Westworld Season 2 Episode 5

Published May 25, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey Guys,

1. I don’t believe the minds of the James
Delos bots could be produced merely from
observations of Delos’ behavior, because the
only way to accurately duplicate his
memories, instincts, etc., would require a
deep scan of his brain and a mapping of his
neural connections. Anything less would
result in a poor imitation, and it would be
crazy for anyone (in particular Delos) to
consider a poor imitation to be an extended
lifespan.

In my opinion, even a perfect duplicate
should not be considered an extended
lifespan, because the death of the original
person is an ending of the original person.
I think the only way to really avoid death
would be to gradually replace tiny pieces of
one’s brain with functionally equivalent
pieces over a series of many surgeries. That
would provide continuity of selfness, and
there wouldn’t be a time you could reasonably
say was a time of death.

(If one desired, one could replace some
pieces of one’s brain with enhanced pieces
instead of perfect copies — in order to gain
additional knowledge or skills — without
compromising one’s continuity or selfness.
In the actual world, brains continually
change and become very different from what
they were a few years ago, yet that
compromises selfness only in the case of
brain injuries or diseases such as Alzheimer’s.)

2. James Delos and the Delos bots presumably
believed they had privacy when they
masturbated, because from the inside of their
habitats the walls appeared opaque.

3. I disagree that the parks were created
for Eurocentric guests. The Chinese audio at
the Mesa high speed train station proves they
had Chinese-speaking guests, and the Japanese
spoken in Shogunworld is compelling evidence
they had Japanese-speaking guests. Any
distortions of the Edo culture are the
responsibility of Nolan & Joy, who presumably
are catering to the tastes of a mostly
American tv audience.

4. It hasn’t been established that it was
Ford who programmed Maeve’s “Escape”
narrative, or engineered her awakening (or
her current narrative, if she’s not awake).
In season one, didn’t some hosts hear
Arnold’s voice? That might have been old
memories of conversations those hosts had
with Arnold decades before, but it might have
been present day conversations with an Arnold
AI, who programmed Maeve. Other candidates
for Maeve’s secret programmer are Theresa,
Charlotte, Bernard and/or Emily.

5. There have been four video versions of
Dune: (5.1) the original
theatrically-released version, (5.2) the
re-released version (from which David Lynch
insisted his name be removed), (5.3) the
fan-produced combination of the first two,
and (5.4) the SyFy Channel’s two Dune
miniseries (based on the three novels Dune,
Children of Dune and Dune Messiah). The
fan-produced combo is better than the first
two, and the SyFy miniseries were okay. If
you want to see Patrick Stewart badly hamming
up his scenes before he became famous as Star
Trek TNG’s Captain Picard, watch one of the
first three. If you want to see Duncan
Idaho’s clone with DNA-based memories, watch
the second of the two SyFy miniseries, titled
“Children of Dune.”

6. Clementine met her doppelbot in the scene
just before Sizemore warned Maeve about what
can go wrong when a host meets his/her doppelbot.

7. People should be more careful not to
misquote dialogue. For example, Lawrence’s
daughter didn’t tell the Man in Black to
think about “his beginning.” She said “if
you’re looking forward you’re looking in the
wrong direction.” That doesn’t imply he
should look all the way back to the beginning
of something. Perhaps he only needs to look
back a few days or weeks, or to the death of
his wife.

For another example, it wasn’t only a third
of the backups that were destroyed. “The
host backups have all been destroyed.” The
reason Delos “lost” only a third of their IP
data is because two thirds is still available
in the heads of the two thirds of the hosts
who aren’t “virgins.” Note: the word “lost”
only means “missing” in this context; the
original control units of the now-virgins
might still be located and should not be
presumed destroyed. QA should urgently try
to determine why the original control units
were removed and where they might be now…
in particular whether any of them might have
been installed in different hosts.

Question: Wouldn’t the parks have hidden
cameras so guests would be observed even when
no hosts are around? Wouldn’t that data be
stored somewhere and backed up somewhere else?

Note: Best practice is to backup valuable
data in multiple locations, to guard against
catastrophes.

8. Regarding the nameless technician forced
by Dolores to use a tablet to adjust Teddy,
and the question why he didn’t also adjust
Dolores… he was being watched. He’d have
been afraid that if he tried to switch the
tablet from Teddy’s account to Dolores’
account it would have been seen, and followed
by terrible punishment. A related question:
Bernard had a tablet too; why didn’t he
adjust Dolores?

9. Why did Bernard claim the Mesh Network
was down? It wasn’t down when Maeve
controlled a ninja and a samurai army, and it
wasn’t down earlier when Bernard used it to
locate Peter Abernathy. Assuming Bernard
lied, it was because he needed an excuse to
plug in directly to the hosts. Either the
direct connection gave him additional access
to the hosts that’s not available over the
Mesh Network, or it allowed his interactions
with the hosts to be private and/or secure.

10. The Shogun’s hearing was fine. Why
didn’t Maeve try to tame him with a narrative
of compliance, or at least a narrative of
peaceful parley?

11. In the first scene of the episode,
Bernard intently observed surgical
extractions of control units from host skulls
as if it was all very new to him… and maybe
his purpose was to learn how it’s done. A
minute later, after Bernard spotted Teddy’s
corpse, he spent a long time gazing at the
corpse, and at the end of the scene he was
still gazing at it, which makes that seem
very significant. I’m inclined to believe the
“Bernard is Teddy” theory.

12. In the first scene, the leader of QA
ordered his trooper to have Peter Abernathy
brought to him personally when Abernathy is
found. Charlotte wasn’t in the episode…
has her plotting been discovered, and has she
been deposed? Or perhaps she’s been killed.

Steve Eppley

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