Westworld

Westworld is enthralling even for those who prefer a passive viewing experience. The sweeping shots of big-sky grandeur! The endlessly creative violence! (Three words: Human railroad crossties.) And the performances--Wood slips seamlessly between characters (Dolores, Rancher’s Daughter, Wyatt).

Boldly playing with time and perspective, Westworld keeps you wondering what's real, even as dangerous parks are revealed. [30 Apr - 13 May 2018, p.13]

[Westworld] impressively returns. ... The series usually hits the mark with strong storytelling that gives you a lot to ponder after the shooting is over. And the performances are outstanding. This year, the females are leading the way. Newton is a joy to watch and Wood shimmers, clearly embracing the new Delores.

It takes a bit for Westworld to get back up to full steam, but by episode three (five hours were made available to TV critics), this futuristic, violent drama returns to fine form, introducing new parts of the park (Shogun World!), new characters and apparently new technology goals on the part of Delos, the corporation that owns Westworld.

Throughout these first five episodes, Westworld continues to have a mind-bending mind of its own, sometimes to the point of being close to nonsensical. It’s also a non-stop killing field, and that gets to be off-putting after a while. But Westworld also remains picturesque, challenging and undeniably distinct.

Westworld season two goes to some unsettling and unpleasant places--it’s not always a fun watch--but as it settles into a chaotic groove, the show is becoming a thrilling mind-bender, laced with just enough intellectual resin to give all that bloodshed a savvy frisson of wit.

Still, Season 2 of Westworld is always absorbing, and more dynamic in its pacing than Season 1. It’s also graced with some tremendous performers, notably Wood, Newton, and Jeffrey Wright.

It's poised to be a intellectually stimulating and emotionally bumpy ride, where the very concept of your existence becomes the stuff of high-brow entertainment and low-bar thrills.

Rather than reflect the panicky, competitive rush that results in all these half-thought, half-finished, fairly expensive and certainly mediocre series, Westworld demonstrates the proper way to spend a lot of time and money in a meticulous fashion.

Westworld, with its florid dialogue and languid self-seriousness, isn’t as much fun as Twin Peaks was. But it’s also easy to see why Westworld is the much more popular show. It’s tapping in to currents in our culture, our feelings that the world has become a far more confusing place, with power struggles that threaten any possible unity or peace. We can’t saddle up and shoot-’em-up, but we can escape and watch others do it for us on Sunday nights.

A lot has changed in the second season of HBO’s arcane sci-fi thriller, but the show’s ensemble remains its most prized asset, notably Evan Rachel Wood and newcomer Peter Mullan (Sunset Song).

It loses its footing sometimes (it did in year one, too), but this is still smart television with film-caliber production values and incredible performances. Sometimes the writing can call a bit too much attention to itself, but the writers are smart enough in season two to avoid piling more puzzles on top of the ones they created in season one.

There's never a sense that Westworld has tripped up, run out of ideas or reverted to some kind of redundancy. On the contrary, the series offers revelatory possibilities and pursues them in massively entertaining fashion.

Season two doubles down on the show’s meta tendencies. The Man in Black repeatedly announces that, thanks to the revolt, the stakes of the “game” that is Westworld (and presumably also the show that is Westworld) have been raised in a way that makes the entire thing more interesting. He’s not wrong.

Westworld is playing with a myriad of timelines again, with some mystery attached to them. But the personal reveals within them are far more satisfying, with particularly great work done by Peter Mullan as William/The Man in Black’s father-in-law James Delos, and from Wright as an ailing but crucially awakened Bernard.

With much more centripetal force than last season, it also draws the audience towards its own center, in its own vivid journey toward self-consciousness.

Blessedly for fans who don’t want to work so hard, less so for those wonks who do, the second season is much easier. It’s still brainy while managing to push the new narrative ahead hard and fast. It also manages to splatter the brains too: Westworld is now less a searing indictment of screen violence (the first season) and more a straight-up snuff series.

Now that the hard work is over, the series is more assured, faster-paced and easier to watch. The characters feel more lived-in, and the dialogue, music and settings can be self-referential. Each scene conveys more meaning.

All around, the actors remain strong, including a number of new cast members. Where Season 2 stumbles is its structure and pacing. Episodes don’t carve equal time for everyone; they focus on the two most connected stories and sometimes break for an entire hour without getting back to a series regular.

Westworld remains a hugely ambitious series, painted on a sweeping, star-studded canvas that continues to expand in the second season. Yet the first half of that run repeats the show's more impenetrable drawbacks -- playing three-dimensional chess, while spending too much time sadistically blowing away pawns. The result is a show that's easier to admire than consistently like.

When it works, there’s nothing like it on TV. When it doesn’t, it’s hard not to watch in fascination as the train flies off the tracks, wondering if it might land back on them or this time finally plummet into the gorge below.

Don’t expect too much improvement too fast from Westworld 2.0. It’s still overly focused on balletic blood baths and narrative fake-outs, and much of the dialogue still sounds as if it were written as a tagline for a subway poster, like Dolores’s “I have one last role to play: myself.” But Westworld remains a glorious production to look at, and there are stretches where it feels invigorated by its new, expanded world--freer to breathe, relax, invent.

The good news is, several glitches and structural issues have been corrected and modestly improved in Westworld 2.0. The operating system is smoother, but the drama’s most insistent claim — or aspiration — is that it has achieved full sentience, or at least a modicum of arresting originality.

It’s still not a great show, but it’s a much more enjoyable one to watch this time around.

Yet while the series is evolving somewhat beyond the hermetic, enigmatic structure of its first season, it still veers too frequently into simplistic misanthropy. Throughout season two, the newly sentient robots are often as vicious and single-minded as their human captors once were.

This is some serious feel-bad TV, which would be OK if there were any character, human or android, we cared about, or if the show was saying something fresh and insightful.

Maeve supplies rare flashes of wit to a series that often equates humorlessness with seriousness of purpose. ... A low opinion of humankind may be a prerequisite to full enjoyment of the series. The viewer, less confused by the weave of time lines, is on firmer footing this season, but the show continues to obscure motivation to the point of making motivation irrelevant.