Nitpicking Your Nitpicking

Published June 6, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey Guys,

First… I love all your Westworld podcasts. I look forward to and listen to all of them every week. I really wish everybody in my life was talking about Westworld this much.

Ok… So… Nitpicking is a given on a podcast like this. And usually, I don’t mind at all. I might yell at my radio or phone while I listen, but for the most part, it’s why I listen. Your nitpicking connects with my nitpicking and the show become a little fuller in my mind. This last deep dive though… Your “problems with season 2” seem super whiny.

About the time-frames… Sure… a story can be told chronologically. But this show isn’t Game of Thrones. It’s Westworld. This is how they’re telling the story. I agree that the timelines are more confusing this go around. Last season we had mostly “then” and “now.” This season, every scene could be taking place at a different moment in time. But remember way back in 2016, Nolan said season 2 would be “defined by chaos

http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/12/05/westworld-season-2-will-be-defined-by-chaos ?

These wild, compact timelines and “when are we” moments create that chaos the way the showrunners want to create it. And I’d say it does work for this show.

And guys, we’ve had a couple episodes this season with 4 or 5 different timeline jumps. This episode was pretty straightforward: They discover Bernard is a host. They take him for analysis. He has a flashback. The bulk of the episode is this flashback. We come back to the present. That’s really it.

The mortality bit… Dead humans are dead. Dead hosts are only truly dead when their control unit is destroyed. This has been established and they’ve stuck to it. We haven’t seen any humans resurrected (Ford. is. dead.) and we haven’t seen a host get shot in the head and then get turned back on. Now, we do see the MIB being shot a bunch of times and somehow he’s still well enough to move and hide. And he’s still breathing when he leave him. But he could die. Or someone could save him. He does have a daughter out in the park looking for him who has already come upon him in TV magic fashion. We don’t fear for a character’s life because we’re on Reddit and reading through theories and filling in blanks with assumptions. That’s the nature of how we’ve decided to consume the show. My mom isn’t doing any of this. She thinks MIB is dead and she is very bothered by it.

Speaking of assumptions… This exchange from the deep dive bothered me so. much. that I started writing this email immediately:

“We don’t know if he’s in there currently.”
“When he’s being interrogated by Charlotte Hale?”
“Yes. ”
“Ford is in there.”
“Well, we don’t know. He could have been taken out.”

Could he? Really? When? What evidence do we have that Ford could have been extracted between when Bernard is in the CR4-DL and when Charlotte is interrogating him? The time between the two is like… a few days? Idk. It looks like they discovered Bernard is a host and then sat him down to get information. That’s it. So the simplest assumption is that Ford is in there. Why wouldn’t he be? They don’t know Ford is in Bernard. Why would they take him out? Let’s not get lost in the “could be’s.” Maybe we don’t understand or can’t place what they show us right when they show us, but let’s not add in events that aren’t there.

Alright… I know you love the show. I don’t think you’d make 3 podcasts a week about it if you didn’t. I expect and welcome the nitpicking. But if you’re going to spend 5 minutes walking back your nitpicking and tell us to just take the show for the art is after you go over problems that aren’t problems, maybe leave those problems out of the episode.

Nicole Kemp

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