The Westworld Rickroll

“This week on Dear Television: Aaron Bady grapples with the concept that a television program might actually be improving. “

“The question of Westworld’s second season, to put it simply, is this: Is it back on its bullshit?”

“These weren’t “twists” the plot took; the entire show was built to keep these secrets from the audience, the way a house is built to keep out rain. Every aspect of it was constructed to manipulate you into misunderstanding what you were “really” seeing, make you jump to the “wrong” conclusions so that you could then be stunned by the discovery that what you had thought you were watching wasn’t what you had (really) been watching at all. “

“The first season was a card trick, in other words, an illusion carefully constructed to make the final act revelations possible: Arnold and Bernard are really different! William and the Man in Black are really the same! ZOMG!”

“If you disliked the show—for reasons other than its love of gratuitous violence, sexual violence, or gratuitous sexuality and violence—it might be because you don’t love the games it plays with you. “

“If you know the sign-systems through which narrative television creates meaning, it’s easy enough to stage false coincidences that will lead the viewers to the wrong conclusion, and to exclude the information that would lead them to the right ones.”

“But if that’s what you’re doing, what makes those conclusions wrong? If the audience correctly interpreted the narrative codes you used to construct your story—if they read the story the way they were supposed to—what makes them wrong?”

” In a show where “everything is code,” as Creepy Young Robert Ford Robot tells us, “real” is a term left without substance.”

“I find that I dislike the first season of the show, now; to prepare for the new season, I tried to watch it, and I couldn’t. Partly this is because—in order to write about it last year—I watched and re-watched it many times, and there is little pleasure left in re-discovery. I already know the whole story, and like the Man in Black, I’m really bored with the old games. But it’s also because, once you know the trick, you notice that there isn’t much there other than the trick. You can admire the craft with which it is put together, retroactively noting how the whole thing was artfully constructed to fool you and exploring the artifice with which it was done (and it is substantial!).”

“But you can’t get fooled again, and too much of what you’re (now) seeing turns out to have been misdirection for a story you can no longer be tricked by. Once you pull the maze apart, the pathway to the center is disappointingly direct.”

“That we know we don’t know the answers to these questions seems to signal that Westworld might be playing straight with us. Season two seems to be building outward instead of inward; the host played by Evan Rachel Wood has two personalities—Dolores and Wyatt, thesis and antithesis—but she insists that she is growing into something new, dialectically synthesizing a new role for herself. And so for the show as a whole, which is now positively post-Fordist; with God dead, his creation can now, it would seem, create a new future. Instead of playing out games already programmed ahead of time, we might be watching a movement forward, into the “real” world.”

“And yet, what is “real”? Just before Bernard’s appearance on the beach, in a sort of prologue, we see a conversation between Jeffrey Wright and Rachel Evans Wood. Keen-eyed viewers will note the backdrop—an underground bunker that we learned last season was Arnold’s private workshop—and deduce that Arnold is interrogating Dolores, in the earliest days of the park, when she was first demonstrating hints of self-consciousness; we are seeing Arnold coming face-to-face with the truth of what he has created, something that might grow beyond the bounds of his initial conception.”

“She asks him “what is real?” and he tells her: “That which is irreplaceable.” When that answer doesn’t satisfy her—when she tells him that he isn’t being honest—he changes the subject; “You frighten me, Dolores…you are growing, learning so quickly; I’m frightened of what you might become, what path you might take.””

“In this exchange, we are seeing the kind of legible foreshadowing that the first scene of a new season usually provides, for audiences that know the “code” of prestige television; Dolores’ consciousness brings choices with real consequences, that there will be stakes to her free will: put on a “white” hat or a “black” one? A thesis of the first season was that grief, pain, and loss were the keys to consciousness, that it was only by going through hell that the hosts could become real: only by losing something could they reach the center of their own maze. This scene would seem to confirm Arnold’s hunch, catching us up on what we learned last season.”