Westworld

Sometimes you want a TV show to make you ponder the very essence of what it means to be a human.  And sometimes you just want something with plenty of sex and violence.  Maybe these two things aren’t that separate after all, as Westworld manages to deliver both, and all in a cheeky cowboy hat.  Let’s be honest, sex and violence are, after all, key parts of the human experience.  According to Westworld, they are definitely key parts of the cowboy experience too.

Billed, as with all big new shows, as something that would fill the Game Of Thrones hole in our lives, I let the first series of Westworld pass me by.  It was everywhere on my Sky EPG, posters followed me on my commute and trailers constantly rolled on every screen I went near.  It all made me lose interest, especially as nobody in the office seemed to be talking about it.  Could this big-budget western be a major dud?  But then, looking for a new show to start, and giving careful consideration to what should be covered on Just One More Episode, I consulted IMDB’s top rated TV shows: a list of 250 programmes that viewers have rewarded with up to ten stars.  Once I filtered out all the really old stuff and nature documentaries, Westworld (currently at #36) was the highest ranked entity I thought I could bear to watch.

My final barrier to overcome was that Westworld was also the name of a hip hop clothing shop at university and one particular friend used to dress in their attire from head to toe after watching You Got Served.  We all experiment with style when we’re young, but I should emphasise there is no age limit to enjoying a film produced as a streetdance vehicle for B2K.

From the cowboy chat so far, it should be clear that Westworld is a western, of sorts.  Not the kind of western made in the fifties that they repeat on TCM and your dad still watches during the daytime even though it’s sunny outside.  The western world of Westworld is actually a theme park.  Rather than queuing up at Thorpe Park to lose your lunch on a roller coaster though, the visitors to Westworld inhabit a near-future USA where technology has advanced enough to create artificial beings tasked with bringing history to life.  The wealthy book passage to this resurrected era, dressed for the period (a bit like those weird photo booths that actually are a part of normal theme parks), arriving by steam train at a frontier town.  Have they hired impoverished actors to flesh out the illusion?  No; these are, essentially, robots.

Right then, so it’s robots and cowboys – together at last.  Of all the historic periods you could create using animatronics, I’m still not sure I would go for cowboys.  What about all the courtly intrigue of Tudor England, or the licentious lifestyles of the Romans?  That might just be me.  Either way, the cowboy theme allows the paying visitors to shoot guns and whore about (literally) with little concern for the consequences.  Only the hosts can be killed, as they are programmed not to hurt humans.  Their purpose of existence is solely to fulfil their storylines in order to entertain.  But, such is their sophistication as pieces of tech, the ultimate tension comes from the slowly revealed truth that the hardware is starting to get emotional.  Cue a glacially paced and artfully crafted build up through series one to the inevitable pay off of the lunatics taking over the asylum.

With sinister grandpa Anthony Hopkins as the park’s founder and the hosts’ co-inventor, Dr Robert Ford, it’s all a bit Jurassic Park.  But that’s a huge part of the fun.  Let’s just say the future doesn’t look great for theme parks.  However, it does look good for A-list actors, as the cast is a roll call of household names, or at least names where you recognise the faces and can get distracted agonising over trying to remember where you saw them last.  They’re all enjoying themselves immensely, from James Marsden providing the cheekbones and jawline of the handsome cowboy hero, to Thandie Newton having the time of her life running the whorehouse as a tart with not just a heart, but a very complicated backstory.

And that’s the beauty of it.  The hosts play out storylines where they die, but then they are picked up by staff, tidied up, wiped and rebooted and sent out to play again in an endless cycle of suffering.  What if the memories start to come back?  Saying more isn’t possible without reeling off spoilers, so let’s instead focus on some questions that I always ask myself while watching.

Why do they have to be naked when they are getting serviced?

When a host is in for repair, they sit in glass rooms in the nude, while human technicians re-programme them using fancy tablets.  Not only is it unrealistic that the tech hooks up every time (the wifi never disconnects temperamentally) and nobody suggests turning it off and then turning it on again, but you’d think someone could afford the poor hosts something for their modesty.  Instead, their exposure further emphasises their abuse by the humans that run them.  Luckily, Newton’s character Maeve does finally get her own back in the second series, almost recognising the show’s surplus of wrinkly willies with one more wrinkly willy.

What’s up with the way the hosts die?

They’re robots, but they seem to have circulatory systems.  When shot with guns, blood spurts forth.  It’s not enough that they mimic humans in every way, they have this further facet of realism to provide.  Is the hardware designed so that injuries are categorised into fatal and non-fatal so the tech knows exactly when to shut down in order to maintain the storyline?  It’s kind of philosophical really.  Nevertheless, they’re back in the park the next day to do it all again.  They also never run out of battery, whereas my iPhone needs two charges a day just to keep up with Whatsapp.

Where is this place?

For the concept to be believed, we need to accept that somewhere there is a massive expanse of land that can be given over to leisure.  Our view of the outside world is, at first, limited, so we are as blinkered as the hosts to life beyond Westworld.  By the second season, characters suddenly start referring to an island, which curiously has never come up before, so I am wondering if they are now writing themselves out of a hole.

All of these niggles are just part and parcel of creating something so ambitious.  The scope of the show is as enormous as the park needs to be.  The first series takes it time letting you into Westworld and then works through twists that shatter your understanding.  Don’t get impatient, as repetition is used to show the farcical nature of the hosts’ lives.  I do admit that I have fallen asleep in almost every single episode, but don’t let that put you off.  It’s something that I have been watching late at night when I invariably start to reason that I can watch the last part with my eyes closed and then wake up to find it’s all over.  I’ve therefore had to re-watch some sequences a few times.  It’s better when you’re awake, or you won’t understand what’s going on.  The one time I didn’t fall asleep, I was ironing shirts at the same time as watching, so that kept me up luckily.

The complete first series is available on Sky Boxsets, while the second season is in the middle of premiering as I type.  This means I have gone from being able to hit up an episode each evening of series one to having to wait for my weekly instalment like some historical artefact.  Maybe this is how cowboys had to view boxsets before on-demand platforms existed.  I hope I remember what’s going on, but this enforced rationing should ensure more time to contemplate Westworld’s inner philosophical debate.  After all, what does define human consciousness?  I shall give it a good think while my eyes are glued mindlessly to the screen, trying to stay awake, watching naked people shoot each other on the telly.