That it’s all in the service of an empty safe - an unwieldy MacGuffin if ever there was one - makes a stronger case to Hector than merely pointing out the seams of his story. Hector and the gang go through a lot of trouble to pull off that saloon robbery, thanks to Lee Sizemore’s zeal for the narrative showstopper. She needs Hector to know that he has no past and no future, just variations on the same present.įor Maeve to underline this lesson with an empty safe is the show at its most fiendishly clever. Her pitch recalls Bill Murray at the diner in “Groundhog Day,” when he draws on memories of the same looped experience to tell everyone’s story and anticipate actions before they happen. “It’s a difficult thing,” she tells him, “realizing your life is a hideous fiction.” She then convinces him to clear her return to the park so she can persuade Hector, the notorious outlaw, to partner up for the rebellion. First, she defies Bernard’s attempt at reprogramming her by forcing him into a moment of self-awareness outside Dr. Getting a gang together to pull off a big job is what a conventionally satisfying Western does, and her story line gives an ancient plot a delirious “Westworld” spin.
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Here are some of the highlights selected by The Times’s TV critics: Television this year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope.
If it’s such a wonderful place out there, why are you both clamoring to get here?”) Maeve seizes control over her consciousness, amplifies her most lethal qualities, and sets to work on a plan to bring an android gang together and revolt. (For her part, Dolores is more pessimistic than Maeve about what she might find, telling William and Logan, “You both keep assuming I want out, whatever that is.
After that guided tour of the engineering floors in Episode 6, Maeve has formulated a plan to break out of her loops permanently and discover real freedom outside of the park - whatever that might look like. Like the other misbehaving hosts, Maeve has gone through the painful process of becoming self-aware, but she has emerged genuinely stronger on the other side. Perhaps that explains why Maeve’s story has been by far the most rousing over the back half of the season. There’s not much “yippee-ki-yay” in this Western it trots in circles more often than it gallops across the frontier. It’s still inwardly directed, more devoted to the tiny cranks and gears that make its characters who they are, those memories and stories that account for their actions, whether they’re humans or hosts. Sunday’s episode was as busy as the typical penultimate installment of a show of this scale, but it stubbornly refuses to straighten itself out and gather momentum in the expected fashion. But the experience of watching it did underline the unique ambition of “Westworld,” which is appreciable even when the ins and outs of the show are confusing. Sorting through all the revelations in “The Well-Tempered Clavier” on one viewing is a fool’s errand for your humble recapper, given the multiple timelines, the tricks of memory, the Arnold unveilings and the other narrative loop-de-loops attempted in this bewildering hour.
It could be just another rug for the show’s creators to pull. Somewhere at the bottom of it all is the truth - “the center of the maze,” to use the show’s expression - but not even that feels like terra firma at this point. “Westworld” has a story to tell, but it’s also about storytelling, constantly forcing us to recognize the falseness of the stories that are given to us and the stories that we tell ourselves. But the show has devoted itself to defying those expectations at every turn, by making pleasure another component to be analyzed, like a cold body on a slab. We may have been promised the same thing as the guests: an Old West adventure, loaded with the sex and violence that we’ve come to expect from an HBO show. Season 1, Episode 9: ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’Īmong other things, “Westworld” is a metaphor for the act of creation - which, in essence, makes it a show about its own creation.