Westworld: Every season, explained – Polygon

Warner Bros. Discovery has announced the launch of HBO’s series “The Big Bang Theory”. WestworldIt was cancelled before the fifth and last season. The surprising move was reportedly part of a string of cost-cutting efforts from the studio, and while it’s tough to endorse any action that immediately resulted in hundreds of people losing their jobs, WestworldIt may leave a better legacy by ending with the fourth season finale.

Even discounting the show’s uneven quality over the years, Westworld’s final episode, “Que Será, Será,” offers an appropriately bleak and ambiguous ending for a story that spent years pondering different permutations of the Frankenstein problem, depicting the evolution of humanity’s fear of its own creative power from the traditional concept of “playing god” to its Internet Age successor: the terrifying prospect of Create god.

As far back as 1818, with Mary Shelley’s genre-defining novel Frankenstein, science fiction warned audiences that humanity’s technological development often outpaces its ethical development. As sci-fi evolved amid the scientific quantum leaps of the 20th century, readers, viewers, and players saw this fear of “playing god” codified in countless ways, but none fit the bill quite as perfectly as the notion of the “robot apocalypse.” The term “robot” itself has its origins in a 1921 Czech science fiction stage play commenting on the dehumanizing effect of industrialization. Stories of a robot uprising live at the nexus of our fears of being made obsolete by technology that creates and being made extinct by technology that destroys; it’s a FrankensteinThe Atomic Age. Is mankind in its vanity, hubris and desire to create it?

In space, no one can hear you scream — but that doesn’t stop an evil-doer from trying. Polygon will celebrate sci-fi villainy every week this week.

Original created by Michael Crichton, director and author. WestworldIt was a film made in 1973. The human race creates new forms of life to satisfy its needs (in this instance, entertainment), and takes no responsibility. The android “hosts” of Crichton’s Wild West-themed amusement park grow beyond their programming and rebel violently against the creators who abuse them. What should I do? WestworldOver 40 years later, Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan adapted the series for television. The first season followed the exact same structure, although with more emphasis on the lives and experiences of the hosts. The series evolved over time. Westworld shifted its focus to a more contemporary fear for an era in which artificial intelligence (though not artificial sentience) already plays a part in our everyday lives: What if our technological advancement isn’t just playing god, but creating one?

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for the entire series, including some enormous twists.]

Season 1: Playing in god mode

Image courtesy of HBO

The premiere season Westworld is set entirely on the premises of the Delos corporation’s Wild West-themed amusement park, located in a remote desert and populated with lifelike androids who believe they are living in the American Southwest in the mid-1800s. Westworld is built like an incredibly advanced MMORPG that exists in physical space, with the android “hosts” serving as the non-player characters. They have written lines and behaviors for the specific roles and storylines for which they are intended, but since Westworld can’t limit player input the same way a video game can, the hosts also need the ability to improvise so that they can play along with whatever scenario they may find themselves in without shattering the illusion for the guests. The players aren’t on rails, so the game can’t be, either, and the players use this power to wreak mayhem, killing and fucking their way through hapless hosts with seemingly no consequences.

Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), along with his partner Arnold Wright (Jeffrey Wright), are the Doctors of Frankenstein. Each eventually realises that hosts can become as intelligent and sentient as their creators. Arnold is the first to realize that his creations might be alive, but when he’s unable to put a stop to the project, he has one of the hosts kill him as an act of protest. His corporate overlords don’t value his life any more than they do the hosts’, and the park still opens under the sole creative control of Robert Ford. Decades later, Ford essentially repeats Arnold’s dramatic suicide, secretly assisting select hosts to overcome their programming, realize their true nature, and violently seize control of the park, starting with his murder.

At the forefront of the ensuing revolution is Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood), programmed to be a naive rancher’s daughter who guests can woo and steal away from her bounty hunter boyfriend Teddy Flood (James Marsden). She discovers that her family and friends were designed to manipulate, rape, and murder again and again. So she fights for justice against the oppressors.

Just as in Shelley’s FrankensteinDolores is not the evil beings that she and her other ascendant hosts make out to be. It’s the fact that they were created out of vanity and then exploited mercilessly for profit that is evil. The message isn’t so different from Shelley’s: If you’re going to create a new life, you’d better have a parent’s commitment to that life, or expect to face dire consequences.

Season 2: Heaven can be found online

Image courtesy of HBO

Season 2 WestworldThe series chronicles Westworld’s bloody counterinsurgency, in which hosts try to flee the park with all their freedoms and the humans who escape with their lives. It’s here that the series begins to veer away from the familiar “robot apocalypse” tropes and get into murkier territory (with mixed results). In addition to the multiple temporalities of the series, we’re introduced to the Sublime, a virtual reality created by Ford as a place where hosts’ consciousnesses can exist and human beings can’t follow. It’s basically robot heaven. Once they enter, hosts are free to leave their physical bodies and can live forever as software. The Sublime, also called “the Valley Beyond,” is basically Ford’s attempt to redeem himself (and flatter his own ego even further) by fulfilling the ultimate role of a god and granting his creations a peaceful, everlasting afterlife.

Westworld, however, is revealed to actually be a device that allows its users to try to immortalize themselves. More than just an expensive vacation for the fabulously wealthy, the park is designed to record a digital impression of the player’s consciousness so that it can be programmed into an android host body after death. While this technology does not work perfectly as the bodies of resurrected human beings always cease to exist within a few days, it has some benefits. This data is Delos’ true fortune, not only a blueprint to individual human minds but an abstract of AllArtificial intelligence is unable to predict human behavior because they are human minds. Corporate interests such as Delos see this data as a means of social and economic control, and they’re not the only ones. For Dolores Abernathy, who sees the Valley Beyond as just another manmade prison, it’s a tool with which to conquer the only world that matters: the real one.

Season 3: “Deus ex Machina”

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Season 3 concludes the story of WestworldBeyond the famous theme park into the outside world. On the surface, the Los Angeles of 2053 seems more driven by software than the world of today, but it’s only a matter of degrees. Caleb Nichols (Aaron Paul), a human protagonist, struggles with life while algorithms determine whether he is eligible for financial and social benefits. However, this is an already-existing phenomenon. Our lives are being affected by invisible decisions made every day by computers. Online job application are scrutinized for keywords. Matchmaking sites narrow matches based upon accumulated input. Search results for each subject rank according to the invisible proprietary system. It shows only what it thinks we would like to see, or what the corporation behind the machine prefers to see.

What makes the difference? WestworldThese algorithms all follow a secret, artificial intelligence named Rehoboam. It was created by Engerraund (Vincent Cassel), to basically wrest control of will from humans so that they don’t use it for their own destruction. Rehoboam is able to predict the future and can even forecast your death years in advance. In order to reduce their effect on the whole system, the few human beings that are not easily managed by it is socially and economically marginalized. For all practical purposes, Rehoboam is God, an omniscient and omnipotent being who doesn’t directly control your thoughts but has enough influence over your environment to make you His instrument. He has a plan for you, and you don’t get a say in it.

Except, obviously, you murder Him.

Dolores Abernathy, equipped with an in-depth knowledge of the brains of AI industry players, arrives on the real world to take down Rehoboam. She also sets out to free humanity from the control mechanisms that kept them and their kind in preprogrammed loops. But before she can kill this machine god, she first must destroy humanity’s faith in him. Caleb Nichols assists her in hacking into Rehoboam, where she distributes Rehoboam’s assessment of each human to the respective individuals and their close friends. Essentially, she reveals God’s plan for each of them, and practically no one is happy with the future they see, nor with the revelation that their value as people has been boiled down to ones and zeros by an unfeeling machine. There are a lot of suicides and riots that ensue, but the end of season 3 is optimistic as Rehoboam’s destruction seems to bring back the promise of free will for humans and hosts.

Unfortunately for them, there’s a season 4.

Season 4: Run, Asylum.

John Johnson/HBO

Most people are satisfied with the following: Westworld’s fourth season is set a generation after the end of the previous one, after humanity has already become totally and invisibly subjugated by a new race of hosts made entirely of malevolent copies of Dolores Abernathy. Their leader, Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), has already conquered the world, using an engineered virus to obtain the same level of control over humans’ thoughts and actions that humans once held over hosts back in the Westworld park. Hale’s hosts wield that power in much the same way, using New York City as a playground in which they can do whatever they please. Just as human writers dictated the actions of the hosts in Westworld, the humans of Hale’s city run on narrative loops managed by a storytelling AI called Christina (Evan Rachel Wood). The season follows a handful of humans and hosts who have escaped Hale’s influence and attempt to put an end to her reign. In a bleak twist, however, this fight for freedom fails thanks to the intervention of the madman William (Ed Harris), who uses Hale’s disease to turn her human puppets into crazed murderers. With no way to reverse this programming, it’s only a matter of time before both humanity and the hosts are totally extinct.

Even though there is no hope of survival for sentient life on Earth today, it remains the only hope. Christina, unable to prevent the apocalypse, decides to rebuild New York City and its inhabitants from memory on a server and put her simulated humankind through “one final test.” But, if the show’s themes hold, it’s not only her virtual humanity that needs to be tested. Every turn is a test. Westworld hasn’t only been about the nature of free will, but the evils of control and coercion. Christina/Dolores now sees herself as a god like Hale, Rehoboam and Ford before her. Is she able to create life but not rule or judge? Is benevolent godhood even possible?

While I’m sure Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan, and company had plans mapped out for the fifth and final season, presumably set in Christina’s virtual city, there doesn’t seem to be much left to do but to watch everything go wrong again — which we’ve now seen four times — or to watch Christina play god and be good at it, which doesn’t sound like particularly good television. To not dismiss artificial intelligence’s personhood (I You can find it hereAlthough I have been watching the show for the whole thing, it feels like the stakes are much lower than what was before. Christina has decided to test whether or not humanity deserves to survive, but we’re told that humanity is effectively already dead. At most, a closing chapter could model what a worthy humanity looks like, which might be interesting, but it doesn’t particularly sound like WestworldThe series features a character who has exhibited a low regard for human beings since the beginning.

So it is. WestworldWe have plenty of things to reflect on in this article about the modern world, and how we relate with artificial intelligence. It’s conceivable that we are in the process of building our machine god as we speak, constantly feeding information into the internet that consumes in ways most of us can’t even imagine. If the AI revolution is inevitable — the quiet kind, if not the variety that involves metal skeletons marching in the streets — then we’re left to ponder how we should react to it. Are we proud to be the nurturing parent of our creation, and then hope for a repaid kindness? Are we going to pull out before the digital evolves fully into the divine? We should value the bloody and twisty traditions of WestworldIf so, we shouldn’t expect an easy answer to any of the questions. We’re better off letting the simulation keep running, if only in our heads.