Contrapasso Instacast Comments

Published November 4, 2016 · Updated July 6, 2022

Listened to the instacast this morning on my way into work. Thank you for getting that out so quickly, it really makes Monday morning much better 🙂

This is a fairly long email, so if you want to comment on it on the telegraph, I’ve highlighted what I think are the most interesting points.

1) On the two-timelines concept.

I was intrigued by this after episode 2, kinda down on it after episode 4, but it is rising again IMO, for a variety of reasons:

a) The “mirroring” between MiB and William

i) MiB mentions that he’s known Lawrence for a long time. Next scene: William meets “El Azo” who is… Lawrence.

ii) William goes to Pariah. Shortly later, Lawrence suggests to MiB that he could take Teddy to Pariah,

iii) William is trying to help Dolores over and over again. MiB mentions the name Dolores to Teddy and Teddy recovers, and MiB says that it’s a “magic word”

b) But the most important evidence for the two-timeline hypothesis is Lawrence himself. Somehow, he’s both a pimp in Pariah, the notorious gangster El Lazo, but then he’s also a family man who lives in a different town with his wife and daughter and 13 cousins? Does he commute to Pariah? It doesn’t make a lot of sense if it’s all one timeline. It does make sense if his loop has changed over the last 30 years.

2) Felix is genuinely surprised when he sees dead Maeve two nights in a row. If there were multiple copies of hosts, they would see the same host two nights in a row on a regular basis. It wouldn’t be a surprise.

a) I think Maeve is deliberately getting herself killed every day so she can silently “wake up” in the operating room and study what’s going on. That’s why she knows Felix by name.

b) Also, if there were multiple copies of Maeve, I would expect the techs/developers/etc to refer to her as a model: “A Maeve” or “A Dolores”, not as a singular entity.

3) The orgy didn’t look like a “real” orgy.

Isn’t that the point? It’s an entertainment company’s representation of an orgy, which is often going to look staged. Of course, I could be going too meta on this – it could just be that the director didn’t know how to make an orgy not seem gross.

4) I think evidence for the “Dr Ford is a self-aware host” hypothesis is rising – it would explain his mind control (via Wifi) of the hosts, it would explain his semi-repetitive phrasing. It would explain the “remember the man I was” comment to Dolores, and to some degree it would explain his disdain for the “regular” hosts – he’s trying to distance himself from them, by treating them as inferior. Lastly, it would be a fantastic irony if Bernard was human and Ford was a host.

a) Why do they (Delos) let a host Dr Robert Ford run the park? Because he can apparently shut it down at will, and no one knows how to stop him.

5) Dolores talking to the darkness after Dr Ford leaves is more evidence that she’s got a “fake Bernard” in her head. That is to say – when she’s talking to Bernard and she’s fully clothed, it’s all in her head, she wasn’t physically moved down into the facility.

6) IMO – the maze is 100% metaphorical – it is a demonstration of a host’s ability to assert free will and escape the restrictions of its programming, and become what a human would call “conscious” – John B

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