Westworld discussion - SPOILERS!!!

[FlyingPenguin]

Season finale.... wow... just... wow...

Let me know when you're caught up.

[FlyingPenguin]

When you watch the season finale, hang in after the credits. There's a little after credits scene worth watching. I missed it the first time but I caught it when I re-watched the ending on On Demand to catch the behind the scenes at the end.

[normalicy]

Finally all caught up. Dang they lay down a lot in that last episode. I was realizing stuff that I had missed a couple days afterwards.

[FlyingPenguin]

SPOILERS BELOW!!!!
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I have to watch the whole thing all over again to re-analyze things I missed and it's easy to miss things. I also want to watch it from the perspective this time KNOWING we were watching multiple time lines, because I'm sure it will now make clear things that were puzzling before. Like how Lawrence could have been killed in one place by the man in black, and then seemly appear within hours someplace else, or Delores seemingly being quizzed by Bernard while she's also off with William somewhere else.

That's why it was fun to listen to the Ars Technica podcast which summarized a lot of the theories going around. There were early clues about the multiple timelines, although ironically the theory was dismissed around episode 3, so it was a real shock when it came back with a vengeance. One clue I totally missed was that when William went through the Westworld lobby, the logo on the wall screen was different than the logo used in the rest of the show and opening credits, but someone else picked that up. It was as if the company changed it's branding some time in the past.



There were apparently a lot of clues like this that were there and I missed.

I do like that they pretty much resolved most of the mysteries in the finale, instead of leaving a lot of it hanging.

There's also a lot of different ways to interpret the ending. We're to believe that Maeve was actually following a program and not actually achieving self-awareness, and that instead Delores was the one who had actually achieved awareness, but I think in those final moments Maeve broke out of her own script and made a decision on her own to get off the train. And one could argue that although Delores may have gone through some self-discovery, in the end she really was following a script. And I don't even know if Bernard is technically self-aware, or just a really smart AI like Maeve is supposed to be.

Fun stuff to think about.

[normalicy]

I believe the second half of your conclusions are true. For me what convinced me there were time issues was the picture. Though, I hadn't expected there to be such a large amount of time.

[FlyingPenguin]

[normalicy]

LOL!

[FlyingPenguin]

Given how much of the season centered around Dolores as she gained self-awareness, you’d think this was the big moment of free will that the entire show had been building up to. But it turns out, it was actually Maeve. That’s right, Maeve exercised the show’s first act of free will when she chose to exit the train instead of continuing on her pre-programmed mission of “Mainland Infiltration.”

I totally got this. Right after the finale I turned to my wife and had a discussion about this. I'm amazed that other people didn't pick up on it.

It was an ironic twist. We were all initially led to believe that Delores was becoming self aware, but then Maeve was becoming self aware when she started waking up in the repair center and hacking herself and it seemed like Delores was just stuck in a loop. But then we find out Maeve was just following a script, and we're led to believe, once again, that Delores is the self aware one.

Then I totally got that Maeve was making a REAL decision for herself when she walked off the train. She wasn't following the script. I always felt that Delores shooting Robert Ford was just her following a script, as was the robot revolt.

Westworld Creators Reveal Which Host Was the First to Use Free Will
http://io9.gizmodo.com/westworld-creato ... 1793650927

[normalicy]

This was my conclusion as well.