Woke up in Westworld

MANILA, Philippines — Somewhere during Westworld’s Season 2 opener, rancher’s daughter Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) has an epiphany. Having evolved past her robotic “host” script, she now considers what to do with a trio of guests — scared, trembling humans, strung up with nooses round their necks.

“Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” she asks them, six-shooter in hand. She realizes she could be what her past coding has led her to be, or move on: “I’m of several minds. The rancher’s daughter looks to see the beauty in you. The possibilities. The Wyatt (an outlaw program the hosts are internally guided by) sees the ugliness and disarray.”

Inside, she realizes, “something else is growing. I’ve evolved into something new. And I have one last role to play.” That’s her true self, of course.

It’s not surprising that Westworld would eventually mirror real-life changes in how we look at abusive relationships. The first season of the HBO series focused on the abuses endured, unwittingly, by the “hosts” — sophisticated robots designed to tickle the fancies of paying “guests” who employ them in any number of assaultive situations. “These violent delights have violent ends,” more than one Westworld host recited in Season 1, echoing Shakespeare.

Now, as Season 2 picks up on a Delos theme park in which the tables have been turned, we enter a world of “woke” robots. Suddenly, they’ve attained enough AI consciousness to realize they’ve been used, and they’re not pleased. Now, they look upon humans as the virus: intruders on their perfect world.

This is a perfect kickoff for what Season 1 took basically forever to arrive at: Westworld hosts, led by the recently murderous-looking Dolores and Maeve (Thandie Newton), are each starting to inch toward the center of their own maze: reaching full consciousness of their situation, without the daily “wipe” of unpleasant, violent activities. That the two host leaders here are women may be only an incidental nod to the #MeToo movement, but it’s there nonetheless. These fembots are not gonna take it anymore. Time’s up, guests!

And that’s where the season opener puts us. The HBO series created by Jonathan Nolan and wife Lisa Joy likes to tease out info (one trailer for the upcoming season played on geek fans’ incessant demand for “spoilers”: it abruptly cuts from a few random clips of the new season to a video of Wood and co-star Angela Sarafyan performing Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up straight to the camera. Joke’s on you, geek fans! You’ve been Rickrolled by Westworld!)

While Season 1 played out reruns of host scripts through Western-style clichés, now things have changed. Dolores is woke, so is Maeve, a saloon madame who’s suffered countless psychic traumas, and other robots are starting to get the big picture. Returning too are Jeffrey Wright as the tragically conflicted Bernard (a host built by Ford, based on the image of his park co-creator Arnold), and Ed Harris as, it turns out, a much older, richer version of William (Jimmi Simpson) — the young Westworld guest from 30 years ago who now seeks a more cutting-edge gaming challenge. On the run in the park after Dolores sets off a killing spree targeting stockholders and guests, the black-hatted Harris encounters a robotic child speaking in Dr. Ford’s chilled British accent. Harris realizes “the stakes are real in this place now. Real consequences.” But now, the child informs him, “You’re in my game.”

Westworld is loaded with layers and ideas, and in that sense it’s a perfect geek show, even more so than Game of Thrones, maybe. Questions of AI, singularity, data breaches and identity theft are as timely as #MeToo nods, and in that sense, Westworld couldn’t be more relevant. But it does tend to substitute visceral violence for plot development, and drag a bit while advancing that plot, possibly because the show is constructed as an elaborate puzzle with pieces that only become clearer by the end of the season, or upon reviewing. Still, there’s little in the season opener as thrilling as seeing Dolores wield a shotgun on horseback, her docile Alice in Wonderland bewilderment replaced by hard-earned fury; or watching Maeve evolve into the role of boss over a theme park that once treated her as a mindless object. 

The game is real, indeed. And the stakes are raised.

* * *

Westworld Season 2 airs on HBO, Mondays, 9 a.m. with a replay at 10 p.m.