But all of that narrative sleight-of-hand led viewers to have to think like Hosts. You likely could have gotten here in three-quarters or even half the time. And that prompted plenty of griping from myself and others.ĭid this particular portion of the story need to be over 10 hours long? Probably not. It was easy to feel lost in the show’s massive timeline and universe, without a firm hand to guide you. In its clever use of mixed, interlocking timelines, which nicely replicated how a Host could become effectively unmoored in time, trapped in their memories and reliving moments from their past, it was able to cover over three decades of the park’s history, all the better to underline how terrible existence was for the Hosts.īut it also led to a show where it sometimes seemed as if it was impossible to ever tell what was or wasn’t going on. In a way, the first season turned out to be trying to have its cake and eat it too - to mixed results. But if it was about the Hosts awakening to their hellish existence and deciding to expunge the Earth of their masters, then it had started too early. If the show was primarily about the folks behind the scenes at the park realizing their creations were approaching consciousness, then the story had started way too late. When I first reviewed Westworld before it debuted, I griped in my last point that the show had either started its story “too early or too late.” Good: The show finally gets where it was going all along Don’t worry, Teddy. Here’s the good, the better, and the best of the Westworld season one finale (along with one thing that still bugs me about the show). I struggled a lot with season one, but after this finale, I could not be more excited for season two to arrive. And if it sometimes struggles to reach that ambition, well, it still gets points for trying. “The Bicameral Mind,” ultimately, reveals Westworld to be a show of almost bottomless ambition.
You, like a Host, are just an endless series of loops, and the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can break out of whatever hell you’ve been imprisoned in. To make your own decisions requires understanding that you were always going to make those decisions, understanding that you are, on some level, programmed to do so.
In the end, Westworld argues, the only way to truly be conscious, to truly have free will, is to understand that you have no free will. Robots are finally rising up against humans - and I’d be hard-pressed to say I want any of the humans to survive. The season, all along, seemed as if it were a meditation on the nature of consciousness, and it was - sort of.īut in “Bicameral,” it pulls the rug out from under the audience over and over again, until it winds up exactly where you thought it would, in the most delectable way possible. In its super-sized season one finale, “The Bicameral Mind,” Westworld suggests that there is no answer to the above question. So their current programming is dipping, just ever so slightly, into levels they don’t know are there.Is it the things you like? The feelings you feel? The thoughts you have? Or is it something more ephemeral - something religion might dub the “soul,” the part of yourself that is hidden away and untouchable to everyone but God?
Ford added Reveries to the latest update to bring out realistic new gestures that are somehow influenced by the hosts’ earlier experiences that they don’t consciously even realize exist.
They only see their current version, but there are earlier “drafts” that still exist - in the case of Dolores, potentially up to 30 years of drafts. Westworld’s hosts are built the same way. But all the old versions of the document are still on your hard drive - you don’t see them, and they can be tough to access, but they exist. As you make changes, every so often the document is saved to the latest version. Here’s a simple way to think about the Reveries and how the hosts’ memories are constructed (as showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy explain in greater detail in an interview at the end of this recap): Imagine the hosts are like a document you’re writing on your computer.