Westworld (TV series): "The Passenger"

Westworld (TV series): "The Passenger." Season 2, episode 10 (24 June 2018). Finale of season.

A cornucopia of images and ideas useful for "the Human/Machine" Interface, in approximate order of importance:

In the opening sequences, we have repeated the scene and image of biomechanical bulls skewering and taking down in a deadly fall heavily-armed security personnel, ripping into the bulls and stripping away flesh, but not stopping them, with the striking image of one bull and a guard going through a railing and falling into a high Modern atrium. (There are also a few hexagons visible, if one watches for them.)

With the Man in Black managing to blow off much of his right hand, we have set up the possibility of the motif of "the hand of Rotwang," which fits in with other possible allusions to METROPOLIS ranging from central female cyborgs/robots to the flooding of an underworld.

Portals real or virtual — "doors" — with a relatively real or VR rip in the fabric of the Westworld universe leading into a Greenworld (as they'd call it in a Shakespeare romantic comedy such as As You Like It) that is a kind of Eden for the Ghost Tribe and other Hosts, although few make it in. And those who make it through appear to "diegetic" humans to fall from a cliff, reiterating the strongly stressed motif in the series of questioning what is real: cf. and contrast the motif in film, especially since THE MATRIX.

The continuing motif of Host telepathic control by Clementine countered, in small part, by Maeve.

Maeve's love for her daughter from a "beta" version of Maeve, and promise to protect the daughter. There's a kind of Turing Test here: if the performance of love and fidelity/honor and promise-keeping by an artificial entity continues for an extended time and to outside observers is indistinguishable from those traits in a human, we would do well to allow that the entity, Maeve in this case, but other Hosts as well, possesses those traits as much as a human does (although humans may just have similar coding).

The related and intertwined themes of free will, choice, love, immortality, survival-values and fidelity (with puns) are developed with great nuance and complexity for both humans and Hosts. Note the authoritative statement that human decision-making is based in a fairly simple algorithm that can be symbolically fit into a normal-size book — and that human «essence» can be summarized, digitalized, encoded on a card, and/or transmitted to space satellites — balanced by Host and human people in Westworld thinking they make decisions and appearing to do so. A crucial issue is whether Hosts and humans can alter our core codes: really change. In this episode, there is strong evidence of the possibility of human change when the cynical script-writer "Lee sacrifices himself to delay Delos' security forces" while delivering a speech he'd written: if this cynical, selfish putz can act like a mensch, real change in humans (and Hosts) may well be possible.

For the image of a cyborg woman going out into the world, cf. and contrast the film EX MACHINA.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 17Ap19