Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Westworld, as a show, is terrific. Thandie Newton is great as Maeve, a robot gaining sentience. Anthony Hopkins is wonderful as the mad genius who oversees his Old West-themed world of robots and high-paying human visitors. The plot is intriguing! The twists are enough to keep the internet abuzz. Yes, Westworld as a show is very, very good.
That said, the one thing that we didn’t learn in the season finale is this: Why would anyone want to visit Westworld? Because, let’s face it, Westworld —as a vacation destination— looks terrible.
For those who only watch the parts of the show featuring Thandie Newton and nothing else: visitors to Westworld begin in the town of Sweetwater, which boasts a brothel, a restaurant, and old men who want to offer you treasure maps. You can venture out of the town on horseback or by foot. The farther you go, the more everything becomes The Purge with cowboy hats. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to see Ed Harris‘s character scalping a robot.
A single day costs $40,000. The fact that people would pay that much seems to presume that in the future, everyone will be really fanatically into Live Action Role Playing.
Maybe they will be! The future is unpredictable! But if that’s not the case, then, other than really rich people, who is Westworld for?
Given that the main attraction seems to be the brothel and shooting robots, maybe it’s for bachelor parties. That’s certainly the impetus for two of the show’s visitors. But then, does anyone want to marry a man who wants to go to MurderTown for his bachelor party? If your future husband’s secret fantasy is “murdering dozens of people/stabbing an old man’s hand/murdering a prostitute/scalping, in general/any of the actions we’ve seen on the show,” don’t marry that guy! Marry some guy who’s just going to get an awkward pre-wedding lap dance at a normal strip club. A non-murder strip club. That seems really harmless by comparison.
Still, bachelors who are also bad people at least seems like an appropriate audience. The most baffling part of the show is when people bring their small children to Westworld. Are those people terrible parents? Why would you bring your children to a place where they watch homesteaders get raped and murdered? All of society is one elaborate construct designed by people who want to avoid having their children witness rape and murder. Sure, there are protocols in place to hopefully avoid that, but it seems like a crux of the show is that all the protocols keep failing.
If you want your kids to see horses, just take them to a dude ranch. Don’t take them to a town where one of the main narratives proposed involves a man cannibalizing himself.
Admittedly, some people have theorized that the allure of Westworld is seeing animals, because all animals are dead in the real world. For $40,000, all the animals in the real world had better be dead.
I have thought long and hard about what I could conceivably enjoy in Westworld and the only thing I can come up with is, “Well, maybe I could unionize the sex-workers and kick-start feminism?” But then they’d all forget by the next day, because they are robots whose memories are routinely wiped clean. Taking that into account, I’d probably just eat in the old timey restaurant. That seems fine, but you could probably get food that is not “old timey mutton” or whatever they serve there for $40,000.
(Side bar: This raises another interesting point. Is Westworld an all-inclusive resort, or do you get charged extra for the drinks and mutton and, erm, sexing? Discuss amongst yourselves.)
When people fantasize about heroic deeds, they fantasize about having a legacy. The deeds of great men change the world. Nothing gets changed in Westworld. Whatever you do, the stories remain the same.
Which makes visiting Westworld less of an experience where, as Anthony Hopkins’ character suggests, “you discover who you could be” and more of “a day at a very expensive Medieval Times.”
Westworld is not only hyper violent, it’s also just incredibly uncool. For all the elements of danger, there’s no actual danger in Westworld. Visitors can shoot at robots, but the robots can’t shoot back. The robots can’t hurt the visitors at all. The stakes are higher in a game of paintball. In the first episode, a visitor kills a robot and excitedly poses for a picture with it. That guy is going to hang that picture proudly in his office and his co-workers are going to snicker about how that geek shot fake people.
The Man in Black seems a lot less menacing when you realize that he’s an adult man who essentially spends every weekend at the Frontierland section of Disneyland.
The most unrealistic part of Westworld is not that the show possibly takes place on the moon. It’s that there’s no recalcitrant teenager in the background telling their dad that he looks stupid in a cowboy hat and that this family trip is stupid. Well, perhaps that’s something to hope for in season 2.
[Watch Westworld on HBO GO or HBO Now]
Jennifer Wright is the author of It Ended Badly: 13 of the Worst Break-Ups in History and Get Well Soon: The Worst Plagues in History. Follow her on twitter @JenAshleyWright.
