Westworld (TV series): "Les Écorchés"

Westworld (TV series): "Les Écorchés". Season 2, episode 7 (3 June 2018).

Important episode, usefully summarized, correctly, and giving correct quotations, on The Verge. Bernard’s [i.e. Bernard Lowe's]half of that story begins inside the simulation world of The Cradle, right when he sees [Robert] Ford again for the first time. Bernard quickly puts the pieces together — Ford had created a copy of his own consciousness, and tasked Bernard with uploading it to the Cradle — but Bernard’s biggest eye-opener is about the park itself. Westworld hasn’t just been a theme park, he realizes; it’s been an experiment and observation chamber, allowing Delos, Inc. to gather all the data it needs to duplicate the consciousness of its various guests. Data gathering in the name of marketing may have been the starting point that William [...] initially suggested, but the project has become something much more sinister. “The humans are playing at resurrection. They want to live forever,” Ford tells his protege. “They don’t want you to become them. They want to become you.” The central — but not only — meaning of "fidelity" in the previous episode, "Phase Space" is specified, in the words of the Verge plot summary, Dolores hung out with the Bernard consciousness inside The Cradle for years, Ford explains, serving as Bernard’s own personal Turing test. Once she couldn’t tell the difference between Bernard Lowe and Arnold Weber, Ford knew he [Bernard] was ready for the real world. ¶ The revelation clarifies that the letterboxed opening shot of the season, in which Dolores appeared to be talking to Arnold, was actually her conducting a fidelity test on Bernard inside The Cradle’s virtual world. But Ford admits that Bernard, like all hosts, is an idealized and romanticized representation of humanity — “more just, more noble” — and when put up against the cruelty of real people, will almost always be destroyed. ¶ “Unless we open the Door,” Ford says.

The dialogs between Bernard and the cyberspace-preserved consciousness of Ford help determine the field of the debate of the consciousness and free will of the Hosts, and/but also of humans, and issues of immortality and social bonds as opposed to freedom and/or limiting freedom. Some quotations of interest: Bernard/Ford exchange in the Cradle cyberspace (or Virtual Reality): Ford calls free will "a mistake." Bernard: "We never had free will, only the illusion of it. You made Dolores kill you," i.e., in the semi-real world at the park. Ford admits to what we'll call foreknowledge of Dolores's killing him, but "I didn't compel it" and adds, "She's free now; you're all free," to which Bernard responds somewhat cryptically, "We're still responsible," with one meaning that Ford and his partner in Host development, Arnold Weber/Bernard are responsible.

Ford to Bernard: The humans now running Westworld and the other parts of the Park "want fidelity" in the sense of "a faithful self-portrait of the most murderous species since time began," but instead got noble Hosts that Ford thinks will be destroyed by the unjust, ignoble humans (see above). Bernard to Ford, "You said the [H]osts could determine their own fates. You gave us free will." Ford: "I did, but you won't have any use for it ... unless I take it back." Dim to black — and the next shot reveals the disabled Park system is back on line.

Dying Maeve to Dolores on why she won't try to escape: "I made a promise," to her daughter; Dolores replies, "You're free to choose your own path."

Significant images in this episode include Dolores's carrying her father's "IP"-data-packed CPU "control unit," which she would have removed bloodily — offscreen for now — from the center of the organic brain in his skull while he is pinned down to a kind of gurney by large nail-gun bolts, alluding to crucifixion and to the removal of Sakura's heart by Akane, and carrying to a home for Sakura for ritual burning earlier, possibly in the preceding episode [Westworld (TV series): "Akane no Mai"|"Akane No Mai"]]. Dolores says she has become "who I needed to be in order to survive." Note for theme of relationships as positive but potentially limiting freedom and survivability (assuming humans and Hosts have some freedom).

Note for question of freedom the repetition of the ability of some humans to control some Hosts with spoken words and the ability of Maeve to control some Hosts telepathically.

Very emphatically in this episode, we see murder and torture by humans and convergence of murderous humanity with Hosts as Hosts become murderous.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 5/6Ap19 (non-attributed quotations were assembled by Erlich from DVD, with help of subtitles)