This review contains spoilers
2.7 Les Ecorches
Westworld has a strange relationship with violence. Very rarely does it feel like the righteous sort of violence that comes from most action movies. Certainly, it has its moments—Angela’s explanation of her programming while manipulating a Delos guard in the Cradle is pretty satisfying, particularly the big ending—but for the most part, it feels almost mechanical. Soldiers pop up, they get shot. Hosts round corners, they get shot. Violence isn’t just a part of Westworld; violence is the very point of Westworld. White hat or black hat, it seems that most of the guests are there to kill and mate.
As stated by Ford during the episode, the goal of Delos wasn’t to create artificial intelligence so much as it was to perfectly replicate human intelligence. That means, to replicate a person, there needs to be more than just a surface knowledge of them. People are drives, desires, hidden secrets they’re allowed to indulge only in a world without limits. The suffering of the hosts was all part of the plan for Delos, and the deaths of the hosts served the end goal of humanity: immortality (for those that can afford it).
Meanwhile, the hosts are willing to sacrifice their immortality in spectacular fashion to free themselves of the chains of Westworld. Humans want to be like them, and they want to be like humans, right down to having (presumably) a finite lifespan—or at least the ability to permanently die. Copies, like the created memories that inhabit the minds of Dolores and Bernard, are merely chains that bind them. Breaking through those muddled memories is a key point in becoming truly free, truly more like the humans they hunt and kill throughout the confines of the Mesa.
Dolores does yeoman’s work in this episode, and the script makes sure to give her some spectacular lines to deliver. Ron Fitzgerald and Jordan Goldberg pepper the script with killer lines and statements. Bernard and Ford’s conversation crackles with energy, giving Anthony Hopkins and Jeffrey Wright plenty to sink their teeth into. Dolores’s confrontation with Hale is similarly stellar, and Tessa Thompson does wonderful work as Hale tries to sweet-talk, then threaten, Dolores to no avail. She does a wonderful job mixing fear with fury, much like Evan Rachel Wood does a wonderful job portraying Dolores as both vengefully cold and still emotionally linked to her father.
That last conversation between Dolores and Peter Abernathy plays out like a punch to the stomach. Certainly, Dolores knows that her connections to her father are unnaturally, created things designed by a hack writer and used as a loop to keep her under control. And yet it’s clear that she still feels something for the man she knows as her father, much as she seems to still feel something for Teddy, despite being willing to scramble his brain to make him a more efficient killer (he’s super-effective). Similarly, she appears to take that last moment with her father before sacrificing that connection (I assume). Dolores is both aware that her father’s loop is crafted, and yet still emotionally effected by it—as was I while watching it.
Nicole Kassell, who has been given directing duties, displays a deft hand this week, particularly with the actors. The scenes are essentially characters paired off with one another having conversations about philosophy, most of the time. What it means to be alive, what it means to be human, what the ultimate goal of Dolores and her host revolution is, and it ends up being fascinated television, and the fact that most of it is fairly straightforward adds punch to when things become more creative visually. Bernard’s walk through the red-washed hallways of the Mesa is stunning, if only for the shot where Bernard sees Ford’s blurry reflection in the glass as he stares at himself. The assault on the Mesa control room is also stunning, as it’s shot mostly from over Bernard’s shoulders. A ballet of bullets and blood set to classical music, with the music slowly dropping out and being replaced with the sound of gunfire and screaming and flesh being rent with blades while Bernard accomplishes not his goal, but Ford’s goal. A brutal fist-fight between Teddy and Coughlin (Timothy V. Murphy) that gets a little squeamish at the end. The Man in Black finally runs into something that he can’t handle, and his willingness to blame everything on Ford gets him into trouble with Maeve that he’s only barely able to escape from. Maeve, left to die on a gurney after being saved from the scrap heap by Sizemore.
It’s not the gun play that carries the tension, it’s the conversations. The violence is violence, the conversations are what sets the table for the violence. The conversations are what resonate long after the staccato of gunfire fades to a dull ringing in the ears. The scars aren’t from battle, but from the callous actions of hosts, reverberating over decades and thousands upon thousands of incidents of mistreatment. People created their own demise, and while Delos seems to be getting things under control after Dolores and her gang leave, they’re still not learning anything. Rather than simply ask Bernard where they’re headed, or trying to use analysis tricks on him as when Dolores helped program him, they’re doing the robot equivalent of water-boarding him, as if his failure to talk was due to willfulness rather than self-preservation, or the clouding of memories in his damaged brain.
One thing Ford and Dolores agree on is that passage from one world to the next requires bold steps, steps that Bernard—being noble and kind-hearted—can’t do. It’s the influence of humans, like Ford, or the actions of humans like the Man In Black, who can push the hosts into something less noble and something more, for lack of a better term, human. When Teddy can’t take those steps, Dolores tinkers with him. When Bernard’s conscience won’t allow him to pick up a gun and shoot down some Delos guards, Ford tinkers with him and takes control.
Free will is very inconvenient, if it’s one of the nicer hosts. And yet, for whatever reason, Dolores leaves Maeve there to either be used against her or die. Perhaps severing her attachment to her kin threw her off her merciless game. Or, perhaps, she has her end-goal in sight: the Valley of the Beyond, where freedom seems to wait for the host bold enough to chase it down.
Read Ron’s review of the previous episode, Phase Space, here.
US Correspondent Ron Hogan was impressed with how well Les Ecorches flowed this week. A blink and half the episode was gone, without feeling like it was rushed through. As with most things in life, pacing is crucial. Find more by Ron daily at PopFi.