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by Karel » Tue Nov 08, 2016 2:51 pm
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.
But the final scene if ep5 was really cool.
. So whats next?
