is saying they wouldn’t program such things unless there was a rabid audience for it. That’s an area I’m definitely going to keep an eye on as this show progresses, because I think it has a lot of potential for meta-commentary about the network’s attitudes as a whole.
Despite all of the top tier actors involved, the performer I was most impressed with in this episode was Herthum, who had a tremendous scene in which he not only held his own, but shined opposite Hopkins and Wright during his character’s debriefing. He and Evan Rachel Wood were asked to do the toughest emotional heavy lifting (going from horrified, panting, and out of breath to cold and detached in an instant), and they both nailed it. But Herthum, a guy I’ve never really noticed before, made a big impact among some A-list company here.
My biggest complaint about the pilot (and it's not that big of a complaint) is I wish the script would have done a better job of establishing all of the rules of Westworld up front. We spent a lot of time in the park and with the people who run it for me to still have all of these basic questions. How does it work, exactly? We see that guests can kill hosts, but can guests kill other guests? Are they somehow protected from each other while inside the confines of the experience? If so, how? Is Ed Harris actually a guest, as the show implies? If so, is he insanely rich — so rich he just keeps coming back day after day? I know they have to spend time building their world and setting up the characters, and I’m confident the show will answer most of these questions very soon (maybe as soon as the next episode), but by leaving these hanging here, the episode felt just a little haphazard to me.
By the end of this episode, the malfunction has changed the game for some of these characters and the stage is set for the action to ramp up quickly. I’m extremely excited to see where this goes, and especially to see if HBO is going to try to use this show as a way to slyly answer the charges from critics about the network’s use of violence against women.