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Westworld - S02E07 "Les Écorchés" - Post-episode discussion thread
These threads worked pretty well over at /r/westworld, so hopefully they will work here too.
Use this thread to post your questions, theories or comments about S02E07 of Westworld.
I'm starting to get tired of confusing timelines. If it weren't for Alt Shift X videos I might be pretty lost at this point. I don't think the show should aim at being this confusing anymore. They did that in season 1, and that was cool (and less confusing), but going on I hope they settle more on one point.
However, this was one of the best episodes this season, I think. And it gave several answers to many questions.
The constant mental overload of having to establish which time line each new scene belongs to has really taken it's toll on me too and I'm actually losing interest.
Some of the plot points and writing over the last couple of episodes have also given me so much cognitive dissonance and clash I'm no longer immersed in the story. Maeve's god-mode, MIBs invincibility (including surviving 4 bullets this episode), how unbelievably amateurish the security teams are and that whole scene where Angela seduces the security guard and blows up the Cradle was frankly insulting to our collective intelligence as viewers.
I probably will continue to watch because I've invested so much, but I'm really not sure now.
Totally agree. I don't even try anymore to understand the time line. I'm like... whatever. Maybe I'm getting old but I think there is no gain anymore in having the different timelines undistinguishable.
And yes to all your examples of stupidity lately. It's like they're full out on an in-your-face mode. I certainly don't have the anticipation I used to to watch the next episode... Sad.
I agree. The different timelines made sense in the first season and was part of what made it so interesting, but I don't think they should have done it again. There doesn't seem to be much of a point other than to be unnecessarily confusing.
And maybe I missed something, but why did Dolores just leave Maeve alive? It seems out of character given how brutally pragmatic she's been so far to leave someone alive that she even acknowledged could be used against them.
Very much didn't like some parts of this episode, felt cartoonish. The security scenes were embarassing and although I like Hopskins acting, Ford seems a bit too animated versus his more reserved, sinister self in season 1. Overall weakest episode of the season in my opinion. Maeve is still my favorite character.
Well he did say that the copies of people are "like a dim-witted boy humming a tune composed by someone else" (or something like that).
True, hadn't considered that. Good point.
For the last few episodes I've felt like Westworld was really cool, but fairly predictable. As awesome as episodes have been, nothing has been too surprising.
This episode I feel like I'm back to having no clue what's going on, and I love it. What's Ford's end-goal?
I feel a bit sad for Bernard and Maeve, who've been my favorite characters for quite a while now. Neither can catch a break, haha.
I'm disappointed by how the confrontation between MiB and Maeve played out. Maybe MiB's redemption arc isn't working out.
This episode also had more Deus Ex Machinas than previous episodes: MiB and Hale both saved by dumb luck.
I feel like MiB is too consumed by this game of his currently. That's all he thought Maeve was, just another plot point in a game set by Ford. (In that way, I kind of enjoyed watching him be proven wrong.)
Can someone explain to me the whole thing about immortality and recording guests? They make it seem that, just by recording the guests, they can somehow copy them and (as their next business model?) sell them on living an immortal live as an AI. But just looking at people's superficial quirks over the course of a couple of weeks doesn't seem to be enough to make a "copy" of a human being, at least not in the sense that I'd pay for it if it was pitched as "becoming immortal". They are creating, as Ford seems to admit, lifelike puppets with some superficial characteristics but it's not the same as having all my thoughts, hopes and dreams live on after I die.
I'm not so sure.
With Machine Learning in real life, you can use it to immitate black-box systems. You train a neural net based on comparing the output of the network against the output of the real system. With enough training data, it should be possible to create an accurate mimicry of a complex system, even without knowledge of the internals of that system. Whether it shares the same hopes and dreams as the original person is debateable, it may be that your hopes and dreams influence your every action and so the easiest way to predict your actions is to understand your drives. Or it may be that there are multiple different internal states that could result in the same output, in which case there's a probability that the network would learn the same ones as the original, but it's pretty slim. For some simpler examples of what I'm talking about, take a look at this video. (Particularly, the example of the sheep detection)
But it depends what Delos' goals for the project were. In a previous episode they talked about using it for marketing purposes. A shallow copy of an individual would be more than enough for this purpose. Or, more sinister, maybe Delos' want to create literal puppets of influential figures.