re: Westworld S2 E10: The Passenger

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I’m sure they wanted us to get the feels when Maeve held everybody up for her daughter to pass, then sacrificed herself. Nope. Nothing. The show lacks heart.

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The hosts realizing their position and still being attached to their "family" members is totally incongruous with the point of the show. It bugged me that Delores knows it's all fake and that the park was created for the guests' amusement, but she's still all "muh daddy." It doesn't make any sense. I still like the show but I think you're right that the stories lack heart because they all know it's not real. If the audience knows that's not Maeve's real daughter, and she also knows, then what's the point of the dramatics?

Probably murder some people since that's the only thing she knows how to do.

Anyone catch the ScreenRant article bending WW S2 over the barrel. Visceral - and true

LINK

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For all the subterfuge and narrative pivots, fans managed to crack nearly all of Westworld Season 1's mysteries. Bernard is a host replica of Arnold? There were two timelines and William is a young Man in Black? Maeve is basically God? Everything was pieced together from some very early clues, meaning that the final stretch was for many less about being surprised than it was being validated. That didn't mean anybody enjoyed the season less - there was a sense of satisfaction in figuring it out rather than the stomach pit of being spoiled - but somebody evidently forgot to tell that to Jonathan Nolan.

From when Season 1 first aired, it was clear that the Westworld co-creator was irked by how fans had cracked his mystery box with so little effort. He repeatedly bemoaned the practice in interviews, alleging it ruined the experience for others, and as Season 2 developed his core drive appeared to be to write a new story that the fans wouldn't guess. This unquenchable distaste for this small-but-key part of Westworld fandom reached the apex when, in the lead up to Season 2's premiere, he trolled the internet by saying he'd spoil the entire show to preserve the experience free of guessing, then releasing a highly elaborate Rick Roll.

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Now, this reaction is understandable to a degree. Westworld knows it's "smart" and so wants to deliver the purest version of that - which, when dealing with twists, comes from a successful rug pull. Additionally, Nolan's experience with twisted narratives comes from less-mainstream shows like Person of Interest (that thus have a less-sizeable fanbase) or movies like The Prestige (where there's no time to speculate on the turn); the latter even preaches wonder coming from the trick. Westworld Season 2 is thus, from its very first episode, made to correct the "mistake" of Season 1 being guessable; a mistake that wasn't actually a problem.

It was so focused on making sure the obsessive one percent couldn't guess where it was going that it lost sight of everything else. Storytelling devices that had been carefully integrated in the first year were pushed to their extreme as anything approaching genuine evidence was backloaded and entire narrative diversions were introduced to throw off the scent (see everything in and around Shogun World). Looking back over the season, for everything that gains new meaning (future Charlotte is really Dolores in a replica body), there a counter clue that has next-to-no purpose in the story and is there just to distract.

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This is why Westworld Season 2 was a chore despite making sense; the big picture was purposely and inorganically obscured. The characters always knew substantially more or less than the viewer, so there was no entrance point. The resulting conversation was unsurprisingly weak, with any theories springing out now incredibly broad and not awfully developed from the hiatus: Was Dolores still on a narrative? Is William now a host? Nolan tried so hard to ensure the show could not be guessed that he made it utterly unwelcoming.

What's happened to Westworld isn't just unclear multi-season planning or naked doubling-down of what worked before. It's being hyper-aware of the fandom to the point what worked and failed is skewed, then overcorrecting with that in mind. It's not dissimilar to Sherlock's Season 3 & 4, where Steven Moffat began playing with the show's online fandom to the point that what had initially been a modern-twist on Arthur Conan Doyle classics lost all sense of realism or telling simple mysteries stories. The biggest difference is that Westworld went the other way: the show didn't buy into the hype, it tried to fight it. It had to be smarter.

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At the end of The Prestige, which Jonathan Nolan co-wrote with his brother Chris, it's revealed that the two warring magicians played by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman have both been living twisted dual lives to become the best. However, the pair are still ideologically opposed. Bale believes that art is for the artist - "sacrifice, that's the price of a good trick" - but Jackman is more beady-eyed:

"You never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special. You really don't know? It was... it was the look on their faces..."

The film's overall conclusion is that neither way is intrinsically wrong - art cannot belong to just the viewer or the creator - but either is self-destructive if followed to its extreme; both characters lose so much in their quest of violent one-upmanship. With Westworld Season 2, Nolan ascribes all too readily to Jackman's monologue, believing that the only way to conjure wonder is to completely wrongfoot the audience.

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this guy's comment was great too

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Let's face it... Nolan is so desperate to create some cerebral existential masterpiece that outfoxes his audience and the Reddit community, but he doesn't have the chops to weave the philosophy into a compelling story.

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I don’t know why anyone is surprised by Jonathan Nolan’s shortcomings as a writer at this point. Only Nolan fan boys will deny it now.

This is the same guy responsible for the plot of The Dark Knight Rises. He’s hit or miss.

If he can control himself and keep the story simple, he’s a hit. If he tries to be complex, he outthinks himself and loses track of the convoluted story and quickly becomes a miss.

Season 1: simple story at the end of the day with a few basic twists. He did really well.

Season 2: at its heart a simple story, but Nolan couldn’t settle on it being simple so he convoluted everything for the point of convolution and forgot the story itself.

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What is Dolores going to do in the real world without money?

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Did you see what she looked like in that black dress and heels?

I can think of a way she could make $1000 an hour.