/ent/ - Entertainment

OP here, I guess I'm the only one here who watches season 3. I like it so far after that convoluted second season. The writers have said this season is about surveillance capitalism, and well, that's what it does. I like the idea that you are not controlled by them using the data, but that already by the collection of it they ensure the outcome. I don't know if the writers have read Deleuze's idea of a society of control, very much has a feel to it.

>>4328
What kind of robots does this show have?
Because the existential "what does it mean to be alive" type then booooooooooooooo.
Greater than human robots would be based

>>4329
They have androids with a human skin imitation because they're designed to pass for people as they were made to be attractions in a theme park where you can shot them, torture them, rape them, etc. - underneath they are all tech.

The whole "what does it mean to be alive" stuff works because the show has good actors that manage to make both their robotic maintenance mode and their scripted programming believable. In general it has an amazing cast, including Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris. It has plenty of gore and action too. Plus the creators actually seem to have looked into theories of consciousness, the robots don't start out being sentinent and conscious but we slowly watch them attain it following the theory of the bicameral mind.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

At least watch season one, that's the best one anyway.

>>4333
I already spoiled myself one afternoon by watching one of those screen junkie videos which lays out all the plot points of every season. But yeah I'll maybe watch it after I get my devices. Also why the fuck does every HBO show have gore and rape? It just feels trashy.

>>4328
I just watched last episode of Season 3 too. It was good. It presented revolution in a positive light at least.
>>4334
> Also why the fuck does every HBO show have gore and rape?
I think only season 1 has that to the greater extend.

>>4329
>existential "what does it mean to be alive"
Season 1 has that theme to some extent. Machines sorta achieves the "free will" by the end of that season. You should still watch Season 1 though. It is wonderfully done as>>4333 said.

>>4335
The only thing that bothered me was the show presenting regular people as wild animals in need of herding who would otherwise bring their own ruin.

Giving this thing a Hebrew name did make for some unfortunate anti-jewish undertones.

>>2641
>Is this show about class?
Season 3 is very obviously about class, although it doesn't get into things like analyzing the mode of production. It's more along the lines of the spectacle or capitalist realism, in that it's about porky controlling proles (and even lesser porkies). The closest it gets to being Marxist is the (obvious) twist where even the porky "controlling" everything (Serac) has given over control to the AI, including having it tell him what to say. This is more or less how commodity fetishism works, but they're using a Leviathan-style AI instead of the market. You are supposed to make this connection. The way the AI's creators prove it can make predictions is through stock market speculation.

Seasons 1 and 2 are kind of third worldist, in that the robots are below the standard working class (the grunts who maintain the park) and are hyper-exploited so that the rich "west" can enjoy nice things. The plot there is not even metaphorical but literal class struggle, just with artificial humans. Season 1 is not just about consciousness in general, but specifically dispelling a false consciousness and the "true" consciousness being largely defined by class consciousness, recognizing that the "guests" are a separate class controlling their lives. Season 2 is pretty much a third-world revolution given the park is like its own independent state. Some characters in season 2 and 3 realize that the humans aren't all the owners but some are working stiffs too.

>>4329
Both? One of the topics in the show is the difference between making the robots human-like vs making them as good as possible. It's more of a background theme but it's been coming up now and then the entire time. One of the main characters says in season 1:
>You used to be beautiful. When this place started, I opened one of you up once. A million little perfect pieces. And then they changed you. Made you this sad, real mess. Flesh and bone, just like us. They said it would improve the park experience. But you know why they really did it? It was cheaper. Your humanity is cost-effective.

>>4334
>Also why the fuck does every HBO show have gore and rape? It just feels trashy.
The show's kind of a meta-commentary about that, and of note is the fact that the park guests are exclusively the mega-rich - visiting costs $40,000 a day.
Fortunately rape is mostly implied and not shown, although there's a lot of nudity. It's all played for sympathy and the visitors who enjoy sadism are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
The swearing is more gratuitous than the sex and violence tbh. Nobody says "fuck" so much IRL.

>>4338
Season 3 has major logical problems (mostly with motivations), but this was one thing they did right. The AI system controlling things was explicitly flawed. The plot revolved around attempting to resolve the problem of the AI not being able to predict the actions of certain people and throwing off the entire future prediction. The doomsday predictions are ultimately meaningless because they're based on a prediction model that is known not to even work without intervention. Nobody discusses this directly, but the whole premise behind the AI is a retarded ouroboros just like the "Economic Man" idea in neoclassical economics. When humans don't behave "correctly", it's a problem with them. We have to assume the model is correct and change the humans to fit the model instead of fixing a flawed model. This is never brought up either, but given the context the AI could plausibly have made up the doomsday predictions as a way to convince humans to give it more control. At the very least, the entire argument about humans needing to be controlled rests on ignoring the flawed prediction algorithm and as revealed in the season 3 finale, the argument is being made by the AI speaking through Serac.

>>4339
lol
I think they just wanted to use the name of a king to fit the Leviathan idea. There's been biblical references all over the series. Most of the bible is the Jewish texts…

>>4334
Well, in the case of Westworld the gore and the rape is pretty essential for the character development of the hosts and not self-indulgent. Another point is that people are fucked-up when they are placed in a sandbox environment where they can do anything they want without consequences.

AFAIK, some IdPol libs were complaining about the amount of violence enacted upon women and PoC in season one, totally not getting that the show is ultimately about the emancipation of those characters.

>>4338
That's pretty much how the bourgeoisie sees us though. It also portrayed the wet dream of Silicon Valley bourgs, the AI technocracy, as something that is in the end fundamentally non-projectable, as you constantly have outliers that you need to contain, adding up to rippling effects, that will always end up with collapsing the entire system. They of course do not make this out as the contradictions of capitalism being the problem here, because in the end it's a popular TV show, but for what it is it was decent. I think the whole point of Dolores' revolution was that people do in fact not need herding.

>>4339
Hebrew names are a popular trope in SciFi. But yeah, I just noticed it now. Pretty hilarious.

>>4340
While the overall topic of season 1 was clearly consciousness attained through the class struggle of the robots (I mean, they literally become conscious through porky murder), and season 3 clearly being about surveillance capitalism, season 2 was a bit of a mess in my opinion. It tried to combine multiple things, I especially loved the idea of Delos trying to live forever but that wasn't really followed upon.

The nudity wasn't gratuitous at all, in my opinion. The swearing is an obvious problem, because while it can be explained by the scriptwriters of the park wanting to give it a gritty atmosphere, it continues to somewhat bother me.

I mostly thought the prediction power of the AI to be unrealistic. For some true deterministic model surface data about people's preferences isn't enough. You'd need data on a molecular level including all data predicting weather and natural events. I was also bothered by the fact that they still seem to have poor countries, and I don't know how incite gets all those people's data, considering they are far less hooked up to data collection devices than people in US megacities.

>>4343
>season 2 was a bit of a mess in my opinion
That's almost everybody's opinion. It did depict a revolution though. The literal first shots were fired in season 1 but the meat of the robots fighting against their owners is season 2. It's not exactly a classic socialist revolution though. They are slaves (being company property) so it's a slave revolt.
>I especially loved the idea of Delos trying to live forever but that wasn't really followed upon.
I wish they had tied this more to the bit about the hosts being turned into flesh bots, because that bit (especially the quote I posted) is RIPE for "capitalism holds back technological progress." The spectacle and commodification of the park is directly antagonistic to advancing the technology in the robots. But that's a more general issue with the show - they try to combine so many things that a lot of good ideas don't get more development than a throwaway line.

>The nudity wasn't gratuitous at all, in my opinion. The swearing is an obvious problem, because while it can be explained by the scriptwriters of the park wanting to give it a gritty atmosphere, it continues to somewhat bother me.
The constant swearing is even dumber when they also try to have certain characters only swear on big lines. Bernard and Dolores have said "fuck" maybe once each but it has no weight when you've got other characters saying it constantly. I thought the nudity like the violence was important to the story. The fact that these elements virtually disappear after season 1 shows that they aren't just doing it for fanservice.

>For some true deterministic model surface data about people's preferences isn't enough. You'd need data on a molecular level including all data predicting weather and natural events.
It wasn't a deterministic model. The AI systems laid out a large number of possible paths according to probability. The humans are (mostly) deterministic, so the implication is that it's the other variables causing the divergent paths.
The thing I kept thinking of was car accidents. Maybe that's why the car chase was so slow - Rehoboam lowered the top speed of cars to reduce the variables.
>I was also bothered by the fact that they still seem to have poor countries, and I don't know how incite gets all those people's data, considering they are far less hooked up to data collection devices than people in US megacities.
(A) You have real life initiatives to get smartphones into everyone's hands.
(B) The minutiae of the poor countries is probably much less impactful on a global scale.
(C) Serac obviously doesn't care about solving systemic problems. A nuke going off matters to him and the system, but sweeping poverty, crime, drugs, and suicide are just "part of the plan." His whole outlook is cartoonish, and that's probably the point. This is your brain on liberalism - it's not the suffering that matters, but the "chaos" as in changes to the status quo. It's the same thing the Nolans were saying in The Dark Knight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0AXgaFqEas

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/westworld/s03/e08

apparently critics hated the finale. don't really see why, it wasn't better or worse than the rest of the season.

>>4373
I mean it was very logical/expected conclusion to the season. Maybe they expected some huge twist.

Behold: human salvation

I watched the first season and it was boring shit. Retreading the same old tropes. You shouldn't waste your time watching it. Watch a kojima game instead.

You're all reading way too much into this shitty show

>>4339
>named after a Hebrew king
>governs the entire world
>its very existance is well hidden from the masses
>uses powerful white men as its chief puppets
>affinity for the financial market
>singles out potential rebels/heroes, stealthily persecuting them and making their life a living hell in order to keep them hobbled
>exemplified, as it were, by this here hard-working stand-up rape-stopping action-ready white conservative straight dude
also I believe the shape of it is a representation of the stereotypical Jewish nose, only so crooked that the curvature is infinite. it could also be inspired by the spheres of the Kabbalistic tree of life

Lesser Nolan and Lisa Joy confirmed for /pol/acks?

>>4380
That ad still makes me cringe

>>9271
>pigsucking
Pork isn't kosher though?
But yeah calling it the "Final Command" was the one thing that actually gave me crypto-nazi vibes about the show. Handing off the revolution to a black kween kind of sinks that.

>>4328
S3 was boring as shit. S1-2 weren't as deep as everyone praised them for being, but the anachronistic park setting was cool. S3 is just a generic futuristic action thriller with more main characters than the writers knew what to do with.

>>4452
I don't think people said the show is "deep." It just combined interesting (if sometimes well-trod) ideas into a watchable story, and at least for season 1 a clever puzzle box that tied the loose ends together effectively. If anything it's rather shallow but quite broad, referencing a wide range of speculative fiction ideas.

But yeah season 3 sucked except for a few neat moments here and there. Season 2 was a total clusterfuck story-wise although the writing suggested that was intentional in part (which doesn't make it not bad). The show keeps reinventing itself though so that has my interest, and like L O S T there is a lot of suggested payoff to come. Wherever it goes, season 1 was still good by itself.

>>9271
Nolan? This has Raimi's fingerprints all over it.

>>4452
Season 2 wasn't nearly as good as season 1, despite having some really cool scenes and 2-3 good episodes. I feel like season 3 doesn't really have any outstanding episodes, and the ending was a bit lame. I think Aaron Paul is a really shitty actor, he has zero charisma and always has this "what the fuck is going on" look on his face, to make him this John Connor type of human leader didn't work at all. He was rather useless throughout the season, why did Dolores even need him? Also, Ed Harris was criminally wasted, to have him to get out of the asylum only to get his throat cut in the post-credits scene was retarded - I guess they wrote themselves into a corner with the post-credit scene in season 2, so they had to add this.

Another problem is that Dolores isn't scary or threatening enough for us to really fear for humanity's future, especially since we know nothing about the outside world, why would we care about its fate? They did a meticulous world-building with the park but didn't built up the real world at all. We only know that there is this tech company that has a super AI that controls everything. That's about it.

>>4457
They're switching gears every season, considering that Bernard woke up covered in dust, it suggests that maybe some decades have passed, or even more. We'll probably get to see a very different world, maybe one where robots and humans had some kind of war (Halores is certainly building her army), some post-apocalyptic shit. Also, I'd be interested in what Bernard saw in the "sublime", which, as I understand it, is some kind of Matrix for the host minds but actually a good one where they can be "free" and build their own digital world? I feel like whatever Bernard saw in there probably wasn't some AI utopia either.

What would be some ironic conclusion, and would also still justify the name of the show, would be if the post-apocalyptic world would sort of revert back to how the Old West was, Fallout-style. Robot William can still be the Man in Black in such a world (which is apparently what Ed Harris wanted). But I think we are definitely in for some apocalypse, considering how often that was implied in the Rohoboam projections.

Also, I fucking hope that Dolores stays dead. The show needs to stop to revive everybody, or actual deaths will have no impact - which is of course a structural problem considering that this is literally how Westworld functioned, reviving the hosts after every single death.

>>2641
>s this show about class
In the first Season this is a theme one can see in the story, but its not the main focus and is forgotten in later seasons

>>5686
It's based on a film, but the first season feels so different (and better plotting) from the rest it seems like Nolan & Joy stole the story from someone else.

>>5690
> stole the story from someone else.
definitely

How did they get Anthony Hopkins on board with this show? Like what made him say yes?

>>4512
Wait wait wait, WHERE is this in Raimi's movies, let along spiderman (3). I wanna see this edgy shit.

>>6383
IDK but whatever it was he hung around for the second season unannounced until the character returned halfway through.

>>4879
>but its not the main focus and is forgotten in later seasons
Not true. In the second season it's a mess that goes nowhere, but they do frame the human vs robots conflict in an obvious parallel to class. The third season weirdly is about literal capitalism and conflict between humans and AI-embodied capital (or more accurately AI-embodied humanity vs AI-embodied capital), but since capitalism has evolved into AI-monarchy there's no direct criticism of the present capitalist system and it's more about AI or the alienated logic of capital driving civilization. But that's giving it a lot of credit for a show that by this point has a couple good ideas and doesn't even know how to execute those properly.

I just liked the main theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X35voOs4rQA

They need to fucking stop with the "smarter-than-thou" onion storytelling where you already know that in the beginning nothing of what you see it coherent or the present, with constant flashbacks, time jumps, the robots "imagining" things because they can't sort out their memories, everybody being or being turned into a robot, different minds inserted into different robots, "bad guy was actually good"/"good guy was actually bad" etc.

This shit is fun when it's spun across a single movie, like Memento, but making an entire show of this is fucking annoying. If you have a season with 10 episodes you need at least some linear story telling - it worked for season one, because nobody knew what to expect, but for the other seasons people feel unmotivated watching this because everybody knows they're going to be bamboozled again in the first 7-8 episodes before shit is actually going to be revealed.

>>4328
interesting that this release coincides with the release of GPT3, an AI that harvests data to accurately imitate real people.

>>13240
I hate it already. Sometimes I understand anprims and their hatred of technology… I feel the same sometimes.