How free is ‘freedom’?

HBO’s big-budget Westworld returns for a second season with some big questions on its mind, writes Steve Kilgallon.

In an all-time league table of “old films I rather like”, it’s probably not sitting in the premier division alongside The Sting, The Italian Job and The Third Man. (Pop quiz: what instrument did Anton Karas play on the soundtrack?*)

But Westworld, Michael Crichton’s 1973 epic about a real-life theme park where the robot hosts turn rogue, would be vying for promotion from division two, thanks in the main to Yul Brynner’s grimly implacable Gunslinger.

The HBO adaptation, the first season of which aired almost two years ago, is faithful to the original premise: a world where human guests can visit and extract their most visceral desires at the expense of lifelike robot hosts.

And like the movie, if in a somewhat slower fashion and with much more intellectual self-examination, it too asks the question: what if the robots begin to realise what’s going on?

I didn’t, dear reader, stay the course with season one. The film was, of course, full of rape and violence, but perhaps because it was the 1970s and compressed into 90 minutes, it never seemed quite as shocking as the full technicolour approach presented by the TV series’ lush panoramas.

Does that mean you can’t pick up the threads in season two? I suspect you still could, despite the complexities.

We open – after a sequence in which he muses on the nature of dreams – with the park’s chief programmer (a lugubrious Jeffrey Wright) waking, dazed and confused, on a beach somewhere as the tide washes over him. As Wright finds himself surrounded by armed guards and sees the execution of various robots, both we and he begin to realise some cataclysmic event has occurred and we’re witnessing the clean-up.

Flashbacks help us realise what’s happened: at a formal celebratory dinner in the park, the robots have turned on their human masters. And so we are treated to a rather memorable scene set to an orchestral version of Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer, in which Evan Rachel Wood – who plays the theoretically subservient robot host Dolores – riding across a field shooting people in dinner jackets.

From there, it’s a constant, rolling sea of corpses as far as the eye can see:

Westworld still wants to confront and shock you. Every so often, there’s a bit of equally killer dialogue, as when one robot essays a graphic threat to a human programmer, who says helplessly: “I wrote that line for you.”

There’s a lot of deep and meaningful stuff said, but the central question that seems to be being posed is: once the robots have woken up to their true nature, how free are they to choose their own path in life? Yul Brynner never seemed to consider that. He just wanted to kill people. This is actually rather fine television.

I’ve recently returned from a work trip to the UK, and thus an absence from this column, having missed the final moments of Married At First Sight, and due to a MySky malfunction, am Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden are among Westworld’s killer cast of rogue bots. now unlikely to ever see that denouement played out. In my mental

MAFS Westworld, then, floppy-haired Troy will forever be vainly pursuing the self-regarding Ashley; Sarah and Telv will remain deeply in eternal love and Dean and Tracey, romance’s great triumph, will stay the model for the modern relationship.

Of course, it turns out, I’m told, they all broke up and like a horde of sex-crazed rabbits, paired off with different people. Like Westworld ,I suppose: they escaped the tyrannical hold of John Aiken, and allowed freedom of thought, chose their own endings, however ridiculous.

(Answer:* The zither. See, you did get some intellectual enrichment and potential pub-quiz score enhancement from reading this column.)