HBO's Westworld VII: Abort?.Retry.Fail

[Kyoshi]

Also, I feel like it makes sense that Ghost Nation was largely ignored and Ake allowed to evolve without interference. These worlds are very disturbing. You have ridiculously rich people paying ridiculous sums of money to basically live out some of the most oppressive times. The first time Ake was reprogrammed one of the techs says something like "dehumanise him. Makes it easier for the ghosts to treat him like crap. They'll feel good about themselves." I don't think it's coincidence that the hosts that have been awake the longest, without anyone seemingly caring, also happen to be native American. Last season we saw that some of the tribes had built being taken for repairs into their religion/mythology. Maeve draws a picture at one point and asks Hector what it is, and Hector says some tribes believe there are worldwalker/dreamwalkers, people who can go between worlds. So yeah, ramble over but I feel like everything fits together nicely. Perhaps too nicely even.

[Slurktan]

1 hour ago, Cas Stark said:

 The techs take his wife for being off her loop, but leave him.  He gets to the edge of the park and sees whatever, but no techs come to wipe his memory.  

The techs didn't know he was there.  That isn't a plothole at all.  I have to assume that the techs aren't constantly watching everything.  If they had a reason to find out where he was they would have. Clearly his wife was part of some storyline and she was missing so they went looking for her.  Would people have reported him missing?  The ghost nation were still doing their thing and it's not like a guest would be like "Hey I have this weird expectation that there should have been one more 'savage' to kill".  So why would they bother looking for him?

[Cas Stark]

6 minutes ago, Slurktan said:

The techs didn't know he was there.  That isn't a plothole at all.  I have to assume that the techs aren't constantly watching everything.  If they had a reason to find out where he was they would have. Clearly his wife was part of some storyline and she was missing so they went looking for her.  Would people have reported him missing?  The ghost nation were still doing their thing and it's not like a guest would be like "Hey I have this weird expectation that there should have been one more 'savage' to kill".  So why would they bother looking for him?

Surely they have some way to monitor anyone who gets too close to the 'whatever' he saw, don't they?  How would they not know a host was there, in a forbidden zone, and then bring him in to wipe his memory?  We saw the border between RajWorld and Westworld was monitored with sensors and even had an audio warning.

And, he has a loop, too.  So, yes, he should be monitored as off his loop as well, but it appears his loop was almost wholly unscripted...which is convenient for the show but is inconsistent with what we have seen of how closely the hosts are monitored.  Never mind why they didn't just wipe his wife, but decommissioned her..

[The Unborn]

I hear you, but at the same time I don't have difficulty believing it. They are still monitored by humans, and humans have flaws. Ford said he had kept a close eye on him all this time, maybe he's the reason behind the fact nobody ever came looking for him. 

[Spring Bass]

I don't have a hard time believing it, either. What we've seen of the staff is that they pretty quickly try to fix up the hosts and get them back out there as soon as possible, so it doesn't surprise me that they overlooked an old host wandering around alone, mostly staying out of trouble or from disrupting narratives with lots of guests. They're harried and overworked.

[Ser Quork]

2 hours ago, Jace, The Sugarcube said:

Huh? That was a pretty well set up character moment, Jace thought.

<>

It felt completely unearned but YMMV.

1 hour ago, Cas Stark said:

Might be.  The show invested so much in her character, and then turned her into deathbringer, I sort of feel like some other twist or something that brings her back to sympathy will happen.  Her scene with her father before she cut his brain out was very moving, but overall, she remains incredibly unsympathetic this season.  I do tend to think she is much more under Ford's control that she thinks she is, or than we are supposed to think she is.

Agreed.

51 minutes ago, Corvinus of Teranga said:

Yes, I think most of his story was for Maeve.

Yes.

30 minutes ago, The Unborn said:

I hear you, but at the same time I don't have difficulty believing it. They are still monitored by humans, and humans have flaws. Ford said he had kept a close eye on him all this time, maybe he's the reason behind the fact nobody ever came looking for him. 

And agreed again!

[DMC]

26 minutes ago, Summer Bass said:

What we've seen of the staff is that they pretty quickly try to fix up the hosts and get them back out there as soon as possible, so it doesn't surprise me that they overlooked an old host wandering around alone, mostly staying out of trouble or from disrupting narratives with lots of guests. They're harried and overworked.

Except we have an entire episode from Season 1 - entitled The Stray - in which Elsie and Stubbs, two fairly senior staffers, investigate when a single host wanders off his loop.  It can be hand-waved by saying Ford made sure the staff wasn't alerted in Ake's case, but otherwise it is completely contrary to the established logic.

[Corvinus85]

The desert and the mountains in the distance where Ake finds Logan made me think that there should be an ancient Egyptian or Roman world, too.

[Kyoshi]

3 hours ago, DMBouazizi said:

Except we have an entire episode from Season 1 - entitled The Stray - in which Elsie and Stubbs, two fairly senior staffers, investigate when a single host wanders off his loop.  It can be hand-waved by saying Ford made sure the staff wasn't alerted in Ake's case, but otherwise it is completely contrary to the established logic.

The guy in season 1 got noticed because he was the only one of his group to carry a weapon. The Woodcutter, I think they called him. So when he went off, roughly six other hosts got stuck in a non-standard loop because none of them could cut wood for the fire to make food. And so they didn't reach some place they were meant to go to, irrc. So the woodcutter got noticed because his trailing off visibly altered a storyline.

[RumHam]

6 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

Arnold had the deathbringer kill all the hosts, but forgot about Ghost Nation.  

I don't think his point was to kill all the hosts. He liked the hosts and didn't want to see them repeatedly raped and murdered. Plus he must have known they'd just be rebuilt. I assumed he had Dolores and Teddy kill them all so they wouldn't stop her from shooting Arnold. They have that samaritan protocol where they're supposed to break character and save any human in danger.  

I think a lot of the complaints about the monitoring of strays and park boundaries and security in the mesa can be hand-waved away since that was decades ago. They improved their security and tracking procedures. 

8 hours ago, Ser Quork said:

MiB surviving those wounds and his daughter turning up and speaking Lakota also stretching my suspension of disbelief too far.  I think I'll have to go with the daughter being a host now - how else would she know to turn up for him?

She pointed out that the Ghost Nation people had healed him somehow, and it was previously established that she spoke their language because she liked spending her time in the park in areas where there weren't many other real humans. Though that's odd itself because they made it seem like she hadn't been to the park since she was a kid, and you'd think if she spent that much time with the Ghost Nation knowing their language she should have figured out their whole deal. 

[Jen'ari]

I liked Djawadis version of Heart Shaped Box.

[unJon]

11 minutes ago, Lord Sidious said:

I liked Djawadis version of Heart Shaped Box.

This. Plus the rendition of Paint if Black on the prior episode. Love what they are doing with the music this season. 

[williamjm]

I thought it was a great episode, probably the best of the season - while I enjoyed Shogun World a lot this does have a more compelling narrative. It does seem to be a trend that the 'main' narrative of the season has been stuttering as it goes along but I think the side plots have often been excellent. For a time it felt as if the scenes with Maeve and Sizemore were slightly out of place in the episode but it all came together at the end. The revelation that it was Maeve that Ake was mostly talking to was done very well, in retrospect it makes perfect sense but I didn't consider it as a possibility. I wonder what else Maeve might have been doing remotely as well as talking to Ake? She could also be guiding Hector and the Armistices back towards her to rescue her.

8 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

Unlike every other host who is 'updated' he retains all of his memories, just because. 

I think the idea here is that since Ake has already 'awakened' the memory wipe doesn't work on him, similar to how Maeve comes to remember her previous lives.

8 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

Ghost Nation is carving the maze in their scalps and no one but Ford notices.

William notices it in the first season. It's possible others have noticed as well but Ford is the only human who would really recognise the significance of the maze, it's not as if Westworld is short of macabre things happening.

8 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

Arnold had the deathbringer kill all the hosts, but forgot about Ghost Nation.

This one does seem like a bit of a plot hole. While they might have planned some of this episode before the first season, such as the maze in the scalps, I wonder if the idea that Ake would be present in the aftermath of Dolores' first massacre was something they came up with later.

2 hours ago, Kyoshi said:

The guy in season 1 got noticed because he was the only one of his group to carry a weapon. The Woodcutter, I think they called him. So when he went off, roughly six other hosts got stuck in a non-standard loop because none of them could cut wood for the fire to make food. And so they didn't reach some place they were meant to go to, irrc. So the woodcutter got noticed because his trailing off visibly altered a storyline.

They're also extra-sensitive to misbehaviour at the time after the hosts have started glitching due to Ford's reveries.  

[HexMachina]

13 hours ago, Marko Antonivic said:

Seriously. Ake went diwn that escalator like a pro for a first timer. 

Ford seemed genuinely surprised by some of the shit Ake told him.

Yeah Ford was definitely surprised. I got the sense Ake’s talk with him prompted him to go ahead and push the Hosts towards freedom but maybe 5hat was just me.

 

As for tracking Ake, couldn’t it be the result of him being an old model that they didn’t track him initially?

[Spring Bass]

I'd forgotten, but apparently Ford programmed Ake to be curious and wander around. Presumably that's why he didn't draw any attention, and as long as he didn't die they never bothered to upgrade him. 

2 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

I got the sense Ake’s talk with him prompted him to go ahead and push the Hosts towards freedom but maybe 5hat was just me.

For sure. I think he was supposed to be referring to Ake in the Season One finale when he talked about a people who "could change". 

[RumHam]

When William sent Logan off into the sunset last season I figured the park people would find him in like an hour or so. But now it seems like he'd been there for at least a day and was damaged physically and mentally before Ake found him. I mean ignoring for a second how it got William a promotion, how was he not arrested for that? 

Though there was some footage in one of the trailers of Logan at a pool with his father.

6 hours ago, Lord Sidious said:

I liked Djawadis version of Heart Shaped Box.

When I read this comment hours ago I thought "I swear it wasn't the first time I heard that..." and re-watching the first trailer it all makes sense now. 

There are actually a few brief snippets in there that we haven't seen yet. 

Edit:@1:14 That's young William with Delores in the glass control room area. I don't think we've ever seen him there before

 

[karaddin]

5 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Yeah Ford was definitely surprised. I got the sense Ake’s talk with him prompted him to go ahead and push the Hosts towards freedom but maybe 5hat was just me.

 

As for tracking Ake, couldn’t it be the result of him being an old model that they didn’t track him initially?

First part - I also took it that way. Perhaps more importantly I took it as forcing him to re-evaluate whether Arnold had been off base about the maze approach to lead to awareness. Initially in the conversation he's dismissing the maze that Ake had been drawing, but following the conversation he seemed jarred into reassessing things he'd taken for granted.

Second part - Couldn't this be the inciting incident for the park security getting beefed up in that way? I can easily see them just assuming every host will get killed regularly enough they didn't need to keep track of whether they'd been patched recently, then Ake came in and the head of the department shits herself thinking of the trouble she'd get in and hushes it up but implements new policies of tracking host movement to ensure that doesn't happen again. I do also agree with the point others have already made that the nature of his loop made it much easier for no one to notice that he was off it as none of the loops relied on his presence the way the woodcutter did.

I also take the idea that even the park doesn't pay attention to the characters from a minority group because they don't care/take them seriously to be rather cutting commentary.

1 hour ago, RumHam said:

When William sent Logan off into the sunset last season I figured the park people would find him in like an hour or so. But now it seems like he'd been there for at least a day and was damaged physically and mentally before Ake found him. I mean ignoring for a second how it got William a promotion, how was he not arrested for that? 

...

When I read this comment hours ago I thought "I swear it wasn't the first time I heard that..." and re-watching the first trailer it all makes sense now.

Bolded - I had that same thought process so thanks for explaining it to me. I loved its use in the trailer too.

As to the first - I thought back in Season 1 that Logan had to have been mentally broken by what happened in the park or there's no way William gets away with what he did, seeing Logan earlier this season as a broken man hiding from himself under drugs just fit with this. If the park surveillance wasn't what it is now back then I guess its easy enough for William to say that Logan went off on his own and snapped, or Delos is enough of an asshole that possible he can just openly say "this is what happened and your son wasn't up to the challenge, I am".

Given what William is using the park for, it stands to reason there will have been many surveillance upgrades between then and 'now'.

[Jen'ari]

10 hours ago, unJon said:

This. Plus the rendition of Paint if Black on the prior episode. Love what they are doing with the music this season. 

I think my favourite piece of music from Westworld so far is their rendition of Exit Music for a Film, Heart Shaped Box and Paint it Black are a close tie for second though!.

4 hours ago, RumHam said:

When William sent Logan off into the sunset last season I figured the park people would find him in like an hour or so. But now it seems like he'd been there for at least a day and was damaged physically and mentally before Ake found him. I mean ignoring for a second how it got William a promotion, how was he not arrested for that? 

Though there was some footage in one of the trailers of Logan at a pool with his father.

When I read this comment hours ago I thought "I swear it wasn't the first time I heard that..." and re-watching the first trailer it all makes sense now. 

There are actually a few brief snippets in there that we haven't seen yet. 

Edit:@1:14 That's young William with Delores in the glass control room area. I don't think we've ever seen him there before

 

I thought itntied I’m well with Ake and his lovers take my heart with you theme really well.

[HexMachina]

I’d heard Heart Shaped Box before because it was available for download afternoon it’s use in the trailer, so I recognised it straight away. Djawadi is always great

[red snow]

I need to rewatch this episode as was dozing off towards the end. It led to a false assumption that the final scene was telling us that maeve was somehow Ake's wife which I thought would have been a neat ending. I guess code can be transferred between hosts but I'm not sure if the timelines fit which is particularly tricky with this show. It would partly explain Maeve's awakening as she had awakened during her time with Ake.

Anyway need to rewatch as no good having dream storylines adding to the confusion of this show