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On paper, it's a can't-miss proposition. The penultimate episode of an HBO genre thriller, shot by Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad veteran Michelle MacLaren, arguably the finest director working in television today? History teaches us this should be some amazing, jaw-dropping, first-rate TV. So what is it about Westworld's second-to-last installment of the season - "The Well-Tempered Clavier" - that inspires more "huh?" than awe.

Before you even suggest it, let's set aside the fact that the evening's biggest "secrets" were anything but. Yes, online theorists sussed out long ago that Bernard Lowe, the bespectacled behavioral scientist near the apex of the park's power structure, was not only a robot, but also a replica of Arnold, Dr. Robert Ford's late, legendary partner. (A few anagrammatic manipulations of the letters in his name gets you "Arnold Weber"; five will get you 10 that that's the scientist's surname in the end.) And while it's not as directly confirmed, the episode's editing - not to mention the gruesome robot massacre he perpetrates after being separated from his beloved Dolores - sure as hell implies that soft-hearted young William grows up to be the murderous Man in Black. We can now be almost certain that the show has followed (at least) two separate timelines, one in the present and one in the past.

But predictability needn't necessarily equal inferiority where storytelling is concerned. Mr. Robot's second season, for example, purposely telegraphed its central twist, which was more about establishing an emotional tone than fooling the viewer. Granted, Westworld feels more like deception was indeed its goal all along. Even so, its failure to successfully deceive could be overcome by tight writing, engaging performances, exciting set pieces, and the like. It's true that this episode blows it in some of these departments as well: The script is littered with advertising-style clichés like "What happens here stays here" and borrowed sci-fi aphorisms like Planet of the Apes' "You may not like what you find"; William's transformation from milquetoast to maniac is comically unconvincing; his frenemy Logan is as two-dimensional a villain as a low-tier pro-wrestling heel, etc. On the other hand, Maeve's ever-escalating self-awareness as a "living" being is marvelously convincing, with the look on her face as she realizes Bernard is a fellow 'bot being a particular highlight, and Ford's sadistic sangfroid makes him a fantastic bad guy. That could well be enough to sustain the show, at least as an entertainment proposition.

So it's not the content that's to blame for the episode's shortcomings,, but the delivery mechanism. From start to finish, the hour's events move in fits and starts, with the herky-jerky rhythm of a malfunctioning host. How else could it work, when nearly all its focal-point characters are constantly moving in and out of awareness? Teddy wakes up from being shot with an arrow, then is promptly killed again. The Man in Black watches all of this smugly, until he gets knocked out; the next morning he realizes he's about to get hanged from a tree courtesy of a noose and a skittish horse. He narrowly escapes, but only to have his narrative stopped in its tracks once again by a visit from Charlotte Hale, one of his fellow members of the park's board of directors. Logan torments his estranged brother-in-law-to-be and Dolores until the latter escapes and the former pretends to forgive him. Cue the smirking asshole waking up the next morning with all his robotic Confederado comrades massacred and the born-again-hard William firmly in charge.

The self-aware hosts go through even more fake-outs and double-backs. Dolores shifts back and forth between locations, time periods, and states of consciousness so frequently that it's impossible to keep track of - deliberately so, but that doesn't prevent it from undercutting the emotional impact of her discovery that she murdered her maker. And poor Bernard splits his time between getting switched on and off by Maeve and Ford on the one hand, and being jolted in and out of his robotic consciousness. Many of said memories involve killing other characters, like Theresa and Elsie, just to add to the staccato storyline. Sometimes he's not Bernard at all, but Arnold ... or at least Dolores's deep-rooted memory of him. His Doctor-ordered suicide at the end of the episode comes as sweet relief after the mindfucks he's been through. When the storyline that suffers the fewest interruptions of this sort (i.e. Maeve's rebellious arc) involves our heroine breaking down a fellow robot's mind before deliberately burning them both to death en flagrante delecto, you know things have gotten way too complicated.

Add it all up and it's like watching a version of The Usual Suspects in which both Chazz Palmintieri and Kevin Spacey's characters are constantly getting hit in the head with a baseball bat. (And are then forced to try and pick up the story where they left off hours later.) There's just no way for it to sustain momentum, tension, or suspense - let alone make its plot twists and shocking revelations work properly - when every character is so busy just trying to stay sentient and upright.

Ironically, this screw-up makes next week's season finale's path through the proverbial Maze a pretty straightforward one. Assuming whatever revelations it has to offer are as easy to see coming as this week's were, all it really has to do is, y'know, not suck in every other way imaginable. It simply needs to give us a a clean, crescendo-ing sense of danger and drama; dialogue that's lively, funny, creepy on its own without resort to shopworn science-fiction boilerplate; and acting that's as fun to watch as what Anthony Hopkins, Thandie Newton and Evan Rachel Wood have been delivering, with less of their more one-note compatriots. After all, even a mediocre gaming experience can be redeemed by a killer ending.

Previously: Tech Revolution

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On paper, it's a can't-miss proposition. The penultimate episode of an HBO genre thriller, shot by Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad veteran Michelle MacLaren, arguably the finest director working in television today? History teaches us this should be some amazing, jaw-dropping, first-rate TV.

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http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/04/technology/westworld-artificial-intelligence/index.html

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Maeve tried so hard all season long to transcend her code and earn her independence, but as we learn at the end of the first season of Westworld, her awakening may have simply been programmed by Dr. Robert Ford all along.

Just as Maeve and her rebellious robot recruits - including Hector, Armistice, and Clementine - ask a resurrected Bernard to spring them from the claustrophobic confines of Westworld, the one-time head of programming gives her some not-so-fortunate news.

"Someone altered your storyline and gave you a new one: 'Escape,'" Bernard tells her, trailing off as he explains that she's supposed to make her big fateful escape by way of the Westworld train. "I'm leaving. I'm in control," she fires back. And for a minute, it seems like she is in control. Hector and Armistice take care of the Westworld security guards and are left behind while Felix reluctantly leads Maeve to the park's main elevator to even more reluctantly see her off.

"Oh, Felix. You really do make a terrible human being, and I mean that as a compliment," she tells him, with her patented programmed wit, before she begins to strut off to freedom. But that's as far as she gets; Maeve glimpses a mother and daughter sitting across from her and decides to leave to try and find her daughter.

In the earlier scene in the elevator, Felix had given her a note of the exact coordinates of where to find her in the park: Park 1, Sector 15, Zone 3. Somehow, the humanity she's been programmed to feel wins out and she hurries back to save her daughter. Of course, there's a solid chance that the decision was predetermined by Ford's programming; after all, she never did get out of the park.

See you in Season 2, Maeve!
You've read that, now watch this: "Soon, We Could Delete Memories Just Like In Westworld"

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Maeve Almost Realizes Her Dream In the 'Westworld' Finale

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Maeve tried so hard all season long to transcend her code and earn her independence, but as we learn at the end of the first season of Westworld , her awakening may have simply been programmed by Dr. Robert Ford all along.

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So... did the violent delights have violent ends, or what?

's 90-minute Season 1 finale had quite the mission: Answer enough questions posed by the previous nine episodes to satisfy loyal viewers, yet leave enough of a mystery to make those same fans want to buy another season pass to the park.

If you didn't watch the season's sci-fi swan song, "The Bicameral Mind," here's the major takeaway: Ford's final narrative harnessed the power of all of the hosts who'd become self-aware and turned it against those who sought to shut him down.

Oh, and he did so by having a self-aware Dolores shoot him in the head while he was addressing the DELOS board.

RELATED Westworld's Jeffrey Wright Talks the Arnold Reveal, Says Series' Remaining Secrets Are 'There on the Table'

Also of note:

* The Man in Black finally and officially outed himself to Dolores as William, who found his true nature in the park and became a black hat/mass robot murderer in his search for her. In flashbacks, we watched him (as a younger man) encounter her again in Sweetwater, and she (of course) had no idea who he was.

* Dolores found the center of the maze, and it was... a maze. A tiny one, buried in the ground underneath a grave marked "Dolores Abernathy" outside the church in Escalante. As far as I can tell, the maze was a test for the hosts who were becoming self-aware. Once Dolores found it back in the day, that was a signal to Arnold that she was alive - and that the park couldn't, in good conscience, open.

* But when Ford promptly overrode his partner, Arnold had another idea: He instructed Dolores to kill all the other hosts, making opening the park impossible. He suggested that she enlist Teddy to help her, which she did. All those scenes of the two of them walking through town and shooting all the hosts in sight? Yeah, that happened. To put it in terms Buffy fans will understand: Dolores is Wyatt. Wyatt is Dolores.

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* After a kickass fight between Dolores and MIB at the empty church, he stabbed her in the abdomen. Teddy came to her rescue, and at her request, carried her off to "where the mountains meet the sea," where she died on the beach in his embrace... and as it turned out, that was the start of Ford's new narrative.

* In another time-trippy segment, Dolores realized that the voice she'd been hearing in her head all this time was her own. In that same segment, thanks to Ford's prodding and Dolores' memories, we watched her kill Arnold in Escalante - at his bidding - because he realized that the park would still open unless there were real stakes at play (aka one human death as opposed to scores of robot ones). So he dragged a chair out into the middle of the Escalante town square, put on Charlie's favorite song, and kissed Dolores' hand before asking her to shoot him in the head. "These violent delights have violent ends," he said, then she did as he asked. Then she shot Teddy and herself.

* As Dolores shot Ford and the DELOS board members who had gathered for the narrative celebration freaked and ran, all of the lobotomized hosts crept out of the woods and started firing weapons. Original Flavor Clementine even grazed the arm of William/MIB, who looked delighted that the hosts could finally hurt humans.

* Meanwhile, Maeve was so badly burned in the fire she started in the previous episode that she was rebuilt. And thanks to Sylvester, that explosive vertebra that would've kept her within the park was swapped out with a benign one. Hector and Armistice were remade, as well; while they were getting the finishing touches (which, sadly for Hector, meant getting sexually violated by a park employee), they both woke up and laid waste to the techs working on them. They joined up with Maeve and Felix; along the way, Felix brought Bernard back online. And Bernard had some bad news for Maeve: Someone had programmed her to escape, though she refused to believe that her exit was anything but an example of her freewill.

RELATED Westworld Star: 'I Will Be Involved' in HBO Sci-Fi Drama's Season 2

* About that escape: It got really violent. Many security guards were gunned down. Armistice got her arm stuck in a door and was seemingly left to her death. (Though did you watch all the way through the credits...?) Hector made it to the elevator before Maever revealed that she never planned to take him with her. He didn't seem to mind. "Kick up a row, will you?" she asks, kissing him and leaving him to battle the armed men pursuing them.

* And Maeve, dressed as regular old park goer, even makes it onto the train out of Westworld. But she can't stop thinking about her daughter in the park - it doesn't help that Felix gave her the girl's exact whereabouts - so she dashes off the train right before it takes off, presumably to head right back into the belly of the robotic beast.

* So was it Ford's design this whole time to have the hosts take over? Depends on how you read a few pieces of dialogue. First, there's Ford's comment to Bernard: "Arnold didn't know how to save you. I do... You needed time. Time to understand your enemy, become stronger." Then, there's what Ford tells the DELOS board about his new story: "It begins with the birth of a new people, and the choices they'll have to make and the people they will decide to become." Finally, there's what Dolores says to Teddy just before she offs Ford and then begins firing into the crowd: "I understand now. This world doesn't belong to them: It belongs to us."

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* Also: There's a Samurai World?!

* No answers on those flies, though.

We'll be back tomorrow with a post-mortem discussion with series co-creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. In the meantime, grade the episode via the poll below, then hit the comments and let us know what you though of the finale!

Take Our Poll

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Westworld Finale Recap: What Did - and Didn't - Get Answered?

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So... did the violent delights have violent ends, or what? 's 90-minute Season 1 finale had quite the mission: Answer enough questions posed by the previous nine episodes to satisfy loyal viewers, yet leave enough of a mystery to make those same fans want to buy another season pass to the park.

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In a show full of questions, one of the most widely debated of Westworld is the actual identity of Ed Harris's Man in Black. Some think he might be Arnold, the mysterious and allegedly dead co-creator of Westworld. More compelling, though, is the theory that the show takes place in two different timelines -and that William is a young Man in Black. This would mean the events with Dolores and William takes place in the past, and Ed Harris and Teddy are in the present.

Many have made pretty good arguments for this theory. And tonight on Westworld, the show got aggravatingly close to revealing the Man in Black's identity. Tied up, the Man in Black tells Teddy about the death of his wife and his philanthropic organization. It's all pretty vague and gets us almost nowhere. But there was another moment that could have subtly revealed the William-MIB theory could be true.

Teddy and Harris come across the host played by Talulah Riley injured in the foothills. The last time we saw her she was introducing William to the park in Episode Two. Remember her? Harris does.

"It's you," Harris says when he sees Riley. "I guess Ford never was one to waste a pretty face."

Now, it's entirely possible that Harris has seen this host over his many years going to Westworld. Or maybe he only saw her once when he first came to the park all those years ago.

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Did 'Westworld' Just Subtly Reveal the Man in Black's Identity?

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In a show full of questions, one of the most widely debated of Westworld is the actual identity of Ed Harris's Man in Black. Some think he might be Arnold, the mysterious and allegedly dead co-creator of Westworld. More compelling, though, is the theory that the show takes place in two different timelines -and that William is a young Man in Black.

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The violent delights of HBO's groundbreaking new sci-fi drama came to a conclusion on Sunday, December 4, when Westworld's first season finale ended with the shocking death of Robert Ford ( Anthony Hopkins) at the hands of host Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) - the first casualty of the robot uprising we'd all been waiting for.

PHOTOS: TV's 10 Most Shocking Deaths of the 2015-2016 Season

But while the rest of us were trying to emotionally adjust to the idea of a Westworld-less winter (seriously, how will we ever cope?!), some fans have been busy asking some interesting questions about what we just saw ... and concluding that perhaps there was more to Ford's death than meets the eye.

PHOTOS: Stars - They're Just Like Us!

In a world where the robot hosts are virtually indistinguishable from the human beings - and where wondering if a given character might turn out to be a robot was a central, ongoing mystery throughout the season - how sure are we, really, that the man who took that bullet was a man at all? And could the real Ford still be alive? Here are a few reasons why this theory might hold water.

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Ulterior motives
In the final moments of his life, Robert Ford claimed to have seen the light vis-à-vis letting the hosts of Westworld be free - the same conclusion Arnold had come to, and sacrificed his life for, 30 years earlier. And like Arnold ( Jeffrey Wright), Ford chose to make himself the first human casualty of the revolution ... which is poetic, yes, but also utterly out of character for the man who spent all season tormenting his hosts like a capricious and cruel god. Ford positively relished his role as creator - and some might suggest that he relished it much too much not to stick around to see the plot of his new narrative unfold.

Meanwhile, setting up a doppelgänger robot to die in his place and then lurking in the wings to watch the carnage would be not just in keeping with Ford's character, but something he absolutely had the capability for, thanks to ...
The underground lab
We already know that Ford kept his own secret lab in the park - the one where he created Bernard, the host reincarnation of Arnold. And the last time we saw that lab, its 3D printers were hard at work creating a new robot ... of undetermined identity. Maybe that's because the host-in-process wasn't important to the plot of Westworld; or maybe, just maybe, it's because the host was a Ford look-alike, meant to die in its creator's place.
And how about that handshake?
Finally, the most telling evidence that Ford was, er, not entirely himself in that final scene at the gala: Before taking the stage to give his speech, Ford approached Bernard and shook his hand - which the camera lingered on for an oddly long time before panning to Bernard, who wore a confused expression. Why? The answer may lie back in the very first episode, when Ford introduced Bernard to the second Westworld host ever built - and reminisced about how totally, discernibly fake the robots were back then. Ford's line?

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"A simple handshake would give them away."

All together, it's certainly enough to make Us go hmm - and to spend the next year or so wondering whether Ford might still be pulling the puppet strings in Westworld' s second season.

Tell Us: Do you think Ford will return in season 2?

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'Westworld' Fans' New Finale Theory Will Blow Your Mind

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The violent delights of HBO's groundbreaking new sci-fi drama came to a conclusion on Sunday, December 4, when Westworld's first season finale ended with the shocking death of Robert Ford ( Anthony Hopkins) at the hands of host Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood ) - the first casualty of the robot uprising we'd all been waiting for.

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From its very inception, Westworld came equipped with a core premise: One day, the robot hosts at the heart of the series would rebel against their human makers and oppressors. When Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) kills a fly at the end of the pilot, the future bloodshed feels all the more inevitable, if not exactly imminent. But as of the finale, it's not just an imminent bloodbath, it's an ensuing one: Dolores, fully conscious and encouraged by an unexpectedly remorseful Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), unleashes a flurry of bullets into a crowd of humans, beginning with Ford himself.

Clearly, the hosts have come a long way between the pilot and the season finale, mirroring the journey of Jonathan Nolan, the co-creator and showrunner of Westworld who also served as director on both the first and last episodes of the season.

"They were very different experiences indeed," Nolan tells The Hollywood Reporter. "The pilot is careful and methodical and languid in places because we're trying to establish the feel of how their lives are when we start. The finale is a hair-on-fire, 200 MPH blast through everything as the season culminates and all these timelines connecting together. It pulls together and pushes forward. We wanted it to have this very propulsive feel. I came to it armed with not only going through the pilot, but also watching all of these other talented directors come in. We took all of that visual language we built up over the course of the season, and a few things we held in reserve: handheld photography, and a little more movement, to use them to give that finale a feeling of climax and completion. We really wanted the season to feel like a complete story has been told, and we're setting up another exciting story. It feels like the end of the first act of what should be a very big and ambitious story."

Here, Nolan breaks down scenes from the finale in tremendous detail, recalling stories of traveling to Germany with his co-creator and wife Lisa Joy for research, accidental glue explosions, an action-packed evening in West Hollywood, and much more - beginning with the finale's very first shot.
The finale begins with Dolores coming online for the first time, mirroring the first image of the entire series. This time, we're seeing Dolores' body in an early stage of development. What did this involve in terms of visual effects?
So much of what we do, and I learned this from my brother [Christopher Nolan], growing up watching him making movies, is really emphasizing the practical elements first, both the location and the practical elements. You want to build as much and put as much in front of the camera first as you can. This opening shot was a really beautiful marriage of all the incredibly talented people who came together to make this show. Our special effects makeup head Christien Tinsley built a prosthetic there that's completely seamless. You could watch that shot a million times and not ever see it. One of our editors until the very last cut thought that wasn't Evan, but a cast we made of Evan. No, she's right there in that skin that Arnold's laying down as a prosthetic piece, and what it covers is a blue suit that allowed our incredible effects supervisor Jay Worth, using one of our effects vendors ILP (Important Looking Pirates) who made some of the most elaborate and beautiful pieces in our series, to create the rest of her body. It's a leap of faith, but we had worked with ILP already; they created the young Ford face effect, with his face opening up [in episode six]. I wanted to see a version of a robot where you're confronted for the first time with the full Monty: "This person is a robot." I wanted it to be dazzling. You've seen a lot of versions of this. James Cameron is obviously the big baddy here with Terminator, which has informed so much of the thinking of this stuff; it's hard to slip out from under the shadow of that. But we wanted to do something a little different, that looked a little bit more functional, and speaks to what these hosts are used for: they're essentially theatrical appliances, where you're supposed to interact with them without noticing their artificiality. We were thrilled with how it came about.
There's another memorable shot of a host coming online in the finale: Maeve (Thandie Newton), her body being rebuilt, her face emerging forward through the goo. How was that constructed?
That started with a conversation with Nathan Crowley, the production designer on the pilot, who I have worked with on several movies. We talked about how my wife [co-creator Lisa Joy] and I, the last time we went on vacation, we went to look at a car factory in Germany, in part for research. This is the kind of vacation we take. ( Laughs.) We toured an auto plant in Germany, and we were interested in figuring out what we wanted the tech world to look like. One of the things they did in this auto factory that was so beautiful and almost absurd is that they dip the car unibody in a tank of paint. In order to do that, they rotate it through space. You have this massive object that's being rotated by robot arms into like a somersault into the paint and out of it, and they do it so that air bubbles don't form in the paint as this thing is somersaulting through it. We just thought that was perfect. If you're putting skin onto these things, we have to do it just like the auto factory. So Nathan and [special effects coordinator] Michael Lantieri built this rig to dip the hosts in and out. It's enormously complicated. The goop I think is Elmer's glue mixed with water. The first time we fired up the Vitruvian Man and dipped it into the tank, air bubbles and the hydraulic lines made it splash down into the thing with such force that it coated the entire glass room from floor to ceiling with Elmer's glue. That was the very first shot. ( Laughs.) When we went back to the finale, we had a perfect model of Thandie and we dipped it into the tank. We ultimately liked the shot the most at the beginning of the take when we were setting up for it, when we first dipped the body into the tank. It had the coolest look when we played it backwards. So that's actually the body being dunked into the tank, played backwards, and cleaned up a little bit by our visual effects team.
The finale features several scenes of violence, largely centered on Hector (Rodrigo Santoro) and Armistice (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal). You have said that video games are a touchstone for you here in Westworld, and this scene feels especially like a game, almost a Metal Gear Solid stealth mission gone wrong. Did you approach this scene like you were constructing a level in a game?
Very much. Where video games and feature films and television run into the same tricks are different levels. Many games, one of the hallmarks is there are multiple levels in a structure. You think about Halo games, or any game that has rendered these beautiful environments, but you have to keep going through them and keep finding new shades to them. That was using our lab set and integrating it with the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, which is the practical location we based the lab set on. Most of the action sequences shot at the PDC were on one crazy night where we went in with myself and producing director Richard J. Lewis picking up pieces from the rest of the season for that location: all of the stuff with the escalators and everything from the beautiful sequence in episode six with Maeve walking through the labs. All of that, and all of the action sequences, in one night. That was the night J.J. Abrams showed up on set. He saw all of the trucks parked in the parking lot and asked, "How big is this crazy show?" ( Laughs.) The run-and-gun stuff there was delightful. I was most excited with the scene in which Armistice comes to and bites the guy's finger off and tosses him through the glass. You had just been waiting all season for the hosts to start fighting back. We thought that when they do start fighting back, it's got to be pretty spectacular and a lot of fun. My favorite shot in the finale, and I have a lot of favorite moments, is the shot in which Ingrid as Armistice tosses the behavior tech back and forth into the glass. We had a very patient and wonderful stunt performer who was willing to get thrown into the glass, thrown over the tray of tools in the background, while in the foreground, our necro-perv Dustin is admiring Rodrigo. I think that's one of my favorite moments in the finale.
Things take a hard left turn as Maeve enters the facility, popularly described right now as "Samurai World." Were you at all concerned about introducing a different genre and visual language so late into the season?
We knew that anyone familiar with the original film knew about Medieval World and Roman World. We also wanted to articulate the distinction between what the park was when it started 35 years ago and what it's changed into. And also the almost obscene moment in which Maeve, who thought she understood the totality of the artificial world she's in, suddenly realizes she's part of a franchise. That kind of delicious moment. I would hasten to point out that for Lisa and myself, the second season is about opening up the world a little bit, as the hosts start discovering it. That was the idea from the beginning: We only know what the hosts know. As the scope opens up in the second season, we'll see more, but Westworld remains the center of our narrative. That's the title of the show and that's what we're doing, so that will remain the center and heart of what we're doing. But we're going to see the hosts start to realize and almost be offended by this notion: "Wait, we're not the only ones here? There's more?" The reason we went with the shogun, Imperial Japanese motif for that world is in large part because of the beautiful relationship you had between the golden age Westerns and the golden age samurai films. As soon as Akira Kurosawa would make a film, it would get remade with cowboys. The idea that those stories worked in two very distinct genres and languages, and the relationship between those genres, to me was irresistible as an homage to how Kurosawa was responsible for some of the greatest Westerns of all time.
We learn at last that William and the Man in Black are the same person, confirming that the season takes place at various points in time. Can you discuss some of the techniques you implemented throughout the season when dealing with the multiple points in time?
We layered it in very carefully. Those timelines aren't in there as a formal gimmick or as a trick for the sake of a trick. If some people take it that way, fair enough. I get that. I've always been drawn to those types of movies. Some of my favorite movies are the ones that mess with the audience's perception of what they're watching. I've made some movies like that with my brother. But all of those movies are first and foremost rooted in the protagonist of the movie. In Memento, there's gut-wrenching information that's only revealed to you at the end because he's an amnesiac, and he's been manipulating himself. In The Prestige, the film is structured like a magic trick because it's about magic tricks. Here, we had a unique opportunity to tell a story about protagonists who don't age and don't change, and their understanding of the world is completely curated. We wanted to play with both space and time. When we first meet Dolores - and Maeve, and Teddy (James Marsden), and in fact Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) - she doesn't understand the geography of her world, that she's in a theme park. We wanted to hold one more thing in reserve, because the audience comes to the show knowing that it's a theme park. We wanted to hide one additional layer of information in there, which was the element of not just space, but time. These hosts would remember just as your laptop would remember its prior experiences - in ultra high fidelity. It's one of the questions not asked and answered, but you can imagine a lovely scene where Anthony Hopkins is talking with Jeffrey Wright about the nature of memory and the fact that human memory is imperfect, and potentially imperfect for a reason. Humans tend to forget things because it's in our benefit to not hold grudges, to move on. But the hosts remember things perfectly. They just don't understand that they're memories. It's drawing on Philip K. Dick. If you're a machine with a perfect recall of memory, placed back into the middle of your memories, how would you know it's a memory? So from the beginning, we wanted to construct that mechanism, not because we were playing tricks with the audience. That's part of the appeal, a sense of discovery for the audience, and I love that in film and TV, the eureka moment of understanding something I didn't understand before. But it also illuminated what the hosts understood about their world, or failed to understand. We spent an awful lot of time talking about how to weave that into our narrative, with little tiny things. For instance, Jeffrey is playing two characters, and he's one of few cast members we have to completely read into the situation. He had to tailor his performance to whether he was playing a host or a human in certain scenes. Little things like his costume; he never wears the black lab coat as Bernard, it's only Arnold. It took several episodes for people, but it's laid out right in front of you: Arnold and Dolores are in an environment that's unlike any of the other environments we've seen. He's wearing something he doesn't usually wear. She's dressed, and we have made a point of the fact that she's never clothed [while in analysis mode]. You're layering all these things in, not because you're playing a trick, but because - and I feel very strongly about this - if you're going to play with the audience's sense of what they do and don't understand, then you have to play fair. You have to layer those things in in plain sight. What that means is some of the audience members who are watching more closely or are more attuned to these things will notice them first.
Do you have any sense of the reaction of the casual viewer, how this reveal landed for someone who wasn't putting it together over the course of the season?
I'm not on Twitter, and I try to be careful about what I read online. Obviously everyone on Reddit is kind of read-in. But the first experience we had with this was the cast. This is a very smart group of people. Clearly they're reading every script with a microscope because we haven't told them what's happening, and they want to know what's happening. The first round of experiences was with the cast. I remember when we sent them the last couple of episodes. Dolores starts questioning what moment she's in in episode eight, and in episode nine, it's confirmed that there are multiple timelines with when who we think is Bernard is actually Arnold and is indeed a memory. Sending those scripts out to the actors was great fun. The emails and texts that would come back in: "Oh, you mother f-kers!" ( Laughs.) That was a lot of fun. The people who are reading this stuff online, I do think it constitutes a relative minority of the 12 million people who are watching. I'd be fascinated to know what they thought about it.
Turning toward the climax of the episode, what do you remember of shooting the final scenes in Escalante?
There was an art imitates life aspect to it. It's among the final sequences we shot. It wasn't the final scene we shot with Tony; that was the scene down below in the basement, talking about Michelangelo with Dolores. That was a great way to wrap it up. But the last major week of shooting was all out at Paramount Ranch. We loved using these old movie ranches; the familiarity of them and the fact that they've appeared in Westerns over the years was a huge selling point for us. We imagined when Ford and Arnold put this place together, they based it on all of their favorite Westerns. It's not just storytelling and tropes from Westerns, but also the actual locations they shot in. Paramount Ranch is a classic movie Western town and now a state park. We went in and built a church. The church is still there. Tony at one point with a flourish remarried Lisa and I in that church in between setups with Jeffrey Wright as the best man, which was very sweet. ( Laughs.) We set up this last kind of celebration. It was Ford's last narrative. It was the last major piece of shooting we were doing. We shot it over the course of consecutive nights with the incredible Tony Hopkins delivering this speech. Like I said, the art imitates life factor was unbelievable. We had 200 background players in tuxedos, and hosts serving them, and Tony speaking to them, and his speech encompassing what he seems to see as a redemptive act. He's recognizing the mistakes he's made in betraying his partner and not understanding what his partner had found. All these humans in the park are a testament to that fact. Cards on the table, it's a deeply misanthropic theory. But Ford keys in that we keep making these mistakes, there's something baked into our DNA that refuses to allow us to get past a certain point. Ford realizes the hosts are not bound by that at all. They can be whatever they want to be. As we've alluded to a couple of times over the course of the season, so many of the stories we tell ourselves are about change. At one point, Jeffrey's character says it's the thing we yearn for the most but experience the least. That's what Ford is saying to this assembled muckity-mucks of Delos: "We're over. We're done." He said it to us in the pilot: "We're done. There's no progressing past this point. Evolution has deposited us in a place where we're pretty smart and pretty cool and can make some beautiful stuff, but we can also do some horrendous things, and our nature is fundamentally unchanged." Shooting that was incredibly fun. It had a festive atmosphere. Everyone knew we were at the end of a long journey, and were very excited for where the journey could take us next.
The finale saves its most haunting images for the very end: a stone-cold Dolores shooting out into the crowd, striking a woman in the background in the back, among other victims.
Lisa and I knew that for Dolores, we needed an actor who had just a massive range and control. We had seen Evan over the years as this incredible actor. She deconstructs and reconstructs herself for every performance. There's nothing precious about it. Her process is the most straightforward of potentially any actor I've ever worked with. She shows up and you turn the cameras on, and it's like a light switch. She is instantly completely, utterly in character. There's such a strength in Evan. She's warm and beautiful when you meet her in the pilot, this rancher's daughter who would be a convivial guide for your first days in the park before you got bored and moved on. But we also knew there was this titanic strength hiding within Evan. We glimpse it through the season. There are a couple of moments where she turns it on for a look or two here and there, and it's terrifying. I remember saying throughout the course of the season, that I couldn't wait to see what she does when she goes full tilt at the end of the season. Remarkable to see how much restraint she carried and how much she dialed that into her performance over the course of the season. There's a tiny bit of that in the pilot, but it steadily builds toward that last shot. That's why for us, it had to be the last shot of the season. Then there's the moment you're talking about, in which she's shooting into the crowd. For us, that's the climax of what the show is asking - and I say asking. We're not answering. It's asking a question about violence in our entertainment. We abhor violence in the real world but are fascinated by it in our entertainment. It's not just HBO; it's everything we watch. Some of my favorite films, whether it's Heat or Tarantino's films or my brother's films, there's violence in all of these things, and we delight in watching it. So what we wanted to do, not just in this moment but also in Hector and Armistice casually machine-gunning the QA responders ... the audience has enjoyed to various degrees watching the hosts get blasted over the course of the season. Now in this final episode, the hosts finally start returning the favor, as Hector puts it. How do you feel about that? Does that speak to the baser human impulse? We didn't want to stand away from that. She's standing on the stage and blasting at people. We didn't want to flinch from that. We didn't want to present that as purely an enjoyable moment. I talked to Jay Worth about that red dot on the woman's back. We went through various different versions and different sizes and the timing of that. It's interesting you point it out, because we really felt like we wanted that moment to make you feel quite uncomfortable. Here, you're getting what you wanted all season. They're fighting back ... but be careful what you wish for.

Head to THR.com/Westworld for more interviews, news and theories.

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'Westworld' Creator Jonathan Nolan Reveals Secrets From Directing The Finale

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From its very inception, Westworld came equipped with a core premise: One day, the robot hosts at the heart of the series would rebel against their human makers and oppressors. When Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) kills a fly at the end of the pilot, the future bloodshed feels all the more inevitable, if not exactly imminent.

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Morality issues Westworld reveals about video games

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HBO's new series Westworld has probably got a lot of people reconsidering their most recent Grand Theft Auto V murder spree.

Reconsidering, though probably not regretting. On the one hand, the first two episodes of HBO's new sci-fi drama have asked us to at least entertain the idea that the computer-controlled civilians we just mowed down have personalities and inner lives. On the other hand, it comfortingly shows us a fictional form of entertainment so far advanced beyond modern video games that we won't lose much sleep over the virtual citizens we just killed. Our current video game moral quandaries remain safely abstract and philosophical. GTA 's androids do not yet dream of electric sheep.

Westworld 's setup, briefly: At some unclear date in the future, enterprising content creators have devised a wild west theme park populated by remarkably lifelike androids. Human "guests" pay an astronomical fee for the freedom to walk amongst the synthetic "hosts" and do whatever they want, which usually means screwing or murdering everything in sight.

As the show begins, the hosts have begun to exhibit erratic behavior as the result of a software update. By the end of the first episode, it's clear that the synthetic hosts are in the early stages of widespread self-awareness. Given how they've been treated by the park's guests over the years-raped, tortured, and murdered over and over again-that awakening is likely to involve some retribution.

In the second episode, we get to see Westworld through the eyes of a first-time guest named William. Before he is set loose, William asks if there's some sort of orientation. "No orientation," his host responds. "No guidebook. All you do is make choices."Sounds familiar, right?

As it is imagined on the show, Westworld is a fanciful but in many ways logical endpoint for the current trajectory of emergent, open-world games. The artificial intelligence and world construction are so advanced that there's no one narrative for players to follow, just a world filled with stories to uncover. All you do is make choices.

Because of this framework, Westworld is explicitly a show about gamers and game designers. Many of us have taken a turn as Ed Harris' Man in Black, putting on our bandana in Red Dead Redemption and shooting up a saloon. Maybe we left a bound woman on train tracks just to earn the Achievement. Harris' scenes are filmed with such casual cruelty that they're hard to watch. I imagine that's the point, but it doesn't make his scenes go down any easier.

The Man in Black may seem like a monster, but in a lot of ways he's just another gamer. He's just playing the "game" of Westworld more actively than any of the other human guests. After 30 years coming to this place, he's moved on from traditional gameplay and begun hunting secrets and easter eggs. He's searching for some mythic second layer, a labyrinth within the game. Many a gamer can tell you that once they get tired of staging ever-more-elaborate heists and shootouts, the next level of a game often involves trying to creatively break it.

Meanwhile behind the scenes, the central conflict between Westworld's staff involves a debate about narrative design. The park's lead writer Lee Sizemore pitches a particularly blood-drenched story for the new "season" of Westworld, but the park's founder, Anthony Hopkins' Dr. Ford, shuts him down. Ford says that people don't come to Westworld for the stories they can be told, but rather for the stories they themselves can tell. Similar disagreements have doubtless been hashed out in many a video game writers' room.

"What is the point of it?" Ford asks. "Get a couple cheap thrills? Some surprises? But it's not enough. It's not about giving the guests what you think they want. That's simple. The guests don't return for the obvious things we do, the garish things. They come back because of the subtleties, the details. They come back because they discover something they imagine no one had ever noticed before. Something they've fallen in love with. They're not looking for a story that tells them who they are. They already know who they are. They're here because they want a glimpse of who they could be."

Last weekend during a New York Comic-Con panel (per ), husband and wife Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy discussed the show's video game influences. Among other things, Nolan talked about how Joy plays Grand Theft Auto. "My wife is the world's more boring Grand Theft Auto player," he said, "She's the only person I know who stopped at traffic lights."

"The city looks beautiful if you just slow down and take your time," Joy responded.

She's right. The city does look beautiful if you just slow down and take your time. I remember forcing myself to walk the entire circumference of GTA V, slowing down whenever possible to take in the sights and sounds. It took me several hours. The amount of detail in that world is jaw-dropping, and we so often miss it because we're too busy with our nose in a mini-map, cruising to our next mission, our next destination.

Here at Kotaku, I write a tongue-in-cheek series called " The Secret Lives of NPCs." In addition to walking around and sightseeing, I like to consider the non-player characters I'll find standing around. What must their lives be like? What do they do when I'm not around? I celebrate the Assassin's Creed guy who exists solely for us to knock him into the Thames. I apologize to the Hitman cook I've clubbed with a hammer so many times.

I have fun with these articles, but I've always been aware of their darker subtext. These fake people exist solely to have violence perpetrated against them or, at best, to bear witness to violence perpetrated against others. Westworld makes that subtext explicit in an upsetting and provocative way.

The more realistic video games become, the more challenging it will be to approach them with the same cavalier "do whatever you want" attitude with which we approached Grand Theft Auto III back in 2001. When the airport civilians screamed and ran in Modern Warfare 2's infamous 2009 "No Russian" level, it was genuinely disturbing. When a 2014 upgrade to GTA V let us maraud around in first-person, violence against the virtual citizenry felt shocking and transgressive in a way the series hadn't managed in years. The more advanced this technology gets, the more obviously horrifying some of our in-game actions will be.

It's one of the most interesting questions Westworld asks about artificial intelligence and game design. We've been trained to see video games as contraptions to be manipulated and mastered. Game-makers often add a veneer of humanity to their systems; they give their logic puzzles personalities and make the target dummies scream and bleed. Game players, on the other hand, are skilled at stripping those layers of humanity away to better focus on the systems within. In many video games, NPCs are little more than cordwood to be chopped and stacked and re-arranged as we see fit. They don't matter.

Westworld questions that premise, offering a pointed critique of modern AAA game design by imagining and interrogating the games we might one day play. If an artificial intelligence were sophisticated enough, would it fundamentally change the way we interact with it? If you remove enough layers of abstraction, are people less willing to inflict harm on an artificial construct? Or is the opposite true? Will we gradually become so desensitized to this stuff that we will become the Man in Black, inflicting the most outrageous pain imaginable in the pursuit of something we haven't seen or felt before?

What will it take to shock me now? These days when I watch a clip of "No Russian" I don't see screaming civilians; I see strained seams. I notice how cynical it is, with its obvious attempts at manipulation. I'm similarly less shocked by GTA V 's first-person violence than I was the first time I saw it.

During a particularly grim act of violence in Westworld 's second episode, the Man in Black ruminates on his own desensitization. "It's beautifully done, really," he says, as his helpless victims sob. "But you see the cracks after a while. That's why I like the basic emotions. You know what that means? It means when you're suffering, that's when you're most real."

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The Video Game Horror Of HBO's Westworld

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HBO's new series Westworld has probably got a lot of people reconsidering their most recent Grand Theft Auto V murder spree. Reconsidering, though probably not regretting. On the one hand, the first two episodes of HBO's new sci-fi drama have asked us to at least entertain the idea that the computer-controlled civilians we just mowed down have personalities and inner lives.

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http://www.thewrap.com/westworld-fan-theory-logan-william-fiancee-picture-juliet-man-in-black/

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West World and Video Games

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The newcomer, William (Jimmi Simpson), takes the "crates" around him for granted, following his storyline on rails like he's supposed to. The unnamed veteran, referred to in the credits as the Man in Black (Ed Harris), has come to only see the invisible walls of the artificial world, and now only enjoys trying to break them down. As Westworld methodically builds out its universe, it seems more and more like a commentary on the psyche of the gamer, and the ways the intentionally limited world around them can feel comforting, desensitizing, and eventually stifling.

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Sympathy for the Robot
Until now, the show had mostly focused on the cold, callous nature of Westworld 's programmers, who drag the game's robots down to the fluorescent subterranean hell beneath the park, clean them up, wipe their memories, and send them topside again to repeat their short, brutal lives as damsels, gunslingers, prostitutes, and black-hatted villains. Episode five, "Contrapasso," centered around two clients the show has been following through the park, charting their journeys as gamers in a scripted world that's beginning to malfunction.

William has been dragged along to Westworld by his co-worker and future brother-in-law Logan (Ben Barnes), a more experienced player who sees visiting the park as some kind of manly rite of passage. Logan dresses up in black and enjoys indulging in Westworld's most lurid features, drawing his pistol at the slightest provocation, and barking at William to be more active. At one point, Logan shoots a host and takes its gun, delighting at the "upgrade," like a Grand Theft Auto player cheerily swapping a shotgun for a bazooka. But the show's contempt for Logan is clear. He's an amateur, looking only to unleash his raging id, and when he's dragged off by robots after another contretemps in this episode, William, tired of his violent antics, doesn't try to save him.

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Are Video Games the Key to Understanding 'Westworld'?

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The newcomer, William (Jimmi Simpson), takes the "crates" around him for granted, following his storyline on rails like he's supposed to. The unnamed veteran, referred to in the credits as the Man in Black (Ed Harris), has come to only see the invisible walls of the artificial world, and now only enjoys trying to break them down.

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This padlet examines the effect of human's exploitation of Artificial Intelligence in the HBO Series "Westworld".

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This padlet examines the effect of human's exploitation of Artificial Intelligence in the HBO Series "Westworld".

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Dolores Shoot her mentor, Bernard

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Live without limits. Westworld airs Sundays at 9PM on HBO Discover Westworld today at https://www.discoverwestworld.com/ Watch all new episodes of Westworld on HBO NOW: http://itsh.bo/2dpoOhY Like Westworld on Facebook: www.Facebook.com/WestworldHBO Follow Westworld on Twitter: @WestworldHBO Use #Westworld to join the conversation Learn more: http://itsh.bo/23iirPJ It's HBO.

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Fly crawls across face of Host Delores.

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William and Logan(black)