Season #2 of Westworld has been airing for a few days now, but I’m pretty firm about not watching it. At all. Not this horse. Some other time.
Once again, the Brenkilco assessment: “The problem with episodic TV narratives designed to blow minds is that the form and intention are at odds. A show designed to run until the audience gets tired of it cannot by definition have a satisfying structure. It can only keep throwing elements into the mix until, like Lost or Twin Peaks, it collapses under the weight of its own intriguing but random complications.”
In short, my loathing for season #1 — that feeling of being fiddled and diddled without end, of several storylines unfolding and expanding for no purpose than to keep unfolding and expanding — is such that I’m determined to hate season #2 without watching it. I don’t care how that sounds or what it implies. Come hell or high water, I will not go there.
One question for those who saw the season #2 opener: Now that the host revolt is in full swing, it seems logical that the Westworld staffers, naturally concerned about their own survival as well as lawsuits and whatnot, would call in outside law enforcement. Perhaps even state militia. What’s preventing this? What am I missing?
From a 4.20 review by CNN’s Brian Lowry: “The first half of [season #2] 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.
“The push and pull of Westworld is that it grapples with deep intellectual conundrums while reveling in a kind of numbing pageant of death and destruction. Where the latter is organic to the world of HBO’s other huge genre hit, Game of Thrones, it doesn’t always feel integral to the story here, but rather a means of killing (and killing and killing) time.”
“For all its strengths, the series [is] a bit of a slog, at times, as the wheels turn along the dusty, blood-specked road to wherever this maze leads.”