The Chilly Pleasures of ‘Westworld’

I let the season finale of Westworld wash over me and became almost blissful in my cheerful confusion. By the time I tuned in on Sunday night to watch the episode titled “The Bicameral Mind,” I’d read so many fan theories — William is the Man in Black, Dolores is Wyatt were the least of them — that I felt as though whatever the show threw at me, I was either going to think, Oh, so the fans were right, or (more often) … huh? WARNING: A FEW SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE SEASON FINALE OF WESTWORLD.

Call me not a hater or a skeptic but just another bozo on the HBO bus, having sat through the entire season taking in the surface pleasures to be had — the excellent acting, especially by Jeffrey Wright, Thandie Newton, and Anthony Hopkins; the seamlessly impressive special effects in the simulation of artificial life — while comprehending only about a third of what was going on below the surface of the (as it turned out) very well-thought-through 10-episode narrative devised by series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy.

Related: ‘Westworld’ Season Finale Recap: Things to Come

I appreciated the way the show operated as both an example and critique of sex and violence as it’s presented as entertainment in genre narratives (in this case, both the western and sci-fi). Yet I’m not much of a fan of the concept of storytelling-as-puzzle-solving, whether it’s a mystery novel by Agatha Christie or (to use the example of a head-scratcher that made me break out in itchy hives) Lost, like Westworld a Bad Robot production that sent its more enthusiastic viewers down so many rabbit holes, it doubled as a painful Wack-a-Mole game.

And so by the time “The Bicameral Mind” presented its most vivid image of bicamerality — the shot of Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores sitting across from another-timeline Dolores in a dark chilly room of the Delos lab, half of one mind talking to half of the other — I was less surprised than I was succumbing to the inevitable. Similarly, the episode’s emphasis of the Maze as a children’s game that was a frustrating clue for Ed Harris’s Man in Black turned that character, to my way of thinking, into a slightly more sophisticated version of one of those people who spend countless hours on the sofa playing video games, trying endlessly to get to the next level. Whether it takes the form of a pizza-eating gamer or a sleek gunslinger, it’s a quest I simply have no interest in.

I can’t say I enjoyed much of Westworld, because it lacks a couple of the things I prize in any piece of art and/or entertainment: a sense of humor (there was only occasional, bleak, sour sarcasm, mostly from the jaded Delos techs or a few of the rebellious hosts) and any substantial emotional investment. It takes a bigger fan of science fiction than I am to feel anything more than cold admiration for Dolores’s plight (which ended, inevitably, in a kind of triumph) or the fate of Robert Ford.

Too much of Westworld just seemed like work to me. My simple brain needed supplements. On any given week, I’d have to read recaps by my colleague Ethan Alter and others — it was like cramming for an exam in college. Believe me, in the lead-up to the finale, I appreciated an effort such as “A Simple Guide to Westworld’s Multiple Timelines” by Vulture’s Brian Tallerico, even as I was dismayed: If this was a “simple” guide, why was I having to reread it three times before semi-getting it?

I know the answer to my own question. It’s the same reason I’ve begun to read, over the years, highly regarded sci-fi touchstones such as Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and China Mieville’s Bas-Lag series only to give up a hundred pages in: I don’t care about world-building and presentations of alternate worlds or timelines — I’m fascinated and mystified enough by our own world.

Westworld now seems to have proved itself the hit HBO wanted to supplement its need for big-scale, mass- and cult-audience-pleasing programming during those months when Game of Thrones isn’t on the air. And I feel about GoT much as I do Westworld: I admire the hell out of its ambition and complexity, even as I say to myself, If I wanted to work this hard to understand something, I’d get out my penciled-notes-in-the-margins college copy of The Complete Writing of William Blake and start plowing through the mystifying pleasures of Vala, or The Four Zoas. This time around, I may even make it further than the fourth of its nine books, or “nights.”

Season 1 of Westworld can be streamed on HBOGo and HBO Now.