Spoiler alert: this blog is published after Westworld airs on HBO in the US on Sunday night. Do not read unless you have watched episode five, which airs in the UK on Sky Atlantic on Tuesday at 9pm.
Watch your backs. Lock up your Nitroglycerin. Keep your condensed milk in a safe place. Here comes Dolores the lawless!
Westworld’s favourite host, the wholesome rancher’s daughter with big dreams (admittedly dreams that usually involve fire and corpses) has gone rogue. She’s broken out of her loop, hooked up with some guests, formed a gang of bandits, performed a robbery and shot up some fat soldiers without even blinking. Though that last one may be because her eyes are programmed that way.
Dolores, along with William, Logan and their captive host Slim have embarked on a new plotline in Westworld. Dolores can’t tell it’s a plotline, so all she sees is a bunch of amoral depravity. But she’s on the lam, so what the heck. Under the instruction of mysterious underworld figure El Lazo, the gang hold up a wagon laden with explosives. This, they are reliably informed, is the best way to get a reputation as a bunch of badasses, impress some dangerous Confederate mercenaries and finally enjoy the innocent bliss of going to “war”.
The gang pull a fetching set of kerchiefs over their faces and hold up the wagon, manned by a bunch of Yankee soldiers. Logan, being the little dirtbag we all know and loathe, is bang up for some murder with his robbery. But the Yankees turn out not to be the docile opponents Logan is used to and start beating some shades of schmuck out of him. With such a twist, it falls to William to save the day. Will professes not to be into the whole shoot-and-shag side of Westworld, but he does seem cut out for it and shoots three soldiers dead, one of whom was in the process of strangling Logan to (we presume) not quite death.
Dolores is troubled by all of this. Like William, she finds casual acts of violence a little dispiriting, particularly when the end game is to get involved in something even more violent. But after returning the wagon, Dolores discovers that El Lazo has gone and double-crossed the gang. He’s stolen the nitro and plans to use it to blow up the Confederates who are in fact racists and deserve it (wonder if they’ll be voting next Tuesday?). Dolores runs to tell William and plot their escape, but before they can vamoose, the Confederates rumble the plot and surround our young couple. What will happen? I’ll tell you what will happen: Dolores shoots the lot of them dead. William pretends to be shocked that a host could do such a thing, but really we know he’s just jealous.
Those of us who have been paying keen attention to this series noted something funny about El Lazo. In many ways, he looked oddly similar to the guy who’d just been killed by the Gunslinger in this very same episode. Yes El Lazo is Lawrence and, if my understanding is correct, our heroes have embarked on the “maze” storyline that so fascinates the Gunslinger.
As for the Gunslinger, last week he and Lawrence were the best of pals. This week the host is just a mobile blood bag. The Gunslinger slices Lawrence’s throat and uses haemoglobin, or whatever type of science madness it actually is, to reflate a near-dead Teddy. The only host to have ever survived an assault by Wyatt, Teddy is now more useful to the Gunslinger than Lawrence and in the bad lands of Westworld, there’s no time for sentiment.
The one exception to the no-sentiment rule is Ford, who likes nothing more than telling a rambling story about when he was a kid and there was a hungry dog. Ford springs a surprise on the Gunslinger this week by materialising in a cantina and quizzing him on his mission. We don’t learn much, beyond the fact that the Gunslinger believes Arnold is behind the maze and that Wyatt has been developed to stop him getting to the heart of it. He also hints that he may have chucked some money at the park to stop it from going under after Arnold’s death. On Ford’s part we see he has programmed hosts to prevent him from coming to any harm, using Teddy to stop the Gunslinger from giving him a pasting.
There has been a lot of talk about whether the Gunslinger is William a few decades into the future. The fact of Dolores’s memories of the Gunslinger and her losing Teddy to Wyatt before meeting William makes me wonder how that can be true. But as we see quite frequently – Dolores spotting herself in this week’s day of the dead procession, for example – maybe memories are not to be trusted.
If William is a young Gunslinger then as EVP of the Logan family corporation he might have a bit of money to keep the park afloat in future. At the same time though, you wonder why it’s taken him 30 years to get to the end of the maze, especially when it’s printed on all of Lawrence’s crates.
Back in corporate HQ, we get a little more sense of what the men in white coats really get up to. Turns out it’s reprogramming birds.
A dude called Felix is one of the lab technicians charged with fixing up hosts after they get all stabbed, shot and smashed up by the guests. His colleague thinks they are nothing more than “butchers”, but Felix believes there is beauty in all of Ford’s living creatures and takes it on himself to restore a broken bird to life.
He does so by fiddling with the avian code. The first time he tries it doesn’t go so well and the feathered friend makes a noise like a 3am techno set at the Berghain. But Felix is not to be dissuaded and gives it another go. This time he’s successful, which gets a round of applause from host Maeve, who was supposed to be lying inert on an operating table. “Hallo Felix,” she says, with the reanimated bird on her finger, “it’s time you and I had a chat.”
While we’ve been used to seeing Maeve have funny turns, we’ve not yet seen her turn so funny as to be inhabited by an entirely different persona. But that appears to be the case here, and my money would be on her being inhabited by the spirit of Arnold. So what is Arnold up to? In other HQ-related could-be-Arnold news, Eloise discovers that her rogue woodcutter has a “laser-based satellite uplink” stashed up his arm. Dolores dreams she’s got one in her too. She’s also receiving direct instructions from Arnold and lying to Ford about him during naked interviews. “He doesn’t know, I didn’t tell him anything”, she says out loud after their encounter. Ford, meanwhile, believes that Dolores is the last remaining connection to Arnold, and that he may even be uploaded up in her bonce. “Your mind is a walled garden, not even death can touch the flowers blooming in there”, he says like he’s just entered his blank verse into the sixth-form poetry competition. Mysterious and mysteriouser.
Notes from the prairie
William and Logan finally fall out this week with William leaving his cynical brother-in-law to the mercy of the Confederados. But before the pair split, they share the following exchange, which made me laugh, though not for the right reasons.
“You feel bad because you killed,” Logan screams. “But there’s no such thing as heroes or villains, it’s just one big circle jerk!”
“I think that philosophy says more about you than it does about the world”, replies William coolly. Though I think philosophy might be stretching it a bit.
Logan’s confederate beating, and his Yankee strangling, make me wonder once again what limits there are on violence in Westworld. I can imagine that, had William not interceded, the host would have stopped throttling Logan before he blacked out. But what if a confederate smash across the chops accidentally caused an embolism? Or a heart attack? Surely no amount of insurance could cover that?
With the new city added to the map this week I’m starting to believe that Westworld is less of a park and more of an actual nation state. This town, full of gold-painted prostitutes and gratuitous orgy scenes, is not even on the fringes of the park – you’ve got to go to war to find that. Covering the lot would definitely be an ask for a weekend away.
Questions for next week
What does Arnold look like? Is Arnold all of us? Are we all Arnold?
Could Dolores turn out to be a bad guy like whatserface in Ex Machina?
What ever happened to sweary narrative guy? I miss that guy!
Is an EVP a good position to have in a company or a makey-uppy one?
