"Westworld," Year Two

Mild spoilers ahead.

I had very mixed feelings toward the first season of "Westworld," but was hopeful about the second.  A robot uprising sounded like a lot of fun, especially if it meant less emphasis on talky mind games and jumbled timelines.  Well, it didn't really work out that way. There are still plenty of mind games and jumbled timelines, though deployed a little differently this time.  The robot uprising doesn't really get anywhere, though there's plenty of carnage, with other concerns and intrigues taking center stage. Overall I enjoyed these episodes, but was left with no small amount of frustration too.

The narrative is neatly split into four major stories, each centering around a major character as they navigate the chaos of last season's finale.  Dolores is a major instigator of that chaos, who plots the overthrow of mankind and gathers an army of other Hosts. The Man in Black is given a new game by a spectre of Ford, and has to confront this sins of his past.  Meanwhile Maeve and a small band of her allies go off in search of Maeve's daughter, taking them to new corners of the park. Finally there's Bernard, who has become unstuck in time, trying to piece together what happened to him and Delos operative Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) after they went searching for an important cache of data.  And though each story had its ups and downs, I didn't find any of them boring or tedious, and the pacing was much improved.

It also helped greatly that each episode was much more self-contained, and the payoffs to certain mysteries came more quickly.  This allowed for very distinct, memorable episodes like "Riddle of the Sphinx" and "Kiksuya" that work in isolation, while I couldn't tell you what happened in any episode of last season, except for the premiere.  Many of the characters got better material, like the weaselly Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), and wholesome Teddy (James Marsden), once they were put in new situations and given important choices. I think the biggest improvement was to the Man in Black, whose search for meaning is much more interesting once you have the context of his personal history.  Some of the new characters, like James Delos (Peter Mullen) and the Native American Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon), are excellent.

"Westworld" remains one of the most expensive and impressive-looking productions currently on television.  The cast is full of excellent actors, the effects work and cinematography are fantastic, and there are some really compelling themes and ideas being explored.  However, for as much as the show gets right, there are also some very unfortunate fumbles and unforced errors. Let's take Shogun World, for example, one of the other Delos parks that Maeve's group wanders into.  It's a beautifully executed samurai pastiche that provides a nice break from the western setting and gives the spotlight over to Japanese actors like Rinko Kikuchi and Hiroyuki Sanada. However, Shogun World raises a lot of questions about the operations of the parks that never get answered.  The new characters are totally abandoned after two episodes, and nobody ever speaks of them again. There are a couple of nice thematic parallels, but narratively the whole trip feels like filler.

The big dilemma of the second season is what the hosts are going to do with their free will now that they have it.  However, "Westworld" spends surprisingly little time actually letting them grapple with this. Instead, there are so many of the usual mystery show distractions, like everyone searching for the "Valley Beyond," and Delos having ulterior motives, and Bernard trying to recover lost memories.  A lot of the basic moral questioning you'd expect to see with these newly conscious robots barely happens, and often far too quickly. It reminds me of Jonathan Nolan's previous show, "Person of Interest," which didn't bother to address any of the downsides of having an omnipresent surveillance system run by a God-like AI until about three seasons into its run.     

So while a lot of these subplots are fun, and the show's storytelling is getting better, there's still a lot of manufactured complication and a sense of going around in circles to avoid actually confronting the show's premise.  I feel like I'm grinding through the second season of "Game of Thrones" again, when they were stalling for time trying to give George R. R. Martin time to write more books. The second season of "Westworld" is more enjoyable than the second season of "Game of Thrones," but not by as much as it should be.  

---