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 stopping away flesh, but not stopping them, with the striking image of one bull and a guard going through a railing into a high Modern atrium. (There are also a few hexagons visible, if one watches for them.)[1]

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,"[2] which fits in with other possible allusions to METROPOLIS ranging from central female cyborgs/robots to the flooding of an underworld.

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 transmitted — 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"[3] while delivering a speech he'd written: 

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

RDE, Initial Compiler, 17Ap19