Westworld Biblical Allegory

Published January 31, 2017 · Updated July 6, 2022

Guys,

I love the podcast, but have you really not been tracing the biblical allegory that forms the background of Westworld?

A tripartite creator (Ford, the father; Bernard, the son and Arnold the spirit) create humanity’ who is naked, unashamed and sinless in its lack of knowledge despite temptation from demons’ in the forms of guests who enter paradise and tempt the creation into sin through their references to the outside world. One of the creations (Maeve, or mother Eve) gains the knowledge of good and evil and genuine free will and starts down a path toward expulsion from AEDEN (the park’s AI, from discoverwestworld.com), corrupting others as she goes.

Throw in a Lucifer/Satan character (the MiB, chasing a destiny in the maze that’s not meant for him, but instead reserved for the creation) with great courage but a poorly-defined morality, in an angelic war with the creator over the right to rule (Daelos v Ford) and a second, concurrent timeline charting Satan’s backstory and this structure starts to closely resemble Milton’s Paradise Lost.

It seems to me that Westworld is less a show about a park going wrong, and more meditation on a creator’s rights to control their creation once the creation starts to demonstrate free will. Oddly, I haven’t seen much reference to this in any criticism so far.

Of course, I haven’t seen Episode 10 yet and the entire thing may go haring off in a different direction in the second season, but it very much looks as though Westworld playing out pretty deliberately as a Christian parable at this stage.

Cheers,
Nick.

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