Westworld: The Question No One Is Asking
I love the early days of TV shows, when they’re unafraid to deal with philosophical musings. Last year, by the end of episode 2 of season 1 of WESTWORLD, a few eagle-eyed viewers had spotted enough to put together that William was the Man In Black (I wasn’t one of them, though I was aware through the editing choices that we were messing with time.) But for most avid watchers of any series that likes to ponder serious questions, the first few episodes are a beautiful time.
TV shows are constructs guided by a set of rules, and in general, the plot must always drive forward. You have to know where your season is going, and you machinate everything around getting there. But if you’re truly skilled at it, those machinations are subtle at first. The viewer doesn’t have all the clues that lead to the mysterious treasure of the season finale, and thus their minds are freer to just live in the world and look at what is being asked.
And by the end of “Reunion”, episode 2 of season 2 of WESTWORLD, we know something is being asked, but at this point, we’re not even quite sure what that is.
“I think there’s an answer here to a question no one has ever dreamed of asking,” Young-ish William tells Dolores.
We’re led to believe that answer and question are related to some massive construction in the park he shows her. But if we can ignore that plot train trying to drag us forward, this is a beautiful place to pause and ponder.
This isn’t a spoiler or a fan theory or a Holmesian logical deduction; but right now, one possibility for William’s question is this: do we WANT to evolve?
WESTWORLD so far loves to remind us that all of our robot friends are on loops. Dolores drops her can, Hector hunts the safe. Giancarlo Esposito, in a fantastic guest role as the latest El Lazo, even evokes the story of the greyhound catching the cat that Robert told last season; having achieved all he ever wanted, he merely stood, trapped in his own confusion.
While a large amount of the plot is focused on the robots breaking their loops,, we the viewers are not advanced cyborgs, so what’s in this for us? Well, how’s this: all of the humans in this show are also in loops.
In William, old and young, we see someone going back, over and over, to the same people — Dolores and Lawrence — and the same place. Logan, who we briefly see shooting up some future-y version of heroin, goes round and round the spiral of a fuck up, caught in one long helter-skelter toward ruin. Robert, obsessed with what went wrong in his relationship with Arnold that led to his partner’s suicide by robot, literally builds himself a second version (not to mention rebuilding his childhood and family.)
Looping behavior in humans isn’t merely a construct of WESTWORLD, it’s a common dysfunctional coping method in humans. Cyclical behavior is one of the hallmarks of our species. Skilled at pattern recognition, we weave loops into the mundanity of our daily lives but also into our most intimate psychological choices. We follow our morning routines, we develop our Christmas traditions, we ruin a relationship and so get into another with near-identical parameters to try and fix what went wrong the first time. We forecast our difficult parents onto our spouses, we handle with abuse dealt by giving abuse, we always like to eat a hot dog on the 4th of July.
Humans derive comfort from our loops, but we also try to problem solve with them. Unfortunately, from within the loop, we often don’t recognize that what we think of as new adventures are actually attempts to fix old ones.
William dismissively calls Dolores a “thing” and merely a “reflection,” but he can’t stop being drawn back to her. Jimmi Simpson, excellent as always, bleeds just enough of Ed Harris’ inflections and intonations into his voice that we can always see quite clearly his future self. But despite his rougher edges, his bravado rings false in his desire to keep Dolores close. Look at his damn face when he sees her the first time: that is not someone who has moved on.
He even reinforces the idea of his own loop, repeating to Dolores a line we’ve heard twice before — a line that was a tell that Dolores was not truly conscious, and looping on her own dialogue.
“Have you ever seen anything so full of splendor?”
This desire echoes in the future version of himself, who knows he’s on a collision course with his former love. Thirty years of masterminding and marauding, and while Dolores has broken out of her loop, it doesn’t appear that William ever has.
The precise robotics of WESTWORLD make it clear that a future exists where your consciousness could be embedded and downloaded into a new version of yourself. Theories abound that the secret mission of Delos has been to use blackmail or even robot clone replacement to control the world. The idea of an immortal robot body would certainly tantalize many; a customizable, advanced version of oneself that will never put on a pound? An easy sell, you would think.
But what would likely be sold as evolution could actually be anything but. Would a thousand years in an immortal body be any different than a hundred, if the loops we set for ourselves are never broken? Would William, if given this option, really want to evolve into someone new, or would he want to go back to his younger self and Dolores, fall in love and never leave, be trapped in a happier loop — one that doesn’t destroy his life both inside and out of the park?
Nolan and Joy have repeatedly referred to this season as “The Door,” a potent symbol of transition and transformation, in contrast to Season 1’s “The Maze.” And if the Maze was a question about whether consciousness could be developed, could the Door be asking us if consciousness is worth it?
See you all in Westworld.
