Westworld: Season 2

This show doesn't deserve a lengthy write-up, but I have a few observations that I think summarize the show in general.

The first is that, after the first episode, Marissa and I disagreed about whether or not Jeffrey Wright was playing "Arnold" or "Bernard" in a certain scene in which he was talking to Dolores. This is because the show takes place at indiscriminate intervals along an unspecified timeline; if the scene took place thirty years ago, then Jeffrey Wright is Arnold, a human, because Bernard did not exist back then. And if it took place thirty years later, then Jeffrey Wright would of course be Bernard, a robot created in Arnold's image, because Arnold is dead now. Dolores is Evan Rachel Wood either way, and she is ageless, because she is also a robot, and God, do you see how stupid this is? Here we are, watching a TV show, trying to get into a TV show we never really loved last season, and instead of focusing on an interaction between two characters, we're unsure who the characters even are, and we're lost right out of the gate.

The show is a puzzle; you don't "watch" Westworld as much as you "play" it. Fine! That makes it a cool and unique experience, I guess, but the whole first season got blown to hell when the Internet "solved" the puzzle and consensus speculation turned out to be major spoilers. This happens with all big shows these days, from Mr. Robot to Game of Thrones, but the difference is that in those shows, the characters are more important than the puzzles. Mr. Robot started to lose track of this, and suffered greatly in its second season for it, but it was ultimately able to right the ship last season with some character-driven stories, rather than audience-misdirect-driven bait-and-switches.

Westworld isn't character-driven whatsoever; its characters don't even really exist in any permanent sense, both because the timeline jumps all over the place and because the majority of them are robots whose "personalities" are tinkered with and changed regularly as part of the narrative. Like at one point an angry robot literally turns another robot's violence knob up, and his sympathy knob down, like adjusting a create-a-character in a friggin' video game.

Which leads me to my second observation - the show just isn't very fun! You should be able to take a premise like "nobody is real and this is all just about futuristic robots trying to have emotions while they murder each other" and have so much fun with it! Think of those Boston Dynamics dog robots that can run extremely fast but take thirty seconds to get up after they fall over. Think of when two Twitter bots get into an infinite loop of replying to one another. A show this stupid ought to be much funnier, much more joyful, much more self-aware, with all kinds of gratuitous robo-quirks and bad ticks. And instead this is the most joyless and humorless show on television, where every single character is just in constant "total badass" mode.

And now, third observation, holy shit, the writing is fucking terrible here. I don't just mean that the show is poorly structured and badly paced, which it is; I mean that the dialogue here is just fucking awful. In every episode's "previously, on Westworld" recap, they play dialogue-free clips. Why? Because allof the dialogue is wet ass, and because none of the "previously on" segments could possibly cohere into a sensible narrative anyway.

I'm way past the point in my life where I'm happy to burn ten hours of my time on very bad TV shows. Whoever is watching and enjoying this shit - great! I'm glad it's entertaining to, well, anybody at all. But holy shit, I just do not see it. This is as uninteresting to me as watching two CPU-controlled teams play a game of Madden - and that's more or less what the premise is, when you think about it.

No more! No third season for me! Frankly I should have stuck to my druthers and never bothered with the second.