WESTWORLD
Your Good Girl’s Gone Bad
So is season two good, bad or ugly? We saddle up and mosey on down.
UK Broadcast Sky Atlantic, finished US Broadcast HBO, finished Episodes Reviewed 2.01-2.10
The biggest problem with the second season of Westworld is something – or technically, someone – we would never have suspected could become a problem: Dolores. The heroine of the show’s first year was the innocent victim of all kinds of heinous crimes, repeatedly raped and murdered to prove the point that the humans controlling this android-filled theme park were evil – and that its fake citizens were the ones we should sympathise with. After watching the poor girl suffer for so long, we cheered when she exacted bloody revenge in the season one finale: killing her creator, the scheming Robert Ford, and going to town on the visitors with her new army.
However, what must have seemed to the writers to be a fantastic character arc for Dolores – from angel-faced victim to murdering Terminator – turns sour pretty damn fast. As she and her android posse rip humans to shreds left, right and centre in episode after episode, how can we cheer her on? Where’s that shining, incorruptible heart? Suddenly the adorable Dolores is unlikeable.. a fatal flaw that reverberates throughout the entire season, even as her very lack of a soul becomes a major plot point.
It’s lucky, then, that we get Maeve to reset the balance. Not only does the former brothel madam reveal Neo-like powers to affect the Westworld matrix, her search for her daughter becomes the season’s emotional backbone. Thandie Newton deserves every Emmy going for her heartbreaking performance, while the episode that sees her meeting her Japanese counterpart in Shogun World is one of the season’s highlights.
Dolores’s character arc becomes sour pretty damn fast
But still, even with Maeve’s deeply affecting love for her lost child, Westworld sorely lacks identifiable characters this time around. With young Will left far behind, Ed Harris’s Man in Black is nothing more than a full-on psycho, and as such, he’s tough to watch, even as we learn more about him. Bernard’s struggles to remain “human” (in two time zones, confusingly) are hard to relate to, as he’s such a miserable, closed-down persona. Meanwhile other characters remain paperthin: most criminally of all (until the finale, anyway) Tessa Thompson’s Charlotte Hale, who surely deserves to play something more than “worried annoyance” given the actor’s current stratospheric success. At least Lee Sizemore, the irritatingly twattish Brit, gets a decent redemption arc.
Character-wise, Westworld might have dropped the ball, but when it comes to creativity it still shines. The moral conundrums thrown up are endlessly debatable; there’s the best cattle stampede you’ll ever see; and there’s always that beautiful cinematography. And the actors still give everything they’ve got – including two guest stars. Peter Mullan is phenomenal as James Delos, the man behind the park, while Zahn McClarnon wins MVP with his extraordinary turn as Akecheta. The fact that it took the show 18 episodes to tell the story of its Native American characters is disappointing, but at least it was worth the wait.
Westworld is a beast that must be hell for the showrunners to piece together. While the series has lost none of its ability to shock, puzzle and entrance, it’s a shame that the human element hasn’t quite worked this time around – even if the “humans” in question are actually androids. Jayne Nelson