After repeated delays, HBO’s Westworld has finally arrived. Based on the Michael Crichton’s 1973 science-fiction film of the same name, the Westworld series has some serious pedigree behind it, with Jonathan Nolan and his wife Lisa Joy Nolan serving as showrunners and J.J. Abrams serving as executive producer. HBO has been looking for its next Game of Thrones for awhile and while it’s still much too early to tell whether Westworld can be that series, it’s certainly started off on the right foot. The series premiere is an immaculate piece of television that delivers a fantastical world full of intrigue and danger. While entertaining, Westworld also introduces a number of complex concepts, and it can all be a bit much to wrap your head around. The premiere left me with a number of questions heading into the rest of the season, so let’s dig a little deeper into this show and see if we can figure out just what the heck is going on.
Also, please note that I’m coming at this from a position of relative ignorance, as I have not seen Crichton’s original film and have limited my viewing of pre-release trailers so as to not spoil the experience. So if some of these questions have very obvious answers, forgive me.
10. Who Are The Villains?
Clearly, Westworld is a show that has far greater ambitions than simply drawing a line in the sand and having clear-cut heroes and villains, but at the same time, the first episode throws a bunch of characters at us and it’s difficult to know who we should root for and who we should root against. Based on the limited time spent with these characters so far, you could make the case that Ed Harris’ mysterious gunslinger (more on him in a bit) is the main villain, since he acts the most sadistically, but even that’s a complicated assertion to make at this stage. We don’t see him commit any violent acts against any of the human guests and it’s clear there there is some higher purpose to his actions, as if he’s trying to figure something important out.
Besides Harris, Anthony Hopkins’ Dr. Robert Ford could emerge as a major antagonist, as Hopkins kind of has a proven track record of being a good bad guy but again, we don’t really know enough about his character yet to make that call. Perhaps Westworld is the type of show that will continue to plow ahead with a cast of morally ambiguous characters who could all reasonably be considered villainous and/or heroic. We’ll just have to wait until we see more.
Source: HBO