Avelera

So Westworld is good but it’s very confusing and my writer brain has been turning it over like a rubix cube since I began watching season 2. I’m up to episode 7 now, but the following analysis will endeavor not to reference events as such except where marked, it’s mostly a craft discussion. Nevertheless, just in case I’ll put it below a cut, mark spoilers (which will be minor and vague) in the text, and ask people not to spoil the end of the show for me.

The good:

– Amazing, passionate (beautiful, dear lord) actors/actresses dedicate to the pathos of their characters giving riveting performances. 

– When the script decides to go poetic it may not make any damn sense at all but BOY is it pretty.

– The budget, sets, scenery, the photography, all make for a visually stunning feast.

– Big questions getting asked like what makes us human, emotional arcs that show characters changing from when we first met them. 

The “bad” (or rather, the confusing):

– Westworld is very jumbled and confusing in a way that doesn’t win my trust that they’re 100% certain of what they’re doing and aren’t instead just going for maximum shock value. 

– Scenes often feel out of order, as if many brilliant scenes and arcs were shot but some were simply stuck in at a certain points of the episode’s timeline to fill the time rather than because they directly followed, so there’s not necessarily a sense of building tension. 

– The central theme seems scattered and confused over the large cast. The previous season felt as if it had a stronger focus on the question of “what makes us human, and are the hosts humans?” that question seems to have vanished largely in this season, despite how compelling it was. Only Maeve’s plotline seems to bring it forward, but it gets lost in the jumble of other plotlines, lingering questions (that should have been answered by now), and newly introduced but not well fleshed-out themes. 

– The biggest failure is in “why” things happen, as in “why now?” Characters have dramatic moments and reversals that don’t seem prompted by any particular exterior or interior action that has taken place. Cool stuff happens like beads strung on to a necklace, each one beautiful, but not necessarily building towards a central revelation, revealing character, or moving plot. Stuff often happens just because it would be “cool”, which is fine but does leave one a bit dissatisfied. Spoiler: for example, Dolores’s emotional reunion with her father in the facility is a gorgeous scene, but her reversal on what to do once she finds him feels unprompted.

– The story often lacks a bird’s eye view of what’s going on and why we should care in the pursuit of hiding the mystery from the audience. There’s been multiple times where questions like “What is the park for?” have been asked but the reason for it not being answered at that moment strains credulity. 

– The technology is wobbly. Sometimes we can bring the dead hosts back. Sometimes we can’t. Sometimes injuries bother the hosts. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the human techs are able to help the hosts, sometimes they can’t. Sometimes hosts break down, sometimes they don’t. The fact that the worldbuilding isn’t more solid and apparent in its rules of what can or can’t happen makes it hard to build suspense or anticipation. Even stuff as simple as “which guns work when, on who, and why?” cause confusion.

– Plot points feel placed for maximum drama, but feel cherry picked by the author rather than organic to the story because there’s no explanation of why this particular plot point happened this way. For example (Spoiler) Dolores’s father being so key to IP in the site. It could have been any character, so why him, except that it draws Dolores into a central conflict she wouldn’t otherwise care about?

– Finally, the timeline seems broken in two, but is not as elegantly interwoven as in the first season, and so the reason for it being broken in two at all doesn’t seem present except to add another layer of confusion and “suspense” over how the opening scenes of the season (which we may have already forgotten by now) tie in.

Basically, Westworld is a very enjoyable story and I am taking notes on matters of spectacle and dramatic character scenes, but it lacks central theme, build, and suspense because of its scattered nature and focus on tension based on mystery rather than prediction or anticipation. I will certainly watch it to the end, but at times it is fatiguing to watch and try to pull together all the different elements when there doesn’t always seem to be something tying them together.