“Spencer Kornhaber: “
“If the Wild West is the racist font of America’s myth of rugged adventure, colonial India is England’s.”
“How damning, and fitting, for this show’s rich to pay to be transported to a simpler time, when they could treat brown foreigners as subhuman. “
“The turnaround by the valet Ganju, as newly unhinged as Dolores’s troopers are, thus plays as if it’s a multi-layered revolution: of class, of race, of android.”
“All this romping was only punctuated—rather than overly suffused with—the show’s obligatory lectures about consciousness.”
“Again and again, we saw just how committed the woke hosts are to their emotional drives even though they realize those drives to be constructed: Maeve pines for a daughter she knows is fake, Hector makes bold declarations of love written by Sizemore, and Dolores appears to earnestly feel as though Abernathy really is her father.”
“It’s not so crazy for them to indulge these pangs. Don’t we humans convince ourselves that we want what we want for reasons higher than primal urges, or more noble than self interest?”
“David Sims: Westworld has long drawn unfavorable comparisons to that special cult sensation of the 2000s, Lost, the show that is always held up as the perfect example of what can go wrong when mounting ambitious sci-fi storytelling on television. “
“Lost is the by-word for a show that asks too many questions and then gets hung up on the answers, or an ambitious story that just can’t stick the landing. But I’m here to dismiss that comparison—Lost was the kind of TV that there just isn’t enough of today, one that took big swings and thrilled in the ways it would entirely upend the rules of its world.”
“The notion of an actual revolution going on felt much more pointed here, since the trappings of this world are even more obviously colonial. “
“In a weird way, the character I empathize with most right now is Lee Sizemore, as he’s frog-marched through all the scenarios he helped design and picks up on pieces of his own plotting, realizing how simultaneously chintzy and fundamental they all are.”
“As Westworld shakes off the bindings of its first season and re-defines the limits of its plotting, Lee is the audience surrogate who thought he knew how everything worked, and is now trying to wrap his mind around how much things are changing.”
“Sophie Gilbert: “
“Here’s a question I’m struggling with: Is the writing within Westworld bad because Lee Sizemore is a hack or is the writing within Westworld just bad?”
“A handful of hosts this week made choices that defied their coding and their history. Free will is one of the most crucial elements of being human, going beyond self-awareness to allow not just the understanding of who (or what) one might be, but also the ability to choose. It’s a complex debate within A.I., but it was embodied this week by Teddy, when he refused to execute the remaining soldiers, and by Hector, explaining his love for Maeve. “
“In other words, the hosts might be limited to the vocabulary they’re programmed to contain (hence Maeve’s nice threat to Sizemore last week in his words), but they’re able to function at a level of humanity not yet seen on the show by choosing their partners and their actions. “
“It’s also a good counterpoint to Dolores’s singleminded pursuit of power and world domination, which still feels like it could be a Wyatt loop. “