Some Thoughts on Westworld

Published November 17, 2016 · Updated July 6, 2022

Howdy Gents,

I’ve been listening to the show for weeks now and have to say it is definitely the best Westworld podcast I’ve found.

So, everybody seems to be more and more on-board with the time periods theory, but I want to point out some issues with it that I’ve noticed. Certain things are made very clear about the park, it seems to me.. First, we know that the hosts have a lot of change-over in their roles. This was fairly clear from early on, but was stated directly to Maeve just a few episodes ago. We also can assume that the name goes with the role, not the host, since when they replace Dolores’s father, they do not change the character’s name. Assuming these things to be true, Lawrence would have to be played by the same host in both timelines, which would contradict this. We can forgive Dolores being in both time periods, as she might be a special case who Ford is watching, but it seems a stretch that Lawrence would not have been moved around. Clementine would also have to be in both periods, since we see her with Maeve and Teddy in the brothel in the first episode and with William in the second. The show has made a lot of effort to make us recognize that the hosts change parts regularly, which would be a really stupid thing to point out if they were playing with multiple time periods in this way. One could, of course, argue that the hosts are duplicates, but this seems silly. First, if they had multiple hosts, why would they always be in such a rush to fix them and get them back to the park. If you had multiples, the very first thing you would do would be to send a second unit in while the repair was being made.

Also, they point out that stories change regularly. While we know that Sizemore’s project was a massive overhaul, we are told about stories that have been dropped (The Dinner Party, for example). Besides, why would they need someone whose job is to oversee the creation and implementation of stories if they were going to just the characters running on the same loops. I actually think that the turning over of the hosts to new roles is very important. Bernard’s comment about repetition causing the hosts to change seems to suggest that the hosts literally can’t be in the same role too long, or it will start causing them to awaken. This certainly seems to be the case with Maeve, who is able to awaken specifically using a concept that was programmed into her and which she repeats daily: the countdown from 3 to wake from nightmares. It is this specific idea, which is in a line she says repeatedly to Clementine, that initially unlocks her from sleep mode. If after only a year and a half the repeated line has already brought Maeve to this level of awareness, and Ford is aware that this can happen (as Bernard’s line shows), why would they ever allow a host to keep the same role for so long? I get that the multiple times makes sense of a lot of background hints, but it seems to me that they have been putting a lot of information into the foreground that, if not out and out contradicting the theory, at least suggests that it is worth reconsidering.

It is fairly obvious how meticulously the show is constructed, and it would be rather sloppy for the writers to emphasize the turnover if they intended to have the same hosts appear as the same characters in multiple time periods, –Will

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