Recap: Westworld’s “Chestnut”

After leaving us with a sinister fly swatting and lingering questions about the story’s focus and direction, Westworld returns for its second week… to provide even more burning questions! We meet some new faces, see some new Hosts go off the rails, and generally speaking, things get weird. Spoilers ahead…

With Dolores on our minds, we reenter HBO’s simultaneously dusty and glossy, futuristic and historical world. And once again, we hear a man commanding Dolores into consciousness: “Wake up, Dolores.” In a glazed, Stepword-Wives sleepwalking mode, she walks out into the middle of the night only to stare into the distance. But who’s commanding Dolores to wake? It sounds like Bernard at first, but then there’s some distortion and it’s not clear who we’re meant to be hearing. Dr. Ford? The Man in Black? Peter Abernathy? Someone else?

After teasing us with a fake-out journey into Westworld from the perspective of someone who seemed to be a tourist last week, we get the real thing this time. …or do we? Yes. Definitely yes. Friendly tourist (and long-lost twin of Liam McPoyle) William enters the park with his dickish friend Logan, a veteran Westworld visitor who only reinforces the impression that most of the wealthy millionaires who visit the park are assholes. I’m not sure if it’s a credit to the show or an unwitting irony that the thoroughly untrustworthy Logan gives the series it’s most overt bit of meta-commentary so far when he tries to sell William on Westworld: “I know that you think that you have a handle on what this is gonna be: guns and tits and all that. You have no idea.” Perhaps the writers testing out a new slogan for the network.
“HBO: guns and tits and all that.”

Our first recognizable audience surrogate, William has shades of Peter Martin, the ordinary, vaguely geeky protagonist of the 1973 movie Westworld, particularly in his relationship with his carefree buddy Logan and his initial skepticism about the park. William tries on hats, admires weapons, and nobly declines the sexual advances of the gorgeous Host who guides him through the park’s glossy antechamber facility. With a white hat (must be a hero!) in hand, William heads through a mysterious door and into a period saloon which quickly reveals itself… to be a train! How does that work exactly? Are there regular trains leaving for Westworld like every half hour, or do the other guests just have to wait if one of the newcomers decides to spend a bunch of time banging his seductive tour guide?

Anyway, we turn our attention to nerd-bros Bernard and Elsie, who are still mulling over the recent glitches. Elsie’s convinced that Peter Abernathy’s problems were serious and possibly contagious, but Bernard believes that Dolores’s problems were fixed with the most recent update. Huh. Wasn’t he the one who said last week that Abernathy’s problems were “miles beyond a glitch”? Surprisingly, after Bernard walks out, Elsie does not lean over and give her fancy tablet a tender, creepy kiss.

Something’s clearly wrong with Dolores, not just because she’s troubled by flashes of memories but also because she periodically and quite suddenly drifts back into her old cheerful self like a sad clown trying to convince a group of second-graders he’s not depressed. Is she faking it? Or is she just glitching out? When she has a flashback (or vision?) of the townsfolk slaughtered, Maeve emerges from her saloon to throw Dolores some shade. But Dolores gives her a death stare and quotes some Shakespeare, and Maeve quite sensibly returns from whence she came.

Meanwhile, the Man in Black, our Cormac McCarthy-esque, quizzical villain with seemingly endless powers, is knocking off more and more Hosts in his quest to discover the “deepest level of the game,” whatever that means. I appreciated at least that in this episode the Delos overseers acknowledge the fact that the Man in Black is keeping their robot repairmen working overtime. Whatever he’s trying to find, presumably it’s okay with them? But then why does that kid say that the maze was “not meant” for the Man in Black? Also, on a side-note, how are knives programmed not to harm fellow guests exactly? Isn’t that a recipe for a disastrous case of mistaken identity? After slaughtering a posse of lawmen and kidnapping the condemned outlaw Lawrence, the Man in Black commands Lawrence to guide him to what he calls “the maze.” Is it a physical maze? A metaphorical maze? Why’s it tattooed on the inside of Kissy’s skull? Mysteries abound.

As Maeve demonstrates this episode, Dolores’s Shakespeare quip is not simply philosophizing; it’s some sort of mental trigger like the ones that the Delos employees use to control the Hosts. “The violent delights have violent ends.” Feel any different? Whoever programmed it into the Hosts, it seems to give them access to memories they didn’t know they had. For Maeve, that means a rather traumatic encounter with a group of Native American Hosts, who slaughtered her wagon party and stalked her and her young daughter to their country home. Interesting to see that even in the immersive world narratives of the future, Native Americans get stereotyped as the bloodthirsty bad guys…

Maeve’s new melancholy and confusion has a negative impact on her job performance seducing horny guests, apparently, so Delos brings her in for some questioning. With new storylines looming over Westworld and the higher ups cracking down on “dead weight,” the Delos staff writers (or are they Westworld’s story producers?) put Maeve into sexual overdrive in a last-ditch attempt to get her ratings up. You hear that, viewers? TV characters get paralyzed and sent into a dingy, depressing storage facility if you don’t keep watching. So keep up those HBO GO subscriptions! Regardless, Maeve’s overboard seductiveness only makes things worse. Fortunately, Elsie gets her hand on Maeve next and restores her to her subtle self, managing to say “fuck” a lot and be edgy with a nervous subordinate all the while.

The milquetoast Bernard gives us a few surprises this episode, which gives the extremely capable Jeffrey Wright a few new opportunities to layer his creation with secrets. The lesser of the two surprises, and the most delightful, is his apparent gift with the ladies. Of all the possible romantic pairings in the series, the one I might have suspected least was Bernard and Theresa. It’s still not clear exactly what they see in each other, but it’s clear that Bernard is keeping his distance, emotionally speaking. Bernard’s more substantial surprise is that he’s been having secret liaisons with Dolores, for reasons unknown. He knows about her strange memories, but he hasn’t told anyone about them. Is he the one who put them there? He seems awfully “fascinated” with her aberrant behavior for someone pulling the strings.

Of course, Bernard’s ongoing bromance with with Ford is the most charming relationship in the series so far. But is Bernard hiding something from his mentor? Is Ford hiding something from him? Ford expands quite a bit in this episode as well. He confirms his penchant for soft-spoken erudition and zen wisdom, reminding Bernard that they’ll have no one to turn to but themselves should the mysteries of Host cognition spiral out of control, but he’s also becoming the most sinister character in Westworld, even more than the Man in Black, since whatever mysteries plague the Man in Black were undoubtedly shaped by Ford himself. The question remains whether Ford holds all the cards as to the future of Westworld or, perhaps more frighteningly, whether he simply has given up trying to control what his creations might do.

Whatever he’s up to, it has something to do with that creepy little steeple in the desert, which is enough to draw even Bernard out into the wilderness for a look, wearing what has to be a non-regulation baseball cap. Are we about to give our Hosts a God? Ford’s vision of the Old West has been suspiciously free of religion so far…

Meanwhile, newcomer buddies Logan and William are revealing their friendship to be… less than friendly. Logan wants to drink, murder, maim and fuck his way through the park, indulging a very HBO orgy with a handful of hookers, including (oh my!) a dude. But William is more like that guy in your DnD campaign who wants to gather strange mushrooms, learn about goblin history, listen to the lengthy tales told by the bards in taverns, and comfort every weeping halfling child. Which is great! It’s just that Logan has his own agenda, and William can’t seem to bring himself to tell Logan to let him do his thing. William also answers the age old question: if you’re fucking a robot with artificial intelligence, is it still considered cheating? (Spoiler: yes, it is.) William refuses to succumb to Clementine’s temptations, but no doubt time will erode his resolve when Westworld inevitably throws him new opportunities for corruption in episodes to come.

With help from a creepy robot kid (the second of two this episode after Ford’s Dickensian robot version of himself as a child), the Man in Black learns that all he has to do to find the maze he’s looking for is “follow the Blood Arroyo to the place where the snake lays its eggs.” The Man in Black apparently knows what this means, since he takes off in short order with Lawrence in tow, only to break into Maeve’s house and kill her… for some reason. Maeve’s storyline take center stage this episode, primarily because she’s the one who’s getting previous lifetime PTSD. She also gets to make some new bad memories this week! Watching her waking up mid-operation, threaten her repairmen with an engineer and then wander through the Delos facility with her hand clutched over her sliced-open abdomen was prototypical HBO stuff: eerie, gruesome, glossy, vaguely salacious, and dangling plot developments in front of us only to tuck them away for a distant future episode. Maeve may not have escaped the park or even caused a stir for Delos higher ups, but surely she’ll retain some memory of her behind-the-scenes adventure, or else what are we watching this for?

There are a few other strains that pop up and then fizzle away: Teddy’s still as handsome, and put upon, as ever, the Charlie Brown of Westworld. The week, on Westworld… Teddy gets murdered for no reason! Lee Sizemore, the dullest of the show’s many douchebags, haggles for some extra attention in a storyline that’s quickly shut down (both diegetically and non-diegetically) by Ford, although the scene where Ford quietly rips Sizemore’s storytelling philosophy to pieces was fun to watch, and presumably something of a manifesto from the Westworld writers themselves on what they want their show to be. There’s plenty of grandstanding going on so far, I’ve noticed. It remains to be seen whether or not the series can live up to its ideals, particular when so many of the characters seem so… determined, like their robots. Crudely human.

And once again, a Westworld episode ends as it began, on the series’s most publicized and least developed character, Dolores Abernathy, doing something sinister. This time she’s digging up a buried pistol outside her home. Something tells me it isn’t loaded with blanks. But who left it there? We are no doubt meant to wonder, and to wait…

Also, did I miss something re the episode title? What the hell does “Chestnut” mean?

Recap: Westworld’s “The Original”

When HBO teased their new sci-fi western serial more than a year ago, I was still suffering Game of Thrones withdrawals, still reeling from the news that HBO’s cash cow had only a few short seasons left (albeit with hopeful talk of spinoff seasons). Westworld promised to ease my pain, offering what HBO no doubt hopes will be the water cooler show to take up the mantle of GoT.

But as the staticky block letters of the HBO logo spread their fuzzy promise of quality across the screen, such considerations slip away. An unsurprisingly lovely opening credits sequence featuring Muybridge imagery of robotic horses, da Vinci imagery of a Vitruvian robot, and the first of many milky liquids (for some reason) lulled me into high-production-value hypnosis. The soothing gravel of HBO regular Jeffrey Wright brings us “back on line,” and we’re off to the Old West. Or the future, I guess. Spoilers ahead, for those of you unfamiliar with recaps. All the spoilers. 

Thrust into a dark and glossy world, we listen as head of Westworld Programming Division Bernard Lowe questions cowgirl android Dolores Abernathy about her understanding of her reality. Although we’ll be swapping character perspectives like its Westeros, Dolores seems to be our primary character here. The story starts (and ends) with her. So we watch her bucolic routine, and listen to her musings on the life she and the other “Hosts” lead for the amusement of the tourists who pay big bucks to visit them (read: murder and screw them). Aligning herself with the forces of good against those who “choose to see the ugliness,” Dolores describes obedience and faith as the primary virtues that will lead her to grasp the greater purpose of her existence, which she never questions and which resets every morning, rehashing the same handful of storylines she’s programmed to experience over and over.

In what turns out to be a tricksy bit of business, co-writers (and co-creators, and married couple) Nolan and Joy introduce us to a group of fresh tourists arriving in Westworld by train, already decked out for the Old West. Among them is the handsome Teddy Flood, who spurns the attentions of the beauties at the local saloon, choosing instead to pursue Dolores, who flirts obligingly. They galavant into the desert. They banter. They talk about their romantic past, her father’s disapproval. Does he come here often? As night falls, Teddy escorts Dolores back to her homestead, where they find a pair of low-down criminals murdering Dolores’s parents… and drinking their milk! In heroic fashion, Teddy blasts the two bandits to hell before they can indulge their necrophilia (thanks, HBO). But before the gun smoke can settle, an imposing outlaw known only as Man in Black steps out from the shadows. He’s met them both before, and he knows how their story will end. In the episode’s defining moment, Teddy fires blanks over and over at the Man in Black, who muses that Guests like himself are paying to win, which means that Hosts like Teddy are by definition programmed to be losers. Gunning down Teddy like a dog, the Man in Black chuckles, “it’s good to be back,” before dragging Dolores screaming into the nearby barn.

Will Teddy seek revenge? Will Dolores? No, as it turns out, because the following morning, Dolores and Teddy and the rest of the Hosts restart their routine afresh, having forgotten the previous night’s traumas. Up in Delos headquarters (which is nestled high up in a mesa above the park rather than below it, for some reason), Bernard and subordinate programmer/creepy robot-kisser Elsie Hughes are admiring the new gestural nuances of one of the prostitute Hosts, Clementine Pennyfeather. Their creative director and eminent sage Dr. Robert Ford has programmed into the Hosts what he calls “reveries,” idiosyncratic gestures that the Hosts draw unconsciously from hidden memories. That is, until Westworld operations leader/every female-exec-in-movies Theresa Cullen sends Bernard and his office frenemy, head of security Ashley Stubbs, down into cold storage to deal with a decommissioned robot who’s been acting up. Descending into the dingy (and smelly, apparently) bowels of Delos storage, where rotting Hosts stand in awkward silence, they find the grandfatherly Ford chatting with Old Bill, a Buffalo Bill-esque android with a simple case of the robot jitters. Ford calmly convinces Old Bill to zip himself back up into a body bag.

Meanwhile, Dolores heads to town for a new day of doing whatever she does when she’s not flirting with Teddy, who gets recruited by a pair of bros into guiding them around Westworld before he can re-sweep Dolores off her feet. But she does run briefly into the Man in Black, who seems to be in a less sadistic mood. He even retrieves her can of condensed milk when she drops it, before moving on to mysterious (presumably evil) “other plans.” Out in the desert, the lame tourist couple Lori and Craig are getting tired of searching for the bandit Hector Escaton with Sheriff Pickett, who gives them something to really whine about when he freezes up mid-sentence.

Here at Westworld, however, even minor glitches are taken pretty seriously! Over at Delos headquarters, Bernard, Theresa and Westworld narrative director/showrunner from hell Lee Sizemore debate what’s to be done about the glitch, which Bernard claims is a side effect of the new “reveries” update. Theresa wants to pull all two-hundred updated Hosts until they can fix it, but Lee’s not having it: the Hosts’s stories are interconnected; pull too many and the whole town goes to pieces. He goes full-on pretentious porn director to make his point, which aggravates Theresa to no end (and prompts Bernard delightfully to ask if he can record the wrinkle in her brow), but Lee makes a reasonable point. Besides, Bernard assures her, the Hosts “couldn’t hurt a fly” even if they wanted to. It’s not in their programming. #allfliesmatter

Meanwhile back at the bunny ranch, douche-bro tourist Clarence and his suspiciously ripped friend are enjoying the afterglow of robot sex and musing that the “real demented shit begins” once you ride out of town, where Teddy will guide them and serve as “target practice” if they get bored. Did somebody say “redshirts”? And over in what is apparently the G-rated section of Westworld, a couple and their young boy happen upon Dolores painting by the banks of a lazy river. The young boy stares at Dolores: “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” She gives him a what-the-hell-are-you-on-about smile and makes a quick exit. But back home, the fourth-wall collapsing only continues. Dolores’s father Peter found a photograph of a woman in modern dress out in the dirt on his ranch, and he’s a mite confused. Dolores shrugs it off: “doesn’t look like anything to me.” She’s not terribly convincing.

As the day comes to a close, Lee and Theresa take a moment to enjoy the sunset and do some extracurricular corporate scheming. Or, at least Lee tries to. He suggests that the “reveries” update was a costly mistake, in more ways than one. The Guests don’t want perfect realism, Lee argues. Westworld works because “the Guests know the Hosts aren’t real.” Besides, he points out: Ford’s heading for a breakdown. Everybody knows it. And management can’t wait to use Ford’s tech for its own purposes. Theresa knows where this is going: if Theresa has Lee’s back, she can count on his support when it comes time to pick Ford’s successor. But Theresa has no interest in Lee’s support; he’s “smart enough to guess there’s a bigger picture, but not smart enough to see what it is.”

At this uncertain midpoint, Westworld turns its gaze to the local saloon, where resident madame Maeve Millay and her dry bartender are closing up. Heading home (and trying unsuccessfully to skim a few coins off the top), Maeve’s hired card shark Kissy heads into the night, only to have his throat slit by the Man in Black, who drags him into the dark. Meanwhile, one of the Hosts is having “a serious problem.” It’s our old milk fanatic Walter. He’s not playing by the rules, refusing to get duped by a scheme he’s programmed to fall for, and refusing to die, even with a few leaky holes in his chest. Arriving on the scene, Bernard and Elsie shut him down to investigate, but they seem unconcerned: “it’s good news, really,” Bernard suggests to the less enthusiastic Theresa. “Confirms the problem was part of the update.” Theresa orders them to recall all the updated Hosts and fix their problems.

Back at Delos headquarters, Bernard relays Theresa’s unpopular decision to Ford. What Bernard is afraid to suggest but Ford openly admits is that the recent glitches are a result of Ford’s updates. Ford muses that humankind itself is merely the product of countless evolutionary mistakes, to which Bernard reasonably banters: “I flattered myself we’re taking a more disciplined approach here.” Somewhere high in the hills the next day, the Man in Black tortures Missy before scalping him, explaining as he does: “The others, they just come here to get their rocks off, shoot a couple Indians. But there’s a deeper level to this game.” Heading out for a fresh day in Westworld, Dolores finds her father sitting on the porch, troubled, glitching out and going on about “the question” the Hosts “aren’t meant to ask.” Frantic, he whispers something in her ear.

Dolores rushes to town to find a doctor. She finds Teddy first, rushing into his arms, but before he can help her, a mysterious quartet enters town… Back at Delos headquarters, Lee describes the revised storylines he devised to give them an excuse to recall the updated Hosts. The handsome Hector, sewn into tight leather pants, murders the sheriff and starts shooting up the town with his gang, including the sharpshooting cowgirl bandit Armistice. In the ensuing gunfight, Teddy’s shot and killed once again, prompting Dolores to fall into her regular despair.

Hector banters with Maeve as he robs her saloon, before heading out into the light to deliver what Lee describes as a terrific new speech. Maeve takes the opportunity to use her mini-pistol dispatch a few of Hector’s henchmen. Outside, just as Hector tries to give his big speech, a shaky Craig shoots him in the neck, and then Armistice. He laughs, while Lori giggles at Armistice: “look at her wriggle!” While Craig and Lori gloat, and Lee mopes about his interrupted speech, Elsie finds Dolores weeping over Teddy and uses a verbal trigger to send her into a merciful sleep before the Delos crew gather her and the other Hosts up for reprogramming.

Back at Delos headquarters, Bernard, Theresa, and Ford question Peter, whose problems Bernard describes as “miles beyond a glitch.” Peter’s quoting authors he shouldn’t know, questioning his reality, and he’s terribly concerned for Dolores, whom he wants to protect at all costs–protect from Delos. Trying to find the root of his problem, Ford asks Peter for his “itinerary.” Peter responds: “to meet my maker.” And when Ford asks him what he wants to say to his maker, Peter grabs Ford, fire in his eyes, and threatens revenge. They quickly shut him down. He’s off script. But to be specific, he’s found some way to access previous characters programmed into him.

Meanwhile, Ashley questions a distraught Dolores, shutting off her emotion components. She claims not to be questioning her reality. And what did her father whisper in her ear that morning? “These violent delights have violent ends.” Means nothing to her, she claims. And would she ever hurt a living thing? “No. Of course not.” Ashley’s assistant Sophia isn’t convinced, but Ashley reassures her, providing the episode with his penultimate reveal: Dolores is the oldest Host in the park.

The next day, as the Man in Black rides over the wilderness, and Teddy rides the train into town, Dolores steps out onto her porch for a new day (and greets her new father, the old bartender at Maeve’s saloon). As she gazing out onto her homestead with a cherubic smile, a fly lights on her neck. She kills it with a slap.

Pregaming: Westworld (1973) Review

It’s difficult in retrospect not to see writer-director Michael Crichton’s 1973 theatrical debut as a dry run for his 1990 novel Jurassic Park. Even if you set aside the fact that both stories are about futuristic theme parks in which the attractions run amok and start killing people, Crichton revisits and expands in Jurassic Park several of the structural and thematic preoccupations that he explores in Westworld.

Take the way that Crichton introduces us to his theme parks: in both stories, he draws us gradually into his fictional attractions, giving us the sort of experience that a first-time visitor might enjoy, albeit with a few behind-the-scenes perks. Westworld opens with an advertisement for Delos Adult Amusement Parks. We enter the park with tourists Peter and John (could their names be any more phallic and everyman?), sharing in their anticipation, experiencing the initial awe of the park alongside them. And then we share in their horror when things go wrong. Behind the scenes at conference tables and in control rooms, people debate what to do about malfunctioning tech and whether the park is really safe.

But whereas in Westworld the backroom debates are practical responses to minor (and then major) malfunctions, in Jurassic Park Crichton gives his archaeologists and… chaos theorists broader ethical questions to consider: it’s not enough just to ask, is it safe? As Malcolm argues to Hammond: “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they couldn’t stop to think if they should.” In Jurassic Park, we’re not simply condemned for our hedonistic impulses; we’re also chastised for our hubristic impulse to play God with systems that are inevitably too complicated for us to truly control. Even if Westworld draws some of the same conclusions about the dangers of human arrogance as Jurassic World, at least in Jurassic Park Crichton gives voice to rational debate before melting our wax wings (or biting our limbs off, as the case may be). Also, Jurassic Park has dinosaurs. So it wins.

But Westworld offers schlockier pleasures than Jurassic Park, so comparing the two might be charitably dismissed as a case of apples and oranges. And there are some lovely moments here: a balding man waking up next to a beautiful woman, confused, and then smiling as he remembers where he is; Peter stumbling through his first encounter with the Gunslinger, then suddenly falling into a steely alter ego he didn’t know he had in him. And there’s a weird, hammy pleasure to watching people who know they’re in a simulation go through the motions of a genre cliche with the joy of firsthand experience. It’s the sort of thing you’d see nowadays in self-aware summer movies like The Cabin in the Woods, Jurassic World, and Guardians of the Galaxy, except in Westworld there’s the added irony of watching the characters gradually forget they’re in a simulacrum and eventually face the terrible truth: you can’t joke your way through a life-or-death situation in the real world. It’s fun stuff, although Karlin’s jaunty score lays on the western schlock a bit thick.

I also like the way that Crichton contrasts the idyllic bulk of the first half with quick cuts to behind-the-scenes antics: nerdy guys in control rooms, arguing over mundane problems like robot laundry and delayed stagecoaches, leading up to the first eerie behind-the-scenes sequence of employees carting “dead” robots away from Westworld in the middle of the night.

Crichton directs like a novelist, which is to say that he conceives of images and scenarios that are laden with meaning, that have the richest potential for social commentary and metaphor rather than the most immediate potential for visceral impact or immersion. And this has some pros and cons. I love, for instance, that Crichton acknowledges the fact that most people are just using Westworld to get laid and kill people. He’s not afraid to sit with people and listen to them talk through the story’s primary themes, but he’s also not as conscious as he could be of the drawbacks of doing so (John, after getting laid by a robot: “Boy, machines are the servants of man!”).  The nicest thing you could say about Crichton’s action scenes is that they’re completely comprehensible. You know what’s happening, and why. When he wants to get a bit fancy, Crichton borrows baldly from Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah (who borrowed themselves from Kurosawa), sending his redshirts flying with spewing squibs of blood, twirling to their deaths in graceful slow motion.

As far as narrative technique goes, Crichton does an adequate job of doling out information and keeping abreast of the viewer’s questions. For instance, as the Gunslinger was bumping into Peter at the saloon, I was thinking, how do they know the guests won’t kill each other? Cue the next scene: Peter, fiddling with his gun: “hey John, how do I know if I’m not going to kill another guest with this thing?” John explains that the guns are designed to work only when shooting at robots. … Sure! Why not? But, what if two people want to be sheriff in Westworld at the same time? What if a guest punches (or stabs) another guest in a bar fight? Hey, forget it, Jake, you’ll say: it’s Westworld. You’re probably right.

Still, there are plenty of moments where Crichton clearly faced some sort of causal dead end and couldn’t or wouldn’t rework his narrative to make the plot more organic in fine-grained detail. In a novel, after two-hundred pages or so you can be forgiven for writing yourself out of a plot hole with a throwaway line: “oh, you’ll never survive this guy… Unless  you happen to find a beaker of acid somewhere and throw it on his visual circuits!” In movies, such moments are a surefire way to lose your audience.

Ultimately, Westworld turns into little more than a slasher flick, with the last act devoted entirely to Peter’s extended attempt to escape the relentless Gunslinger. It’s not bad stuff, by any means. Cameron’s The Terminator, for instance, at first glance seems to owe much to Crichton’s relentless cyborg killer. But there’s little else to pay attention to here. The movie ends abruptly after the Gunslinger dies. We don’t even know what happens to those guys stuck in the control room with the malfunctioning power-lock doors. Are we supposed to assume that they’re just stuck in there to die? They don’t seem to be panicking that much… I guess we’re not supposed to care.

One of the things I’m looking forward to in the series Westworld (and one of the things Crichton does considerably better in Jurassic Park) is the inevitable expansion and enrichment of characterization. Who conceived of this place (i.e., who’s our Hammond)? James Brolin and Richard Benjamin, who I know mainly for his comedic performances in Catch-22 and hosting SNL (is he playing against type here?), are perfectly serviceable as John and Peter, respectively, but they’re written to be generic stand-ins for the straight, white, male American viewer. Sure, John makes a passing reference early on to a divorce from which Peter is trying to recover (and from which their trip to Delos is meant to be an escape), but then it never comes up again. Nobody has any personality, any ambition, or any personal problems, which means that the Gunslinger steals the show by default. Let’s face it: Yul Brynner’s too much of a badass not to take over this movie, but his character is also the only character in the movie who persistently does exactly what a character like him would do.

Crichton is clearly a high-concept genius. As far as Hollywood hit factories go, he’s right up there with George Lucas and Stephen King (did you know Crichton created ER?), and in his ability to execute his brilliant concepts himself he’s certainly closer to to King than Lucas. Still, it remains to be seen whether or not HBO’s team of creatives will be able to take the raw potential of a flawed film like Westworld and shape it into the eerie, insightful, thrilling, immersive and even moving story that it could be. That’s a lot to put on anyone’s plate, but if anyone’s up to the task, it’s HBO. Let’s see if they’ve got the gumption!