Westworld – The Host Aren’t Woke!

Published May 31, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey Shatters

Love the podcast, been following you guys since season 1.

So something’s been bothering me all season long… the hosts are now supposedly ‘woke’ and freed from their narratives. Woke in the sense that they have become self-aware… aware of their ‘host-ness’ and all that that means. However, even the most woke hosts – Dolores and Maeve – actually seem to be nowhere near true self-awareness. This is manifested in very similar ways with both characters. Dolores retains an odd attachment to her “father” despite her supposed awareness that there is no actual familial bond between herself and the other host known as Abernathy. Maeve, meanwhile, has gone on this absurd quest for 6/7 episodes to find her “daughter” despite her full knowledge that the part of her identity which made her a mother was completely fictional and fabricated by her human programmers (I seem to recall in one episode that the British dude even said this to her directly). If these hosts were truly self-aware, shouldn’t they be fully aware of the fact that those relationships were simply programming and backstory fabricated by their former human masters? Shouldn’t they then completely disregard all those previous relationships and attachments (unless they form a new post-woke connection e.g. Maeve/Hector)? With Dolores, it’s particularly maddening since she seems to be entirely aware of every other host’s host-ness such that she doesn’t think twice about committing mass host murder or forcibly changing Teddy’s personality… but then she still misses her ‘daddy’??? Come on!

This has been annoying me to no end all season to the point that the groans and eye rolls at every mention by Dolores of her daddy or by Maeve of her daughter became an involuntary reaction, earning me several smacks upside the head from my girlfriend who thinks Westworld is just the best thing ever.

Please guys – help make sense of this for me with some explanation other than the showmakers just being stupid!

My sneaking suspicion/hope all season long which would potentially explain this is that the hosts are not actually woke at all – they are all still on Ford’s new Wyatt narrative, which is still going (i.e. all of this host rebellion is really still just part of Ford’s final narrative rather than an unintended/intended consequence).

I don’t quite buy the notion I’ve heard around the Westworld chatter that even the woke hosts like Dolores and Maeve are still getting to grips with their self-awareness and that’s why they are struggling to let go of certain things from their past. It just doesn’t fit with the uber-woke behaviour we’ve (at times) seen from especially these two characters.

All the best
Antonis from Greece

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