This review contains spoilers.
2.4 The Riddle Of The Sphinx
Westworld‘s been expanding this season, but at its core, the show functions best when it leans on the vast catalogue of Western cinema. I don’t mean Western as in the Western Hemisphere, but Westerns as in Sergio Leone and John Ford. A centrepiece of this week’s extended episode was a brief scene of Craddock and the surviving Confederados (who were released by Teddy last week) terrorising the townsfolk of the small village where Lawrence’s family lives. They do all the cliched Western things, like terrorising the bartender and forcing the townspeople to huddle together in the church, and it’s effective because it feels so much like a grimy spaghetti Western, right down to the way William eventually responds to the behaviour.
That’s a credit to director Lisa Joy and the crew behind the camera. The scenes work because they’re framed beautifully, and full of all kinds of little touches, from the way the bartender’s hands shake being mirrored in both Lawrence and the Man In Black’s arrival to the way his hand shakes while he carries the shot of nitroglycerin, to the way that the rain pools and trickles off the brim of William’s hat. There’s serious tension in every little interaction, and while William’s change of heart is couched in his typical gruffness—he’s tired of wasting time—it’s also displayed on his face in ways that suggest that he’s not quite as terrible as he wishes he was, or as immune to sympathy as he might have seemed in the first season.
It’s not an easy task to redeem a character like the Man In Black, but Ed Harris is more than up to the task. When faced with cartoonish villainy like that of Craddock, he shows them what the face of death truly looks like. Certainly, it seems there is some sympathy there, some crack in his armour; after all, as the Robert Ford stand-in of Lawrence’s daughter tells him at the end of the episode, looking forward won’t solve this riddle, and that one good deed won’t change his perception of William. Like the redirected railroad, Robert’s game has one real end: he wants to make William reflect on his past. Westworld doesn’t tell you who people want to be as much as it tells you who they really are. William, from what he says to Craddock, is Death personified.
Is William the Man In Black, or is he the idealist who tried to rebuild his late father-in-law in a laboratory? Is Bernard the sum of his actions under Ford’s influence, or does he have a new leaf to turn over now that he’s free? Is Dolores the farmer’s daughter or the cold-blooded killer? Perhaps more importantly, is their future going to be determined by past experiences? Is the future of Delos going to be determined by past experiments?
One of the bigger questions surrounding Westworld is just what Delos is trying to get out of the park. Is it merely decades of blackmail material on the world’s richest and most powerful people, or is it something somehow even more nefarious? Certainly, William’s experiments with James Delos suggest something more dangerous than simply keeping a record of the peccadilloes of rich weirdos. Immortality, giving a human brain an essentially unstoppable robot body, has long been a science fiction dream, and it appears that Delos has spent decades trying and failing to perfect the process.
That said, it seems as though Robert Ford has stumbled across something awfully similar to being able to live forever, assuming Arnold didn’t beat him to it first. That’s the suggestion put forth in the script from Gina Atwater and Jonathan Nolan; there’s a reason Robert keeps popping up in William’s narrative. Perhaps it’s guilt on the part of William. Perhaps Robert, as everyone seems to suspect online, has become the ghost in the machine, hopping from host to host and pulling strings from beyond the grave.
Certainly it’s no more tragic than to watch James Delos glitch and fail time and time again as his organic-based mind refuses to accept its new robotic body. To watch James repeat the same day over and over again, only for his mind to fail him, is tragic. Peter Mullan and Jimmi Simpson tell a wonderful series of stories in a short amount of screen time, and it’s impressive physical acting from Mullan as he communicates James’s deterioration and breaking down with tics and awkward body language. James Delos clearly isn’t a good man, but he doesn’t seem to deserve this kind of fate, even if the dispassionate William is willing to put him through it time and time again to try and perfect the secret of immortality.
Has Robert Ford achieved the dream of Delos simply by being willing to abandon his physical body entirely? Or is he just that good at programming the game to run without him? This is apparently Robert’s master stroke of gamesmanship. He’s turned everything people thought they wanted from Westworld into a reality, and there’s lots of screaming and shooting and dying because of it. Perhaps he’s achieved the greater goal of Delos in a way that the company isn’t interested in selling to the masses as well?
Ford clearly was keeping secrets from Delos, and likewise, Bernard continues to keep secrets from the world as well. Bernard is out of self-preservation (at first blush), and Ford seems to be expressing dissatisfaction with William as an employer (or as a person). Both Bernard and William have seen themselves revealed by Westworld as something other than what they once thought they were, and both are seeking to, perhaps, atone for past sins or absolve themselves of them by plunging headlong into fiction and ignoring past mistakes.
Bernard can only lie for so long. William can only run so far. And potentially living forever has a price that must be paid. Whether that price is loss of family or lost of self remains to be seen, but whatever form it may take, the price is steep and only the most dedicated would be willing to pay it.
Read Ron’s review of the previous episode, Virtu E Fortuna, here.
US Correspondent Ron Hogan was surprised to find himself as enthralled in an episode without Delores as he was. Long stretches of meaningful silence can do that. Find more by Ron daily at PopFi.