‘Westworld’ Season 2’s First Full Frontal Nude Scene Was A Revolutionary Power Move

The only thing shocking about the nudity in Season 1 of Westworld was how cruelly blasé it was. Because the show was then merely about a robot-populated pleasure playground, hosts’ bodies were treated as nothing more than afterthoughts. Naked forms were pretty much piled on top of each other. You almost thought that the showrunners built their orgy scenes in as a joke to see just how many nude forms they could nonchalantly shove into a single frame.
**SPOILERS FOR WESTWORLD SEASON 2, EPISODE 1 “JOURNEY INTO NIGHT” AHEAD**

But so far, Season 2 of Westworld is different. Yeah, there is a dead topless corpse in the park HQ and we get a naked host corpse getting crotch swabbed in that Bernard/Charlotte scene, but you have to look closely to find these flashes of the flesh, and they aren’t front and center. The only real big nude scene in the Season 2 premiere, “Journey Into Night,” happens late in the episode. And it’s not a thoughtless bit of nudity, but the result of a meaningful power play. In fact, it might reframe most of the show’s nudity in full. You see, Maeve (Thandie Newton) forces “Westworld” writer Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) to strip down to his birthday suit to show her power over him. Sizemore is left fully exposed. It’s meant to be a moment of embarrassment for the cocksure writer.

It’s a role reversal in the extreme — and it’s proof that many things have changed on for the characters in Westworld in Season 2.

The very first episode of Westworld opens with Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), nude and bruised, sitting in the dark shadows of the Delos lab. She is sometimes dressed in these sessions, but often nude. Nudity is treated like a default for the character. In fact, most of the time we see hosts outside the park grounds, they are stripped down and left exposed. We see scores of hosts like this, fully nude; their bodies are treated like empty bits of ornamentation.

We have seen human characters in moments of nudity, but never before has one of the humans been forced to strip down quite like this. Usually, the guests are the ones being pushed around, ordered about, and played with. Forgive me, but this is a hang dong with some real meaning behind it.
When we look at nudity in premium television, we should be able to see a reason for it. There’s not a practical reason why Maeve needs Sizemore to strip in front of her or the audience at home. Sizemore will need to change clothes to blend in while they are traveling through the park, but Maeve’s insistence on him taking it all off right in front of her is nothing more than a clear power move. It’s meant to signal that the tables have turned on their relationship. He can no longer script what she does — he has to follow her lead. And that’s a stark sign of how much things have changed between the first and second seasons of Westworld.
Oh, and by the way: it’s been confirmed. Thrillest reports that really was actor Simon Quarterman giving the moment his…all.

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