HBO's Westworld (Official) Season 4 discussion thread (Full trailer 6/16/22) drops 6/26/22
- Thread starter fonzerrillii
- Start date
The reviews have been really good so far. I'm pumped for this.
IT BEGINS!!!
Man how many Hemsworth's are out there......
Luke Hemsworth
Luke Hemsworth
Man this is good. I know some are going to say that it's slow.... but it's supposed to be.
Also if it sticks to the movies... there's room for tons of other worlds. Westworld is only one. I'm all in on this show.
Also if it sticks to the movies... there's room for tons of other worlds. Westworld is only one. I'm all in on this show.
I also like the change to the gunslinger..... This isn't the same one from the movies.
if you mean Ed Harris? he is a guest not an android
LOL... I was trying not to spoil anything, because that is a major difference from the movie.
You might want to put spoiler on that.
not really a spoiler...
but - forget EVERYTHING from the movie - there is no gunfighter, everything in this show will be systemic
True.... but it is still based on the movie and in the Movie... What he was and why he was doing what he was doing.... Are major deals...
Plus... I'm still not 100% sure that he is a
Guest
ok.... I get the uncertainty
one thing though -in the movie gunslinger etc never achieved sentience / self awareness / self direction - it was a virus that removed the safeties and looped the affected in the current objective... this show is already telling a WAY different story
.......................
Oh i agree that it is telling a different story but it is still following similar beats.....
I'm very intrigued to see the evolution of Dolores...
Man the show is utter bullshit based off the first premier...brah
Naw this show is tight to me.... but I like slow world building shows.
Like I said... it might now be for everyone early on...
Forgot about this.
Its like groundhog day on Crystal meth..time keeps repeating itself..ova and over... Brah
Don't even bother. These niggas want 50 minutes of shootouts and 10 minutes of fucking.
Truth right here.....
15 Questions We Have After the WestworldPremiere
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. We may not know what’s going on yet, but we’re definitely going to keep watching to find out—and here are the questions we hope get answered by the finale. (Well, at least some of them.)
1) How does the park’s timeline work?
As the first episode shows us, the “hosts”—i.e., the cyborgs that populate Westworld, fulfilling roles and interacting with the “guests”—go about a proscribed day, which changes based on the how the guests interact with them. However, it seems like after night falls, they wake up to re-enact the same day, Groundhog Day-style, forever.
This makes sense in that it minimizes the time the hosts are traumatized by whatever the guests have inadvertently (or very deliberately) done to them or their assigned “loved ones.” However, it does mean that unless the guests only stay for a single day, they too are reliving the same day, although they get to know what’s going happen. But if that’s the case, why does park storywriter Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) go out of his way to “write” a massacre to explain the absence of all those updated hosts?
2) Are there any rules for the guests?
As we learn throughout the premiere, the guests are allowed to do anything to the hosts, no matter how violent or depraved. If you shoot an “outlaw” in the back, the next day the outlaws are on the loose again; if you do something worse, to say the show’s main host Dolores, she wakes up the next day with no recollection of whatever she might have experienced. But are this there anything a guest isn’t allowed to do? So far, the answer seems like it’s “no.”
3) What prevents the guests from hurting each other?
Westworld’s guns are designed so that they won’t fire on living people (or rather, they go through the semblance of firing, but shoot no bullets). In a future that can create cyborgs that look so human, it’s totally plausible to imagine that the gun are programmed to not work when aimed at a living being, meaning if a host tries to shoot another host with one, it won’t work either, although this technically has not been confirmed. But what if a living being steps in front of a hosts just before he’s shot? What about other accidents? And the Gunslinger (Ed Harris) carries a very large knife with him. Seems like that could be used to hurt a guest very easily.
4) Where is the park located? Addendum: Is it tiny?
The area of land dedicated to Westworld seems enormous, and seems to extend at least a day’s ride in all directions from the center of the town. When the camera pans out from the town, we see several strange rock formations indicated that the land has been terra-formed in some way—nor surprising, given how much work has gone into every other aspect of the park.
But the weird part of that shot is that it pans out of the town into the park’s operating center, as if Westworld and all its inhabitants were in fact miniaturized, and the park is in fact under control to the tiniest detail. Now, the Westworld disc could just be a super-advanced surveillance system, and the pan-out shot a conceit of the series to show how the staff loom over the park like gods. Also, the park staff use the disc to zoom in on the planned shootout massacre near the end of the episode, which certainly makes it seem like a screen… although it could also be a close-up overlay. Most likely, the park is life-sized and located somewhere else, but it’s not 100 percent obvious.
5) Who is Ed Harris’ Gunslinger, and what is his deal?
One really brilliant subversion of the original movie is to take the iconic Gunslinger, played by Yul Brynner there, and turn him from a host into a guest. But that leaves us with the question of who Harris’ character is outsideof Westworld. According to executive producer Lisa Joy, the character is “has been coming to the park for a long time. He’s an expert gamer, in the gaming sense of this world.”
She also told the Hollywood Reporter that the character has come back every year and now “he’s looking for something deeper. What it is he’s looking for, and why it holds personal meaning to him, is something we’re going to explore over the course of the series.” Which is intriguing and still doesn’t tell us anything concrete. He’s got to have a giant pile of money though, right? To afford coming to the park for days on end every year? In the first episode, he says he’s been coming for 30 years. That’s a lot of dough. That would mean he’s a big deal in the world outside the park, too.
6) What was the “critical failure” that happened at the park 30 years ago?
Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright, managing to be both a comforting and unsettling presence) says that the park hasn’t had a critical failure in “over 30 years.” Given that this is brought up in regards to the hosts ignoring their programming, we can safely assume the robots then had a similar problem. However, 30 years is also around the same time Ed Harris’ Gunslinger says he started coming to the park. Is that a coincidence or something more?
7) Is the 1973 Westworld movie part of the show’s canon?
The obvious answer is that the critical failure back then was the events of the original movie. The futuristic setting of the movie and the TV show are both purposefully vague, but the meta-reference would be to have the events of the movie occur 43 years ago, the number of years between the release of the movie and the premiere of the show. So that doesn’t quite match up. However…
Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) does say that a “simple handshake” would give away the hosts back then, which is an allusion to the movie. In the movie, the hosts had weird-looking hands that distinguished them. So if that was true back when things went wrong, maybe Ford’s line is a clue indicating that the events of the movie did happen in the history of this show.
8) Is there a Roman World and a Medieval World?
In the original movie, Westworld was the last of three areas in Delos to go haywire. The other two are Roman World, which was modeled on Pompeii (very on the nose), and Medieval World, which was basically an uber-Medieval Times. Given the expense of the show, it seems unlikely we’d spend that much time out of the richly appointed Westworld set, but maybe we’ll get a coy reference to the other worlds.
9) What are the real plans for the park?
Park storywriter Sizemore says that the corporation who owns and runs the park have interests beyond just making a better plaything for rich people. And his supposition is confirmed by woman-in-charge Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen), who tells him that the park means “something completely different to management” and then says Lee’s not smart enough to guess what management’s “real” interest is. Apparently, the people in charge have something more interesting in mind than just making money. Or even inventing ever better technology.
10) Is Dr. Ford’s new programming what’s really causing the problems with the hosts?
It could just be that Dr. Ford is played by Anthony Hopkins, but there’s something really suspicious about him. The sudden outburst of hosts remembering their prior lives/roles, straying outside of their plot lines, and questioning reality seems like a pretty big consequence of introducing some new movement quirks to the hosts. If it is because of Ford’s update, it seems quite plausible that he did it on purpose. Given how brilliant Dr. Ford clearly is to have created these incredibly lifelike robots, it seems… unlikely to us that he made an error of this magnitude without ever realizing the potential consequences.
11) Why does the park save the hosts at all?
Inside the park HQ, there are levels apparently full of retired hosts, just standing around naked, waiting to be fixed, or reused, or… what? Why save them? Why aren’t the broken ones destroyed? Is it really less expensive to keep rebuilding them every time a guest destroys one? Why were they all used in different roles, rather than building a new host for a new role? Dr. Ford is watching a new host be built at one point, which means the park is still constructing them. But if they’re so expensive and valuable they have to be reused, why are there rooms and rooms full of dozens of them, hanging out in storage
12) What was the deal with that photo?
Dolores’ (host) father finds a photo of a woman in a city, half-buried under the dirt by his horse pen. The city, the cars, the woman, the photo itself—it all seems to set something off in the robot’s programming, causing him to break down, but not before whispering something to his daughter, Dolores, that allows her to start to break her programming by the end of the premiere.
How did that photo get in Westworld, and how did it get right next to that pen where it would definitely be found? Was it left their intentionally by somebody, and if so, why? If it was completely random, how had it not been found before? Why does it have such an effect on Dolores’ dad? And who is the girl in the photo?
13) What did Bernard say to Dolores’ dad before making him walk into the room of broken hosts?
We have no idea.
14) What is the significance of Dolores being the oldest host in the park?
One of the last scenes in the first episode says that Dolores is special because she’s been rebuilt so many times because she’s been there the longest. That means she’s got the possibility for the most memories to come bubbling up thanks to the new glitch. More importantly, if she’s been working at the park for all these years, what has she seen?
15) What was on the inside host’s scalp?
The premiere ends with Ed Harris’ Gunslinger having scalped one of the hosts, and cutting out part the top of its skull—which has a strange design on it. Is it a logo? A map? Something else entirely? And what the hell does the Gunsinger want with it?
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. We may not know what’s going on yet, but we’re definitely going to keep watching to find out—and here are the questions we hope get answered by the finale. (Well, at least some of them.)
1) How does the park’s timeline work?
As the first episode shows us, the “hosts”—i.e., the cyborgs that populate Westworld, fulfilling roles and interacting with the “guests”—go about a proscribed day, which changes based on the how the guests interact with them. However, it seems like after night falls, they wake up to re-enact the same day, Groundhog Day-style, forever.
This makes sense in that it minimizes the time the hosts are traumatized by whatever the guests have inadvertently (or very deliberately) done to them or their assigned “loved ones.” However, it does mean that unless the guests only stay for a single day, they too are reliving the same day, although they get to know what’s going happen. But if that’s the case, why does park storywriter Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) go out of his way to “write” a massacre to explain the absence of all those updated hosts?
2) Are there any rules for the guests?
As we learn throughout the premiere, the guests are allowed to do anything to the hosts, no matter how violent or depraved. If you shoot an “outlaw” in the back, the next day the outlaws are on the loose again; if you do something worse, to say the show’s main host Dolores, she wakes up the next day with no recollection of whatever she might have experienced. But are this there anything a guest isn’t allowed to do? So far, the answer seems like it’s “no.”
3) What prevents the guests from hurting each other?
Westworld’s guns are designed so that they won’t fire on living people (or rather, they go through the semblance of firing, but shoot no bullets). In a future that can create cyborgs that look so human, it’s totally plausible to imagine that the gun are programmed to not work when aimed at a living being, meaning if a host tries to shoot another host with one, it won’t work either, although this technically has not been confirmed. But what if a living being steps in front of a hosts just before he’s shot? What about other accidents? And the Gunslinger (Ed Harris) carries a very large knife with him. Seems like that could be used to hurt a guest very easily.
4) Where is the park located? Addendum: Is it tiny?
The area of land dedicated to Westworld seems enormous, and seems to extend at least a day’s ride in all directions from the center of the town. When the camera pans out from the town, we see several strange rock formations indicated that the land has been terra-formed in some way—nor surprising, given how much work has gone into every other aspect of the park.
But the weird part of that shot is that it pans out of the town into the park’s operating center, as if Westworld and all its inhabitants were in fact miniaturized, and the park is in fact under control to the tiniest detail. Now, the Westworld disc could just be a super-advanced surveillance system, and the pan-out shot a conceit of the series to show how the staff loom over the park like gods. Also, the park staff use the disc to zoom in on the planned shootout massacre near the end of the episode, which certainly makes it seem like a screen… although it could also be a close-up overlay. Most likely, the park is life-sized and located somewhere else, but it’s not 100 percent obvious.
5) Who is Ed Harris’ Gunslinger, and what is his deal?
One really brilliant subversion of the original movie is to take the iconic Gunslinger, played by Yul Brynner there, and turn him from a host into a guest. But that leaves us with the question of who Harris’ character is outsideof Westworld. According to executive producer Lisa Joy, the character is “has been coming to the park for a long time. He’s an expert gamer, in the gaming sense of this world.”
She also told the Hollywood Reporter that the character has come back every year and now “he’s looking for something deeper. What it is he’s looking for, and why it holds personal meaning to him, is something we’re going to explore over the course of the series.” Which is intriguing and still doesn’t tell us anything concrete. He’s got to have a giant pile of money though, right? To afford coming to the park for days on end every year? In the first episode, he says he’s been coming for 30 years. That’s a lot of dough. That would mean he’s a big deal in the world outside the park, too.
6) What was the “critical failure” that happened at the park 30 years ago?
Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright, managing to be both a comforting and unsettling presence) says that the park hasn’t had a critical failure in “over 30 years.” Given that this is brought up in regards to the hosts ignoring their programming, we can safely assume the robots then had a similar problem. However, 30 years is also around the same time Ed Harris’ Gunslinger says he started coming to the park. Is that a coincidence or something more?
7) Is the 1973 Westworld movie part of the show’s canon?
The obvious answer is that the critical failure back then was the events of the original movie. The futuristic setting of the movie and the TV show are both purposefully vague, but the meta-reference would be to have the events of the movie occur 43 years ago, the number of years between the release of the movie and the premiere of the show. So that doesn’t quite match up. However…
Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) does say that a “simple handshake” would give away the hosts back then, which is an allusion to the movie. In the movie, the hosts had weird-looking hands that distinguished them. So if that was true back when things went wrong, maybe Ford’s line is a clue indicating that the events of the movie did happen in the history of this show.
8) Is there a Roman World and a Medieval World?
In the original movie, Westworld was the last of three areas in Delos to go haywire. The other two are Roman World, which was modeled on Pompeii (very on the nose), and Medieval World, which was basically an uber-Medieval Times. Given the expense of the show, it seems unlikely we’d spend that much time out of the richly appointed Westworld set, but maybe we’ll get a coy reference to the other worlds.
9) What are the real plans for the park?
Park storywriter Sizemore says that the corporation who owns and runs the park have interests beyond just making a better plaything for rich people. And his supposition is confirmed by woman-in-charge Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen), who tells him that the park means “something completely different to management” and then says Lee’s not smart enough to guess what management’s “real” interest is. Apparently, the people in charge have something more interesting in mind than just making money. Or even inventing ever better technology.
10) Is Dr. Ford’s new programming what’s really causing the problems with the hosts?
It could just be that Dr. Ford is played by Anthony Hopkins, but there’s something really suspicious about him. The sudden outburst of hosts remembering their prior lives/roles, straying outside of their plot lines, and questioning reality seems like a pretty big consequence of introducing some new movement quirks to the hosts. If it is because of Ford’s update, it seems quite plausible that he did it on purpose. Given how brilliant Dr. Ford clearly is to have created these incredibly lifelike robots, it seems… unlikely to us that he made an error of this magnitude without ever realizing the potential consequences.
11) Why does the park save the hosts at all?
Inside the park HQ, there are levels apparently full of retired hosts, just standing around naked, waiting to be fixed, or reused, or… what? Why save them? Why aren’t the broken ones destroyed? Is it really less expensive to keep rebuilding them every time a guest destroys one? Why were they all used in different roles, rather than building a new host for a new role? Dr. Ford is watching a new host be built at one point, which means the park is still constructing them. But if they’re so expensive and valuable they have to be reused, why are there rooms and rooms full of dozens of them, hanging out in storage
12) What was the deal with that photo?
Dolores’ (host) father finds a photo of a woman in a city, half-buried under the dirt by his horse pen. The city, the cars, the woman, the photo itself—it all seems to set something off in the robot’s programming, causing him to break down, but not before whispering something to his daughter, Dolores, that allows her to start to break her programming by the end of the premiere.
How did that photo get in Westworld, and how did it get right next to that pen where it would definitely be found? Was it left their intentionally by somebody, and if so, why? If it was completely random, how had it not been found before? Why does it have such an effect on Dolores’ dad? And who is the girl in the photo?
13) What did Bernard say to Dolores’ dad before making him walk into the room of broken hosts?
We have no idea.
14) What is the significance of Dolores being the oldest host in the park?
One of the last scenes in the first episode says that Dolores is special because she’s been rebuilt so many times because she’s been there the longest. That means she’s got the possibility for the most memories to come bubbling up thanks to the new glitch. More importantly, if she’s been working at the park for all these years, what has she seen?
15) What was on the inside host’s scalp?
The premiere ends with Ed Harris’ Gunslinger having scalped one of the hosts, and cutting out part the top of its skull—which has a strange design on it. Is it a logo? A map? Something else entirely? And what the hell does the Gunsinger want with it?
smh im watching and thinking for all that happening so fast this show going to be wild as hell(or @ least better be)
did they not catch the scene between the maker and delores's pops
maker: what's your itinerary ?
pops: to meet my maker
maker: well you're in luck, and what do you want to say to your maker?
pops: my most mechanical and dirty hand, (laughs) I shall have such revenges on you .... both, the things i will do what they are yet I know not, but they will be the terrors of the earth.
You don't know anymore do you, you're in prison of your own sins.
pops: to meet my maker
maker: well you're in luck, and what do you want to say to your maker?
pops: my most mechanical and dirty hand, (laughs) I shall have such revenges on you .... both, the things i will do what they are yet I know not, but they will be the terrors of the earth.
You don't know anymore do you, you're in prison of your own sins.
I completely forgot
That's because one of her pops earlier characters was a serial killer.
Side note.. that fucking scene was tight.
Pretty good first episode...waiting to see how it will all develop with time 
Westworld ratings: HBO's biggest premiere in nearly 3 years
BY JAMES HIBBERD • @JAMESHIBBERD
ENLARGE PHOTO
(John P. Johsnon/HBO)
Posted October 3 2016 — 4:10 PM EDT
HBO’s Westworld looks like a hit.
Sunday’s premiere episode delivered a strong 3.3 million viewers across its first two airings and streaming, industry sources say.
That’s HBO’s biggest series premiere audience since the first season of True Detective nearly three years ago (January 2014). And True Detective stands as HBO’s largest series opening since Boardwalk Empire back in 2010.
Westworld did way better than the network’s most recent expensive gamble, Vinyl, which opened to only 764,000 viewers last February and was canceled after a single season.
The sci-fi series was down a bit from a show to which its frequently compared, Game of Thrones, which debuted to 4.2 million viewers across multiple airings back in 2011.
Successful HBO dramas tend to often debut somewhat modest, then grow week after week due to word of mouth and subscribers getting a chance to catch up via On Demand, on DVR, and in repeats.
Combined with its glowing reviews from critics, Sunday’s Westworldratings set the stage for an extremely likely second season renewal
http://www.ew.com/article/2016/10/03/westworld-ratings
BY JAMES HIBBERD • @JAMESHIBBERD
ENLARGE PHOTO
(John P. Johsnon/HBO)
Posted October 3 2016 — 4:10 PM EDT
HBO’s Westworld looks like a hit.
Sunday’s premiere episode delivered a strong 3.3 million viewers across its first two airings and streaming, industry sources say.
That’s HBO’s biggest series premiere audience since the first season of True Detective nearly three years ago (January 2014). And True Detective stands as HBO’s largest series opening since Boardwalk Empire back in 2010.
Westworld did way better than the network’s most recent expensive gamble, Vinyl, which opened to only 764,000 viewers last February and was canceled after a single season.
The sci-fi series was down a bit from a show to which its frequently compared, Game of Thrones, which debuted to 4.2 million viewers across multiple airings back in 2011.
Successful HBO dramas tend to often debut somewhat modest, then grow week after week due to word of mouth and subscribers getting a chance to catch up via On Demand, on DVR, and in repeats.
Combined with its glowing reviews from critics, Sunday’s Westworldratings set the stage for an extremely likely second season renewal
http://www.ew.com/article/2016/10/03/westworld-ratings
Was that Black Hole Sun playing on the organ?
Yeap.... I'm actually curious to see how far in the future this show is.
And then they had Painted Black during the fire fight scene. Well shooting
did anyone catch the songs the automatic piano were playing?
That alone should give you another reason to watch this episode again.
That alone should give you another reason to watch this episode again.