1x02 Chestnut

[7.3/10] The nice thing about series premieres and season finales is that they are focusing. Even for the most opaque shows on television, a premiere has to set expectations, establish a setting, and introduce characters. And even for the most surreal or elliptical programs, a finale involves some amount of summing up, of brining things to a head, on tying loose ends together and reflecting on what’s come before.

But the measure of a show is what it does in between. Sure, it matters a great deal whether you can deploy a compelling hook in your opening stanza, and it matters even more whether you can nail the landing. But what your show is, what it’s really about, takes shape more in those in-between episodes, where you can either craft compelling scenes and stories even without the guideposts and heightened stakes of endings and beginnings, or you can tread water and set tables for whenever those big event episodes come down the road.

Westworld, in its second episode at least, is somewhere in the middle. There’s not much of a larger theme or unifying story to this installment. Instead, it’s a series of vignettes, none of which is fully complete or clear, all of which seem more calibrated to tease greater or grander things to come than they do to grab us in the moment.

But each of them works as a tease, as something to at least make us wonder what comes next, where these people’s lives are headed, even if those viewers accustomed to prestige genre television’s usual song and dance of mystery and doublespeak.

The most notable, and not coincidentally the clearest of these vignettes features newcomer William (played by Jimmi Simpsons of IASIP, House of Cards, and Black Mirror fame). When we meet William, he is a complete neophyte at Westworld, one whose traveling companion (implied to be his brother-in-law) is an old pro.

What makes William interesting as a character is that in contrast to the other “guests” we’ve met so far, he’s the only one who seems to have any reluctance or hesitation about the hedonism and brutality on the buffet table of this amusement park. He seems to enjoy the facade and seems impressed by the craft and care put into this world, but he’s also inclined to show empathy for his robotic hosts, seems shocked by his friend’s dismissive or downright cruel treatment of them, and turns down the chance to sleep with one of the androids at the saloon because he has “someone real” waiting for him at home.

There’s not much plot to this part of the episode. It’s more a character piece -- something to introduce the audience to William, and put him in some kind of context, one that marks him as unique relative to the other folks we’ve met in and around Westworld, because he treats the figures around him as people, not just as toys or tools, which means he’s inclined to show them kindness and apt to treat encounters with them as real and significant, not as disposable or not counting.

That’s in direct contrast to The Man in Black, who clearly sees no humanity in the hosts he’s willing to brutalize and use to reach his ends. “Chestnut” drops an interesting idea very briefly here -- that the center of Westworld is generally safe and simple, and that the further you venture out, the wilder things get. It also drops the nugget that The Man in Black has been rumbling through these park for thirty years (conveniently, the same amount of time since the last major incident, per the prior episode), and it shows.

Because The Man in Black is looking for something deeper, something beyond the everyday. There’s something like the hedonism treadmill at play in the character, that he has seen it all, hundreds and hundreds of times, to where he’s looking for newer and more difficult extremes in order to be stimulated, figuratively or more literally, anymore.

He’s desultory, almost weary, about taking out a gaggle of cowboys to drag a host about to be hanged back to his village. He finds a town he’s never seen before and starts blasting folks away to get more information on “The Maze.”

For the most part, this is the same sort of cryptic teasing that feels like the show offering breadcrumbs than a complete or compelling narrative. But as with William, it feels more like a character piece, something to signify that The Man in Black is not just a purely evil guy (though he appears to be that too) but also someone who’s seen and done it all, and is desperate and casually cruel in the effort to find something new.

(And now for some baseless, probably wrong speculation: I know going in that there’s some timeline shenanigans in this show, so my current bet is that William and The Man in Black are the same person, with TMiB just being the “thirty years later” version of William, which would make the contrast in their treatment of the hosts all the more striking.)

Speaking of Cryptic teasing, we get Ford going on a walk, making a robo-snake move around at his command, and ordering a little kid (who’s presumably a long lost dead sibling or younger self or something) around. He seems to speak exclusively in aphorisms in these stretches, offering little more than overwritten texture that only manages to pass the smell test because Anthony Hopkins is a consummate professional. Which is not to say I can brook no mellifluous prose in my genre T.V., but that in interludes like these, it becomes difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff of legitimate foreshadowing and philosophy vs. faux-profound nonsense.

The one vignette that actually splits the difference between clarity and crypticness centers on Maeve, a host and prostitute from the saloon who’s malfunctioning like the other “upgraded” robots on the property. What works about Maeve’s part of the episode is that it balances plot and character, while also working as a sort of impressionistic bit of artisticness in the show.

On the one hand, you have the plot relevance of yet another robot acting abnormally, of recalling some history of pain that makes them dangerous, and tying it to The Man in Black somehow. On the other, you have a more personal story, of this seeming automaton feeling something, being slowed and stymied by the ghosts of past abuse that linger and rear their ugly heads when she’s supposed to be an object of pure delight.

And there is legitimate thematic heft in that. It’s no coincidence that Maeve’s speech -- the one she keeps not being able to spit out -- is one about being whomever you want to be, about new shores creating new chances to forge a different identity. But Maeve herself cannot escape her past, even with the help of her programmers, which hauntingly involves a Native American raid and the trespasses of The Man in Black. The scenes are mostly delivered in flashes, with shots of naturalistic light and a warming glow, that turns into unavoidable terror.

As much as the programmers seek to wipe the slate clean, Maeve cannot escape that terror. There is a cycle of abuse brewing in Westworld, one that Ford may have knowingly facilitated, where the robots become dangerous by recalling who they are, what they’ve been through, in ways that make them useless as objects of pleasure and dangerous as beings slowly but surely becoming human enough to want justice for what’s been inflicted upon them.

“Chestnut” is nowhere near as tight or focused or functional as Westworld’s premiere. It’s meandering and vague in a way that suggests the show may be more interested in teasing its audience with nebulously-defined mysteries and trying to impress the viewer with good texture than delivering on story or substance. But this early in the show, it’s easy to be lost in the trappings and teases, to be compelled by individual moments and characters, and hope that the intrigue generated by the likes of William and Maeve and others, will amount to some sort of greater whole as the pieces the show listlessly shuffles into place start to come together.

Second episode has a very different tone to the first, I thought. It was a lot to take in and I think I enjoyed it a bit less, but still very engrossed. The two newcomers are obviously stand-ins for the two leads in the original film, though they've made their personalities very extreme (Ben Barnes is a monster).

LOVED that disorienting transition from the staging area to suddenly being on a moving train. What on Earth is going on there? Fascinating.

Thandie Newton's stuff was the most interesting, along with Delores' continuing story, though I really wanted to follow her more. The Man In Black's story was odd - I like it, but if he can't be hurt then there isn't much real tension in any of it. It's like he's being cruel just for the sake of it, and I don't see why it's at all necessary right now. Obviously, we need more of his story revealed. Ed Harris is great, anyway.

And as everyone else is saying, Sizemore the scriptwriter is just... appalling. How did this guy get cast? Is it intentional? It's utterly horrendous acting and dialogue. Is it going to turn out that he's a robot that they're trying to teach emotions to? Similarly, I'm not amazed by the female administrator either, and the reveal that she's sleeping with the engineer felt a bit soap opera-esque.

Great use of 'No Surprises'.

Imagine, if you will, that Westworld actually existed in some form in reality. Now before you too far down that rabbit hole, understand that the basic premise behind Ford's intention is mirrored somewhat in Disney World. But in reality, Nolan and Joy's vision here sees a synthesis between the philosophical drive behind Disney's Imagineers and the realization of game theory in modern open world gaming, particularly seen in experiences like The Elder Scrolls or Breath of the Wild. I think about all this because of arguably one of the most powerful and interesting lines of the first season, Ford's "they come here to see who they could be."

It's the details, he emphasizes. But not the obvious ones. It's the tiny, perhaps inconsequential, ones. The ones that people think they're the first to notice. This becomes interesting because it echoes the zeitgeist of games in the 21st century. Think to reddit posts. People love to point out details that they think they've discovered. Then think to walking through Disney World. It's a place of discovery, really. We see tiny things that seem to be almost imperceptible as if they were placed there for no reason at all. It's gratifying. We think we matter. We feel a sense of immersion from a thing that doesn't even make a difference on the macro to the entire thing, but matters most to our enjoyment. But that thing, that thing that matters the most, is fake. We weren't the first to notice it. Others have too. It was deliberately created and placed in an area just obscure enough for you to feel important.

The modern adaptation of old philosophical concepts in this episode is really fascinating because it applies it through parts we can relate to. Although we can't empathize totally with The Man in Black, we can see parts of ourselves in him, wishing there was more.