HBO’s Westworld is, with apologies to Dr. Johnson, like watching MIT’s Mini Cheetah robot do a backflip: It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all. Machine learning and AI are notoriously difficult subjects to grasp, let alone to present intelligibly to a popular audience, and that’s but a small part of the challenge accepted by these showrunners. How to wring oil-slick, emotionally resonant prestige TV out of a hokey ’70s property, the characters of which dress like they’re posing for a novelty tintype between bites of fried dough? Talk about hubris. Talk about “playing God”!
Seasons 1 and 2 are confined to the titular Westworld, an anything-goes theme park populated by artificially intelligent robot “hosts” and designed for the entertainment of evil billionaires of all ages and DSM-5 classifications. After the park’s hosts spontaneously develop memory and consciousness and begin to “question the nature of their reality,” they are led in a slave rebellion by headstrong farmer’s daughter Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood). It is their Manifest Destiny to butcher the guests, escape the park, and exact revenge on the human race. Though, in fairness to the human race, only the top 1% of the 1% would be able to afford a holiday at Westworld, which packages the no-account whoring, drinking, gambling, and violence of Nevada for the private-jet clientele of Monte Carlo.
This sounds like a straightforward premise for an action-adventure romp, but, like the awakening hosts, the show has grander ambitions. These don’t always work in its favor. Critics and audiences have complained that the show is confusing, elliptical, and also, like the hosts, unwilling to play by its own rules. Season 3, which premiered on March 15, seems to have doubled down on that strategy, adding new complications and mysteries faster than it bothers to satisfy the existing ones.
Westworld is more science-fantasy than science-fiction: It promotes a vision of AI that owes more to Frankenstein than to the sobering forecasts of a Nick Bostrom, the Oxford philosopher who expects our computers to achieve potentially dangerous superintelligence. Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the devilish Prometheus who, along with his deceased partner, developed Westworld’s technologies, was always preoccupied with narrative, memory, consciousness, free will, and identity as a still and unchanging point. He saw AI as the key to unlocking us. While these traits categorically cannot arise in machine minds, they are the show’s true passions.
Watching Westworld, with its principal hosts—such as the good-hearted gunslinger Teddy Flood (James Marsden) and the vengeful madame Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton)—struggling free from their endless narrative loops, is more like observing Alzheimer’s patients than malfunctioning robots. The repetition of scenes and motifs that made seasons 1 and 2 so exhausting has died down, but the suffocating fatalism remains.
The hosts do eventually get out of the park, if not their own muddled heads. We see them galloping across a plain of blood—Dead Horse Point in Moab, Utah, and Arizona’s Monument Valley furnish some of the show's iconic backdrops—and season 3 finds the luckier ones in a future Los Angeles of dark, polished metal and glass. Call it iPhone revival architecture. A magnificent shot of a skyscraper of terraced, sublimely green gardens tells us that this is either Babylon, the Promised Land, or both. Fitting, as the show begins to acquire explicitly Biblical coloring with the introduction of the omniscient supercomputer Rehoboam and the troubled veteran Caleb Nichols (Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul), recruited by Abernathy into the war on techno-tyranny.
Nichols stands in for the neglected or forgotten, the people for whom a technological society has no use. The show’s predictive computing, which decides whether a human being is worth “investing in,” as Abernathy puts it, aligns with our own anxieties about big data, but the stakes are particularly high for Nichols: According to forecasts, Abernathy informs him, he is expected to commit suicide within a decade.
Of course, should we need a reminder of how Abernathy feels about the power of the surveillance state, we see her fooling a police car’s facial recognition interlock with a dead cop’s head. Westworld is anything but subtle.
Season 3's great mystery is who, or what, is now inhabiting the robotic replica of dead villainess Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson, here doing a stomach-turning job as someone uncomfortable, literally, in her skin), which Abernathy used, in last season’s finale, to smuggle her consciousness out of the park. Hale herself masterminded the theft of Westworld’s coveted IP. To precisely what end, we know not yet. That’s the point: We’ve reached the phase of progress where not even a company’s own employees can be sure of the true purpose of what they’re building.
As “Hale” transforms from confused to predatory, we suspect that these are very much the wrong hands, whoever it is they belong to, for the answer to fall into.
In any case, this season is paying for previous frustrations and loose ends with a generous helping of fun. The future looks cool and is almost worth the price of admission: It’s less colorful than Blade Runner’s para-L.A., but, with its meticulously designed architecture, vehicles, weapons, and robots, not all of them humanoid, it’s credible and a pleasure to see. A side plot in an artificial Nazi Germany delivers terrific visuals, as did previous detours into Japan’s Edo period and India under the raj. We must endure some melodramatic action movie dialogue, but the most vexing challenge of seasons 1 and 2, keeping track of when and where its proliferating flashbacks occur, is mercifully less of an issue here.
It’s a bit of an evasion to argue that the bewilderment of watching Westworld evokes the kaleidoscopic ambiguity of consciousness itself. But it’s true. Trying to untangle the machinations and motivations of hosts and men on the fly is like defusing a bomb: so many colorful wires, so little time. “I’m a dead man either way,” Nichols tells Abernathy toward the conclusion of episode 3. “At least this way, I get to decide who I want to be.” The next moves are unguessable, as they should be. But to frustrate the all-seeing algorithm remains a Promised Land we can keep in our sights.