So, within short order, the new Westworld begins acting more and more like the same old Westworld. People don’t work like that, nor do huge, premium-cable sci-fi spectacles. At one point, he complains that a new situation “makes me look back on my time in a murder simulation theme park with fondness.”īut staying in a bad relationship in the belief that you can fix your partner almost never works, because asking them to be only their best and none of their worst is asking them to become an entirely different person.
(*) Luke Hemsworth’s Stubbs, the former Westworld security chief, somewhat shockingly becomes the most consistent source of humor, given how fed up he is with everything happening. As Caleb’s side work as a freelance criminal on an Uber-style app intersects with Dolores’ plot to overthrow humanity, it feels as if Nolan and Joy have pulled off the impossible reinvention promised by that trailer.
The premiere is characteristically dour - outside of scenes with Thandie Newton’s wry super-robot Maeve, it’s always startling whenever anyone on this show is funny(*) - but emotionally engaging in a way the show only tried to be in a handful of previous episodes. And the casual world-building of this future can be jaw-droppingly beautiful. Caleb is almost instantly more compelling than any of the human characters from previous seasons - though as I write this sentence, it occurs to me that I’ve lost track of which humans ultimately turned out to be humans, and which of them were, like Bernard, robots whose true identities were hidden from us and/or them. We know from his years as Jesse Pinkman just how effectively Paul can play angst and alienation. It’s something of a role reversal from how Dolores and the other hosts had to submit to the cruel whims of the human guests, even as early episodes depict just how much the top one percent of the One Percent are living higher than ever on this placid dystopia their computers have built. After a prologue that shows Dolores delivering some karmic justice to one of the many powerful men who abused her during her time as a park host, we get to know Caleb (Paul), a military vet struggling to readjust to civilian life, especially in a future where everything is controlled by algorithms. Season Three does, in fact, start out feeling like a brand-new-ish show, one that incorporates the strengths of the first two seasons while mostly casting aside the more self-indulgent parts. Heck, it even suckered me back in after I’d written off the show following the Season Two finale. The creators seem aware that they let the spoiler tail wag the narrative dog, and over the summer promised, “This is season is a little less of a guessing game.” Pair self-reflective comments like that with a change in locale prompted by robots Dolores ( Evan Rachel Wood) and Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) leaving the park at the end of last season, then add in new faces like Paul ( fresh off El Camino), Vincent Cassel, and Tommy Flanagan from Sons of Anarchy, and it looked like as fresh a start as a show this prominent could make several years into its run.
Season Two in particular seemed less concerned with telling a story than with outsmarting Redditors who sniffed out Season One’s big twist moments after the character in question was introduced.
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Mostly, though, they just used those amazing resources in service of puzzle-box nonsense, valuing surprise over characterization, even over Westworld‘s larger philosophical questions about the nature of existence and free will. With an incredible cast and a seemingly limitless production budget, Nolan and Joy could have crafted virtually any story that had something even vaguely in common with the Seventies film on which the show is based.
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That’s because few series in recent memory have squandered such vast potential and resources as thoroughly as Westworld did.
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