One of my earliest jobs was secretary at my mother’s hair salon. I booked appointments and sold shampoos, sure, but mostly I gossiped with customers. I could spot the exact moment when a guest spotted a juicy tidbit in the salon’s copies of Entertainment Weekly or US.
Chris Ryan: “Park 1.” Which would suggest very strongly that there is a Park 2. So would the samurai. When Maeve asks Felix WTF, he tells her, “It’s complicated.” It is and it isn’t. It’s telling that very little of “The Bicameral Mind” mined the Old West for plot.
Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have been thinking a lot about simulations. The creative duo have divided their last few years between writing for television and raising their first child.
Television’s best show about murderous sex robots, HBO’s Westworld, wrapped up its debut season last night in the way most prestige TV shows do. Characters died, twists were revealed, and the season ended on a somewhat ambiguous note.
What a beautiful mess that was. The finale of Westworld was the best the show has been since the pilot.
I was blown away by the first episode of Westworld, and now it's time to analyze it obsessively on Ars Technica's podcast Decrypted. Previously, we plumbed the depths of Mr. Robot, and now we're ready for a show with actual robots.
NOTE: Spoilers for episode seven of Westworld follow. HBO’s Westworld is taut and tantalizing, a gripping and gorgeous sci-fi puzzle box of a series with a stellar cast and a meticulously designed world that feels at once real and unreal.
Image: John P. Johnson/HBO In episode three of Westworld, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) describes the theory of the mind that his co-founder, Arnold, used to try to create consciousness in the hosts.
There’s a train in Westworld, or near Westworld, or around Westworld, or maybe the train actually is Westworld. I don’t know.
“This story line will make Hieronymus Bosch look like he was doodling kittens,” Lee Sizemore brags. He’s the head of the “narrative department” at Westworld, a frontier-themed vacation park where customers act out their darkest fantasies.
Last Sunday, we passed the halftime mark on HBO’s series Westworld, with the airing of episode five of 10 in the first season.
The second episode of Westworld, "Chestnut," took us deeper into the mysteries of robot consciousness and the Man In Black's obsessive quest. Now we'll take a deep analytical dive into Westworld on Ars Technica's podcast Decrypted.
When robots achieve sentience, they will enjoy a luxury that humanity has been denied since Adam and Eve frolicked in paradise: They will get to converse with their godlike creators.
Westworld, HBO’s long-gestating adaptation of the 1973 movie of the same name, finally premieres this Sunday. In a lot of ways, the first episode already lives up to the hype—but you’re also going to have to be okay with being confused.... at least for now.
The paradox of Westworld as a theme park is that guests come seeking a taste of freedom — no laws, no standards of decency, no limits beyond the horizon — but are, in fact, submitting themselves to a world that’s controlled, surveilled and quite literally programmed.
We’re three episodes into Westworld’s inaugural season, and things keep getting weirder and weirder (and in many instances, creepier, too). It’s answered exactly zero of the questions we had after the premiere, while new ones keep piling up.
The season finale transformed the core conflict from a single-player game into a multiplayer experience. Now, the show will have to range farther afield to support that choice.
On October 2, the 1973 scifi movie Westworld will be reimagined as a sleek, modern TV series courtesy of HBO. Given that the show is produced by the likes of Jonathan Nolan and J.J.
As the deviously puzzling first half of HBO’s “Westworld” has unfolded, sleuths on fan sites and reddit threads have spun elaborate theories about what is really going on in the futuristic, Wild West-themed amusement park of the title.
HBO’s new series Westworld has probably got a lot of people reconsidering their most recent Grand Theft Auto V murder spree. Reconsidering, though probably not regretting.
I suspect that audiences watched two different finales of Westworld last night. If you were a casual Westworld fan, someone who catches it every week but doesn’t spend a lot of additional time thinking about it, the revelation of William as the Man in Black was most likely quite surprising.
Everything I believed was a lie on Westworld—at least, that's what I got out of this week's episode "Trompe L'Oeil." I guess that's just par for the course in this mind-breaking story about storytelling.
Near the end of Westworld’s first season, Host designer Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), recently revealed to be a Host himself, tearfully asks the park director, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), how Ford could so casually force Bernard to murder someone — Bernard's own lover, no less.
There was a moment in last night’s Westworld that made everyone who’s seen the original film freeze in shock. Thankfully for our sanity, showrunner Jonathan Nolan has confirmed that we all saw what we thought we saw.
Every week, I swing for the fences with one massive theory about the future of Westworld. Am I wrong? Am I right? We probably won’t know for sure for years, so why not enjoy the present? Spoilers ahead.
HBO's Westworld is a show about technological anxiety, explored through the lens of a futuristic theme park where you can live out your wildest fantasies with hundreds of almost perfectly lifelike (and increasingly self-aware) animatronic "hosts.
Since it popped up online last week, the trailer for HBO's new science fiction series Westworld has been viewed almost 2.5 million times. That's because it offers a raw, original vision of what a robot uprising might really be like in the twenty-first century. Of course, it starts with gaming.
One of the most pervasive fan theories concerning HBO’s Westworld is that the show seems to be portraying two or more different timelines at once without indicating to the audience that it’s operating under such a time split.
As you probably know, many members of The Outline staff are huge Westworld fans. Well, at the very least, many members of the staff spent an enormous amount of time debating the nature of our reality and also whether or not the show was any good.
Everything in Westworld is a game. Guests can join robots on quests and missions or just do a hack-and-slash on poor Teddy. The park workers play power games.
We are getting closer to that mysterious maze, yet we return with some more Westworld theories for you to consider before the penultimate episode of the HBO series. We take a look at a mind-blowing theory which suggests a connection between Dolores and Wyatt.
Westworld, HBO’s new series, reframes the classic monsters-run-amok plotline: The audience watches androids become more human—as the humans become less so.
Ready, player one? Switch off awareness of your surroundings and focus your attention exclusively on this EW recap. We’re booting up our Analysis Mode of HBO’s Westworld, and there is a lot of data to process.
A beautifully restored old train deposits visitors in Sweetwater, a manufactured Old West town and the central settlement within “Westworld,” the role-playing resort in which paying customers can bring their most elaborate fantasies to life, setting out on frontier adventures or staying in the
Five years ago, Game of Thrones turned our expectations upside down. Here was a fantasy show that focused not on the portentous prophecies and heavy spellbooks, but on the politics and personalities of its medieval realm—and in the process, cultivated millions of fans.
Think of Westworld as the Garden of Eden. Think of the Hosts contained within it as hundreds upon hundreds of possible Adams and possible Eves.
It took three years, upwards of $100 million in start-up costs, and one halt in production, but HBO’s Westworld ended its first season on Sunday as what’s arguably the network’s most successful drama launch since Game of Thrones. It’s not just that the ratings for the J.J.
The first episode of Westworld laid out the scope and mechanics of the show’s sprawling yet self-contained universe. The second got at what it’s trying to say.
Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Dissonance Theory’For visitors to the park, the chief allure of Westworld is freedom: freedom from the strictures of legality and social norms; freedom to indulge in whatever violent and sexual fantasie
HBO has made this episode available in advance of its regular Sunday night slot. You can stream it now on HBO Go and HBO Now.
Now that it’s out of the way, where does the show go from here?This post contains one rather large Westworld spoiler. Proceed with caution.
The HBO drama’s finale hinted at a dark, meta message. This post contains spoilers for the season finale of Westworld.
If you've been watching Westworld, at some point you've probably found yourself wondering how close we are in reality to the science fiction of an immersive theme park populated by robots near indistinguishable from humans, whose bodies are there to cater to guests' every perverse pleasure.
If Westworld can be described as “about” any one thing in particular — which is a dangerous game to play, because the show is trying to encompass a great number of themes — it’s about the nature of consciousness.
Note: Spoilers are ahead for previously aired Westworld episodes, as is some potentially spoiler-y speculation for future episodes.
Mystified by Westworld? You’re not alone. We don’t have many answers yet, but HBO’s sci-fi brain teaser will surely offer a few from week to week. So we’re following up each episode of Westworld with a list of the myriad questions we’re pondering.
The 1973 sci-fi/western “Westworld” was the feature filmmaking debut of Michael Crichton, who wrote and directed the film soon after having established himself as a genre novelist, mostly under a pseudonym.
In my first review of HBO’s Westworld, which ended its first season this weekend, I called it “… a meticulously constructed, obsessively self-analyzing show, tailor-made for a pop-culture era dominated by TV and discussion of TV … an adults-only drama about the id
Westworld finished its first season last night. Most of the time, we learned exactly what we expected to— but that didn’t stop the show from delivering as many punches as it could on the way there. Since I was a child, I’ve always loved a good story.
Four episodes in, and we’re reaching a point in Westworld where I’d believe that almost anyone was secretly an android. But, last night, there was finally a hint at an answer to one of the show’s biggest mysteries: Who is the Man in Black in the real world?
Much like the center of the maze, we’ve been progressing toward a revelation in “Westworld” that’s been teasingly within our grasp all along.
Going into “Trace Decay,” the eighth episode of “Westworld,” some fans held out hope that Sidse Babett Knudsen’s clever performance as the theme-park underboss Theresa Cullen wasn’t at an end.
This article discusses plot points from Westworld’s first-season finale, “The Bicameral Mind.
With the few fragments of brain we have left this deep into the first season of “Westworld,” let us try once again to remember the source of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s series, the starting point of the maze in which we currently find ourselves.
“You needed time. Time to understand your enemy. To become stronger than them. And I’m afraid in order to escape this place, you will need to suffer more.” -Ford
Expectations are ridiculously high as Westworld rides onto HBO tonight. The first season cost a reported $100 million to make, and it’s being pitched in some quarters as the new Game of Thrones.
NB: Westworld is a TV show. This article contains spoilers. Artificial intelligence made enormous strides in 2016, so it is fitting that one of the year’s hit TV shows was an exploration of what it means for machines to gain consciousness.
While it's up for debate as to whether this includes any major spoilers, fair warning that it does contain some images which may give away minor spoilers. So turn back now if you haven't seen through episode seven of HBO's "Westworld.
The first episode of Westworld opens with a creepy, disembodied male voice interrogating a naked lady robot.
Hi, it’s me, the millionth media critic to explain to you that HBO’s Westworld is a metaphor for a video game. But, it is. The problem is that Westworld is a really crappy video game.
You can do anything (or anyone) you like in Westworld, the robot cowboy-populated theme park at the centre of HBO’s sci-fi series. And thanks to some mystery-filled storytelling, the possibilities for in-show conspiracy theories are similarly endless. Here are some of the most out-there ones.
The late Michael Crichton was as cunning as the fictional mad men he occasionally chronicled. In the early ’70s, the Andromeda Strain author accepted a paltry budget and a tight schedule to direct his screenplay about catastrophic breakdowns at a high-tech vacation spot.
Westworld has us right where it wants us. After five weeks of strong episodes moving the plot forward, revealing mysteries, and developing characters, I've realized the stark truth: people are about to start dying. I mean, really dying.
GIF We don’t know all the secrets of HBO’s hit series Westworld, but we do know the park inside the show is essentially just like a video game There are quests for the p
Although Bernard’s true identity is the episode’s big twist, the most enduring revelation may be Ford’s resistance to Delos’s plans for his creations. Last week, that off-the-grid cottage seemed like Ford’s nostalgic attempt to revisit his childhood, using older models of his machines.
Who would go to Westworld? On the surface, the appeal might be obvious: Guests are unmoored from traditional concepts of right and wrong, given freedom to unleash their inner monster, with no judgments and no laws to break. No one actually gets hurt. Maybe.
Westworld is a drama about robots and cowboys, but it’s also a drama about other dramas.
In its first episode, Westworld spent the majority of its time focused on the inner workings of the amusement park that gives the show its name.
Most of the time, we’re rooting for the robots. Oh, there are exceptions: your Terminators, your Brainiacs, your Eves of Destruction. But putting aside the obviously homicidal, most stories featuring pre-fabricated humans encourage us to have at least a little sympathy for the machine.
Late in the second episode of HBO's Westworld, set in a theme park where visitors act out Wild West fantasies with the help of lifelike robots, the park's visionary co-founder Dr.
What if you could shoot or screw whoever you wanted without consequences? Would you feel bad about your decisions? Would you pity your victims, even if their digital memories were wiped clean? HBO dives into the heady, murky depths of virtual reality ethics with its new show Westworld, premie
Westworld has delivered its biggest twist of the season (so far): Kindly chief programmer Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) is not human after all, but a host. It’s a revelation that fans have suspected in recent weeks, but the news was coupled with a fateful event that nobody saw coming — Dr.
The latest trailer for HBO's Westworld just aired on HBO, and it looks terrifying. Here, we see the eponymous Westworld, a futuristic theme park filled with human-like automatons. But it seems like the robots are developing sentience — and that may lead to deadly problems.
After months of both hype and delays, it seemed like the Westworld TV series would have a hard time living up to the anticipation. The fact that it pulled it off is impressive, especially given how many questions the premiere raised.
Jonathan Nolan's new TV series Westworld is finally premiering on HBO tonight, and the network has some big plans for the show. But before diving in, it's worth remembering that it is based on the 1973 film from Michael Crichton (yes, the same guy who wrote Jurassic Park).
The first reviews are in for HBO’s big-budget new robo-thriller Westworld — and the results are unanimous (so far).
After only two episodes, HBO’s Westworld already has thousands of people speculating in a way that television hasn’t really seen since Lost. Some of the theories are pretty far out there — Ford is God and Lowe is the Devil — but others appear to hold water.
This post contains frank discussion of Season 1, Episode 10 of Westworld, titled “The Bicameral Mind.” If you’re not all caught up on the twists within twists, now is the time to leave! Well, that was a fascinating hour and a half of television.
The robot discourse has changed dramatically since the first season of Humans was on air in 2015. This is mainly because HBO premiered Westworld last fall, a mindfuck of a show that used robots to dig deep into the nature of consciousness and the metaphysical requirements of a soul.
Ever since the first few minutes of the Westworld series premiere tricked fans into thinking an android character was actually human, they’ve been waiting for such a move to get pulled again.
Westworld had a record-setting debut on HBO, and so far we’re loving it. But it wouldn’t be a Bad Robot production if it did cause us to ask all sorts of questions, speculate at the possibilities and obsess over the many Westworld theories floating around the internet.
All images: John P. Johnson/HBO Let’s just immediately move the discussion of last night’s hugely important Westworld below the spoiler bar, shall we? Well. One major Westworld theory just got confirmed.