Westworld Timeline Explained
July 5, 2018 9:37 AM   Subscribe

 
*spoilers*

The time fragmentation in season 2 was so disappointing compared to season 1. In the first season, the fragmentation roughly mirrored Dolores's journey of self discovery - a path she had traveled for over 30 years. The story was fragmented because her memories were fractured, but her final awakening was all the more satisfying as she put herself together.

Season 2 sort of mirrored this with Bernard's journey of self discovery, but his was more like being led through Dante's circles of hell while he just looked around with utter confusion. It's not until the final episode that we see Bernard's real self discovery in a compressed timeline, after which he decides to scramble his own mind for reasons.

Season 1's time fragmentation worked because it served the plot and characters. Season 2's did not because it was all just an incoherent choice made by one character to serve a need for narrative puzzles instead of good storytelling.
posted by fremen at 10:41 AM on July 5, 2018 [10 favorites]


The writers for Season 2 failed to grasp that the very thing that makes ambitious, serialized story-telling possible on television -- time-shifting, TV anywhere, etc. -- limits attention span. Any show that simply demands that you put away your phone and iPad and pay religious attention had better be damn amusing. I know that I am less excited about Season 3 of Westworld for that reason. With a plot that literally concerns overlapping and jumping time-frames, 12 Monkeys manages to have a much more straightforward narrative even though it too demands a lot of attention.
posted by MattD at 11:15 AM on July 5, 2018


Yeah, the time twisting in S1 interacted with the story in interesting ways, exposing us slowly to the idea of host consciousness and its implications.

In S2 it was basically just there to make the story harder to parse, and the season's best episodes ("The Riddle of the Sphinx" and "Kiksuya," in my opinion) could just about stand on their own without the rest of the story to prop them up.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:22 AM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


This season was kinda like when I saw Inception, I got up to pee during one of the boring talky parts and missed some important bit of exposition that explained how the entire movie worked. So the remainder of the film was just strange sequences in which the motivations of the characters and the mechanics of the in-film universe was a complete mystery to me.

Part of what made Westworld season 2 not work for me was that the motivations of the characters were kept a mystery to the viewers until the end. Everyone was on a journey to the valley beyond or whatever they called it, but we had no idea what that place was or what would happen there until the very end. So why that location mattered to Bernard or Delores or Charlotte was very "stay tuned and find out" instead of something that provided a deeper understanding of their characters.
posted by peeedro at 11:32 AM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've said this over on Fanfare but between the confusing timeline and the unreliable narrator, season 2 was just unreasonably difficult to follow. It was particularly telling when they stopped even doing narrative "previously on Westworld" recaps and switched to impressionistic montages. Even the editors couldn't make sense of the show.
posted by Nelson at 1:08 PM on July 5, 2018 [2 favorites]


I mostly just want to know what servers the afterlife was running on, and how long they're paid up for.
posted by ver at 1:08 PM on July 5, 2018 [6 favorites]


I mostly just want to know what servers the afterlife was running on, and how long they're paid up for.

They've all gone to live on a server farm upstate.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:27 PM on July 5, 2018 [13 favorites]


I describe season 2's timeline as "purposefully confusing."
PS: Is this now?
posted by Crystalinne at 2:02 PM on July 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


Is it possible to watch this series and not conclude, yeah, humanity pretty much needs to go extinct because we are just too evil/fucked up to be worth the effort? This is my problem with shows like this, Walking Dead, etc. is that they seem to add up to such a catalogue of despair that I end up shrugging and going numb. Why invest in a story full of doomed and/or unredeemable characters?

I mean, I guess that's my feeling about dystopias in general so perhaps too broad.
posted by emjaybee at 2:05 PM on July 5, 2018 [6 favorites]


Why does everything have to be made so complex these days? What's wrong with just exploring, in a tidy linear fashion, the interesting and challenging world that Westworld presents by its very existence?

Like whatever -- I was super into this series and then it got really rapey and then it got insanely complex and now I just don't care any more.
posted by DarlingBri at 2:21 PM on July 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


Echoes of season 3 of LOST.
posted by Wild_Eep at 2:28 PM on July 5, 2018


So, season 1 is twitter with retweets, and season 2 is instagram with the non-linear timeline. Gotcha.

And Westworld the film is... Myspace?
posted by The River Ivel at 2:56 PM on July 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


I mostly just want to know what servers the afterlife was running on, and how long they're paid up for.

Season 3 is about William trying to reduce his AWS spend
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 3:08 PM on July 5, 2018 [8 favorites]


I liked season 2, while also acknowledging that it's probably unnecessarily complicated. Bernard's story line isn't actually that complex but the exploration of what it might need to feel like a nonhuman intelligence simultaneously discovering and reinventing principles of both narrative and .... I guess ethics at the broadest level?

That's ambitious. Even if it only about two-thirds landed, I appreciate they haven't fallen back on "oh it's just the enchanted Forest/Joseph Campbell sequence we know."

Caprica tread here and got lost. Lost hand waved here. Westworld is making an honest bid to imagine something more complicated than its creators.
posted by abulafa at 3:42 PM on July 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


Season 3 is about William trying to reduce his AWS spend

or just trying to understand it
posted by Foci for Analysis at 4:20 PM on July 5, 2018 [6 favorites]


i do note that valleybeyond.com appears to be an unregistered tld
posted by mwhybark at 8:11 PM on July 5, 2018


Don't they add confusion to stories to make them seem smarter than they really are?
posted by PHINC at 9:59 PM on July 5, 2018


I think it kinda went over the tipping point from intriguing to being just a bit confusing this time around. There seemed to be more story and thematic reasons to have it in the first season - show how the park is eternal, until it isn't, whilst people change, for one. Not it just seems like a gimmick.

Had such hope for it (those amazing trailers way back in the day!) but now it's just another show to me
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:45 AM on July 6, 2018


This show is only a dystopia if what you mean by "dystopia" is "accurate depiction of human behavior." The only part I don't buy is the notion that anything we had a hand in creating will be better than us.

Still love the show, primarily for its casting, production design and music; the rest I take in stride.
posted by adamgreenfield at 4:27 AM on July 6, 2018


I mostly just want to know what servers the afterlife was running on, and how long they're paid up for.

I expect in a John Nolan universe, it'd be running on Thornhill Corp's distributed cloud....
posted by mikelieman at 4:51 AM on July 6, 2018 [2 favorites]


I'm about a third of the way through the second season, and I agree with all the comments above about the heavy-handed complexity making the season less interesting and less engaging. I'll probably finish it, to watch Thandie Newton if for nothing else, but there is a lot of yawning through boring parts to get there.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:33 AM on July 6, 2018


I had it mostly straight, but I can't remember a far future scene where The Man in Black sits down with a host version of his daughter.

What episode did this occur in?
posted by flippant at 6:30 AM on July 6, 2018


It was the post-credits scene of the finale.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:51 AM on July 6, 2018


The middle few episodes of season 2 were some of the best TV I've seen in a long time, then suddenly I just kept going Huh? HUH? I don't get it? for an hour and a half.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 9:30 AM on July 6, 2018


Y’all don’t even get me started on the idea of a post credits scene in the first place!
posted by Crystalinne at 10:31 AM on July 6, 2018 [4 favorites]


I mostly just want to know what servers the afterlife was running on, and how long they're paid up for.

I imagine its on some home server in Escondido, CA where 13 year old Breyson can't figure out where all his saved Minecraft data has gone.
posted by Foam Pants at 12:55 PM on July 6, 2018


Is it possible to watch this series and not conclude, yeah, humanity pretty much needs to go extinct because we are just too evil/fucked up to be worth the effort?

Just think of Season 2 (at least the 45 minutes I could tolerate) as the fall out after some asshole with a God-complex decides to rage quit.
posted by MikeKD at 5:43 PM on July 8, 2018


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