Amph Westworld series by J.J. Abrams and Johnathan Nolan

So is James Marsden going to be the new Kenny?

 

So that's a 'yes' to there being a hatch.

 

Well I hope Desmond is down there - he really needs to escape The 100 into a better show.

 

I don't know. Do churches generally have hatches at the bottom of the steeple?

 

what I don't understand is - what are they shooting at Ed Harris ? I mean we're seeing impact 'puffs' , so they're shooting something , but wouldn't whatever it is cause injury to a human ?

 

No, the bullets don't hurt humans.

 

Episode 2 of the Watching Westworld podcast is available. I saw the premium live recording yesterday and thought **** that, but they made a free one available so I'll be checking that out today while I work.

http://baldmove.com/westworld/102-chestnut/

 

I've just finished listening to it myself.

 

I can't imagine why the robots would have maps of the maze printed on the inside of their scalps .

 

Also note that Dolores and her dad start the day the exact same way, same with Dolores and Teddy's meeting (rolling can of food), the Prostitute seems to have the same line of dialogue etc. etc. (Well, okay, prostitutes in general probably reuse a lot of the same lines but Dolores and her dad / Dolores and Teddy seem to also do the exact same thing every day unless they get waylaid by something / somebody else)

I noticed that too, I think the Hosts can't harm the Guests in any way so they aren't given actual real guns. But, if someone just wanted to go to Westworld and play it like an First Person Shooter (which the Man in Black seems to be getting close to at times) I guess you're basically on invincible mode the entire time.

 

Some futuristic advanced type of airsoft I'd assume.

How the guns work are the last thing I'm questioning right now...I'm still wondering how the newcomers got transported onto a moving train from the Delos prep/costuming room.

Was his prep room already part of the train that he boarded without realizing it?

Or is Westworld doing an "Avatar" thing, where he's actually asleep and piloting a remote body?

 

"One cannot play God without being acquainted with the Devil." -- Dr Robert Ford

AH HA!

 

"Are you real?"
"If you can't tell, does it matter?"

In The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever the protagonist may or may not be in a dream featuring a fantasy land. He destroys lives, betrays everyone, manipulates where need in order to try and get out of this dream. The theme here "should you feel responsible about what you do in a dream?"

All these lines in this episode contain this. "find out who they could be...this place answer that question of who you really are...the only thing this tells me is who you are..etc

Also, Delores and the whorehouse madam have mirror moments and they have memory moments to do with their previous "lives". Mirrors as a symbol reflect who we really are, again the theme here.

OMG they killed Teddy! You bastards!

 

did anyone understand what Ed Harris was doing with the bullets ?
when he was with the 'noose-guy's family he emptied his gun and then gave some bullets to a girl , then he seemed to do various things with the hammer , it was all rather complicated .

.

 

I was under the impression it was an intimidation tactic. "Bullet with your name on it" type of thing. In this case, the bullets were for the wife and child. After he killed the wife, he gave the child the bullet that was "hers" when she gave him information about the maze.

 

After tonight's episode, it seems as if they are going to turn Anthony Hopkins into Jurassic Park's novel version of John Hammond.

Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp turned him into a charming Walt Disney type, even going so far as to get Richard Attenborough to play him, but in the original novel, he was a complete and total raging a**hole whose misdeeds included:
- Continuing to deny that animals were getting off the island, even when presented proof that animals were getting off the island.
- Blaming all of Jurassic Park's problems on everyone but himself and vowing to build another park on another island with a more competent staff. (and yet of all the staff he blames, he never mentions Nedry)
- Using his own grandkids as bait for investors, then complaining about how they always mess things up for him. ("Those damned kids. He should never had brought those kids. They had been nothing but trouble from the beginning")
- Racism against Central Americans. ("He passed one of the workmen, who nodded curtly. Hammond did not return the nod. He found the Tican workmen to be uniformly insolent." According to a quick Google search, "Tican" derives from "Tico" which is a )

At the end of the novel, he falls down a hill and is devoured by a flock of procompsognathus, a fate which was later given to Peter Stormare in the movies.



*PS the novel Jurassic Park features a segment when Robert "Clever Girl" Muldoon gets totally sh**faced drunk and starts blowing raptors up with an RPG launcher.

 

His revolver appears heavily customised. Not only does it hold more than six bullets, as you pointed out he did something with the hammer (or perhaps secondary hammer, it wasn't clear to me) which might well have been to select an armour-piercing round, as he then shoots through solid rock to kill his target. But I've only seen the first two episodes, it might be explained in more detail later.

 

The Lemat Revolver, a version of which is what Ed Harris' character uses in the show from what I can read, had not only the cylinder for shots but also a barrel for single shotgun shell. The Lemat is a gun the French made and the Confederacy used in the Civil War.

 

I've actually heard of it before, I just didn't recognise it. Cool.

 

Yeah, I don't think I've actually seen one in person. Though it makes sense since the arena/park seems to be set in the late 1800's after the Civil War, but it's just a really odd choice for someone to give a character that specific gun. It feels like the armorer on the show was like, "You want this guy to stand out? Well, I have the gun for you."

 

I felt really manipulated by the long exposition on backstories followed by the revelation of Lowe's backstory. Yes. Backstory. I get it. I get it. Breaking Bad would have saved Lowe's Facetime with Zoë for a later episode.

 

This episode was definitely one to just lay a lot of groundwork. We got some more backstory, including the obviously important stuff about Arnold. We didn't see Ed Harris's character at all, which leads me to believe when we do see him, it'll be a big revelation (maybe finding the maze). Obviously Dolores has had a big turning point.

I'm curious to know how much Ford knows about Ed Harris's character. You'd think that a guy who'd been coming to the park for 30 years would be someone Ford and other staff members would be intimately acquainted with.

I'm also interested in the fact that Ford has some much darker storylines in mind. The hosts fighting for Wyatt, for instance, didn't seem killable...

 

So someone is doing a tl;dw for these episodes, and some of the captions are epic. No really, here's an example.


More from episode 2: http://imgur.com/a/x7b6c
Episode 1: http://imgur.com/a/K2qdQ
Episode 3: http://imgur.com/a/9wtjD

Enjoy!

 

that's a judas steer.
What's that?
Foreshadowing.

 

Yeah a bit heavy on the foreshadowing and track laying in this episode but it ended with a robot friggin crushing it's own skull to keep vital information secret so I'm a fan. Also the quippy security dude seems to be a bit like Mr. Reese from PoI which I like. ("Only one line of your code keeps them from killing us. I sleep with this thing.")

Anyway, yeah, at some point there's probably going to be a "they were a robot the whole time" twist. If they wanna go Twist-Bomb on the audience, they might go with Anthony Hopkins character but dunno how that would work.

Anyway, jabberwalkie link posted was gold