Review 464: Westworld - The Door

Westworld - The Door builds impressively on its inaugural season, expanding it's world and delving deeper into the shows richly complex themes.

Two weeks after Delores’ (Evan Rachel Wood) uprising, Delos security led by Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård) arrive to exterminate any hosts they come across. Delores starts recruiting a number of hosts to fight them off while also searching for the key to the Valley Beyond, believed by the Ghost Nation to be a door to the next world.
Maeve (Thandie Newton) continues to search for her daughter whilst learning that there are other parks like Westworld along the way.
Meanwhile, William/The Man in Black (Ed Harris) finds that Ford (Anthony Hopkins) has left him clues to find “the door”, a new game for him to play, during which he encounters a mysterious figure from his past.

Much like its inaugural season, Westworld - The Door follows two separate timelines but unlike the inaugural season, the premiere episode: Journey into Night, firmly establishes that we'll following different timelines for the duration of the season.

By Season 2, Westworld is not the place it once was. It's been turned upside down. The Hosts are off their loops and running wild. They understand that there's a difference between them and the humans.

Whereas in Season 1, the Hosts didn't understand the nature of their reality. They didn't have that element of choice and all that changed with the pull of a trigger and the whole park has been thrown in chaos.
As the Hosts begin to explore their own world, the textures start to change and shift.
The Hosts are a metaphor for Humanity at its purist.

The primary theme of Westworld - The Door seems to be Choice: The Hosts make conscious choices for the first time.
In the first Season they didn't understand the true nature of their reality.
They get that element of free will, they can be whoever they want.
If you can be anything, who will you be? The Host's are looking for freedom but what does that mean exactly?
The characters continue to question their reality and along the way discover there are possibilities beyond the possibilities.

During her time in Shogun World, Maeve and her Shogun dopolganger Akane (Rinko Kikuchi) talk about their shared scripted storylines and Maeve offers to wake Akane and show her the truth behind her simulated world but Akane refuses and Maeve respects her choice so Akane can keep her grief which puts her at a great contrast with Delores throughout the season who is willing to force Hosts to her will. The hosts Akane and Sakura are based on Maeve and Clementine and the Hosts Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Hanaryo (Tao Okamoto) rob Akane's teahouse much like Hector and Armstice robbed Maeve's Saloon. A lot of the shots are direct recreations of the Original Westworld loop using repetition

Survival: How can the Hosts survive now that they have no longer

Westworld - The Door is also about Mortality and Imortality: The problem with reducing the human mind to data is that it's more complicated than they thought.

Season 2 is the story of an origin of a new species, which are the sentient Hosts.
Most people think that robots are programable but what Westworld does so well is show that we as human beings are also really quite programable.
We are creatures in loops that are really hard to break out of and they are not necessarily loops that we ourselves constructed.
In a sense we are the robots, the one key thing that distinguishes us from a Host is what goes on in our mind.
The Hosts can adapt and change but we humans cannot.

In particular, Ep. 8 Kiksuya acts as a sort of Bottle Episode explaining the backstory of the mysterious Ghost Ntion tribe who recure throughout the season - particularly following a warrior named Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) as he explains his life story to Maeve’s “daughter” while they sit in the Ghost Nation camp. The way the episode unfolds is both mesmerising and hypnotic, revealing secrets about the Park and is a poignant story of heartbreak and suffering.

Ep. 9: Vanishing Point sheds an impressive new light on William/The Man in Black’s (Ed Harris) backstory

Much like its inaugural season, Westworld - The Door culminates in a finale that pretty much answers every question raised over the course of the season along with some jawdroping twists that

Directors Richard J. Lewis, Vincenzo Natali, Lisa Joy, Craig Zobel, Tarik Saleh, Nicole Kassell, Uta Briesewitz, Stephen Williams & Fredrick E. O. Toye's direction is, the production design is fabulous (now that the Hosts have obtained free will they begin reaching out and discovering other worlds and they're all rich with texture, detail and depth).
In particular, Maeve's quest to search for her daughter takes her to Shogun World and the results are beautifuly breathtaking, making us as an audience feel as if we have stumbled into a different genre, a different moment in cinematic history. A world that has its own rules and textures as well as its own deliciuous energy behind it. We learn that Lee copied or as he put it "cribbed a little bit" of Shogun off Westworld so there's a town like Sweetwater with a Maripo
The costumes are magnificent, the score by Ramin Djawadi is beautifully haunting, the scenery is breathtaking (there's a new kind of geography and an oddity to the landscape, sand meets rock meets greenery). The make is rich and superbly detailed,

Evan Rachel Wood delivers a superbly enigmatic performance as Delores Abernathy. Delores is a much darker character than she was in Season 1, she's become ruthless, brutal, unforgiving and quite terrifying. She wants something real and, ultimately, she wants to be free.
Delores has suffered so much abuse at the hands of the guests for so many years in the park. Her worldview has soured to the point where she can't feel empathy for human beings. Over the course of the season she slowly looses more and more of what she cares about in her quest for revenge and freedom and ultimately realises that her violent approach alone won't save the hosts. Her arc explores how far she'll go to survive and along the way, she does some truly terrible things such as torure and kill lots of humans
Whilst her love for Teddy might be real, Delores sacrifices the man that she loves for the sake of her war.

Now that the mystery arc of Season 1 is over and done with William/The Man in Black has become a much more complex and interesting character and Ed Harris sinks his teeth into his characters psychological complexities. Throughout the season, William struggles with his human nature, he feels his violence and obsession are a "stain." In the real world, he puts on the front of a good man, a philanthropist and family man but it's all a facade. He can't hide his true nature which drives away his wife and daughter. He tries to change but again and again, he fails so he questions his free will: Does he have a choice or can he only follow his code
He realises that they're all just pawns in game.
So now he's got a different agenda. He’s full of regret and self loathing yet continuously rejects the possibility of personal redemption.

Jeffrey Wright At the start of the Season and indeed throughout the season, Bernard's relationship with time is distorted so it's all readily available, he just has to decipher what is the present, what's the past and possibly the future, so he's as much in the dark about the situation as we are as an audience.
He's desperately trying to sort through his memories and understand what has happened whilist also experiencing this existential crisis about who he is, where his allegiances truly lie, if it's with the Hosts or with the Humans.
He's also remembering things that have happened in the past and trying to figure out how it all fits together.

Thandie Newton continues to amaze as Maeve. Her quest to find and protect her host daughter was truly one of the highlights this season. Lee, however says that her relationship with her daughter isn't real. It's just a story programed for the park. Her arc explores the realness of Host love  Maeve is a host programed to care about no one but herself yet she risks her life for her daughter. Love is not just a feeling, its an action and throught their struggles and choices, the Hosts make their love real.

This season also gives a fair bit of character growth to Lee Sizemore and Simon Quarterman really sells it as Lee goes from being an annoying, whinny jerk to genuinely caring about Meave and trying to help her reunite with her daughter all the while witnessing her suffering and yearning to be reunited with her.
The relationship that develops between him and Meave over the course of the season is

James Marsden is given the thankless task of playing Teddy with a  Dolores becomes convinced that Teddy's morality is a liability and has him forcibly reprogrammed to serve her own ends.
In a season that deals with the theme of choice, Teddy has his choice taken away from him as Delores believes that his mercy and compassion are liabilities in her war against the humans.

Jimmi Simpson and Ben Barnes also recur throughout the Season as the younger William and Logan. We get to see William's rise in the Delos company and see him slowly transform into the man he is now.

New to the show are some fresh characters including Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård), the head of Delos Security sent to Westworld to deal with aftermath of the Host uprising, James Delos (Peter Mullan), the founder Delos Inc., Emily Grace (Katja Herbes) a woman with a mysterious connection to William and Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon), leader of the Ghost Nation and one of the oldest Hosts in Westworld.
McClarnon, in particular, has an incredibly interesting role to play as Akecheta, one of the oldest Hosts in Westworld and one of the first Hosts to achieve consciousness

As his primary objective is the preservation of Delos' business interests, Strand views the Hosts as nothing more than soulless killing machines.

Sela Ward makes a very notable guest appearance in Vanishing Point as Juliet, William's wife and delivers a deeply emotionally affecting performance.

Chaos has taken over, 4.5/5.

The Anonymous Critic.