Westworld’s Prescient Warning Couldn’t Survive The Streaming Wars
After 10 years, nothing can top Westworld’s shocking premiere.
“You had to be there” has become an effective shorthand for the chronically online and the cultural moments that unfolded largely in cyberspace, but it’s hard to think of a modern show more deserving of that phrase than Westworld. You couldn’t enjoy a leisurely scroll back in 2016 without running into post after post trying to make sense of the HBO series. “What the heck is going on with Westworld?” was the phrase on everyone’s lips and at the top of every headline; in turn, it became the show’s biggest draw. A mystery box of such heady proportion hadn’t graced our screens since Lost — and though plenty have sprung up and even surpassed Westworld since it premiered 10 years ago, the rush its first season gave us has yet to be replicated.
Despite rebooting the 1973 cult classic of the same name, which was itself based on a novel by Michael Crichton, Westworld felt fresher and more novel than any genre mash-up that’d come before it. Series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy changed very little about Crichton’s original premise, which imagined a near-future theme park populated with lifelike animatronics in cowboys-and-natives cosplay. This realm is a perverse pleasure ground for the wealthiest of the wealthy: for the small fee of $40,000 a day, patrons can dress up in Old West costumes and release their inhibitions. The android “hosts” live to serve — they’re anything from cannon fodder in a shootout to a warm body for guests with love on the brain.
It’s all relatively harmless. Bullets tear through artificial flesh, and any memory of violation is erased at the end of each day, as we learn when the higher-ups at Delos (the corporation that keeps Westworld and an indeterminate number of parallel parks running) perform a wellness check on their oldest host. Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is effectively Westworld’s resident Disney Princess: she and the rest of the hosts are physically incapable of harming any human guest, and our heroine swears that she’d never even hurt a fly. Her bright-eyed complacency upholds Delos’ carefully constructed status quo, but it doesn’t last long. Though she denies ever questioning the nature of her reality in her diagnostic with Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), the inherent cruelty of her “story loop” — which involves the murder of her family and the constant threat of sexual assault — eventually seems to break her.
The crumbling of Dolores’ psyche has something to do with “Reveries,” remnants of her memories and updates that are growing past the point of suppression. Dolores has been in the park for decades and has effectively seen it all. Though multiple software updates have wiped memories both good and bad, Westworld’s founder, Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins), has loosened the restrictions to beget more authentic interactions between hosts and guests. That choice notably compromises the precarious balance keeping the hosts docile — the park’s head writer (Simon Quarterman) warns that they’re becoming “too real.”
Ford’s mysterious role in the burgeoning host uprising was one of Westworld’s greatest threads.
Whether Ford is consciously trying to compromise his greatest creation is one of the most intriguing questions posed in Westworld Season 1. If the hosts think and feel on a human level, how does one justify the cruelty they face day after day? How can Ford (and his small army of operations managers, technicians, and writers) continue the charade?
There’s no question that Westworld has plenty to say about our own relationships with escapism and artificial intelligence. We’re at least a few decades removed from the technological advancements that would make the eponymous park feasible in the real world — but humanity has easily matched the depravity we see in the guests and Delos’ operatives. As AI advances, absorbing our traits and tics and destroying analog records, our own place in the world has never felt more retrograde.
Westworld poses that same theory in its first season: Dolores, in her radicalization, becomes the pinnacle of android potential. Ditto for characters like the crafty Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) who, like The Matrix’s Neo, spends the first season downloading enough information to become a formidable murdering machine. The smarter the hosts get, the crueler the guests become; by the end of Westworld’s first season, you’re unequivocally rooting for the latter, which might be one of the better narrative coups of 21st-century television.
It’s just a shame about, y’know... the rest of the show.
Westworld had a lot to say about AI-human competition. We need that message now more than ever.
In hindsight, Westworld might have worked better as a limited series. Sure, there was good to be found in the seasons that followed its first, but none of it matched the greatness of that debut. Season 1 supplemented its central mystery with turns more shocking than any theory you could find on Reddit or Twitter. (Many might have guessed the true identity of Ed Harris’ Man in Black, but the question of who was a host in disguise threw us all for a constant, and gratifying, loop. Again, you just had to be there!) Its cast was ironclad, and its plot walked the line between heady alienation and bingeable fun. But that perfect tapestry began to unravel almost immediately after Westworld’s solid Season 1 finale. Eventually the story escaped the parks altogether, latching onto a future-set plot that would have been confusing if it weren’t also so, so boring.
Westworld maintained its loyal following throughout its four-season run. Most hoped the show would somehow reclaim its magic, but it never truly got the chance. HBO canceled the series in 2023 and almost immediately washed its hands of all things Westworld. It’s no longer available to stream anywhere, not unless you’re willing to shell out some money for a rental. It’s a tragic end for a show that began with so much promise: even if its early seasons were strong, they feel practically lost to time.
