WESTWORLD IS BACK

[33cl33]

I'm really digging the whole show. The bio-droid thing made me a lot less interested in Battlestar, but for some reason, it's easier for me to overlook here.

Different strokes for different folks (particularly for internal combustion folks), I guess.

The thing with Dolores being the oldest in-use model... Plenty of opportunities for flashbacks, repairs, upgrades, etc... even if the 'now' version of her ends up being organic.

Although, Dolor does = sorrow. Maybe we're destined to be bummed in here.

[Karel]

OK, people, I'm still putting my thoughts together for what will probably be a very long post on the series as a whole thus far, but as someone who has HBO and who has watched every episode as it's come out let me just say that this "biodroids" thing is being blown way, way out of proportion.

1) the hosts are clearly controlled by computer software, that's unambiguous, and we see that that programming can be degraded to the point where they actually move mechanically regardless of their "biological" components.

2) as has already been mentioned, earlier versions of the hosts are seen in flashbacks that are fully and unambiguously robotic and mechanical. It is further stated that Dolores and possibly other hosts are upgraded versions of these where the new more "realistic" components have been gradually added to the old robotic composites.

3) this isn't at all surprising as a direction for the technological development of the park, which is after all not designed to cater to technophiliacs like us but to a mass market seeking the most realistic sex and gore on offer.

4) even the new "biological" components are still obviously artificial. There's the opening credit sequence, obviously. In the most recent episode we see a clear eyeball (obviously made of some kind of plastic, with internal lattice work not present in a real human eyeball) being filled with fluid and coloured in by machine. One host is drained of blood and the blood siphoned in to another host to keep it functioning, playing off an earlier reveal that the hosts are programmed to "die" once the amount of "blood" in them goes down to less than two liters. It's obviously not real blood, as the otherwise intelligent person who performs this hillbilly transfusion gives no thought to type or hygiene, only leakage, yet it still seems to work just fine. In several episodes we see discarded hosts standing in what is supposed to be a cold storage where the refrigeration system is broken, obviously undergoing mild decomposition but nothing like what you would see if they were actually made of fully organic human flesh, more like, well, plastic that's been left in a warm, damp place for too long.

So again, while the show is being deliberately vague about a lot of things (much too vague, in my view, a view I'll expound upon later), I also think it's gone out of its way to show that the hosts, however superficially realistic, are robots, are machines, are artificial. Their physical makeup hasn't ruined the show for me at all (some other things, however, are coming perilously close).

[Matryoshko]

Pretty much agree with Karel.

Also, wow, every Maeve scene was great today.

[1001011001]

Bioroid or not, Maeve's malfunction was beautiful

[Worldowner]

Hey people. I see that fembotwiki not hurries with Westworld updates, its section for this show still contains a few screenshots from the teaser only.
I have made a pack of good screenshots from ep 1, 2 and 5, and i could share it with someone, who can upload it to fembotwiki, just offer a reasonable way to do so (i mean - no surcharge file exchangers at all). It's around 500mb of unsorted jpg shceenshots, but i can sort it a bit to make size smaller.

Also, wow, every Maeve scene was great today.

I think she's kinda creepy But the final scene if ep5 was really cool.

[Worldowner]

If you would like to upload them to FembotWiki yourself, I can make an account for you. Let me know.

well, that's an option. But i hope for a little induction, i don't want to accidentally delete half of the site . So whats next?

[Spaz]

I was planning on helping out with these, but HBO caught me downloading one of their other shows and tattled to my ISP, so I have to be extra careful now.

[Karel]

So I’m finally putting together my mid-season thoughts on Westworld, to relieve election day jitters (seriously, folks, if you live in the States, go out and vote Trump; it’s important), and because I suddenly can’t get the show out of my mind. That’s a sign of how much it’s really grown on me, and that in itself is now unusual: to have a show gradually grow on me over time, rather than grabbing me right out of the gate (and then usually leaving me disappointed or angry, à la Lost, True Blood, etc.) or being consistently mediocre.

It probably should have been obvious to me before now that this Westworld is not our Westworld, but for some reason this fairly glaring observation only hit me today. HBO’s Westworld is, in essence, no different than the Battlestar Galactica remake.

The original Battlestar Galactica was pure dross, completely unworthy of a remake, and I found the attempt to turn it into a highbrow meditation on the human condition at first bizarre and incomprehensible, and only later (after it turned into the most unsubtle political commentary imaginable) perversely thrilling and brilliant. Now, I personally think that taking this same approach does a disservice to the original Westworld, which is in many respects a nearly perfect film. Viewed purely on its own terms, the original Westworld is excellent. The script and direction by Michael Crichton are tight, the story is a straightforward one of technology run amok, extrapolated from existing trends, the action and tension are sky-high throughout the last half of the film, and I still believe that it’s the first film to reference the concept of a computer virus. That last point is now backed up on Wikipedia, but I do not understand why the film isn’t better known for it. Instead there now seems to be some asinine idea that it’s a “camp classic.” I’ve seen live “Rifftrax” style screenings of it put on in local rep cinemas, and I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would think it is an appropriate film for that kind of treatment.

Nevertheless, here we are. Although I think the remake is in a sense unnecessary, I also think it’s more justifiable in this case. You could have written a completely new science fiction setting for the remade Battlestar Galactica’s story and no one would have noticed, since everything was different anyway; but if you wrote a completely new story about a robot theme part everybody would have just said it was like Westworld anyway, so there’s really no way around it. It’s simply too specific a setting. But it has created perhaps insurmountable difficulties for the series’ attempts at world building. Continued in the next post.

[Karel]

The World of Westworld

The original film was pretty vague about where exactly Delos was located, and that worked just fine because there was no reason to address that question in film’s limited runtime. It wasn’t relevant to the story. I had the impression at the beginning of that film, as that hovercraft sped across a scubby desert, that it was either in a particularly desolate stretch of Nevada or else (even more likely, in my mind) in North Africa or South America somewhere, some large, empty, low-tax, zero-regulation despotism (still run by a stable 1970s era pro-American dictatorship) that allowed them to set up shop in exchange for a miserable payoff and the hope that the tourists would buy a few knickknacks at the international airport. And that was plausible, because the park was just a big, interactive, X-rated version of Disneyland. You could fit the whole thing on a few thousand acres, and people would come, even if the whole thing was rather superficial, because it still showcased cutting-edge technology that couldn’t be seen anywhere else.

Where is the park in the HBO series located? I have a theory about that. Do you want to know what it is? I believe that the only plausible location for the park in the HBO series is Mars. I hope I am not proven correct, because, as you can see, that theory sounds stupid when it is actually espoused. In fact, I hope that the question is never addressed, because I can’t think of any answer that would not be stupid. But I don’t see how the writers can possibly avoid addressing that question for the entire length of a television series.

So we can see that the cutting edge robotics technology of the new Westworld makes the hosts largely physically indistinguishable from human beings. The much more obviously robotic first generation hosts from thirty years ago, far in advance of anything we have today, are ancient technology. So really, why is the park such a big draw? I mean, really. $40,000 per day? Sure, inflation might’ve chopped that down a bit, but it can’t have done so too much or they wouldn’t be able to emphasize the super-elite status of the people who get to visit the park. But why couldn’t somebody with that kind of disposable income in this world simply purchase a reasonably realistic robot for themselves? Or a harem of them? Why wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t that be a more lucrative business for the people manufacturing the robots than running the theme park, with all the additional overhead and operating costs that the latter entails?

Yet there’s no mention of it. Nobody talks about owning robots like the hosts as personal property in their own homes outside the park. There’s no cross-marketing, as there surely would be if the park was just a glorified dealership, i.e. “Do you like this one? You can own one just like it for $XX,XXX,XXX.” Moreover if that kind of private ownership were an option it would clearly strip the park of its novelty and fatally cut into the already small demographic of people both willing and able to go. We clearly see when William is introduced that interacting with a host is for him a totally novel experience, which you wouldn’t expect if owning androids (even less realistic androids) was an option outside the park.

So why is this sort of technology confined to Westworld? The most plausible reasons that I can think of would be legal or regulatory, like the restrictions in Blade Runner banning replicants on Earth. The androids are potentially dangerous, or can interact in potentially harmful ways with other technologies prevalent outside the park, or private ownership would potentially breach ethical or other guidelines that the park has to adhere to (which I think might be indicated by the fact that the park keeps all its decommissioned hosts in cold storage rather than burning, burying, or recycling them), etc. It’s notable (and a welcome departure from most stories like this) that the people running the place are not cavalier about safety, with Stubbs indicating his firearm and saying “I sleep with this thing.” But it still seems as though there would have to be an extremely unforgiving legal and regulatory environment in the real world for this potentially extremely useful android technology to remain completely confined to the park for thirty years.

You might posit that such a forbidding legal and regulatory environment could be a result of the briefly mentioned “incident” at the park thirty years ago. But if that were true, if that incident was so bad that it justified, all by itself, such severe economy-wide restrictions on the use of android technology, then surely the reputation of the park would have been irretrievably destroyed! Or, at the very least, they would have rebranded it away from the Western theme (which we clearly see didn’t happen). No one would risk their safety by continuing to go to “Westworld”. They didn’t keep building passenger airships after the Hindenburg. The development of this technology would have run in a completely different direction.

All of this is relevant to my original question, but let’s go back to that: where, in this unimaginably distant future, is the park in the HBO series located? For starters, it seems unaccountably vast, far larger than any existing theme park on Earth today. Even at $40,000 per head per day running such a large facility on an economical basis would require them to pack in as many guests as possible, yet those same guests can ride out for days and days in any given direction and potentially move so far apart from one another that they never interact at all. The park is so huge that it’s virtually impossible to see everything contained within it even if you have been a repeat visitor for years, like the Man in Black. There are multiple complete towns miles and miles apart. We see Logan, riding into one, say “they’re hemorrhaging cash”, and the only response I could think of was “Ya think!?” And it isn’t merely the size of the park: the absolutely stunning terrain is of a kind found nowhere on Earth other than the exact area where most of the classic Westerns were filmed, i.e. Southern Utah, Nevada, Arizona, etc. Most of that landscape is now protected in State and National Parks. Now, I suppose you could posit a dystopian future in which all of that was sold to corporations who could do with it whatever they wanted, and you might find some support for this in the bizarre exchange between Felix and Sylvester (“You’re a butcher, you’ll never be a coder!”) that seems to suggest a devolution of society into some kind of corporate feudalism, but standing against it are other statements which seem to suggest the world outside the park is a sort of paradise where diseases are cured and people lack purpose because their basic needs have all taken care of. And neither an overcrowded Blade Runner world nor a benign welfare state would be likely to stand for the kind of wanton environmental damage inflicted by running an earth mover and letting robot animals lose in the Grand Canyon National Monument.

Moreover, one gets the distinct impression that absolutely everything in the park has been manufactured, including the landscape. The sort of rock formations that you see in places like Monument Valley are totally unique and formed over the course of millions of years: you would not set an earth mover lose anywhere near them, or construct major new topographical features like valleys and canyons around them, unless you were confident that you could restore them to look exactly as they did before, or (more likely, and now possible if the former point is true) that they were your creations in the first place. There’s also the fact that the entire landscape seems perforated with park facilities, with elevators popping up out of the ground in distant locations and William’s stepping out of wardrobe and onto a moving train. If we take the things depicted onscreen seriously, this is, as Arthur C. Clarke said, “sufficiently advanced technology… indistinguishable from magic.” And, unlike something like the anti-grav coffee table from Almost Human (which another poster here astutely cited as an example of “the art department run amok”), I think we are meant to take this seriously. Manufacturing an entire landscape like this today would cost so much money that $40,000 per day by a thousand or so guests wouldn’t even begin to cover it; but in this far distant future, it’s apparently (just) economical.

If that’s the case, then what else is possibly economical? Terraforming. Hence, Mars. Mars is the only place that makes sense to me. A regulatory environment that could allow for restricted use of technologies banned on Earth? Check. Endless amounts of empty space in which to build your park and create any terrain you want? Check. No environmental concerns about habitat disruption and robot animals? Check. Employees who mostly have to live at the park and wait to “rotate home”? Check. Why is this expensive park still a draw in spite of the prevalence of other entertainment technologies like VR? Well, if you’re a tourist from Earth, it’s something to do on Mars; if you’re a member of the Martian elite, you’re paying as much for the recreation of Earth’s environment and wide open spaces in this artificial setting as you are for the robots, sex, and violence; so check and check! The omnipresence of the colour red in the main control room? Check, check and check!

That’s my tortured reasoning. And this is not just me spinning my wheels here, this is the sort of reasoning that I have to engage in in order to be able to suspend my disbelief! And that’s a problem! That’s why I hope the writers can keep spinning plates long enough to avoid the need for any of this to be specifically addressed, but at the same time I don’t want them to just be spinning nonsense and wasting my time like most of the disappointing shows I’ve already mentioned. The good news is, I think the show just might be starting to develop strongly enough to overcome it. I’ll share my thoughts on that in a later post.

[N6688]

The World of Westworld

The original film was pretty vague about where exactly Delos was located, and that worked just fine because there was no reason to address that question in film’s limited runtime. It wasn’t relevant to the story. I had the impression at the beginning of that film, as that hovercraft sped across a scubby desert, that it was either in a particularly desolate stretch of Nevada or else (even more likely, in my mind) in North Africa or South America somewhere, some large, empty, low-tax, zero-regulation despotism (still run by a stable 1970s era pro-American dictatorship) that allowed them to set up shop in exchange for a miserable payoff and the hope that the tourists would buy a few knickknacks at the international airport. And that was plausible, because the park was just a big, interactive, X-rated version of Disneyland. You could fit the whole thing on a few thousand acres, and people would come, even if the whole thing was rather superficial, because it still showcased cutting-edge technology that couldn’t be seen anywhere else.

Where is the park in the HBO series located? I have a theory about that. Do you want to know what it is? I believe that the only plausible location for the park in the HBO series is Mars. I hope I am not proven correct, because, as you can see, that theory sounds stupid when it is actually espoused. In fact, I hope that the question is never addressed, because I can’t think of any answer that would not be stupid. But I don’t see how the writers can possibly avoid addressing that question for the entire length of a television series.

So we can see that the cutting edge robotics technology of the new Westworld makes the hosts largely physically indistinguishable from human beings. The much more obviously robotic first generation hosts from thirty years ago, far in advance of anything we have today, are ancient technology. So really, why is the park such a big draw? I mean, really. $40,000 per day? Sure, inflation might’ve chopped that down a bit, but it can’t have done so too much or they wouldn’t be able to emphasize the super-elite status of the people who get to visit the park. But why couldn’t somebody with that kind of disposable income in this world simply purchase a reasonably realistic robot for themselves? Or a harem of them? Why wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t that be a more lucrative business for the people manufacturing the robots than running the theme park, with all the additional overhead and operating costs that the latter entails?

Yet there’s no mention of it. Nobody talks about owning robots like the hosts as personal property in their own homes outside the park. There’s no cross-marketing, as there surely would be if the park was just a glorified dealership, i.e. “Do you like this one? You can own one just like it for $XX,XXX,XXX.” Moreover if that kind of private ownership were an option it would clearly strip the park of its novelty and fatally cut into the already small demographic of people both willing and able to go. We clearly see when William is introduced that interacting with a host is for him a totally novel experience, which you wouldn’t expect if owning androids (even less realistic androids) was an option outside the park.

So why is this sort of technology confined to Westworld? The most plausible reasons that I can think of would be legal or regulatory, like the restrictions in Blade Runner banning replicants on Earth. The androids are potentially dangerous, or can interact in potentially harmful ways with other technologies prevalent outside the park, or private ownership would potentially breach ethical or other guidelines that the park has to adhere to (which I think might be indicated by the fact that the park keeps all its decommissioned hosts in cold storage rather than burning, burying, or recycling them), etc. It’s notable (and a welcome departure from most stories like this) that the people running the place are not cavalier about safety, with Stubbs indicating his firearm and saying “I sleep with this thing.” But it still seems as though there would have to be an extremely unforgiving legal and regulatory environment in the real world for this potentially extremely useful android technology to remain completely confined to the park for thirty years.

You might posit that such a forbidding legal and regulatory environment could be a result of the briefly mentioned “incident” at the park thirty years ago. But if that were true, if that incident was so bad that it justified, all by itself, such severe economy-wide restrictions on the use of android technology, then surely the reputation of the park would have been irretrievably destroyed! Or, at the very least, they would have rebranded it away from the Western theme (which we clearly see didn’t happen). No one would risk their safety by continuing to go to “Westworld”. They didn’t keep building passenger airships after the Hindenburg. The development of this technology would have run in a completely different direction.

All of this is relevant to my original question, but let’s go back to that: where, in this unimaginably distant future, is the park in the HBO series located? For starters, it seems unaccountably vast, far larger than any existing theme park on Earth today. Even at $40,000 per head per day running such a large facility on an economical basis would require them to pack in as many guests as possible, yet those same guests can ride out for days and days in any given direction and potentially move so far apart from one another that they never interact at all. The park is so huge that it’s virtually impossible to see everything contained within it even if you have been a repeat visitor for years, like the Man in Black. There are multiple complete towns miles and miles apart. We see Logan, riding into one, say “they’re hemorrhaging cash”, and the only response I could think of was “Ya think!?” And it isn’t merely the size of the park: the absolutely stunning terrain is of a kind found nowhere on Earth other than the exact area where most of the classic Westerns were filmed, i.e. Southern Utah, Nevada, Arizona, etc. Most of that landscape is now protected in State and National Parks. Now, I suppose you could posit a dystopian future in which all of that was sold to corporations who could do with it whatever they wanted, and you might find some support for this in the bizarre exchange between Felix and Sylvester (“You’re a butcher, you’ll never be a coder!”) that seems to suggest a devolution of society into some kind of corporate feudalism, but standing against it are other statements which seem to suggest the world outside the park is a sort of paradise where diseases are cured and people lack purpose because their basic needs have all taken care of. And neither an overcrowded Blade Runner world nor a benign welfare state would be likely to stand for the kind of wanton environmental damage inflicted by running an earth mover and letting robot animals lose in the Grand Canyon National Monument.

Moreover, one gets the distinct impression that absolutely everything in the park has been manufactured, including the landscape. The sort of rock formations that you see in places like Monument Valley are totally unique and formed over the course of millions of years: you would not set an earth mover lose anywhere near them, or construct major new topographical features like valleys and canyons around them, unless you were confident that you could restore them to look exactly as they did before, or (more likely, and now possible if the former point is true) that they were your creations in the first place. There’s also the fact that the entire landscape seems perforated with park facilities, with elevators popping up out of the ground in distant locations and William’s stepping out of wardrobe and onto a moving train. If we take the things depicted onscreen seriously, this is, as Arthur C. Clarke said, “sufficiently advanced technology… indistinguishable from magic.” And, unlike something like the anti-grav coffee table from Almost Human (which another poster here astutely cited as an example of “the art department run amok”), I think we are meant to take this seriously. Manufacturing an entire landscape like this today would cost so much money that $40,000 per day by a thousand or so guests wouldn’t even begin to cover it; but in this far distant future, it’s apparently (just) economical.

If that’s the case, then what else is possibly economical? Terraforming. Hence, Mars. Mars is the only place that makes sense to me. A regulatory environment that could allow for restricted use of technologies banned on Earth? Check. Endless amounts of empty space in which to build your park and create any terrain you want? Check. No environmental concerns about habitat disruption and robot animals? Check. Employees who mostly have to live at the park and wait to “rotate home”? Check. Why is this expensive park still a draw in spite of the prevalence of other entertainment technologies like VR? Well, if you’re a tourist from Earth, it’s something to do on Mars; if you’re a member of the Martian elite, you’re paying as much for the recreation of Earth’s environment and wide open spaces in this artificial setting as you are for the robots, sex, and violence; so check and check! The omnipresence of the colour red in the main control room? Check, check and check!

That’s my tortured reasoning. And this is not just me spinning my wheels here, this is the sort of reasoning that I have to engage in in order to be able to suspend my disbelief! And that’s a problem! That’s why I hope the writers can keep spinning plates long enough to avoid the need for any of this to be specifically addressed, but at the same time I don’t want them to just be spinning nonsense and wasting my time like most of the disappointing shows I’ve already mentioned. The good news is, I think the show just might be starting to develop strongly enough to overcome it. I’ll share my thoughts on that in a later post.

https://youtu.be/x8w95xIdH4o?t=39s

[Extyr]

This might please all those questionning the premise of the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvLoheKYmLI

[Karel]

This might please all those questionning the premise of the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvLoheKYmLI

It's true: what happened to Roman World and Medieval World?

P.S: it's hilarious (I didn't think about the furniture).

[Dolljoints]

What is she even saying, I don't get how it's relevant.

[rickdrat]

Anyone know who's been putting episodes on the FTP? Don't have HBO and episode 6 hasn't shown up there yet.

[rubycalaber]

good news everyone! when Bernard looks up a list of the 82 first generation hosts (the ones with a metal endoskeleton that can split apart their face to show a robotic skull) still in rotation, Dolores is on there

[rubycalaber]

If that’s the case, then what else is possibly economical? Terraforming. Hence, Mars. Mars is the only place that makes sense to me. A regulatory environment that could allow for restricted use of technologies banned on Earth? Check. Endless amounts of empty space in which to build your park and create any terrain you want? Check. No environmental concerns about habitat disruption and robot animals? Check. Employees who mostly have to live at the park and wait to “rotate home”? Check. Why is this expensive park still a draw in spite of the prevalence of other entertainment technologies like VR? Well, if you’re a tourist from Earth, it’s something to do on Mars; if you’re a member of the Martian elite, you’re paying as much for the recreation of Earth’s environment and wide open spaces in this artificial setting as you are for the robots, sex, and violence; so check and check! The omnipresence of the colour red in the main control room? Check, check and check!

That’s my tortured reasoning. And this is not just me spinning my wheels here, this is the sort of reasoning that I have to engage in in order to be able to suspend my disbelief! And that’s a problem! That’s why I hope the writers can keep spinning plates long enough to avoid the need for any of this to be specifically addressed, but at the same time I don’t want them to just be spinning nonsense and wasting my time like most of the disappointing shows I’ve already mentioned. The good news is, I think the show just might be starting to develop strongly enough to overcome it. I’ll share my thoughts on that in a later post.

well... there was a line last episode "you run a whorehouse, not an orbital launch facility"...

[rubycalaber]

further good news, a schematic of Dolores' inner workings

[toysher]

After seeing the seventh episode, I get this idea. Since Ford was once threatened by management after the accident that occurred in WestWorld, did not he kill a person who would take control of him by using a controllable host and replace it with a host?

It is a bit sad ending, but at the end, the only person in Westworld might be Ford.

[Trace Venom]

I doubt the only human in Westworld is Ford. But that would be a pretty sweet outcome. I was having a conversation with Robotman earlier and I did say this:

I would be fucking amazed if SOME videogame developer didn't take the initiative and try to create a Westworld themed, sandbox type game.

At the very least I expect Tell-Tale Games to step up and create a point and click, choose your own adventure type game like they have with Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Batman, and Fables. I'm absolutely going to 100% guarantee someone is going to get the license and do something with the idea. It's way too lucrative of an idea not to.

Westworld is super "videogame-y" by design. Tell Tale seems the obvious choice (because of their handling of Time-Warner I.P.) but I also think it would be likely that, if the series keeps rising in popularity and becomes more relevant within the mainstream of pop culture, it will likely get a nod or two (be it by Easter egg or DLC) in the Red Dead Redemption sequel being produced right now by Rockstar. Hell, it would be full circle, because Jon Nolan has already admitted publicly that he was inspired by videogames, mainly the previous Red Dead Redemption and Bioshock Infinite (the player piano being one of the more obvious nods to BioShock Infinite) when he came up with the concept of the current Westworld reboot.

[dale coba]

I haven't even been watching.
My life is a wreck, but mostly I've been constantly occupied with my non-erotic fandom.
Sad about the coming Comcast data cap, I've been neglecting the FTP.

The least I can do is update the Westworld episodes - so, I threw a few more in there. Hope you are all having a blast - though I maintain the premise is fundamentally stupid, insisting that sentience has to arise from an attempt to imitate sentience; and that debating the human treatment of robots devalues human life. We'll have to see if anyone else ever comes to my conclusions. Mostly, I'm a tired old sourpuss.

- Dale Coba

[rickdrat]

I haven't even been watching.
My life is a wreck, but mostly I've been constantly occupied with my non-erotic fandom.
Sad about the coming Comcast data cap, I've been neglecting the FTP.

The least I can do is update the Westworld episodes - so, I threw a few more in there. Hope you are all having a blast - though I maintain the premise is fundamentally stupid, insisting that sentience has to arise from an attempt to imitate sentience; and that debating the human treatment of robots devalues human life. We'll have to see if anyone else ever comes to my conclusions. Mostly, I'm a tired old sourpuss.

- Dale Coba

Dale,

Continued and heartfelt thanks for doing what you've done when you're able to do it. I know I speak for most of the members here who value the resources of the FTP and your work to keep it up. What will be, will be. Don't sweat it.

And thanks for the Westworld update. I know it doesn't fit everyone's desires here, but outside of the fetish, I'm enjoying it.

[User1222]

Those of you wanting a bit more 'robotic' and a bit less '3d printed' scenes might really like tonight's episode (Ep9) at around 17 minutes in.

I am still watching so I'm not sure if there's more to follow.

[tinyspider]

I don't suppose any kind souls would screen capture the Dolores scene and possibly upload the episode to the FTP server?

You meant the confrontation between William, Dolores and Logan, right? If so, it's on the FTP now

[Karel]

Spoilers, obviously, if you avoided them before.

Theory 1: I was going to say that this was implausible, but on second thought it's equally likely (but no more likely) than my first thought, which was that it's simply another copy of Bernard. In Bernard's conversation with Ford he realizes that "we've had this conversation before." Now, you can assume that Ford has simply erased Bernard's memory in the past but that he opted for a more violent ending this time; yet Ford didn't seem overly fazed by the element of violence this time, or at all worried that his backup might not work, suggesting that that too isn't a new element. Plus, if he really believes himself to be so in control of the situation, why be at all surprised by Bernard's impotent reaction, or react so strongly to it himself by ordering Bernard to kill himself? It could be that a bullet to the head wouldn't actually "kill" Bernard, making the need to create a new Bernard unnecessary: just patch him up like all the other hosts (who certainly take bullets to the head all the time, albeit maybe with special park guns). The ordered suicide might just be a "teaching moment". Then again, Ford is using an old printer in his private cabin and maybe doesn't have trusted techs who could repair Bernard quickly.

Where was I? Oh yeah: in any case, faking a letter from Elsie saying "I quit", or staging another "accident" in the park has to be less elaborate than covering up Bernard's suicide and disappearance and preventing an autopsy. Ford needs Bernard back, new or old. Have Ford and Elsie ever even met? Ever interacted even once? Why would he care enough about her to create a copy of her?

(Theory 3): Ford using Dolores to murder Arnold is one thing. He could cover that up, and yet still keep Dorothy around to preserve Arnold's work (this much is no longer speculation: the only hosts capable of attaining sentience are the ones build by Arnold that have the "bicameral mind" feature built in*). But pinning the death of a guest on a host would lead to that host's immediate retirement.

*Edit: I should say "designed by Arnold", as Ford is obviously capable of reproducing Arnold's work with Bernard. Bernard initially thought that the signs of Arnold's handiwork in his own code indicated Arnold built him, only to find out that that was impossible.

P.S: I should also say that, with only one episode left to go in the season, I finally feel comfortable handing in my own preliminary personal verdict on the show. "Westworld" is... good!

[33cl33]

A little preview of Dolores, back in 2008... https://youtu.be/1YTx4e52ROk

Anyone know of better video from this tour?

(designed by magician Rudy Coby)