WestWorld May Be Too Clever for Its Own Good

Marsden is Either Bored or Constipated

So, I’ve been watching WestWorld on HBO. This enrages my brother, Yan, who more or less believes that all remakes, reboots, and reinterpretations are bullshit. The moment he learns that a remake is looming, he goes off on a rant about how no one writes new stories any more.

He’s not wrong, but he’s not right, either. HBO’s version of WestWorld is entirely different from the original film. Everyone has a lot of affection for the original, mainly because of Yul Brynner’s classic performance as the Gunslinger and because every young man who watched that film in the 1970s and 1980s immediately began thinking about Sex Robots.

There are plenty of Sex Robots in HBO’s WestWorld. There’s also a lot of video game stuff, because some clever bastard obviously thought that a place like WestWorld would basically be an IRL video game. So when a guest arrives in town it’s like being in a sandbox-style video game, where you have a main storyline, but there are endless side-quests you can get sucked into that add content and depth (and playing time) to the game. That’s all well and good. That’s interesting and quite clever for a modern reboot of the concept.

The downside? The god-damn Non-Player Characters (NPCs) and the god-damn cutscenes.

GO BACK, JACK, DO IT AGAIN

A Cutscene is an unplayable scene in a video game that advances the story along a single, pre-chosen path. In other words, control is removed from the player and you just have to sit and watch it unfold. You can’t do anything to change it, and sometimes you can’t even skip them. Which is okay the first time you play a game, but the second through hundredth time you play it’s infuriating and boring (the 101st time it suddenly becomes funny, and then it’s funny from time 101 through 10,000, at which point you buy a new computer that no longer supports the drivers needed for that moldy old game).

WestWorld is so committed to the video game idea that they do a version of this. NPCs go on with their scripted actions whether a guest is there or not. This ensures that guests won’t spy NPCs just standing around like, well, robots, and it also adds to the organic adventure. Because the NPCs follow their scripted routes and actions, guests can encounter them at random places, and affect their stories in random ways. That’s good game design.

But when the NPCs are allowed to follow their own path, they do the same exact things over and over again. Take Teddy and Dolores, shown in the image above. As NPCs they have a set pattern they repeat if no guests interact with them. Dolores comes out of the dry goods store, drops a can of condensed milk, Teddy retrieves it, makes a joke, and she says “You came back.” They chat, he accompanies her home to her farm, they have a conversation—and then the cutscene ends as Dolores’s father is usually murdered, Dolores is raped, and Teddy is killed trying to defend her.

At this point, viewers have seen various versions of this scripted cutscene several times. Which means we’ve seen the same actions, dialog, and outcome several times. We’re being forced to watch a non-interactive cutscene over and over. And it’s killing me.

The Subtle Knife

There’s a point to this, I’ll admit. One, it demonstrates the NPCs’ robotic nature. It demonstrates that they have an existence, however programmed and controlled, outside the guest experience (that will be important, methinks). And by introducing the occasional flicker of doubt or hesitation, it’s actually an effective way to introduce the slow spread of sentience and awareness. When Dolores asks Teddy a non-standard question, Teddy hesitates as he tries to process a response that will get them back on script. That’s useful for a story that (appears to be) about the nature of existence and whether an artificial intelligence can evolve sentience and personhood. Which might be inconvenient for the AIs makers if that AI exists, like Dolores, to be endlessly raped and murdered by hooting, monied guests.

But, despite there being a cleverness at work here, it’s too clever. Because it’s boring. If I have to watch Dolores and Teddy have one more identical conversation, I will go Ham on everything in sight and burn my house down. As a writer, sometimes you need to recognize that just because an idea is a good, clever one doesn’t mean you need to double down on it endlessly.