On this here blog I posted reviews of Westworld episode one and two, with the intent of continuing forward and doing those weekly. The week three review is half-finished and has been sitting there, unfinished for well over a week now and I just watched episode four last night. Newborn twins are tough at times and finding time to watch a show then sit down and blog about it isn’t always easy. Plus, nobody really cares about Westworld in the face of The Walking Dead coming back, which, yeah, I won’t even get into that.
Anyway, what’s the matter with Westworld? We’re four episodes deep and there are fan theories, subreddits and comment sections degrade to obsessing about the minutiae of detail that is buried beneath the surface of this Jonathan Nolan-based show. I’m tossing in brother Nolan’s name because I feel like the work that he and his brother have done is important to understanding Westworld and why it’s just not that engaging.
Westworld isn’t very good. I really want to enjoy it, to find it to be the most awesome thing around and get obsessed with it. The thing is, I’m older now than I was when Christopher Nolan was churning out high-concept movies with big twists and I’ve grown a lot as a writer. This means that things stick out to me more now than they did back then. Where I would’ve been one of those people on an easter egg hunt prior, instead I’m saying, “Okay, but what about the plot? What about the characters?”
Because those are the things that matter. I’ll ask you this; which character do you care about the most now that we are about halfway through season one? Is it Teddy? William? Dolores? Maeve? The Man in Black? Bernard? If your answer is none of the above then we are in agreement. The problem with doing multiple point-of-views in writing is that in the beginning it’ll be difficult for the audience to really latch onto anyone and form an emotional bond with them.
Westworld has eschewed having a main character for having like eight main characters, which wouldn’t usually be a problem, except for that fact that this is the first season and there hasn’t been enough time to form an emotional bond with any of the characters. Maybe Dolores? I’m not sure, because she gets screen time, but in this last episode it felt minimal. Here’s the thing, you can absolutely build a story around an ensemble crew of protagonists, it’s been done before, but without an emotional hook it simply can’t work.
Let’s compare to HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones, the show that HBO is desperately hoping Westworld can replace. Game of Thrones follows a ton of characters and we care about just all of them at this point. The thing is, how did we get to this point? The answer is simple; Ned Stark was our anchor in season one.
Think about it for a minute and reflect on that first season and how Ned-centric it really was. The whole first season was about Ned being visited by the King, Ned being named the Hand of the King, Ned moving his family from their ancestral home to King’s Landing to serve his good friend, the King. Much of season one is the Stark family on the road to King’s Landing learning just how shifty and shitty the Lannister’s are, getting a lay of the land on some of the politics involves and growing to see Ned Stark through his own deeds and through the eyes of his children, friends and adversaries. That’s why near the end Ned’s (THIS IS A HUGE SPOILER, OBVIOUSLY) execution is so amazingly jarring; he was our anchor and guide to Westeros, he set out expectations, introduced us to a set of values and endeared the audience to his way of life.
It’d be like if Rick from The Walking Dead died before the end of the first season. Since that first season we’ve all had time to adjust to the lack of Ned, even saw Robb as the replacement Ned that we pulled for only for it to go horribly wrong, all the while the other characters and the world had been firmly established and there was no way that we’d stop reading or watching just because we lost our precious Ned. We had his family still, we had Dany and her dragons, we had the sharp-tongue Tyrian and the conflicted Jaime.
All of this because we were slyly focused on Ned Stark for most of the first book/season. Hell, I think of James SA Corey’s novel series (and now television series) The Expanse and how the first book focused just on two characters; Miller and Holden. Later on it branches out into a whole ton of different characters, including the crew of the Rocinante that have been established throughout the series.
You could make the “slow start” argument with Westworld, as shows like Breaking Bad for sure had a very slow start. In fact, while that show went down as one of the best in history, the entire first season is just a bit, well, whatever. The thing is, Walter White was your established protagonist early on and you were given reasons to care about him; he’s dying, he wants to provide for his family, he’s desperate. While the story moved slowly, there were still emotional hooks to keep the viewer somewhat engaged.
But none of that exists in Westworld. There is an ensemble of characters, but we see such little glimpses of each that their struggles, emotions and quests have no real value. So, the Man in Black wants to solve the puzzle, to find the “end game” of Westworld, but apparently all that we’ve learned about him over four episodes is that he’s sadistic inside of the park and that he’s incredibly wealthy and his company was involved in saving lives. This is all that we know, but the concept of the puzzle that he’s trying to solve is supposed to be the hook.
The Nolans have a history of style-over-substance and the whole, almost comical M. Night Shymlalan-style plot twist that is meant to BLOW YOUR FUCKING MIIIIIIND, MAAAN. That’s fine, plot twists are a real thing, but at a certain point it’s a gimmick. The whole reason that Christopher Nolan’s movies have done as well as they have is not only the MIND-BLOWING TWIST, but also that there is a story built there as well. Inception was all about the mind-fuck of dream-inside-of-a-dream and “what is really real,” but you had some reason to care about Leo’s character and his losses.
The same can be said for the rest of his movies, even Interstellar was based around the relationship of a father and daughter. But what is Westworld’s hook? There is a lot of meta-game sort of stuff buried in there, for sure. Everyone is talking about Dr. Ford’s ability to stop the hosts with a seemingly hidden trigger, debating if his little finger movement was the trigger, if it was a set of words or if it was telepathy. Perhaps there are trigger phrases and perhaps these have caused the androids having awakenings? While that’s great and all, it’s a trail of breadcrumbs that is meant to give deeper meaning to the world while there is absolutely nothing but surface-level stuff in the show.
This is HBO, which means ten episode seasons and we are halfway through. There’s nothing, no stakes, no characters to latch onto, no main story arc that matters. The story that has been established is that the hosts have a consciousness, even if they aren’t supposed to, and that there is inner turmoil within the park’s staff that may or may not be affecting all of this. Writing is not easy, especially when expectations are this high, but this is stuff that could’ve been established within an episode or two, not four.
So while everyone is so focused on finding the secrets of Westworld, they are missing the fact that there isn’t anything else beyond those secrets, just a thin veneer of a show without much going for it, much like Westworld the park, which is just a bunch of androids there for amusement but can’t actually have any impact on the guests whatsoever. Maybe that was what they were going for, but I sincerely doubt they’d invest this much money on a show that was meant to be worthless.