I’ve been watching Westworld on HBO these past few years, and generally enjoying it. While the first two seasons were fascinating explorations of the nature of sentience, the loops and chains that bind us in our lives, and the innate brutality of mankind, they were also a bit small-scale and interior. The fact that almost all of the action took place in the titular park didn’t help this suffocating sense of insularity, although it did make the glimpses we got of the futuristic world outside that much more tantalizing.
Season 3 has finally moved outside of the park, said park being in bloody tatters after the (SPOILER ALERT) android uprising and jailbreak. And I have to say, they’re doing a bang-up job of world-building, exemplified by a wonderful show-don’t-tell moment in Episode 3, ‘Absence of Field.’
An App for That
As far as I can tell, the future of Westworld is a sort of Late Stage Capitalism nightmare where an advanced AI is keeping things stable by predicting all possible outcomes and then tightly controlling society at every level. This results in things like Caleb, played by Aaron Paul with typical weary charm, being denied any possible employment that might improve his life because the AI has predicted an early death by suicide for him — and thus concludes he’s not worth any additional resources, or the criminal underground of society using an App called RICO where they sign up for crimes and advance in a gamified fashion as they make ill-gotten gains. This is, I imagine, some sort of control or release valve the AI is using to let the oppressed and unhappy vent a little, feel like they’re sticking it to The Man when in fact The Man has hired them a’la 1984‘s revolution.
The set and costume design is pretty great. The cars are all driverless and look like slightly wonkier versions of the Tesla Cybertruck (if that’s possible), the flying machines are sleek and futuristic, and the personal technology is the sort of Apple-fied techno porn that reads as totally possible. At the same time, the fashions aren’t too far out there. Someone could time travel from Outer Westworld into our own dimension and they might seem a little bit weird, but they’d pass. Which I think is smart; the big mistake a lot of sci-fi makes is either having people dress in crazy, bizarre ways that feel artificial or exactly as we do today, which feels lazy. Westworld‘s elevated and slightly amplified fashions feel resfreshingly possible.
But let’s get to what I really liked about this episode: The ambulance. The main protagonist, slightly crazy and vengeful android host Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is badly injured, and Caleb calls an ambulance as a Good Samaritan. The EMTs in the ambulance hook her up to the diagnostics, and are then baffled because, of course, Dolores isn’t human.
But here’s the thing: As Dolores appears to sink towards death, former soldier Caleb calls upon his training and begins telling the EMTs what they ought to be doing, and their response is that they can’t do anything until the App in the ambulance gives them a diagnosis and treatment plan.
In other words, the implication is that the EMTs know nothing. They know how to interact with an App, and that’s it.
A Better-Looking Idiocracy
The show hasn’t come out and stated that most jobs are performed by robots or Apps with minimal expertise required of the humans around them, but it’s easy to see the clues. The world seems to have further divided between the super-rich who flit about from board meetings to cocktail parties and the super-not-rich who scrape by in minimally-viable jobs that anyone can do because the Apps are doing all the work. Even the crimes are being committed by people who can’t actually plan crimes.
This fits in perfectly with the series’ other themes concerning AI and sentience and consciousness. Who is really alive in a world where meat sacks can’t do anything unless the AIs embedded in their systems tell them how? But what I really like is the unshowy way they’re exploring this future. No one is As You Knowing the Apps or the lack of education/experience/skills. They’re just showing you examples of it throughout and letting you piece it together.
This being Westworld, of course, there’s going to be at least one enormous orgy sequence featuring robot sex, and frankly I can’t wait to see the Apps for that.
I’m waiting for the app that can dictate a best-selling novel.