it was a fun episode to watch if one was looking to waste an hour. which fortunately, i was. i think there's a joke i'm missing about bernard. is his new story arc to just walk around doing basically nothing now? he did that last season! bless jeffrey wright.
Last season he had his memories unhinged and he was mentally in and out of timelines. Along with a mental avatar of Ford shoving him around. This season, this incarnation, he's not necessarily been aimless--he was busy getting his act together as a butcher (a period that ended before he wished) then set off to WestWorld then onto a plan with Doug.
i'm sure he will soon, but even then it'll be about as hollow a character as the man in black ended up being.
The Caleb character worked for me in the first episodes of the season but it all started falling apart for me in that last episode. Caleb was being set up as the everyman that is the human we can all relate to--I think badly needed at this point of the show. Up until now the only sympathetic characters were some of the hosts. But nothing in the new episode worked for me, sorry to say, as I had really found the show top notch up until now. The car chase was badly choreographed and just a mess, and the score and new characters just didn't gel. The stylization of Caleb's drug experience didn't work for me at all. It didn't mesh with the explanation we got in the commentary after the episode. Lisa Joy wanted Caleb to go through a full range of human emotions during the chase scene. That wasn't paid off. Ultimately I think Nolan and Joy are trying to bite off too much with these new corporations and characters, and it's causing problems with the arcs of the more established characters. We had two years to set up Delos and its objectives, and now it doesn't even seem like Delos is the company to focus on.
I felt similar criticisms to this episode to those above before watching it a few more times. I do see the "episodes" as working a bit better than some. And what I find interesting about the music and syncopation is imagining why this is in Caleb's head, is that his mind's choice or an implant from a drug? And the whole tableau of the chase and weapons exchange was just so unreal and unlikely that it seemed insane. Not insane really though, but inhuman. Dolores in her multiple incarnation is embarked on an over-arching revolution that just seems cheezily impossible and insane for a human. . . but these are not humans. And they are combating the very heart of an inhuman "algorithm" that hides in plain sight, a machine and force conceived by a madman. And these goals do fall right in line with Caleb's character, who is I believe haunted by actions in the past, and he has sensed were controlled by a cruel fate of some sort. That he has invested so intently and passionately in Dolores' leadership (he's seeing the plan bit by bit) . . . does seem to fit for me. Now we have I think some strong conflict ahead of us. . . and there will be collateral damage! Edit to add: I thought this episode sounded great. . . I got to listen to it carefully and a bit loudly and really enjoyed the sound.
I find this season's programming to be intriguing, fascinating, dense and confusing. I am watching each episode as it airs and plan to binge the entire season after the last episode. This season just may be a great piece of art. Then again...
I viewed this as a testimony to the seductive nature of the Rehoboam society. As was noted there's hope, that may not seem "false hope" to everyone. The structure is set up such that there doesn't seem to be poverty and suffering that would feed violent riots. There is even an outlet, "RICO," for those who need a bit of mayhem and salary boosting, and there seems a blind eye built in. The revelations are going to reveal personal betrayals and career and emotional disappointment and the "rioting" is of a different nature.
A few episodes into the 2nd season after the completing the first. I give up. The most confusing thing I have ever watched.
Just getting started with Season 3 this weekend...Verizon FiOS has a free HBO weekend, and one of the channels is airing all five episodes thus far tomorrow, then the next episode premiers!
This latest episode of Person of Interest (Big Budget Edition) . . . no I mean WestWorld, Season 3, is a lot of fun for me!
I enjoyed it as well, and found the focus on Hale/Dolores and William to be interesting. It's still creepy to me that Lisa Joy tries to make the hosts so much more human than the humans. From the after-episode commentary, it's clear that she is the driving force in that. She seemed very proud of Hale/Dolores for bonding with her family more than the human Hale. Joy gives compelling backstories that everyone can relate to for many of the hosts--moreso than Caleb's backstory, which seems like a fatal flaw in the season. Caleb's childhood trauma and PTSD seem shoehorned in. Young mothers don't get alzheimer's and the soldier with PTSD is so cliched. I was glad to drop Caleb for this episode and I thought it ended on a great note with Bernard and William embarking on a new subplot.
You do know that there is such a thing as early onset Alzheimer's and that some mental illnesses could account for Caleb's mother's behavior? And that PTSD is a real thing, not just a cliche? I didn't find fault in those story points myself. In Caleb's case it's far more than PTSD. It's rage against being manipulated and duped and having his own free will usurped. A powerful cocktail, or at least one that invokes my empathy. The trope of being "more than human" is a real one in science fiction, Sturgeon and Dick were heavily invested in it and this series reflects that vein of the genre. I looked at Charlotte/Delores differently--it's not that the android's are more "human," it's that the "humanness" of the coded personality was so strong. Of those we have seen Delores Prime, Doug, Maeve and Bernard are the androids, the other three "hybrids" of a sort.
If you look at Maeve's arc, she is defined by remembering her child (which is of course programmed). Her superhuman powers grew out of being motivated by that memory. Juxtopose that with the Caleb story, where he is defined by his mother forgetting him. Maeve and Dolores have off-the-charts motivation that drives them to survive but Caleb is burdened with suicidal ideation that is just a real downer. While the audience can certainly empathize with Caleb, it is much easier to relate to the hosts and get behind their motivations. I find that creepy, and you raise a good point about human free will being usurped. At this point the show imbues the hosts (or at least the main ones) with more free will than humans. I don't think that's a proper commentary on humanity or machines, regardless of any precedent in sci fi.
I honestly think that this is a perfectly valid commentary on the potential dangers facing humans with machines. And you'll note that it can be surmised that free will has just been potentially reawakened in human beings as their "profiles" have been released and untangled their paths allowing for moments of choice. And there's only a handful of hosts yet ambulatory, though I suppose there will be more manufactured to come, we'll see. Maeve's superhuman powers are actually either a mystery (which is how they appeared as her consciousness was growing and dominating) or a technological result (viewing all the attributes she programmed into herself and the fact that she is now given a new power). This is a clear danger that artificial intelligence could present in the world to come. Delores and Maeve's motivations are programmed seemingly emotional responses, that they are beginning to be reinforced with learned emotional responses due to consciousness; Caleb's are more complex. Humans are shown as more complex, and creating character and motivations that include self-destructive impulses and attachments to others due to the reaction of experience and emotion, Charlotte/Delores represents the danger to the machine that emotional experience can present. In a way this seems to be a somewhat ancient Gnostic cosmology at play here: the "enlightened" that are above material corruption, the spark of the divine in the material, and the corruption of the spark of divinity by the deluded material nature that prevents escape to the real world of divine power and majesty. I at first bristled at Dolores and Serac talking of "gods" but I now see that this is at the heart of the matter--the deluded material god Rehoboam, and the divine incarnated in machine of Delores. I personally no longer feel more empathy for the androids than for the humans. The androids are agents of chaos and destruction. The humans are awakening from a fog. I empathize with the foggy more than the maniacally determined. They haven't shown us many really decent humans, but they've shown us even fewer decent machines. Dick wrote of humans who had become android-like via drugs and abuse and who had lost empathy and even self-strength. I have encountered similar people, but don't admire them or want to hang with them. I can empathize with them in the sense that I feel sorry for them. . . . Fascinating stuff, I don't have the issues you seem to with these, seeing them a bit differently and I'm glad I don't have impediments to enjoying the heck out of this.
This episode was better than the last. Can't say I was impressed though. Bernard's character, this season, really has been wasted.
I think there has to be a payoff for Bernard, that Dolores may have set him up as a chess piece for one important move. We'll see.
It's also I think important to realize that Caleb is part of this AR program and has that "governor" implanted in the roof of his mouth. As we see William now being fitted and submitted to the program. So there's a lot more than just child abandonment and militaristic PTSD going on with that character! Any word on renewal of the series? I wonder what the build up for a next season will be. I can see the present plot situation as being an end-game in its way.
What if, instead of this obvious intent, machines are instead actually the Great Temptation, by which we are meant to be judged by not only how we treat them, but how we use them to treat one another? We treat our machines like cattle, we get used to treating beings who look like us, as lesser beings...including one another. We've certainly seen the human race portrayed in this series as people setting their own examples as less-than-kind. This is the giving-in to the temptation of seeing our own creations as lesser beings...and not having the standards to see our peers and our fellow man, as equal to ourselves either.
