“Sophie Gilbert: “
“If Westworld is just a higher-tech Jurassic Park, like we discussed a few weeks ago, then “Les Écorchés” is the moment Dr. Grant discovers that West African bullfrogs can change sex at will, and the velociraptors reach the visitor’s center. “
“Some (but absolutely not all) questions were answered. Some extremely pivotal characters were shot. Some even died. And Bad Teddy brought his vengeance down upon Coughlin and his black-ops security squad like a Dilophosaurus in the passenger seat of Dennis Nedry’s Jeep.”
“To start with the basics: Ford, whose soul lives in unhuman form inside the Cradle of Westworld’s servers, is the architect of all this chaos.”
“These violent ends have been his goal all along, given the ugliness he sees in humanity, “the most murderous species since time began.” By comparison, he told Bernard, the hosts are “something very different. A original work, more just, more noble.””
“Ford, the Promethean creator, wants to preserve the life he’s made at the expense of mankind, setting up a showdown that he’ll help the hosts win.”
“He’s facing off against Delos (embodied now by the increasingly awful Charlotte Hale), which we found out weeks ago had been using Westworld as a giant data-mining operation, secretly extracting information from guests without their consent. But their goal isn’t using people’s data to help sell them things, it’s …(dum dum DUM) eternal life. “
“The conversations between James Delos and William earlier in Season 2, and the routine between Dolores and Bernard in last week’s episode, were just microcosms of a larger project: uploading the human soul to help humans live forever, like hosts. “
““Every piece of information in the world has been backed up, copied,” Ford explained. “Except the human mind. The last piece of analog technology in a digital world.” The more humans reveal about themselves within Westworld, the more Delos learns about human nature, which it’s essentially trying to copy and paste via a janky USB equivalent awkwardly inserted into Peter Abernathy.”
“The question is, who do we want to win? Dolores and Teddy have been undeniably corrupted. Delos is rotten to its core. The poem Ford quoted to Bernard was William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” which observes cruelty inflicted upon innocent animals by humans and a cycle of death and rebirth. (“They broke my head,” Peter Abernathy told Dolores. “They filled it full of howling and sorrow.”) But are the hosts still innocent?”
“Spencer Kornhaber: “
“On that last question, absolutely. When it seemed Maeve and Lawrence might make a very final mockery of William’s gamer smugness, it made for one of the biggest thrills of the season. When Maeve, in turn, was shot, it was one of the biggest scares. That neither fate turned out to be permanent reminds me of how rarely the show escapes its middle zone of entertainment: We get twists but few true shocks, and speeches about emotion but little of the actual thing, though we came close to both sorts of payoff with this crackling episode.”
“The looming threat of doom did help underscore the significance of one of the grander turns of the episode. Dolores sacrificed the “advantage” that the hosts had, their immortality, by destroying their backups. “
“If the hosts are really to be a race superior to our own, it’s only Maeve who shows why. It’s touching that she still wants to save her kid, but I wish she’d heal up and then save the world instead. David, is she now our one true hero?”
“David Sims: “
“You nailed it, Spencer—in this increasingly dispiriting tech experiment, Maeve, who’s largely wielding her power out of a real sense of love, is the only one the audience can really root for anymore. “
“Maeve, then, has the narrative I’m most invested in—not the mystery around her daughter (who isn’t an actual character), but the very reason Maeve is still in the park—her flowering humanity. “
“Her relationship with Lee is basically the first of its kind in Westworld: A friendship between host and human that is based on mutual understanding, rather than a means to an end.”
“It flies in the face of the evolved, human-replacing consciousness that Ford has planned, or the cold-blooded evaluations of Dolores and Charlotte, each of whom are seeking some sort of supremacy.”
“This episode was chock-a-block with that favorite Nolan storytelling tool, the long, expository monologue, something I actually have a lot of admiration for—both Jonathan and his brother Christopher excel at turning instruction manuals into snappy prose. “
“Ford’s explanation of the deeper, colder motives powering this expensive leisure park clicked nicely for me. I also appreciated the show shedding light on that Dolores/Arnold scene last week, perhaps just because I was so thankful it didn’t turn out to be a vision of the future, and of machines making machines.”
“Confusion for confusion’s sake: It’s one of the most common complaints I hear about Westworld. So far, this season has done a fabulous job deepening the universe Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have constructed, and digging into every possible knotty future-concept proposed by artificial intelligence. The test of the next three episodes is whether they’ll build to real answers.”