The Official "Westworld" Season 1 Thread

[charmander]

episode 2 was piff brehs

 

[Mr. Manhattan]

I thought about this some more, and I think the "Assassination of Lord British" incident from Ultima Online really does give us a clue to what the TV version of the Man In Black character might be about.

In this analogy, think of "Rainz" (the assassin) as the Man in Black and "Lord British" (the real life game designer) as Anthony Hopkins' Ford.


What these articles don't mention (but was admitted to back 1997) was that "Rainz" was a notorious PK player character called "Aquaman" who had used exploits to kill supposedly thousands of other players. Back in the days of the UO Beta the PK-ing was totally out of control, and a strong enough player could get away with killing other players in town in supposedly "safe" areas. After getting bored of the conventional slaughter of other players, Rainz decided to take his game to the next level and try to take out the "immortal" game designer's character "Lord British".

Quotes from Rainz in the link above:


Quote from the article, written 13 years after the fact:



I think THIS is what the Man in Black is going for in Westworld. He's bored of playing the game "by the rules", and now he's playing a new game:
Himself vs. the all-powerful game designers.

He's trying to get away with secretly break the game (without giving himself away and getting banned) so that he can get Ford and the other designers to put themselves in a position where he can get to them directly. The game designers will allow you to get away with role-playing as an evil "Black Hat" character, so he's using that as cover for his attempts to hack the system. If they think he's raping Dolores they'll let him get away with it (because that's what Evil characters do), but he's really trying to see if he can trigger the kinds of changes we saw when she swatted the fly. I'm also thinking he's probably the one who left the photo in the ground for Dolores' father to find. He's played the game so many times he has their scripted routines memorized, so he knows where to bury something where only that one specific host will find it.

By subtly messing with/hacking the robots, he's forcing the designers to react to him and expose themselves. By studying what they do, he can find a way to use it against them. The trick is not to attract too much attention to himself in the process.

I don't know if he's literally trying to kill Ford, but his goal is almost definitely to beat Ford at his own game. In his mind, that would mean that he would have won an "unwinnable" game.

My initial though of the man in black is that he's trying to find an exploit so the machines become self aware and rise against the creators, maybe he feels a morality dilemma, it mustve affected his real world life, and maybe its a chance at redemption

 

[Tasha And]

I'm supposed to be watching this with my girl but she doesn't have time to watch it till Sunday

Think I'm gonna watch ep 2 now and then pretend it's my first time watching it on Sunday

 

[FlyRy]

episode 2 was piff brehs

In many ways it felt more like a premiere than the premiere

 

[Mr. Manhattan]

Black Hole Sun (classic) was playing in the background in the saloon, does this have a significant meaning?

Is The Man in Black the Black Hole Sun

 

[charmander]

Black Hole Sun (classic) was playing in the background in the saloon, does this have a significant meaning?

Is The Man in Black the Black Hole Sun

not to spoil anything for people who haven't watched episode 2 yet

but No Surprises by radiohead was playin in the saloon on this one

 

[chopchop702]

Just watched first two episodes.

Most thrilling tv ive seen in a long while

 

[FlyGuy]

I think maybe Man in Black is trying to hack the game so he can live in Westworld

 

[hex]

Depends on what you mean by small. In the 1st ep someone said there's about 2000 hosts and 1400 guests I'm the park.

@Common manslaughter
@ fukking tumble weeds

Well 1,400 is pretty big but we don't know how big the park is. Even if the park is the size of a small U.S. state 1,400 people would probably rarely (or never) interact with each other.

Fred.

 

[AkaDemiK]

if you go to one of the sites @TheDarceKnight linked Westworld: A Delos Destination you can read some Delos "personnel" emails where they shed light on a few things

apparently there's an Arrivals section of the building where guests go to enter the park...i assume most hosts are already in the park and a few might be added on the train in the same way...but they still have yet to reveal any info on how they actually get guests/hosts/objects in and out of westworld...but it does seem to all be done in the same facility

another email on the site i found kinda interesting could explain how dolores' dad stumbled on that pic of the girl in times square

there seems to be a few instances of employees mixing their personal belongings up with stuff meant to be put into westworld...one example they cited was an employee's bra that they almost put on to one of the hosts before sending it back in

so it's possible that the pic could be an employee of Delos or someone they know

it's not VR

on the Discover Westworld site they keep mentioning a process called "decompression" when leaving Westworld...so i assume that guests enter the facility and are somehow shrunk down or warped into the park...same thing with all the hosts, animals, etc

if it was VR how would people die from most of those causes, like allergic reactions to plants?

That you char....wait....

 

[hex]

Dope second episode :smugnolan:

@hex @Sensitive Blake Griffin

My man. Let me grab a plate.

Fred.

 

[hex]

Black Hole Sun (classic) was playing in the background in the saloon, does this have a significant meaning?

Is The Man in Black the Black Hole Sun

not to spoil anything for people who haven't watched episode 2 yet

but No Surprises by radiohead was playin in the saloon on this one

Jonathan Nolan said "Westworld" was heavily inspired by video games (no surprise there) but one in particular he mentioned was "Bioshock". There is a lot of anachronistic music in the 3rd game due to reality shifting. There was a character that used portals to other realities to steal music and do old time versions of it decades before the song was written. It wasn't a main plot point of the game, it was just a cool little easter egg.

Fred.

 

[South Paw]

delos sent me another email

 

[FlyRy]

Jonathan Nolan said "Westworld" was heavily inspired by video games (no surprise there) but one in particular he mentioned was "Bioshock". There is a lot of anachronistic music in the 3rd game due to reality shifting. There was a character that used portals to other realities to steal music and do old time versions of it decades before the song was written. It wasn't a main plot point of the game, it was just a cool little easter egg.

Fred.

There's a scene with that Ed Harris in this new episode that I swear was taken from a map of a town in Red Dead Redemption

 

[Red Shield]

One thing that stuck with me and I've been thinking about the entire day, and which I finally figured out why it stuck with me is the importance of the fly. And I'm not merely talking about the ending scene.

In the opening scene it's established that the hosts don't react to them as one crawls across Delores' eye.

Then there's the piece of dialogue about how a host could never hurt a human, they couldn't even hurt a fly. This obviously seems like a setup for the ending scene but there's an even more important scene about it, the one where the sheriff starts to malfunction when he's escorting the guests. Because what's important here is what happens precisely before he starts malfunctioning. A fly lands on his face.

Why is this important? Because of what is being discussed about the hosts in other scenes about the reveries allowing them to pick up small touches/details in human behavior and imitate them so they appear more lifelike, such as the hooker from the saloon rubbing her lips and the sheriff, when fixed, combing his mustache with his fingers. So to bring that back to the fly, what is the most subconscious, instinctive move a person makes when a fly lands on them? They swat it, and I think we all know that we do it without even thinking about it. So what happens when the hosts constantly register the guests doing this? They want to start imitating it, but to do so they would intent on killing the fly, and this goes directly against their core programming. And thus, unaware to the programmers, they have created a paradox in their system, one that is causing them to glitch.

This brings a lot more meaning to the end scene because it doesn't just mean that Delores' has somehow overcome the glitch, but this means that her AI is evolved far ahead of the other hosts in the park. And we already know why this is because of what is said about her towards the end, namely that she is the oldest host in the park. Which means she contains more reveries than any other host in the park, the same reveries that stand at the core of the hosts' changing behavior.

So we really already know why and how she has overcome her programming, and this leads me to theorize that she is in fact so far ahead of the other hosts that she is evolved even far beyond what the programmers think is going on, and that she has been playing along for a while now.

Had not thought about that fly thing and the host mimicking human behavior


Figured Delores would be special, but when dude said she was the oldest host then it clicked.