Westworld, our sweet violent delight

This fall is giving us excellent experiences if you are a TV Show enthusiast. It all started with Quarry, which cut so deep in me that I still can't write about it in a reasonable number of lines. Then we had Pitch, a show that is somehow managing to face any major contemporary theme while telling a story about baseball. Then many other shows are going very well: You are the Worst, Chance, and even The Walking Dead is coming back to be a great show thanks to the best villain ever.

Above all of that, here comes HBO. For. The. Win. 

Westworld just aired its last episode and I can finally be sure about one thing: it is the show of the year. I will not say anything that can possibly spoil the events of this amazing show, go ahead with peace.

Westworld is a futuristic theme park inhabited by robots where the visitors go to be involved in numerous storylines. Or, you know, to kill or have sex with stuff. The show drives us along some of those storylines, making us grope in the maze of its main plot, and showing us the hand every time before hitting with unusual strength.

The futuristic look of the show is masterfully mixed with the raw, dusty one of a western movie. The subtle, sneaky moves of the big corporation are surrounded by the dreams and the obsessions of a human mind. The piano is playing in the background, but it is playing a rock song. The perfect gift wrapped up with extremely convincing acting performances, deep dialogues, and a few hauntingly beautiful scenes.

There are many aspects of this show that make it great, but the one that stands out, in my opinion, is the use of foreshadowing. Mostly because this series made me realize that I don't hate foreshadowing, I simply never liked how it was used before. Every piece of information is given in the first few episodes and the rest of the season relentlessly drives the viewers to what they knew all along. In this sense, Westworld is very similar to the first season of Mr. Robot. Every turn, every twist, every revelation is in front of you at any given moment: you just realize it step by step.

The narration is designed to make you lose sight of what you know, providing a full immersion in the fictitious world represented by the park. The narration itself is the maze and the viewer is the character looking for its center. This mechanism is so well implemented that nothing is really a surprise anymore, every twist is part of the maze and you see it coming. However, like the characters are completing their journey, loop after loop, you also need time to process it and the effect of every revelation is not ruined.

If you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?

In this genre, a recurrent theme is what can possibly differentiate a human from a very intelligent machine. The authors acknowledge that in the first two episodes using two not so relevant characters and thus paving the way for the exploration of such deep theme. The instrument for the exploration is an introspective trip, involving both the humans and the machines, eventually leading to their own consciousness and, ultimately, to free will.

The robots struggle relentlessly looking for a way to do something originated by their own will and not by their code. They miserably fail over and over, since their will is by definition a creation, they are constantly under the control of their maker. At the same time, every human in the park experiences something that resembles a world of complete freedom. This is no less than another illusion of the creator of Westworld: for how much they let themselves go, none of their choices is unscripted.

As one may expect, the rebellion to such scheme emerges on both sides. We assist to the same stages of the different journey that a robot and a human experience in their seek of freedom. The only difference is that a human will be able to leave the park and its illusions, finally experiencing a true free will and a true consciousness. Under this light, the park/maze is for the hosts a representation of what a religion is for a human brain (I will elaborate more in the spoiler section).

The theme is beautiful, although not particularly original for the genre (I cite Dark Matter as most recent example AND for a pointless self-promotion). In conclusion, there is a concept to express, a very good story to do so, and a general badassery all over the place. This is more than enough to look forward to a season 2. 
(Do not pass the picture to avoid spoilers)

These violent delights have violent ends

    
I would like to spend a few more words to explain the religious analogy that I saw in Westworld. The hosts are designed to have a very blessed life, considering that their purpose is to satisfy any sadistic impulse of the guests. They are designed to not see anything that may hurt them because, otherwise, it will drive them crazy. As soon as they are allowed to see the real world, they call the humans gods and, of course, the first decision is to kill the gods and free themselves. However, this is just another illusion because, once that you admit the existence of a maker, free will loses any meaning and even the killing of the gods or the acquisition of self-consciousness is just a permission given by a greater designer.

I particularly appreciated a moment in the finale where the technician finds out that Bernard is a robot and instantly questions his own nature, stressing out how facing the existence of a maker lead to an instantaneous collapse of the self-consciousness. However, again, if you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?

Another question is: now that the true god has been killed, are the hosts really free or rather actors in a different narration? 

At last, I would like to speculate on what is coming next. After the mark left in me by the second season of Mr. Robot, I try to manage my expectations as much as I can. One of the more interesting characters, Antony Hopkins (in the role of himself, evidently), is dead and therefore I expect the show to elaborate a way to compensate such important defection.

We saw on the technician's note to Maeve that the park is only park 1. Moreover, we saw the samurais being prepared. So, looking at the original material too, I expect to see a lot about this other park. The result is not going to be good a priori, but the writers pleasantly surprised me so I am confident in a good result. Moreover, we have to wait till 2018 and this may indicate another accurate execution of the new narration.

The first season was so well designed that it didn't leave many open questions. It is, in a sense, very self-consistent and there would be nothing wrong to end the show with those amazing 90 minutes. Except that it was so good that I want more.

We are then left with the usual feeling: we must wait an entire year to find out. Luckily we can watch scenes like this one every day. 

The fall of the titan: Mr. Robot

I took my time to re-watch the two seasons and be sure about what I want to discuss here. Before moving forward, I have to admit that I can't hold such discussion without talking about specific events of the 22 episodes aired so far. So consider yourself warned, there will be spoilers.

I also have to admit that I am writing these lines with the spirit of a betrayed lover. Therefore, to explain my feelings, I have to justify both the love and the betrayal.

The love was coming from season 1. I am not afraid to say that Mr. Robot (with Sense8 a close second) was the best show of the past year for the concept, the message and, most of all, the execution. The structure of the narration was nearly perfect, moving the plot at every given episode without wasting any time: every single storyline matters in the big picture of the full season. I can spend many words on the convincing acting or the amazing camera work, or on how much I loved the soundtrack (and how they brutally interrupt it to let a scene suddenly begin). The psychological drama was in a sense hidden in the frame of the plot before revealing itself in that eighth episode and then explode in the amazing next one.

You knew it all along, didn't you? 

It is thus clear that living up to that level is difficult for any show. If you try to look at it with a cold heart, you will notice that you have enjoyed a show that is basically a montage of different movies. The high skill of the creators was lying precisely in feeding us something that we knew all along and yet entirely different and exciting. For this reason, I look at the first season as a miracle of TV Shows.

However, considering my high expectations, season 2 turned out to be such a mess on almost every good aspect of the previous one. I can't help to consider this a betrayal.

First of all, the season suffers from a problem sadly common to many many movie sequels/prequels: a good part of it is dedicated to explaining the previous season. Such explanations, like the episode that opens up with a flashback to the moment when they decided to do the hack, do not add anything to the story and, therefore, have no reason to be there. In a season that, as we will see in a moment, has to explore so many storylines, adding unnecessary details to something that already happened makes the narration cumbersome and confusing. 

It appears clear that the plots to be explored are 4:

• How they follow up the attack
• How they escape to the FBI
• What the Dark Army and WhiteRose have in mind
• What's the next move of the E-Corp

These were the plots to be developed and to some extent they were. My problem is in those useless flashbacks and in what surrounds them. One plot above all: Joanna, Tyrell Wellick's wife. At the beginning of the season, she is covering something up about the hack by paying and then killing (s02e05) the guy that woke up Elliot at the end of the previous season (s01e10). Then she is struggling to maintain a clandestine relationship with the boring but beautiful guy that punches like a little girl. Her continuous presence on screen is not justified by the events, I waited and waited to see if she got eventually relevant, but no. She receives calls for the entire season, that would be interesting if they were coming from Tyrell; except they were coming from another insignificant character! Her presence just slows down the stories and it is, in the big picture, irrelevant. 

One may argue that it will be relevant in the next season so they, so to speak, kept her character warm for the viewers. But this is a betrayal of the first season's approach where nothing was there only to set up a sequel.

Another element of confusion is the character of Angela. She is popping out everywhere in the story, in every subplot. She does everything, she even knows how to contact Tyrell and even WhiteRose is surprised of her. Her character takes so many spins and turns along the season to lose any identity: she is just what is needed to move the plot along, the Angela ex machina. 

Control can sometimes be an illusion, but sometimes you need illusion to gain control.

The first episodes were mostly dedicated to exploring the psychological drama of the main character, Elliot. This was done perfectly, with him fighting his alter ego and then understanding how to live with it (except falling in another illusion of control). I started to appreciate that only during my second viewing, especially once that I was sure what was the end of the mentioned illusion. It is precisely this difficulty in being involved in this new season that made me focus on another sloppy aspect of the show. 

We can all agree that the opening is very dense of plots to be wrapped together, reminders of what happened a year ago, and Elliot descending to madness. Thus I now justify the difficulties that brought Sam Esmail to apologize on twitter. However, after episode 5, the narration is confusing, jumping from character to character without a specific logic. Sometimes the authors interrupt one plot for 1 or even 2 episodes, moving our attention somewhere else. This can be a strategy to transmit the chaotic state of mind of the protagonist, but the effect is rather making the viewer less involved in what was happening on the screen. 

I could surely mention a few great scenes or even great episodes, from now and then. I surely appreciated the bold experiment of episode 6, where Elliot finds himself living in an illusory world based on the Tv Show Alf, a situation heavily recalling a scene from Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers that is one of my favorite movies. But if I have to evaluate the season in its entirety, Mr. Robot falls short even if I do not consider my high expectations.

You realize that the episodes that effectively develop the plots listed above are less than 5. In a 12 episodes season long, this is a failure at the level of Game of Thrones. The powerfulness of the show was to create a cluster of episodes where everything ultimately mattered and contributed to the final result. The plot was interesting and loaded with complexity by itself, the narration was then direct because further complications weren't needed. Here we just have another show trying to drown itself in the storytelling. The complexity is now coming from a cumbersome narration rather than from the plot itself.

The entire post could have been shorter, containing the single thoughts that surprised me at the end of season 2: I didn't want to find out immediately what happens next. This is how bad it was. And we can only feel sorry about that because we have probably lost a gem.