Monday night is my Westworld night, replacing Game of Thrones (given we're in between seasons) as my buddy TV session. And I love it.
Maeve's story is the only one that really bothers me and it's less about the themes at play and more the execution. The body shop workers are atrociously written and the arc is filled with outrageously stupid contrivances. There's good stuff in there but they've fucked around with it in the dumbest ways. With so much talk of control and monitoring and a strict pecking order with staff and access, hers just leans way, way too heavily on disbelief. I get what they're trying to do, but the way they've done it doesn't work at all.
That being said the other themes surrounding her character; awaking, having trouble distinguishing between subjective realities, fragmented memories, impulsive violence, and much of this linked to Arnold's old code adds to the mystery. I love this part, and I thought this episode in particularly did a fantastic job of integrating Maeve more deeply into the core themes following other characters without having to fully sit on her on arc as a this weird, silly isolated (for all the wrong reasons) sequence of events.
Beyond that I love almost everything about the show. I love the mystery, I love the predictions coming true (which just gives them weight in believably, in my opinion), following the Man in Black, the fragmented time lines of Dolores, the deeper meanings of consciousness and separation from artificial intelligence, what drives both the Man in Black and Ford. Yes it can sometimes be hammy, but overall I feel many of the monologues and exchanges, and the themes they explore, to be built on strengths quintessential to science fiction. There's a standard action drama everything is rooted in, but the modus operandi for most of the characters go beyond.
I'm not going to pretend like the show isn't without issues; aforementioned Maeve arc, acting inconsistencies, murky rules of the park itself and how it's run and monitored, kitschy sequences, etc. But as a whole I'm totally in love. A part of me is deeply worried it's going to fall into Lost territory of unbearable dumb fucking shit, mysteries answered with more mysteries until we've built a shit mountain of mysteries the end desperately tries to sculpt into a sculpture of shit. But whenever I have these worries, that the show is running too far ahead of itself without the elegance and grace to explore its established mysteries, we get monologues from Hopkins and Harris that bring me back in and give me hope the writing team, flaws and all, do have a coherent vision for their project.
I guess we'll have to wait and see, but yeah. Chalk me up in the group that adores Westworld and looks forward to the new episode each and every week.
