If this is really the second time this has happened, what's different now compared to the first time?
That's kinda the whole point of showing us the past and the present at the same time, at a point they're going to diverge.
If this is really the second time this has happened, what's different now compared to the first time?
Now The Man In Black is involved, and trying to find the maze too. Now Wyatt and his forces are a new obstacle. Now there's corporate espionage going on. Now Maeve is gaining sentience and clarity seemingly faster than anyone anticipated. Now Ford has a new story in the works
Hard to put a finger on it but this show is losing my interest
How can people say we haven't gotten answers? We've learned about in part what the maze is, some of the park's history, the how and why hosts are gaining sentience, about the Man In Black and his motives, and so on.Every episode = more questions and no answers to previous ones. Leave each episode with the same theories and no new knowledge of potential directions the story can take. You get to see cool new character development (Dolores shooting her gun), but nothing that changes the conversation
Let's compare Dolores' story arc:
NONLINEAR THEORY
Arnold plants secret code in Dolores and other hosts
-> Arnold dies
--> 4(?) years pass
---> William picks up the can for Dolores
----> ??? (Something happens to Dolores off-screen)
-----> Dolores stumbles into William's camp
------> Dolores shows signs of awareness
-------> ??? (we haven't seen this part yet)
--------> 30 years pass
---------> Reveries & codephrase allow Dolores to gain awareness again, and retrace her adventure with William
----------> ??? (we haven't seen this part yet either)
I think William not being the MiB is incredibly bad storytelling.
Let's compare Dolores' story arc:
LINEAR THEORY
Arnold plants secret code in Dolores and other hosts
-> Arnold dies
--> 34 years pass
---> Ford implements reveries in certain hosts
----> Reveries cause dormant code to surface
-----> "Violent delights" codephrase spreads the dormant code activation to Dolores & Maeve
------> Dolores begins to remember prior events and gain new abilities
-------> New abilities allow her to break out of her loop
--------> Breaking out of her loop results in her joining William on his adventure
---------> Bernard encourages Dolores to continue going off-loop and seek the maze
----------> ??? (we haven't seen this part yet)
NONLINEAR THEORY
Arnold plants secret code in Dolores and other hosts
-> Arnold dies
--> 4(?) years pass
---> William picks up the can for Dolores
----> ??? (Something happens to Dolores off-screen)
-----> Dolores stumbles into William's camp
------> Dolores shows signs of awareness
-------> ??? (we haven't seen this part yet)
--------> 30 years pass
---------> Reveries & codephrase allow Dolores to gain awareness again, and retrace her adventure with William
----------> ??? (we haven't seen this part yet either)
Viewed as a linear narrative, each plot point clearly and elegantly leads into the next. The nonlinear version is comparatively full of holes. For example, why would Dolores be left in service after the original incident? Or if not retired, why wouldn't they at least wipe all traces of Arnold's code from her system? Why is she apparently the only robot malfunctioning in the past timeline?
If someone wants to take a stab at laying out the nonlinear version in a way that makes more sense, be my guest.
Even if you subscribe to the one timeline theory, the show STILL shows things in a nonlinear fashion. How many times has Bernard pulled Dolores into the interview room even while she is still with William. Unless he drives out there to get her himself. If William and Logan are Delos employees, I doubt it would go unnoticed if Bernard kept pulling a host accompanying them just to have secret conversations. The show is clearly going with an unreliable narrator/non-linear approach to telling its story. The show presents events out of order even in a single timeline.
Calling those plot holes seems premature considering the show has yet to show us these things.
Even if you subscribe to the one timeline theory, the show STILL shows things in a nonlinear fashion. How many times has Bernard pulled Dolores into the interview room even while she is still with William. Unless he drives out there to get her himself. If William and Logan are Delos employees, I doubt it would go unnoticed if Bernard kept pulling a host accompanying them just to have secret conversations. The show is clearly going with an unreliable narrator/non-linear approach to telling its story. The show presents events out of order even in a single timeline.
The robots have digital minds and can be transferred to new duplicate bodies if one is damaged beyond repair.
These can easily be linear scenes. The robots have digital minds and can be transferred to new duplicate bodies if one is damaged beyond repair. Analysis sessions could therefore be conducted by downloading the host's mind into a spare body, leaving the original body out in the field. Or, some have speculated that the analysis scenes take place in VR.
The show is clearly implying that he's pulling her out while she's still in the park, usually when she's sleeping/unconscious. They refer to those meetings as dreams, and he always mentions that she needs to get back before she's missed. As for how they're doing this without physically moving her, we don't know yet. Could all this be a lie? Maybe. But that's how the show has been presenting it so far.
Why?? He can still be an example of the park turning a good person bad without them literally being the same character.
(I'm not even convinced that his arc will be about him going from white hat to black hat. My bet is that his adventure with Dolores will allow him to be a white hat character to a much more meaningful extent than he's expecting.)
If it's really such a simple linear explanation, why make it so obtuse?
Viewed as a linear narrative, each plot point clearly and elegantly leads into the next. The nonlinear version is comparatively full of holes. For example, why would Dolores be left in service after the original incident?
Or if not retired, why wouldn't they at least wipe all traces of Arnold's code from her system?
Why is she apparently the only robot malfunctioning in the past timeline?
Here's my question. Why make that a mystery at all? Why isn't it clear unless they are trying to hide something? Why not show that he is in a VR interview simulation? Why not show Bernard transferring consciousnesses? Why show Dolores clearly walking out of the room to go back to where she was? Bernard makes no mention of guests at all during the interviews and asks nothing about what Dolores feels when traveling with guests. Likewise Dolores doesn't mention them.
If it's really such a simple linear explanation, why make it so obtuse?
We don´t know how the hosts are programmed, we can assume that Arnold´s works are the core of how the hosts works. Why? Because every host, not only Dolores, still have Arnold´s pieces of code even today. If they could clean Dolores of all Arnold's code, why wouldn´t they do the same for all hosts, including new ones that were build after the incident?
This is exactly why I believe it's a linear narrative. Arnold's code still exists in the robots today because, until now, it hasn't caused any problems!
This is exactly why I believe it's a linear narrative. Arnold's code still exists in the robots today because, until now, it hasn't caused any problems!
I think the reason people hate the two timelines theory is because they don't like knowing how the William/Logan story ends. It feels pointless if we already know what is happening 30 years later. Except we don't know how their story ends even though we are getting perspectives from the future. I don't think having two timelines automatically makes William's story pointless. I'm still intrigued by William and Logan's side of the story and want to see their significance in the overall story with Dolores. I don't think it's going to be as simple as people think with a dark Darth Vader turn or anything. I think what she remembers at the end of her and William's journey will be a huge turning point in her character and the story for the present timeline. I think it's going to be a lot more complicated than people think it is.
Dolores having two meltdowns flies in the face of Stubbs utter confidence that "good ol' Dolores" would never have any issues like Abernathy had. The line pretty heavily implies that she's been the perfect host since day one. Being the root of a previous issue kind of throws that whole confidence out the window. How would someone be sure assured that the original problem bot wouldn't have problems now? It doesn't make much sense.
We also see that william is pretty much done with the park and wants to leave. MiB wants to stay forever. They are the most opposite characters ever.
William is kind of falling in love with Dolores... so that big of a heel turn would have to be her dying... but she can't die, and is around in MiB "timeline".
I hate it cause William and the MiB are not even the focus of the show... why dedicate half of it to his backstory. It makes no sense, for a show about AI to dedicate so much time to MiB backstory.
We all know whyAnd if we're gonna go with "but storytelling 101 dictates!" How come William and Logan's story seem to exist in a vacuum outside of the characters who are connected to the overarching plot? It's something I've noticed while watching the show. A sense of unsatisfactory with William and Logan's pov. I thought it was cause they don't have enough screentime. But I realized it's cause no one acknowledges their existence. No one who is connected to the greater story comments on them five episodes in. MiB and Teddy are in Pariah as of the last episode. If they run into Logan in the next episode will eat my fucking shoe.
And if we're gonna go with "but storytelling 101 dictates!" How come William and Logan's story seem to exist in a vacuum outside of the characters who are connected to the overarching plot? It's something I've noticed while watching the show. A sense of unsatisfactory with William and Logan's pov. I thought it was cause they don't have enough screentime. But I realized it's cause no one acknowledges their existence. No one who is connected to the greater story comments on them five episodes in. MiB and Teddy are in Pariah as of the last episode. If they run into Logan in the next episode will eat my fucking shoe.
Imagine if someone had a theory that all of the scenes at the Wall in GOT actually took place 30 years in the future, and explained all of the resulting inconsistencies away because GOT's world has magic and immortal characters.
I hate it cause William and the MiB are not even the focus of the show... why dedicate half of it to his backstory. It makes no sense, for a show about AI to dedicate so much time to MiB backstory. That is like season 5 single episode flashback special crap.
We also see that william is pretty much done with the park and wants to leave. MiB wants to stay forever. They are the most opposite characters ever. William is kind of falling in love with Dolores... so that big of a heel turn would have to be her dying... but she can't die, and is around in MiB "timeline".
It just doesn't make as much sense as you think it does.
Why does each character's story in GOT exist in a vacuum? It's so that the writers can explore what's happening in various corners of the world (or park, in this case). It makes the world and plot seem more sprawling and allows us to feel different moods, see different types of places, explore different segments of Westworld society. Like in GOT, eventually these different threads will meet.
Imagine if someone had a theory that all of the scenes at the Wall in GOT actually took place 30 years in the future, and explained all of the resulting inconsistencies away because GOT's world has magic and immortal characters.
It makes sense in GoT because there are no corporate overseers who have literal cameras on every tree to monitor every person in the realm. But it doesn't make sense here. If Bernard is so curious about Dolores's emergent AI behavior, wouldn't logic dictate he wonder how she interacts with the guests who she has been accompanying longer than anyone we have seen her with before?
Characters in GoT at least acknowledge that other characters exist and events that happened to them has transpired.
Dolores having two meltdowns flies in the face of Stubbs utter confidence that "good ol' Dolores" would never have any issues like Abernathy had. The line pretty heavily implies that she's been the perfect host since day one. Being the root of a previous issue kind of throws that whole confidence out the window. How would someone be sure assured that the original problem bot wouldn't have problems now? It doesn't make much sense.
And again, I have to reiterate the significant issues of control talking about Dolores being off-loop and wondering if she's with a guest and in the next scene us seeing a host trying to return her to her loop before verifying she's with William, and the progression of her very clearly having a meltdown in the "present" to her fleeing the barn and stumbling into William and Logan's camp. And before anyone says it, yes, I know the explanations among ardent flashback theory supporters - that it's a trick, that the scenes are actually not progressing literally, that she ran off twice, etc.. Except, those aren't tricks. Those are lies. For it to be a trick, there needs to be a way for the audience to see through it, and hint for those re-watching that maybe it's not exactly as represented. Some sort of tell. There's not one. So for those sequences, for it to be anything other than as represented you're effectively lying flat-out to the audience. That is not good storytelling.
Now, I've said several times I'm not willing to rule out the flashback theory 100%, and I have admitted that there are elements that can be taken as clues (particularly in the last episode or so). But the problem with a lot of people in the flashback theory camp is that they are 100% dead certain it's the case, and when something conflicts with that it's "just a trick", which is a bad explanation, without being able to consider that perhaps what they're taking as evidence is the trick, or even that they're just over-reading. Obviously that's not that case for everyone, but there are at least a few people in that camp who are overly positive in their theory and just dismiss everything outright.
I took that to be them showing how Bernard views her and maybe just the hosts in general. It's a direct contrast to the way Ford views them. I think Bernard sees the hosts more akin to how Arnold saw them. He's becoming attached to them and viewing them as human. Ford warns him about Arnold and tells him not to make the same mistake. Compare this to Ford who cuts a hosts face to make a point.there is something here too and the writers clearly wanted a second layer mistery.
Why when Dolores met Bernard she is always fully dressed, something that never happens with other hosts, and did not happen with Dolores herself when she was interviewed by Ford, when she was naked? Why the difference?
Thus, pay attention to Ford's words. In debug mode do the hosts have access to all memory loops? She would not be able to answer about Arnold if not so. So reveries only allow them to access those memory segments on operational mode? Why Ford asks if she remembers the man he used to be? If Arnold can be remembered, so Ford can be.
Last episode showed that William is actually starting to get comfortable within the park, I don't see where you're getting this he wants to leave thing from other than his first day or so in the park.
The problem is you assume the only way he could change is through her dying and not a ton of other different reasons such as wanting to set things right for something he did wrong in the past. IMO MiB isn't actually much changed. I don't believe the character is actually evil or has any ill intentions for Dolores.
But this has never been shown on the show?
Why do these idiots put bodies into cold storage? Why did they replace Dolores's dad with a new body if they could've just swapped in a new "mind"?
Isn't that just good storytelling? Filling in those holes you have laid out. I think William not being the MiB is incredibly bad storytelling. Someone just happened to figure it out sooner than the show writers would have liked.
I just personally feel like him being the MiB is too good of plot development that anything less would be a let down. It's also possible that this is just someone's theory and now that I am watching the show with that in mind, it's skewing the experience.
Peoples in the remake of "Shaft" disagrees with this.
That latter notion is more likely. Think of it this way: what does MiB gain as a character from being 'revealed' to be another character that we consider to distinctly different from him in every way? I mean, it's literally already been parodied as a shallow trope in the 90's, as you may suddenly recognize a certain gif from this video:
Do you really think Ed Harris would have signed on based on 'my character's only importance is being a trope' ? He's a serious man, he ain't got time for amateur shit like that. The only value of playing a character is if that character is a holistic seeming entity, with its own values, dreams, ambitions, and unspoken fears. This whole unfortunate takeover of discussion of the show by the crazies is kind of detrimental to it, since it takes people out of what it's actually trying to do.
Ed Harris isn't lasting more than 1 season i bet. He'll be the Sean Bean of this series.
But William turning out to be a MIB's origin wouldn't be a "twist". Bernard being a host or Ford really being a host that Arnold uploaded himself into would beNo, it's not good storytelling. You might take me a numbers nerd when I say it, but the finest storytelling is simply told in a direct, linear manner. Because anything other than that is either a waste of time -like flashbacks- or a vehicle to make the creation of elaborate confusion seem 'deep'. Nothing gets added by the overdependence on 'the twist' other than it being there because TWIST. In fact, it deflates most tension in arcs almost immediately, because once there's been a far-ranging twist, there is nothing left to do for any characters within arcs that are now pretty much moot.
Tell that to Dracula, Frankenstein, Memento, Psycho, House of Leaves, and so onYou might take me a numbers nerd when I say it, but the finest storytelling is simply told in a direct, linear manner.
Today staff was not the one in charge 30 years ago. If something went wrong with Dolores, they would not know. Only Ford seems to remember that time, so he is the only one left that were part of the team at the time. For the newer staff, she is the good ol' Dolores, which is being active since the park beginning, a relic.
Plus, again, we don´t know nothing about how Dolores quest would have ended 30 years ago. MiB has being told several times that the Maze isn´t for him. Why? maybe the Maze is Arnold´s Ultimate Turing Test, the host which can go through it will have to have develop sentience to do so. And maybe Dolores failed the first time, and that is why she was kept in duty. Maybe William had something to do with her failure, and that haunted him so much that he kept coming to Westworld year after year and become MiB.
This is not a lie, but a trick to the audience. Of course the effective of the trick depends on how they will reveal it. Do it bad, and the audience will think like you, bad storytelling, lies. But do it right, like showing parts of the sequences again with new information, and the audience will be either "I knew it" or "How could I not see it".
I can already see the people who are going to say "well that's just bad storytelling. Show sucks" if the theory is true lol.
You can't use "that's just good sensical linear storytelling!" As a defense. It just makes sense that William will confront the Man in Black because that's what the way these stories always go? Concurrent timelines as a twist has been done in movies and games plenty of times before.
And if we're gonna go with "but storytelling 101 dictates!" How come William and Logan's story seem to exist in a vacuum outside of the characters who are connected to the overarching plot? It's something I've noticed while watching the show. A sense of unsatisfactory with William and Logan's pov. I thought it was cause they don't have enough screentime. But I realized it's cause no one acknowledges their existence. No one who is connected to the greater story comments on them five episodes in. MiB and Teddy are in Pariah as of the last episode. If they run into Logan in the next episode will eat my fucking shoe.
We all know why
It gives a mysterious character with unknown intentions that's central to the plot a backstory. Right now he's just an eccentric rich guy that's going around fucking shit up, that's not a very compelling character.
No, that's what you want and think he should be.His character worked way better before they humanized him. He's the antagonist to Dolores' protagonist, and he works best when seen through the eyes of the hosts - as a nightmarish invulnerable force of nature.
Giving him understandable motives and redeeming qualities in the recent episodes was, I think, a mistake. Giving him an entire backstory would be more so. "Once upon a time, he was naive and good!" Who cares? He's supposed to be filling the "heartless death machine" role from the original movie.
It gives a mysterious character with unknown intentions that's central to the plot a backstory. Right now he's just an eccentric rich guy that's going around fucking shit up, that's not a very compelling character.
Ed Harris isn't lasting more than 1 season i bet. He'll be the Sean Bean of this series.
But William turning out to be a MIB's origin wouldn't be a "twist". Bernard being a host or Ford really being a host that Arnold uploaded himself into would be
Tell that to Dracula, Frankenstein, Memento, Psycho, House of Leaves, and so on
No, that's what you want and think he should be.
Um, they're are in direct contact with dolores, the main character of the show. They also are in contact with clementine, desperado bounty guy, Lawrence, etc. who are all also present in the other timeline, if there are 2 timelines.
They also could be the board reps that Ford mentions, if board reps might be folks with stakes in the park and delos isn't the sole owner but just a majority owner. Logan might be talking about buying out delos' stake in the park, and maybe Ford is keyed into that, and would also explain Meredith being clueless because she's with delos.
That's the point: he's a (bored) player looking for something new, something he probably won't get a second chance to do. And he's related to the park from near its inception. Please tell how this character is less compelling than 'EINHORN IS FINKLE!'. Seriously, I'd love someone to explain to me, in fucking detail - because I keep doing that and then it's all "oh you're wrong" - why that would possible be worthwhile story..