Then, I was going to do a post outlining each part of the yearly Arrowverse crossover which now includes four separate shows, two and a half of which are particularly terrible. However, I could only sit through two episodes and it doesn’t feel right railing on a story when it’s entirely feasible (but probably not) that the conclusion featured in Legends of Tomorrow could have turned things around and made this event tolerable. So we’ll mark that as “to be continued.”
Then I was going to update you about how Civil War II is going, but I don’t think anyone will be surprised to know that it’s still pimpled butt cheeks. The past three issues have been going over the same three points over and over: 1). Captain Marvel is strong and wrong; 2). The young heroes are sick of the old heroes and their shit and 3). Spider Man really doesn’t want to go to jail. So yeah, still awful.
And then I realized that while I’ve been looking one way, HBO’s sci-fi mind bender, Westworld has been low key becoming the best show on television. It hits all the obligatory markers of an HBO show….obscene budget, brilliant A list casting, first class writing. Clearly, the network is aiming for this to be the successor to the crown currently occupied by Game of Thrones which is officially on its way out. But the show goes a little further than that, ambitiously reaching past the story’s roots from the Michael Crichton movie. There are spoilers after this point. They are really MINOR spoilers but I'm still obligated (by the fact that I don't want to hear whining about spoilers) to tell you that there are spoilers after the jump. That's four times I've mentioned spoilers. Five now. So I don't want to hear any bullshit about it.
At its first glance, sure, it’s about fairly intuitive robots losing their shit. But it’s more about an autopsy of the human condition and technology’s affect on it. It ponders what kind of people it takes to dissect the things that make us who we are, reverse engineer those things and mass produce them in mannequins. Anthony Hopkins’ character, Westworld founder Robert Ford is so thoroughly interesting because he simultaneously has a god complex AND is cartoonishly codependent. He chastises his employees for treating the “hosts” with basic human dignities like they’re real such as covering their naughty bits….but then is also caught in intimate moments reliving the good old days with one of his Year One creations. He represents exactly the kind of flawed hubris it takes to be at the center of what looks like a massive full immersion MMORPG.
The other major thing this show constantly does is call into question how you, the viewer, processes information within the story you’re being told. I got through the first four episodes and it didn’t even occur to me that (MINOR SPOILER) that this story is happening in two completely different timeframes in which the character only overlap incidentally up to a certain point (I’m not going to go into my Westworld twitter theories). Essentially, the show asked “Are you truly paying attention?” as a test and I admittedly failed at first. The only other time I can say this about a show I thought I was fully thrown into is Mr. Robot. I went in expecting a straightforward story and what I got was a story that was planting seeds and telling other stories I didn’t even notice right in my face. Westworld takes the plot device of the “unreliable/untrustworthy narrator” and makes it a character or a set of characters such as Dolores and, more importantly, Jeffrey Wright’s Bernard Lowe that question everything and everyone around them including themselves.
Honestly, I think I’ve probably said too much. The best thing I can suggest is to see it for yourself. There’s a marathon on Sunday, December 4th, leading up to the season finale that night. I envy anyone getting a look at this in one day long binge, getting to watch the plot unravel and see the clues scene after scene without having a whole week to analyze it bit by bit. So there’s that.
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