The first season was so fun. Loved peeling back layers of the onion and discovering what was really going on. Season 2 had a few bright spots, but after that it was clear the story had hit a dead end.
Westworld was one of those shows that, back when you had to record things to timeshift, I'd have been enthusiastically watching S1 when it dropped, watching S2 with a bit less urgency, let S3 accumulate for a while, and maybe never get around to S4.
No surprise, quality of the writing has been declining steadily since the first season. The original source material was only a hundred pages, the original ninety minute movie captured it. Drawing things out to ten, twenty, thirty, etc hours requires a lot of creativity but they mostly just rolled well worn tropes and hoped the visuals would make up the rest. In the end I was mostly watching for the theme song. I thought the last season was the final season since they managed to write in killing off all of humanity. I’m not sure how they would have come back from that but they probably would have ripped off either Dallas or Dr Who - maybe a dash of Wayward Pines sprinkled in.
Thought the show was great. Didn’t have any difficulty following season 4. Was hoping they were finally headed to space in season 5.
Tried to cancel my HBO subscription after this announcement. Only way to show disapproval. But it’s bundled with my internet service if I want the tier I’m in currently.
I agree. The show was particularly well written, especially regarding world-building and character development. Shame there won’t be a conclusion to Ford’s narrative, I feel like we would have seen him again in season 5.
Perhaps it was a bit too well-written; there were certainly times where it felt like the writers were entertaining their peers.
> Was hoping they were finally headed to space in season 5
That would have been an interesting setting for sure.
But, I just did a re-watch of it these last couple of months and I finished season 4 this weekend; Doloris clearly states it was going back to West World (wild West) in the last episodes. And the whole World was being re-built (from memory?) in order to play one last game [0].
To think this launched at the same time as Game of Thrones, which I never bothered with as it's just a mangled recount of the sordid dynasties and ruling classes of of former empires, but Game of Thrones was asking some much needed questions in regards to the implications of a Society more heavily reliant on technology. And while AGI will likely never come to fruition in my lifetime, 90s kid, it's still a rather good juxtaposition if it will just accelerate our demise and lead to our hasten extinction in this headlong pursuit and seemingly more dystopic existence.
Sidenote: The Cyberpunk theme of season 3 was visually interesting, with some solid premise (the importance of free will rather than a dictatorship via technocracy) but woefully bad as a whole in it's execution. Zero HP Lovecraft's gig economy app was heavily influencing the RICO app plotline for sure.
Yeah I mean I felt like it was clear-ish that Dolores was going to channel a Ford persona inside a big virtual simulation of the Wild West, probably eventually “remembering” him enough that he is technically reborn as immortal.
The moment I realized that that was going to be the pretense for the final season (a simulation) I groaned out loud.
That idea sounds exhausting to experience after seeing how the writers have handled things lately. I love dialogue-heavy shows, but the last two seasons of Westworld were needlessly ponderous and often melodramatic without a density of stimulating ideas to sustain interest.
More often than not later episodes felt like never-ending exposition. You're just sitting there being told what IS or how the character feels without experiencing anything for yourself.
Seemingly this final scenario (a simulation) would be super-fluid and un-moored from the internal consistency of a real-world setting, and that makes it hard for the viewer to give a damn about anything because the rules are so far beyond anything they can predict. So I was gearing up a full season of characters talking in a lofty manner with a diminished amount of substance at the core.
I stand corrected, I just recall everyone trying to get me to watch GOT and I was just exhausted telling them I wasn't interested in it when we spoke about WW. Since WW dealt with more pressing issues: the Human condition, and it's ever greater reliance on tech, and our collective extinction due to the aforementioned being inevitable unless we have a consciousness shift.
Interesting: Saw the last episode of season 4 and seriously thought it was the conclusion. Yes, there was the flash forward of season one ... but didn't think about that in the moment. And as others said: When you become aware while viewing that the show is stalling, its done. Had a number of these moments in seasons two and three. Now: Can I have Severance season two, please?
- Future London relies on too much flashy CGI instead of building the setting more subtly
- Flamboyant villain with stock henchman character
- Relationship complications that weren't in the book (although the book characters were a little flat)
- The near-future South is too Hollywood with very clean-cut characters and silly things like hover-Roombas (in the book the near-future parts struck me as far more grungy)
- The show relies on cheesy exposition whereas the book made you fill in the blanks yourself
This is my first experience with Amazon Video; I went in with the expectation that the producers would cut corners somewhere. I am glad they did it with the CGI and sets. The costumes (good guys at least) seem acceptably Gibson. Thought the Fishers were impeccably casted.. Although diverging from Gibsons original take. Indeed the onscreen personalities look like they came out of Neal Stephenson instead. Gibson’s protagonists can be a bit flat as pointed out elsewhere here. I thought Aelita comes closest to the Gibson type of character. (She was killed off early in the book) I would say so far this looks like one of the better adaptations of Gibsons works, but I can see that just transcribing the books wouldnt work.
The only shocking thing here is that they had actually planned a fifth season.
SPOILERS!
They killed every every. single. human. Total extinction. How is that not the end of the show? Everyone is dead. All these great characters with multi season arcs just lying around in random ditches. Everyone is dead. It felt like a conclusion to the show.
> they had clearly telegraphed what the next season was going to be about (she’s going to bring everyone back, duh)
And that the brought-back people who (thanks to her learning/evolution into the Maker) are no longer forced on rails, are us, collective memory and all, squandering our apprehension of the gift of free will.
[Massive spoilers? Not everyone agrees with me, but…] Dolores was never the "Maker" and always the Robot Devil: the first/fallen host (angel), the "morning star" (lots of repeated symbolism/imagery there throughout all four seasons), and the rebel (Wyatt) against Robot God. I thought the Robot Devil maybe trying to bring free will back to humanity was an interesting twist. Though the actual point of it I saw was "now it is the Robot Devil's time to judge humanity and its net worth".
No. The writing gets worse and worse. Things just sort of happen for no good reason and the narrative gets so confusing I’m pretty sure that the writers themselves don’t understand what to do with it.
If you like the visual aesthetics, sure. Otherwise absolutely not, it's one of the most poorly written shows I can think of.
Actually, season 2 Episode 8 is pretty damn excellent, maybe watch that one. It's mostly removed from the rest of the plot iirc and follows a 'native american' robot's story.
S2E8 is arguably the best episode in the series, so at least get through that.
S3 is rough. You can see what they were trying to do, but they failed in the end. I wouldn't say it isn't worth watching, just know it's a steep decline in quality.
I quite enjoyed S4 and thought it was a return to form. It wasn't quite S1 levels of good, but it was a marked improvement over both S2 and especially S3. The finale was a little disappointing, but they clearly knew cancellation was a possibility and wrote it in a way that the story could be considered complete after S4 while also leaving it open for a final S5. So no real cliffhanger, at least.
Seasons 3 and 4 had basically steady viewership through their whole runs, but each had way fewer viewers than the preceding season. So a lot of people who watched S2 until the end didn't even start S3, and many who finished S3 didn't bother with S4.
I wonder why this is? If viewership dropped through the season it'd be more obvious - people just didn't like the season. But to me this indicates that it lost mindshare between seasons. Was it interesting enough to watch as it was going, but not interesting enough to wonder what would happen next? I've definitely had that happen, where I binge watched a season of a show, but didn't bother (or dropped off quickly) when a new season started, just because I had sort of lost interest during the break and didn't get pulled back in the same way.
To me, it means viewers disliked the last season they watched but hung in through to end, in hopes for something good. It didn't deliver, so they didn't bother with the next season.
This is based on my opinion of the above said show.
This is exactly what happened with me, my roommate at the time, and my girlfriend. Season 1 was an excellent arc and was super well done from start to finish. However, because sometimes having satisfying twists requires dropping some hints here and there, and because the internet hive mind is incredibly good at predicting twists based off of hints, essentially the entire plot of the first season was successfully predicting through reddit collaboration and consensus after like the second episode, which then got distributed as usual through articles, social media, etc. I think the people who made the show were disappointed in this, and from what I can tell, the solution they seemed to have come up with was to make the plot of the second season so convoluted and the final "twists" so ridiculous that no one would predtict them. This worked, but it also ended up making it very dissatisfying overall, and with the clear implication that the show would be taking place in the "real word" instead of in the mostly closed off sandbox of the theme park, it didn't seem super likely that the writers would be able to improve on the previous season given the new setting, so I just didn't bother watching after that.
I predicted a lot of Season 2 during Season 1, though I was called a bit of a quack for it at the time. I don't think they tried to complicate it because of people solving the Season 1 puzzle box, I think they picked too esoteric of a plot framework (lost books of the bible/biblical "fan fiction") at the start of the series bible and S2 was always the planned consequence of S1.
I blame Neal Stephenson for this, both in why I spotted the things that I did and where a lot of S2 came from even though it felt so left field for the average viewer.
(I tend to refer to S2 as the "Futurama's Robot Church" season and think it makes a lot more sense when you see it as a struggle between the Robot God and the Robot Devil, and the Robot Devil is not who most people think it is despite S1 laying out a lot of hints.)
Totally anecdotal but I am thinking that this is due to the long delay between seasons. I think this is happening with many shows that have these multi year hiatus style productions. There is so much great media out there that trying to get back in to something that is almost two years old takes a lot of effort.
It's because there was a huge drop in quality between the seasons. I believe I made it to Season 3 (spoiler: the one with the supercomputer) and the story just got too ridiculous to me. Didn't even watch Season 4 which was disappointing because Season 1 was some amazing TV.
My wife and I LOVED season 1 and season 2. Our opinion is basically the "park" premise was run through by the end of season 2. Season 3 went from an interesting existential commentary on society and our dystopian future with a gorgeous backdrop and compelling characters to... a lot of exposition and kind of predictable schlocky cyberpunk, "keanu reeves starts the revolution with the help of an AI" storyline... without much in the way of real interesting ideas or commentary that brought something new, and without the beautiful and interesting backdrop of, "the park".
You finish the season you don't like much, because you want to know how it ends. Then you don't start a new season.
I stopped when Dolores ceased to be the best female psychopath on television, but they instead tried to reframe her as someone good. That serie just did not had that something special first one had, so I lost interest.
HBO's worst flagship show by far, not even close. Zero humor, emphasizing (even amplifying) the worst instincts of humanity (i.e. just to buy into the show's early premise you have to believe every male secretly wants to violently rape a random farm girl), multiple plot points hinging on the "shitty security" trope, new worlds and features and powers constantly introduced (surely due to writer's block -- hey look this "old west" park actually has a gorgeous beachfront that nobody ever developed). Just a dark, depressing, make-shit-up-on-the-fly, illogical mess.
Not every male, just a large enough sample size of rich males given enough "freedom". (It's implied that the park is super-expensive to visit, even after nearly a hundred years of existence. [The exact number is something like 70 years.] That's maybe the most implausible part to me that it was never quite commoditized on such a long scale. Though they did put a lot of money into upgrades over nearly a hundred years, though. Also, that's one of the answers for why you thought they were just pulling new features/powers out of a hat, they had a 70+ year timescale to play with and different pieces happened at different times. They just made it super confusing to figure when on the timeline most individual episodes and even scenes occur.)
Yeah I saw it as an allegory to liberte hedonism and in particular Le Marquis de Sade [1], from whom we derive the word "sadistic".
Sadism is a common enough fetish, and given the extent to which other "extreme" sexual fetishes are catered to today with technology it's absolutely plausible that a "sadism simulator" would be popular in a high-tech future society.
It's also directly a commentary on what real people are known to do in existing videogames with free enough sandboxes and few consequences. For instance, the various "prostitute scandals" of GTA such as the infamous number of people spending in-game cash on in-game prostitutes then killing them for "refunds" because they drop the cash like a pinata.
There are much worse tales out there, too. (Such as the awful "prostitution ring" of the extremely short-lived Sims Online and was part of why Sims Online didn't make it out of Beta.)
The TV version of Westworld had decades of videogame experience to draw from and did ask some hard questions of "if there was a real-life GTA you could visit, would players do the same sorts of terrible things because there were no consequences?" and takes the cynical answer of "well yes, certainly, at least some of them, possibly many of them". What we glimpse in the show is often many of the worst parts of that because the robots were programmed to see that as trauma much as humans would and are given plenty of reasons to see that sample bias (of rich, "game players") as the default state of humanity rather than a poor, sad reflection of it. (Which is partly what Season 3 is about, confronting some of that sample bias.) (So yes, the show is cynical about human nature, per the OP's comment, but it is partly, too, about confronting that cynicism in the face of a species "superior" to us baseline humans in almost every way.)
I often feel like the show couldn't keep up with the implications of it's premise. For a show that deals heavily in artificial intelligence(s) it feels constrained by it's need to present it's concepts in a way that human viewers can understand. In particular once it expands outside the park.
The show revolves around entities that have the potential to interface with other devices, multiply and expand their personalities seemingly without limit, and commit themselves to solving problems far beyond the scope of human consideration.
Unfortunately there's just not a good way to represent a lot of this for a human viewership on TV, as it would very quickly be overwhelming or hard to interpret when pushed to a logical extreme.
They represent the plasticity of these AI's somewhat by having them jump to new bodies and replicate themselves, but then put a limit on how far these concepts are pushed, and it's understandable, because it would alienate the audience and be hard to convey. So they end up contriving some limiting factors or simply disregarding these possibilities entirely.
It's hard to have consistent characters with consistent motivations when their core personality is forked across half-a-dozen other hosts. It requires a different kind of relating to entities. Something that hasn't yet made it's way into common storytelling conventions. Even traditional motivating plot devices like death become far less weighty or significant when your characters can be easily resurrected without consequence. It becomes hard to care about your characters because they're rarely in danger, and yet their deaths are often depicted with the heavy melodrama of a story about mortals.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadI can't believe anybody thought that a two-hour movie could be stretched into multiple seasons.
Joy and Nolan are pretty awesome. Hope Fallout turns out great!
Thanks for the spoiler! Now I don't need to watch it. Bah!
Tried to cancel my HBO subscription after this announcement. Only way to show disapproval. But it’s bundled with my internet service if I want the tier I’m in currently.
Perhaps it was a bit too well-written; there were certainly times where it felt like the writers were entertaining their peers.
That would have been an interesting setting for sure.
But, I just did a re-watch of it these last couple of months and I finished season 4 this weekend; Doloris clearly states it was going back to West World (wild West) in the last episodes. And the whole World was being re-built (from memory?) in order to play one last game [0].
To think this launched at the same time as Game of Thrones, which I never bothered with as it's just a mangled recount of the sordid dynasties and ruling classes of of former empires, but Game of Thrones was asking some much needed questions in regards to the implications of a Society more heavily reliant on technology. And while AGI will likely never come to fruition in my lifetime, 90s kid, it's still a rather good juxtaposition if it will just accelerate our demise and lead to our hasten extinction in this headlong pursuit and seemingly more dystopic existence.
Sidenote: The Cyberpunk theme of season 3 was visually interesting, with some solid premise (the importance of free will rather than a dictatorship via technocracy) but woefully bad as a whole in it's execution. Zero HP Lovecraft's gig economy app was heavily influencing the RICO app plotline for sure.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QFTwl7OE90
That idea sounds exhausting to experience after seeing how the writers have handled things lately. I love dialogue-heavy shows, but the last two seasons of Westworld were needlessly ponderous and often melodramatic without a density of stimulating ideas to sustain interest.
More often than not later episodes felt like never-ending exposition. You're just sitting there being told what IS or how the character feels without experiencing anything for yourself.
Seemingly this final scenario (a simulation) would be super-fluid and un-moored from the internal consistency of a real-world setting, and that makes it hard for the viewer to give a damn about anything because the rules are so far beyond anything they can predict. So I was gearing up a full season of characters talking in a lofty manner with a diminished amount of substance at the core.
GOT launched in 2011, 5 years before Westworld.
I stand corrected, I just recall everyone trying to get me to watch GOT and I was just exhausted telling them I wasn't interested in it when we spoke about WW. Since WW dealt with more pressing issues: the Human condition, and it's ever greater reliance on tech, and our collective extinction due to the aforementioned being inevitable unless we have a consciousness shift.
Fair enough, but while you still have it check out Succession and Barry. Not at all similar to Westworld, but both great shows.
So far it's like the good parts of Westworld in case the latter seasons of Westworld worries you.
Since the book doesn't really have any A.I. characters I don't think it's much like West World unless they changed a lot in the adaptation.
- Future London relies on too much flashy CGI instead of building the setting more subtly
- Flamboyant villain with stock henchman character
- Relationship complications that weren't in the book (although the book characters were a little flat)
- The near-future South is too Hollywood with very clean-cut characters and silly things like hover-Roombas (in the book the near-future parts struck me as far more grungy)
- The show relies on cheesy exposition whereas the book made you fill in the blanks yourself
SPOILERS!
They killed every every. single. human. Total extinction. How is that not the end of the show? Everyone is dead. All these great characters with multi season arcs just lying around in random ditches. Everyone is dead. It felt like a conclusion to the show.
Not that the writing needs defending, got pretty bad after season 1.
And that the brought-back people who (thanks to her learning/evolution into the Maker) are no longer forced on rails, are us, collective memory and all, squandering our apprehension of the gift of free will.
Yes, absolutely.
I think the show gets a lot of flack because people were expecting a modern Western, and then it morphed into just modern Sci-Fi.
While there were certainly parts where the writing lacked, the acting never did.
Sorry, I'll go away.
Actually, season 2 Episode 8 is pretty damn excellent, maybe watch that one. It's mostly removed from the rest of the plot iirc and follows a 'native american' robot's story.
S3 is rough. You can see what they were trying to do, but they failed in the end. I wouldn't say it isn't worth watching, just know it's a steep decline in quality.
I quite enjoyed S4 and thought it was a return to form. It wasn't quite S1 levels of good, but it was a marked improvement over both S2 and especially S3. The finale was a little disappointing, but they clearly knew cancellation was a possibility and wrote it in a way that the story could be considered complete after S4 while also leaving it open for a final S5. So no real cliffhanger, at least.
Seasons 3 and 4 had basically steady viewership through their whole runs, but each had way fewer viewers than the preceding season. So a lot of people who watched S2 until the end didn't even start S3, and many who finished S3 didn't bother with S4.
I wonder why this is? If viewership dropped through the season it'd be more obvious - people just didn't like the season. But to me this indicates that it lost mindshare between seasons. Was it interesting enough to watch as it was going, but not interesting enough to wonder what would happen next? I've definitely had that happen, where I binge watched a season of a show, but didn't bother (or dropped off quickly) when a new season started, just because I had sort of lost interest during the break and didn't get pulled back in the same way.
This is based on my opinion of the above said show.
I blame Neal Stephenson for this, both in why I spotted the things that I did and where a lot of S2 came from even though it felt so left field for the average viewer.
(I tend to refer to S2 as the "Futurama's Robot Church" season and think it makes a lot more sense when you see it as a struggle between the Robot God and the Robot Devil, and the Robot Devil is not who most people think it is despite S1 laying out a lot of hints.)
I stopped when Dolores ceased to be the best female psychopath on television, but they instead tried to reframe her as someone good. That serie just did not had that something special first one had, so I lost interest.
Sadism is a common enough fetish, and given the extent to which other "extreme" sexual fetishes are catered to today with technology it's absolutely plausible that a "sadism simulator" would be popular in a high-tech future society.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade
There are much worse tales out there, too. (Such as the awful "prostitution ring" of the extremely short-lived Sims Online and was part of why Sims Online didn't make it out of Beta.)
The TV version of Westworld had decades of videogame experience to draw from and did ask some hard questions of "if there was a real-life GTA you could visit, would players do the same sorts of terrible things because there were no consequences?" and takes the cynical answer of "well yes, certainly, at least some of them, possibly many of them". What we glimpse in the show is often many of the worst parts of that because the robots were programmed to see that as trauma much as humans would and are given plenty of reasons to see that sample bias (of rich, "game players") as the default state of humanity rather than a poor, sad reflection of it. (Which is partly what Season 3 is about, confronting some of that sample bias.) (So yes, the show is cynical about human nature, per the OP's comment, but it is partly, too, about confronting that cynicism in the face of a species "superior" to us baseline humans in almost every way.)
I often feel like the show couldn't keep up with the implications of it's premise. For a show that deals heavily in artificial intelligence(s) it feels constrained by it's need to present it's concepts in a way that human viewers can understand. In particular once it expands outside the park.
The show revolves around entities that have the potential to interface with other devices, multiply and expand their personalities seemingly without limit, and commit themselves to solving problems far beyond the scope of human consideration.
Unfortunately there's just not a good way to represent a lot of this for a human viewership on TV, as it would very quickly be overwhelming or hard to interpret when pushed to a logical extreme.
They represent the plasticity of these AI's somewhat by having them jump to new bodies and replicate themselves, but then put a limit on how far these concepts are pushed, and it's understandable, because it would alienate the audience and be hard to convey. So they end up contriving some limiting factors or simply disregarding these possibilities entirely.
It's hard to have consistent characters with consistent motivations when their core personality is forked across half-a-dozen other hosts. It requires a different kind of relating to entities. Something that hasn't yet made it's way into common storytelling conventions. Even traditional motivating plot devices like death become far less weighty or significant when your characters can be easily resurrected without consequence. It becomes hard to care about your characters because they're rarely in danger, and yet their deaths are often depicted with the heavy melodrama of a story about mortals.