1x03 The Stray

[7.4/10] How do you make someone or something into a real person? It’s a great question for a television show because it allows the writers and performers and other creative people to turn it into two related questions that give you all kinds of juice when making a television show.

The first is, in very specific terms, how does a robot become a sentient being? That’s a nicely loaded question, one that allows Westworld to explore the nature of man, the morality of disposable beings, and the tender, fraught path of emerging from automation into consciousness. It not only provokes all sorts of fertile science fiction-y themes and story possibilities, but teases you with the potential for a robo-revolt and allows a prestige drama to get all philosophical as needed.

The second is, more generally, what makes a compelling character. How do you craft a persona that is not fully real, but feels like it is, enough to make the “guests” let themselves believe the reality of it, however momentarily, to enjoy the ride. Ford in particular, and the programmers and storytellers of Westworld writ large in general, have been trying, apparently for decades, to make personalities to populate their world that will not just pass as human, but pass as real people who can provoke an emotional response.

That is absolute catnip to a writer, because it allows them to write about their favorite thing -- writing. It lets them talk about the magic trick that is taking a series of words and ideas and recognizable parts of the human experience and turning it all into something that feels real, but isn’t. The people writing Westworld get to be stand-ins for the people writing Westworld, which gives them all kinds of space to comment on and have fun with how you bring a character to life and make them come off as worth investing yourself in, whether that’s a sexy and/or killer robot in a futuristic amusement park, or a character in your script about a sexy and/or killer robots in a futuristic amusement park.

And “The Stray” seems to offer two answers to what seems to be the essential question of this season, if not this series, of what makes someone a real person: pain and truth.

Pain is what allows Dolores to break past her programming. In something characteristic of this episode, “The Stray” semi-awkwardly delivers the info that only certain hosts are programmed to be able to use weapons, to the point that a group of random robots ends up cycling through a series of excuses why none of them should be made to chop wood for a fire since, in reality, none of them can touch the axe with the wood-cutter of their group (the titular, or at least literal “stray” in the episode, Dolores’s breakthrough notwithstanding) having wandered off.

That gives context to when Dolores picks up a revolver in her bedroom drawer, but then quickly puts it back down. It makes it meaningful when she feels threatened in the public square and asks Teddy to teach her to shoot, but physically cannot pull the trigger. Despite her apprehensions, her anxieties, she has been programmed not to be able to harm anyone or anything, or even to engage in a little target practice.

But we know from the final moments of the series premiere, where Dolores finally swatted one of the flies that had been crawling on the hosts throughout the rest of the episode, that she’s nudging her way past that restriction. And when she’s cornered and about to be assaulted by one of the property’s blackhats, she remembers her experience with The Man in Black, and it’s enough for her to overcome that limitation. The pain is a catalyst; the memory is a push, that allows her to make her own choices, to break some of her chains and get a measure of the freedom she speaks of to Bernard, when her safety and life and pain is at stake.

But that sense of realness also requires truth. That’s why Ford and Bernard don’t just craft these figures and boot them into this world. They deposit their own pain into them, treat them as real, including their own backstories, their own traumas, as a way to push the robotic man and woman who seemed most poised to make the leap into sentience (give or take Maeve) into something closer to true consciousness, or at least something more advanced than inputs and improvisation.

In truth, these are the worst scenes in the episode, and there’s no shortage of them. The scenes with Bernard talking about Alice and Wonderland, his dead son, and the concept of change with Dolores are the type of overwritten faux-profundity that plagues prestige dramas with well-intentioned, high-minded checks that the actual dialogue can’t cash.

There’s interesting concepts at play, with Bernard processing his son’s perishing (I’m guessing from drowning after Bernard wasn’t ready to teach him to swim on his own) and Dolores processing her newfound bits of autonomy and desire for freedom, but it’s full of obvious signifiers and signposts that substitutes vagary and doublespeak for genuine subtlety and depth.

The same goes for Ford’s conversations with Bernard about his dearly departed partner, Arnold. The scene is non-stop convenient exposition and thematic gilding the lily. Again, the concepts behind it are interesting -- that Arnold thought voices from “the gods” could help prompt the hosts to gain sentience and that it’s dangerous to mistake hosts for real people -- but it’s delivered in such a cliché, overdramatic fashion as to render it inert and worthy of eye-rolls.

But we at least get a little insight and foreshadowing when Ford tries to put a little truth of what is presumably his own backstory into Teddy’s. Teddy finally finds an object for his otherwise formless guilt. He has a man he can blame, someone who used to be a friend that turned into a bitter enemy, that he’s now after, suggesting more to the story of Ford and Arnold that meets the eye.

Speaking of things that fail to meet the eye, this was a literally dark episode of Westworld in several places. When Teddy sets out in search of Wyatt, he’s encircled by a group of either masked warriors or some other sort of creatures, who can’t be hurt by his weapons but are otherwise indiscernable. The picture also gets muddled when the head of security and Bernard’s subordinate go out in search of a stray, ruminating about backstories and mysterious carvings, and having a close shave.

Some of this stuff is the same sort of vacant mystery-teasing I expressed some exhaustion with from the last episode. Some of it is the kind of nominally blood-pumping action you need to keep casual fans invested in a prestige drama. But mostly, I just wish I could see it, rather than it being shrouded in indecipherable darkness the whole way through.

Still, the episode reserves one last bit of truth and pain to drive its point home, this time for William. The man who seemed disinterested in Westworld’s delights and danger gets pulled in when he sees an innocent person (or host) at risk in a gunfight between bandits and lawmen. He saves her life, gets clipped a bit in the process (enough to hurt, not enough to kill), and as his companion suggests, that makes it feel real to him.

It draws William into this world. It makes him want to go after a bounty. Protecting an innocent life from a bad actor, suffering a little in the process, feeling the truth in that story, makes him want to be a part of it. That’s what the creators of Westworld hope their show will do to the audience, to be invested in the slings and arrows these character suffer and the breakthroughs they achieve, and come back to the show week after week, year after year.

And it’s what Ford and Bernard and others seem to hope will happen with their creations, that with enough of the truth from their experiences, and enough pain to motivate them, they will become human, or at least closer to it, which introduces far more complications than simply entertaining the guests, both in-universe and out of it.