All you do is make choices"-a set of suggestions for navigating Westworld that helpfully doubles as a set of suggestions for navigating life. When he works up the courage to ask if she's real, she's quick with a reply: "If you can't tell, does it matter?" And when he fumbles with what to do next, she offers advice: "Figuring out how it works is half the fun. Through William's eyes, we see what it's like to arrive at Westworld for the first time, as a beautiful host personally guides him through the process of choosing his outfit and entering the park.
In a more conventional pilot, these are probably the characters Westworld would have introduced to us first, and they're clearly modeled on the characters played by James Brolin and Richard Benjamin in the original film. For some, the real joy of Westworld will be thinking they've outsmarted it-picking through the layers into they've reached an "authenticity" others might have overlooked.Īnd that brings us to our new characters: Logan (Ben Barnes), a returning Westworld veteran, and William (Jimmi Simpson), a first-timer, as they arrive at the park via train.
Maybe, the episode argues, because some guests won't be satisfied by the first lie. And by the time she reaches the climax-"This is the new world, and in this world, you can be whatever the fuck you want"-the seduction should be complete. To leave most of my life unlived." By the time Maeve speaks that line, the guests should already be on the hook. Whenever I wanted to do anything, I could hear that voice telling me to stop. "You can hear it, can't you? That little voice," Maeve says to any guests that happen to be in earshot. Every robot has a role to play, and Maeve has been cast as the madam at the Sweetwater brothel-but apart from seducing the guests and sucking down cheap sherry, her main function seems to be delivering a showstopper of a speech to guests who aren't fully embracing the Westworld experience. Maeve was essentially a background character in last week's premiere episode, but she takes center stage in Episode Two, as the Westworld technicians toy with her programming in an effort to make her more appealing to the guests. But whatever the grander implications, the immediate impact is enough, as Maeve spends much of the episode slowly recalling a horrific event from her past buried somewhere deep within her memory banks. As the episode begins, we see the first tiny seeds of the virus that Dolores will spread around the park when she runs into Maeve (Thandie Newton) and whispers the key quote from last week's episode: "These violent delights have violent ends." The line seems to function as a kind of trigger phrase, which might lend credence to Bernard's theory that someone is deliberately sabotaging the robots. If there's going to be a revolution, it'll be a slow-burning one-but the revolution is coming.
But it wouldn't be much of a TV show if the robots were already exacting bloody revenge on their human creators and tormentors at the end of Episode Two.
This is the closest the new HBO series comes to replicating the original Westworld, which distilled this robot-gone-wild story to a tight 90 minutes.