Endless Delights, But
an Endless Mess
The Overrated Series:
Westworld
1300th
Column
Many of the series that I consider
for this column, I consider overrated because of their lack of ambition (Succession, Ozark) or their emphasis of
style over substance (Euphoria).
However, there are also some series that I don’t want to consider overrated
because I badly want them to work but never quite gel. One of the prime
examples of this is Westworld, one of
the most convoluted and messy series in recent years that when you consider all
the talent involved, you truly wonder: how did they get to this point?
Let us concede the obvious: the
series is infinitely better than its source material. What was essentially a
one-act horror movie in the 1970s, developed by Michael Crichton (who had yet
to realize his talent) it’s basic plot was very simple: wealthy patrons went to
the title park where they could undergo their most primitive fantasies against
human-like automatons (the most famous of which was played by Yul Brynner). You
went to the atmosphere and you got to have sex with or kill robots without
paying the consequences. Then one of the robots malfunctioned and started
attacking the guests. It inspired a couple of sequels in the decade, but the
premise just sat there (unless you consider that Crichton considered it on a
much grander scale for
And to be clear, the first season
mostly worked very well. We spent most of it trying to figure out what was
going on and who was actually human. (That Jeffrey Wright’s Bernard was
revealed to be one may not only have been the highpoint of the first season but
perhaps the entire series.) There were clearly levels of awareness around and
brilliant performances from an extraordinary cast, made up almost entirely of
actors I have admired for decades. Evan Rachel Wood, playing first the delicate
flower we often associated her with as a youth and then realizing violence.
Thandiwe Newton, getting to reveal inner deviousness as she tried to figure out
the reality of her daughter. Ed Harris, one of my favorite actors of all time,
as The Man in Black, someone whose been coming to the park for thirty years and
who clearly believes there’s a message in it just for him. (Regardless of my
feelings for the series, this is still some of the greatest work he’s ever
done.) James Marsden, trying to figure out if his love for Dolores is real. And
in a marvelous one season role, Anthony Hopkins as the mastermind behind the
park, who spends the entire season trying to come up with a new ‘narrative’ and
actually seems proud when that narrative begins with Dolores shooting him in
the head. Throw in later appearance by such wondrous talents as Tessa Thompson
and Aaron Paul, and you have one of the greatest casts assembled in any Peak TV
series.
So what’s the problem with Westworld? Simple. After the first
season, it became almost entirely incomprehensible. I watched the first season
on and off with admiration, but I abandoned the series halfway through season 2
because the jumps in the timeline, the switches between new characters and fundamentally
trying to figure out what the writers were trying to tell us with each
successive season keeps becoming harder and harder to fathom. I have dealt with
mythology series in my time where the backstory starts fraying at some point
and it’s clear the writers have lost the narrative thread. The larger problem with Westworld is that rather than try and resolve any basic threads
with each season, the writers keep expanding the world of the show and putting
the characters in it. Which would be fine if it didn’t keep changing the rules
with almost every character.
After watching Westworld for long enough, I think the model that it follows the
most closely is not a sci-fi show like Battlestar
Galactica or The X-Files but
rather Millennium. A little history will
be in order. In 1996, Chris Carter premiered his follow up series to The X-Files, a show which followed
ex-FBI profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) who has just start consulting
with an agency called the Millennium Group, an organization that, at least in
the first season, is made up entirely of ex-FBI agents and other law
enforcement officers. For much of the first season, it followed a simple model
of Frank chasing down brutal serial killers (a precursor of later shows like Criminal Minds and Law and Order’s) Then near the end of the season, one of the
recurring characters was murdered by someone identified as the Gehenna Devil, a
clear demonic presence.
From that point on, Millennium became a series that would delve as much into the
paranormal as it did the mundane. The problem was it never defined what the
show was basically about. This was clear fundamentally in the nature of The
Millennium Group. An organization of ex-law enforcement in Season One, in
Season Two, it appeared to become a cult centered on Judeo-Christian end-times
determined to bring about the apocalypse. In Season Three, it seems to become illuminati
like group bent on world domination. Terry O’Quinn played Peter Watts, the groups’
clearest face. In Season One, he was an ally of Frank. In Season Two, he seemed
to be the group’s unwilling representative, questioned everything he believed
as an apocalypse neared. In Season Three, he became something of a puppet
master, trying to lure Frank back to the group. It’s small wonder that as you
watch the series, you often see Henriksen struggling to figure out how to make
his character shift with the tone of the series. (Adding to the confusion was
the fact that each season of the series had a different set of showrunners at
its head and the fact that Season 2 seemed to conclude with the apocalypse
coming…and Season 3 acting as if it never happened.)
Fans of the show (and while it was
never a smash, it did have a cult following) tried to find some kind of
underlying plot going on within it. The truth is far simpler: Millennium managed to exist for three
seasons without a clear mission statement as to what it was supposed to be about. We had no clearer perspective as
to what the show meant at the beginning then we did when it was cancelled. And
I think this fundamental disconnect is also apparent in each subsequent season
of Westworld.
In Season 2, we get a clearer
perspective as to what’s going on in the outside world: that some people are
trying to use the hosts as a form of immortality or to defeat death. (Harris’
character is the son of one of the initial patrons.) Throughout Season 2, we
learn that workers are also collecting data files on the patrons as much as the
hosts. The purpose to this becomes clearer (as much as things do on this show)
when we enter the outside world and learn that humanity is being controlled by
an artificial intelligence system that is subverting everybody’s free will led
primarily by the technology developed by Delos. Season 3 ends with the
destruction of the system and the revolt of humanity.
The most recent season involved a
new world where the Man in Black (Harris) was working with Thompson’s character
to develop a farm of servers. She was created a world where hosts were now in
power and spent their time hunting humans.
There were revolts going on by a ‘resistance faction’, characters who
we’d seen dead were now alive in some form, there was a virtual world known as
‘The Sublime’ and Maeve’s daughter was leading the resistance searching for her
father. It was fascinating – and utterly impossible to follow what the hell was
going on from scene to scene, much less episode to episode. The season ends with Dolores (I know she was
killed at the end of Season 3, but let’s not pretend that logic holds a place
here) telling us that sentient life on Earth is doomed, unless one final test
saves it. And the Season ends with us back yet again in the title park.
Westworld
is a series designed not only to isolate the casual viewer but pretty much
even the viewer who is loyal for four seasons. This is a tragedy because many
of the individual parts of the show are absolutely fascinating. I remember
watching a recent episode where Caleb (Paul) tries to escape from his cell,
only to realize that there are dozens of hosts in the cell around him. As he
escapes, he keeps coming across bodies of himself, each of whom followed this
exact path but couldn’t get further. At one point, he finds a dying version of
himself in a duct and an impossible jump. The dying Caleb tells him to use his
body to survive. Caleb finally makes it to a place to escape and instead
broadcasts a message to his daughter. He spends his final moments raving at his
captor – and the episode ends with a new Caleb being molded and the questioning
about to resume.
And all of the actors are always
mesmerizing on the screen, particularly Harris who seems to be relishing
playing the destroyer of worlds, human or host. There is a reason that members
of the cast keep getting Emmy nominations year after year; the performances are
always solid, and that’s remarkable considering that who were watching is often
as much a mystery to the actors as it is to the characters as well as the fact
that none of them, being human, get to emote much.
Normally I flaunt series that I
consider unambitious in their scope. Westworld
has the opposite problem: it’s far too
ambitious. If it were to try to deal with smaller in scale ideas – had it stuck
within the realm of the parks and the
I suspect that the next season for Westworld will be the final one – the
phrasing of all the characters in the last episode would seem to indicate as
much. Besides, there isn’t much further they can take the series – space exploration anyone? While the legacy of so many overrated series
is that they barely tried to shift the parameters of their formula, the flaw of
Westworld is one that shifted far too
often and whose reach was ultimately beyond its grasp. I regret the way things
turned out for Westworld far more
than I did for a show like Ozark –
this series had the potential for greatness, but couldn’t move beyond the
limits of its hosts.
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