Someone should give Hale a fresh pair of underwear.
There's a lot happening in this episode but it's all so clunky. Westworld is usually pretty good with not playing favorites and allowing the main characters to get messed up pretty bad and "dying" but this episode had way too many situations where Dolores or Teddy or Maeve or whoever hit every single fucking shot except for the shots on major characters. A lot of the dialogue and choices that were made were also questionable and the convergence of the timelines was so inferior to how it was done in the first season it's not even really comparable.
Pros
+Maeve confronting Man in Black
+Possessed Bernard
+Dolores intimidating the dumb bitch using her father
Neutral
*Teddy going berserk
Cons
-while the confrontation with William was good, it's setting up the all too obvious daughter rescue mission
-that idiotic decision for that guard to talk to the obviously hostile blonde host lady
-pretty much everyone seems like they're just running around like a chicken with its head cut off
[6.7/10] We only have two data points to go on, but it seems like Episode 7 is going to the part of the average Westworld season where the big reveals happen. Les Escorches is less a story, or even a chapter of a story, than it is just a series of twists and revelations, and other instances of the show pulling back some curtains, even though there are undoubtedly more curtains to come. And honestly, I cannot be bothered to muster up that much enthusiasm for any of them.
But let’s start with the biggest one. We finally know the purpose of the park. It is not, as I once theorized, to use hosts as soldiers or as infiltrating doubles of world leaders and such. It is not, as I thought the show was hinting at, a commentary on online data-collection, where guests are the product not the customers. It is, instead, a testing ground for the park to test the accuracy of their downloaded and copied versions of the guests’ minds.
It is mildly clever. In turns the hosts from highly sophisticated toys or objects of fantasy into the control group for a grand experiment. It recontextualizes the conversations between Arnold/Bernard and Dolores, changing them from him testing her to her testing him. It shows that the hidden, presumably lucrative goal of this park is not just to entertain the wealthy with their basest desires, but to achieve digital immortality, and keep the human mind intact and copyable in some form after death.
It’s not a bad twist. I’ll admit that the “robots are there to test the fidelity of the copied humans” bit feels a little implausible to me, but it’s enough to pass the smell test. Human preservation is longstanding extension of science fiction stories where human-like robots are present, and a natural one at that. Nothing in this reveal is outright bad, beyond Ford’s usual array of portentous word salad in describing it, and the necessary gobfulls of exposition the episode doles out to explain it all.
But it just doesn't move me. Okay, the park exists to preserve people, even if the technology to put them in equivalent robo-bodies without them going mad isn’t really there yet. So what?
From a plot standpoint, it doesn't really change much. It means that anybody who dies may not be dead for long, but that’s been a part of Westworld from the beginning. Whether it’s the hosts being refurbished, or Bernard turning out to be the second coming of Arnold, or Elsie turning out have been imprisoned rather than killed, death has long been cheap on this show, so the possibility of familiar characters living on doesn't do much to move the needle.
It doesn't really do much thematically either. I like the broader theme that Westworld has been setting up for a while -- that there is a coming conflict between humanity and synthetic people as to who shall inherit the Earth. This reveal is an escalation of that conflict, one that shows that human beings have technology to make them as malleable and improvable as their potentially faster, stronger, counterparts.
But again, we’ve already had the idea of Arnold surviving as Bernard, of Ford maintaining robotic versions of his family (including him as a child), of Papa Delos existing in some form after his death, even with beaucoup kinks to work out. This is the big mystery that Westworld has kept under lock and key from the beginning, and when it’s out in the open, it’s perfectly fine, but neither narratively jaw-dropping or thematically impactful enough to really make a difference.
The second, related but less interesting reveal, is what’s inside Peter Abernathy’s head. It turns out to be a decryption key, one that will presumably decode all the human minds that have been transmuted to digital form. That at least has some symbolic resonance, as Dolores must effectively kill her father in order to obtain the thing that will give her power over her erstwhile controllers. It means there is a sacrifice she has to make in order to obtain her freedom.
But in practice, it gives us a farewell exchange between the Abernathies that isn’t nearly as emotion-laden as the one earlier in the season, a stock conversation between a confident-but-subtle-groveling Hale and an intimidating Dolores, and a thin excuse for the humans to escape a sticky situation thanks to some well-timed mayhem.
Well-timed mayhem is the name of the game here. If you want action, this episode features robots vs. strike forces, femme fatales pulling grenades, and skirmishes shot in silhouette. And it all becomes completely, utterly static nigh-instantly. There’s some meaning in the way that the hosts are indecipherable from the security forces, and we get yet another brick in the wall of ruthless Teddy being concerning, but it’s bland action that can’t excite otherwise.
It does, however, lead to the one well-done colloquy in this whole thing, which happens between Dolores and Maeve. The show has teased their interactions before, but it’s a compelling contrast, to see the two liberated and in-charge hosts clashing if not exactly having a conflict with one another. (Prediction: that will change, though probably not for another season or two).
Dolores is amazed at Maeve’s journey, but is ready to put her out of her misery, but Maeve wants to hang on to save her daughter. Dolores, having just lobotomized her father, has made peace with the idea that the idea of family implanted by their programmers is “just another lash,” but Maeve isn’t so convinced, and sees Dolores’s altering of Teddy’s psychology as something that makes Dolores no better than the humans. It’s brief, and a little too grandiose in places, but there’s a juxtaposition of perspectives there that generates more meaning than all the shocking reveals that “Les Escorches” can muster.
The last of these reveals is that Ford is not only alive and well (or at least his mind is), but that he’s imprinted himself on Bernard, to the point that he can not only order Bernard around, but even take control of Bernard’s body when he chooses to. It’s a neat enough twist in that it means we can question any odd behavior from Bernard in the “present” as potentially being directed by Ford, and it’s a reasonable excuse to keep Anthony Hopkins around.
But again, it feels like a twist for the sake of a twist, something hidden from us not because it really adds meaning when it’s revealed, but because Westworld wanted to deliver a shock at the appointed time. There’s plenty of potential -- in terms of storylines, character work, and metaphor -- in somebody self-aware but living with another person inside them who causes them to do things against their will. Why that information is delivered the way it is -- with the usual spate of exposition and florid nonsense and cryptic hints -- is beyond me.
But maybe I’m just watching the show wrong. Maybe I’m in it for the meaning that can be extracted from new souls finding their humanity, gaining their freedom, and establishing what self-identity amounts to in a premise that works fantastically as a series of though experiments, while the show wants to deliver soapy reveals and pulpy twists with abandon, with the idea that pulling the rug out from under the audience is more important that making those twists mean something.
“Les Escorches” has plenty of dramatic reveals, but it’s light on letting them amount to anything real, and that makes it pretty damn hard to care.
I just can't pick a side. Who is the bad side and who are the good guys. Just so confusing.
Talk about decode humans... I'm gonna need a whole week to decode this episode!
I'm glad Ford is back. Now he gets to keep messing with Bernard.
Ford: “Here let me tell you what is happening”
Me right now: what the fuck is happening?
Welcome to WestWorld. Angela (Right before Sacrificing herself)
The lesson we learn is no one is happy. Humans are in search of immortality to make them feel more comfortable with life/death etc.. while the hosts are in search of mortality to have their "life" have a purpose and meaning. Kind of deep sense that humans/hosts are both in search of the thing that they aren't supposed to - or can't - have.
I hope Elsie makes it back to dental school.
We're all doomed because some dude couldn't resist the urge to bang a sexy robot.
You try writing 300 stories in three weeks! ;)
We learned that sci-fi special forces teams do not enjoy wearing helmets while embracing over top cliches.
Bernard: So, it's my story now?!
Ford: Yes!
Bernard: Cool, let me do all this cool shit now.
Ford: By the way, we gotta kill these people real quick.
Bernard: But, you said...
Ford: Yeah, I lied!Welcome to Delos. We spent 90% of our budget on the parks, 9% on accommodations, and 1% on Security. Welcome to the 1%.
Recap
Bernard being awoken by Ashley Stubbs in the present, weeks after the robot uprising started. Stubbs doesn’t trust Charlotte Hale or Strand to protect the lives of its employees or guests. But, before he and Bernard can discuss it more thoroughly, Strand proves Stubbs right by apprehending him and Bernard and taking them to the secret Delos bunker located in the basement replica of Dr. Ford’s childhood home, the same place where Ford had Bernard kill Teresa in season 1.
Teresa’s blood is still on the wall. Strand thinks either Bernard or Stubbs killed her, but right before Strand is about to settle on blaming Stubbs, Bernard speaks up and leads the crew down a secret passage where they uncover a bunch of extra Bernard bodies.
As the revelation that Bernard is a host sinks in, Hale delivers a line fit for a Disney villain: “I figured you’d have some skeletons in your closet, Bernard. I didn’t think they’d be your own.” Ugh. The next time we see Bernard, Hale is torturing him in an attempt to discover the location of Peter Abernathy, so we know immediately that Peter — and probably whatever valuable data Delos wants to suck out of his head — must get taken in Dolores’ attack.
At Charlotte’s urging, Bernard flashes back to the past, where we see Dolores and Teddy lead their forces in an assault on the Mesa. Coughlin sends his Delos strike team to intercept, but get ambushed by Angela and her group. Dolores and Teddy, meanwhile make their way to the room where Charlotte has Dolores’ father bolted to a table.
Hale tries to defuse the tense situation by patronizing Dolores into submission, using the Cradle as leverage. It goes to waste. Dolores isn’t phased by the thought of what might happen to all the host backups there; in fact, she’s here specifically to destroy them, reasoning that that’s the only way she and her kind will indeed be “free.” Charlotte has nothing here and is poised to have less still after Dolores revs up a nasty-looking whirling saw and waves it menacingly in Charlotte’s face. But distant gunfire and Peter Abernathy stirring provide a timely distraction, and Hale and Stubbs escape.
Left alone, Peter tells Dolores it’s okay, and she removes his control unit. It’s an emotional scene, and sort of a cruel thing for Dolores to do, but as we see later in her conversation with Maeve, Dolores thinks that “the kin they gave us” is just another way for the humans to tie them down. Away with them.
Meanwhile, Angela’s team makes it to the Cradle. Angela seduces an idiot Delos QA guy into letting her get close and then uses his grenades to blow the whole thing to smithereens, killing herself for good in the process. Welcome to WestWorld.
With the Cradle destroyed, the stakes are finally real for the hosts, as they can no longer be recreated and brought back online. Without their backup code stored safely in the Cradle, the host can be killed for good. RIP Angela.
Right before the Cradle was about to be destroyed, Bernard and Dr. Ford continue the conversation they started at the end of last week’s episode. Ford explains that Westworld was never about providing a vacation spot for the rich, but instead about gathering data on its human visitors so Delos could successfully mimic human behavior. As we saw with JamesDelosBot, the prospect of giving someone immortal life by putting their consciousness in a host’s body is a very seductive one; you can make more money off that than by letting them stay in Violent Disney World.
Ford had himself uploaded to the Cradle before Dolores killed him in the season 1 finale, but explains that he could only ever exist digitally. If he tried to upload his data into the body of a host, he would degrade rapidly as James Delos did. Much as they’ve been attempting, Delos’ grand experiment still hasn’t been successful.
But if Delos can’t make functioning human-bots, how do you explain Bernard, who is ostensibly a copy of Arnold, Ford’s old business partner? Ford explains that, too. Ford built Bernard long ago, in the house that Arnold built for his family, the same one we saw in Episode 2. With help from Dolores, who knew Arnold better than anyone, they tested Bernard for similarities to Arnold over the course of many years. But it ends up that Bernard was never supposed to be a replica of Bernard. Indeed, Ford seems to find the notion of making exact models of actual people distasteful; he’d instead design something new. Bernard embodies much of who Arnold was, but was made to be “nobler” and better than base humans, which may explain for Ford seems so eager for the hosts to conquer their makers.
But he doesn’t trust them completely. Ford jumps into Bernard’s mind as a passenger, a secret friend only Bernard can see and guides him through the Mesa. I wonder if co-piloting a host is more comfortable for one mind, or if Ford will still degrade inside Bernard.
Later in the episode, Bernard is confronted with a few Delos security officers. They get confrontational, and while Bernard doesn’t want to commit any more violence, Ford takes over his body, picks up a machine gun, and shoots all the humans in the Mesa map room. He also works the keys at a Delos terminal and opens the “door” (whatever that is), so the hosts can have a chance at surviving the uprising.
While all this is happening, Maeve and her daughter are fleeing from members of the Ghost Nation tribe. They run into an abandoned town and hide inside a house. The Man in Black and his men ride into the same town. He enters that same house, which is understandably terrifying for Maeve on account of the Man in Black killing her in front of her daughter in one of her previous narratives, but a lot has changed since then.
Maeve pulls a gun and shoots MIB, who’s under the impression that Maeve is just another marker Ford has left for him and uses her Jedi mind powers to make his men turn on him. Lawrence draws his gun on Maeve just as she’s about to deliver the coup de grâce to MIB, and tells her to drop the weapon. Maeve tries her voice on Lawrence, but it doesn’t work, and she congratulates him on being “free.” (Maeve control hosts by injecting her voice through a mesh network, this doesn't work on awake or semi-awake hosts because they have their voice already and can tell her to piss off.)
Apparently, her mind bullets only work on hosts who aren’t free from their narratives, and she implores Lawrence to remember all the horrible things MIB has done to him in the past. Lawrence remembers and shoots MIB directly in the center of his chest. Just then, Lee Sizemore shows up with the cavalry: the Delos security forces he called in last week’s episode.
Maeve tries to run for it but is shot several times by the Delos QA team, and falls on the ground watching helplessly as Ghost Nation tribesmen swoop in and grab her daughter. In confusion, MIB crawls away and hides behind some barrels. He was shot four times — one of which was center mass — yet somehow he still lives. Or he could be a host.
Lee and his Delos teams return to the Mesa, only to find it under attack by Dolores and Teddy. On her way out, Dolores sees Maeve and offers to end her suffering, but Maeve says she made a promise to her daughter to find her. Maeve also points out some of Dolores’ questionable methods, like turning Teddy into a MurderBot against his will, and says she’s “lost in the dark.” Dolores, ever clear-eyed about her future, maintains that she’s doing what she has to do to free her people from bondage. They have a Professor X/Magneto thing going on; they want the same thing but have different ideas of how to achieve it. I’m curious to see if they come into greater conflict down the line.
Dolores honors Maeve’s request and leaves her there, while Lee hides in the corner.
The final scene of the episode is Charlotte Hale interrogating Bernard. She wants to know where Peter Abernathy is. Bernard obliges right after being placed into analysis mode.
Who else waited for Anthony Hopkins appearance? xD
And that epic quote
We weren't here to code the hosts.
We were here to decode the guests.
However, in my mind, this episode full of flaws, like what the guard did and caused the cradle to get destroyed! really WTF! and how everyone is just getting killed almost without a fight! Shame on you HBO, we didn't expect those mistakes from you!!
I only gave it 7 because of Anthony Hopkins appearance.
An eye for an eye. But all the other parts first. -
Dolores
Charlotte i love you. Fucking Dolores! please someone kill that fucking robot soon, at least we got a dead Maeve in the near future
THAT EPISODE JUST FUCKED ME UP SO BADLY
Shout by whos_ur_buddhaBlockedParent2018-06-11T23:17:38Z
I really wish the editors placed visual indicators so you know where the hell they are in the time line. It’s super annoying because half that time you’re going “...wait where in the timeline is this?” They made it unnecessarily complex for no freaking reason because they refuse to provide any sort of indicators.