Westworld: Genre (3x05)

Hey, so Animal Crossing has consumed my life the past couple of days now that I finally have a Switch... which is my way of saying that I was definitely playing it while I watched this episode and I may or may not have any freakin' idea what actually happened.

Cons:

Just looking at the broad strokes, though, I wasn't a big fan of Serac's backstory, with his genius brother and the crazy all-seeing computer thing. The thing is... I want to care about Serac and his brother. I want to feel the tragedy inherent in Serac's monstrous decisions to run experiments on his own family member, but the whole thing is so high-concept and artsy that the humanity of it gets lost.

Caleb spends the episode high, but in my opinion it doesn't really add much to the episode? I'm not sure why the choice was made to name the episode after this aspect of it. And my god, that ending moment when Caleb thinks he's still hallucinating but it turns out people have returned to their "base natures" because Dolores has revealed how they will all die... yikes. This show purports to be deep, but that felt like some pretty hokey stuff to me. You're saying that the minute human beings get a text message announcing how they will eventually die, they'll just revert to beating each other up like it's the Purge or something? Puh-lease.

Pros:

While Caleb being high seemed somewhat pointless in the scheme of things, I did like the action-movie vibe of Dolores and Caleb's plot here. Car chases, explosions, Dolores gathering a crack team, Liam as the disdainful yet terrified prisoner... it all worked really well in terms of keeping the excitement high. I might have trimmed down some aspects here or there, but by and large I was impressed.

Thus far, I'm very much rolling my eyes about Dolores' big plan being to reveal the super-computer's data on all humans... but I will admit that the concept could be interesting, if they decide to go somewhere cool with it. Obviously the very decision to tell people how their stories are supposed to end, means that things have changed. The computer's predictive technology essentially must break down at this point, right? I find that idea intriguing, and I'm excited to see where they go with it.

I continue to enjoy the glimpses of the bigger picture, as we're filling in some detail as to how the world has come to be the way it is. I just hope they have a plan for it and we'll get to know the history of Paris' destruction, and thus Serac's whole life journey.

We also see snippets of Bernard keeping tabs on Dolores, and some potential hints that Caleb has more going on than even he remembers.

This is a short review (I blame you, Animal Crossing: New Horizons!) but suffice it to say, Westworld is on thin ice with me. I want to be blown away by the cool visuals and the interesting concepts, but I honestly think they don't go far enough sometimes, and they spread the story too thin on the ground. I missed Maeve, for example... are we going to find out what happened to her, or is she just dead?

That's all for now!

7/10