A WRENCH IN THE MACHINE
Third season of android-human drama Westworld is less vibrant and complex
Westworld Season 3 debuts Sunday, Crave
Perhaps it’s fitting that Westworld is the recipient of the most extensive, and jarring, reboot in recent TV history.
After all, the show’s characters are hyperintelligent androids, forced in the show’s early going to forget who they once were and what they’ve endured in order to begin their “storylines” anew. Later on, these unhappy automatons discovered the power of self-reinvention, grafting onto themselves new capabilities and identities.
In its third season, Westworld itself is going for a similar trick, overwriting what had been a dense contemplation of identity and humanity with a more obviously crowd-pleasing ride through the world of the future. The show’s second season was widely pilloried for its purposeful deployment of audience confusion, a way of depicting its characters’ shifting experiences of their lives that frustrated expectations. The new Westworld seems designed to meet expectations precisely where they are. The new capabilities it’s aiming for — to satisfy fans with crisp, straightforward storytelling — have obvious virtues, but limit the show’s power, too.
The differences in the series set in from the first scene, in which an investor in the Delos company — the parent company of the Westworld theme park and the underwriters of all the robots now on the loose — faces a home intruder.
We’re, for the first time, outside the Westworld theme park, in the world of the future, and facing down the radical change Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) hopes to bring to bear.
Her vision of the world is one in which evildoers are vanquished, and everyone else lives in limitless freedom, under her rule. The scene is startling less for its sudden, random violence (hardly new for this show) or even for its setting than for its frank, plain tone. Dolores, who throughout the show’s first two seasons spoke in aphorism and metaphor, has suddenly downloaded a patch for modern American vernacular.
Similarly, her lofty goals for the restructuring of society and the defeat of a corporation restricting liberty (led by Vincent Cassel, a new hire this season) tend now to find their expression in small-bore gunfights or quickand-dirty schemes.
Wood remains a compelling presence at the show’s centre, but it can be hard to root for a character who’s forced to read hokey lines like “I don’t need an algorithm to know that the man who built the system — he won’t go down without a fight.”
Ed Harris suffers a similar fate, and Jeffrey Wright and Luke Hemsworth coexist in a plot line that veers unnervingly close to outright buddy comedy.
Others fare better, at least. Tessa Thompson’s performance as an android masquerading as a corporate-suite human is an elegant way to deploy Thompson’s natural chilliness, and Thandie Newton, whose majestic journey through the mind in season 2 won her an Emmy, at least gets to have some fun this time around, traversing through various worlds and assuming new guises in a subplot with wheel-spinning that has the benefit of being somewhat dazzling. New character Caleb (Aaron Paul) enters the story via an app that hooks potential criminals up with crimes and has a Siri-like voice in his ear, but much of his story is that of a generic fellow living in a world basically like our own, but with robots.
The viewer grabs onto tiny detail — a mention that elephants are now extinct, a child playing outside in a surgical mask — because so much of Westworld’s setting now feels plain, like our world but slightly worse.
Perhaps the flatness of Westworld’s new setting might have served, or might eventually serve in the season’s second half, as ironic counterpoint: The peculiarity of the robot uprising exists against a backdrop so flat and familiar as to make it all the more intriguing. But what tends to happen instead is that the flatness sucks away the vibrancy.
It is perhaps understandable why Westworld chose to refocus on more familiar ground, but the beauty of Westworld’s first two seasons were that they didn’t need a sympathetic human lead at all. In becoming a totally fine action serial, Westworld has taken a significant step back from being great.