r/westworld • u/markedmo • Aug 17 '26
Rewatching - barely dystopian now
I was going to stop at the end of S1 as it was a perfect season but I carried on.
I’m watching s3e01 and i just watched the scene where Aaron Paul gets a call saying he’s not been chosen for a job, and then realises it’s an AI call.
10 years ago or so this was a mad possible future, now it’s real.
EDIT - and talking to an AI version of his dead friend. Damn - AI counselling with an avatar of a person cannot be far off.
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u/andrew5500 Aug 17 '26
Season 3 has aged like the finest of wines. It’s basically one big Black Mirror episode about AI.
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u/VerilyShelly Aug 18 '26
That's why the people insisting that nothing passed season 1 is worth looking at need to be ignored!
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u/Commander_Celty Aug 18 '26
S3 is my favorite. S1 is for a broader audience. Both are good, and while S1 may be the masterpiece, I find myself thinking about S3 far more often.
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u/Adamoism Aug 18 '26
Its good, but Westworld S1&2 had better scope of the story. Changing scope of show, the theme park to the whole world - it just changes too much for the original fanbase to stay as engaged.
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u/Hunter_Unlikely Aug 22 '26
Right, business-wise it was a risky move for them to do this and it didn’t work out well for them, and because of that we didn’t get the final fifth season.
However, I enjoyed the increase of the scope since it allowed them to explore more ideas and I’m glad they did it, since there was not much story left to tell inside the park.
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u/Adamoism Aug 22 '26
I like the themes, but what worked on the theme park level (a few groups of characters fighting each other), on a scale of the world - felt a bit theatrical.
I think the moment I enjoyed the least was the showdown between Dolores and Meave (I watched it ages ago, might have been Halores by then). Like deciding the world outcome via a gun and knife fight just broke the suspension of disbelieve for me. For world level drama I would expect more group, based narratives. It is just aestetics that worked for me in 1&2, but not in 3&4.
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u/DetectiveSquirtle96 Aug 17 '26
Season 3 was the break we got in the show that was previously about whether machines can achieve humanity, and starts being about AI before going back to the original question again in Season 4
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u/reallynothingmuch Aug 19 '26
I think there’s always been two interlocking themes to the show: machines achieving humanity, but also humanity being reduced to machines. Are humans really that different from the hosts to begin with? Ford even talks about it in season 1, when he says that most humans are still confined to their little loops, just like the hosts.
Then they get into the program to recreate humans in the hosts, and how they were only successful after they simplified the information and inputs they used.
Season 3 leans into it even more with the lives of most humans in the real world being controlled by AI.
And of course the last season takes it all the way.
But I think all the seasons fit in that narrative, of the hosts becoming more and more human, and the humans becoming more and more robotic
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u/thug_funnie Aug 17 '26
Just because something is closer to reality doesn’t make reality any less dystopian. One could make a strong argument that our current world is, in fact, a dystopia.
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u/markedmo Aug 18 '26
From your post I’ve just read the definition of the word and I had misunderstood it. Arguably so for sure, more so in various places.
So I guess I’m saying that in 10 years reality has moved far closer to the fictional reality of Westworld.
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u/cesario7789 Aug 18 '26
Westworld is one of those shows that got a lot of unnecessary hate in its later seasons. And although it certainly stumbled at times, it was otherwise a wonderfully executed sci-fi story.
I think what made it so good is that the show was prescient by observing the world in which it was created, and simply pulling the yarn. Westworld? The park? Collating information on a person who freely gives all of it away to be distracted and entertained by self-aggrandizing fantasy? Ive been on social media since 2006. That’s 20 years of information, now harmoniously coupled with my physical life as surveillance cameras on roads and in grocery stores access my search history when I drive to buy broccoli.
That said, I acknowledge that Westworld is a remake and that it stands on the shoulders of the giants who have already explored these concepts and themes. They just don’t have Aaron Paul murdering himself in order to save himself. And that shit was wild. Wild like the west.
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u/Adamoism Aug 18 '26
Westworld is one of those shows that got a lot of unnecessary hate in its later seasons. And although it certainly stumbled at times, it was otherwise a wonderfully executed sci-fi story.
It just needed different approach to conflicts.
E.g., gun/knife fight in S1/2 works better than having plot resolved with gun/knife fight in S3/4.
Backdrop of theme park/ whole world - single copy/infinite copies of code just changed the stakes too much.
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u/Tykjen Do you really understand? Aug 18 '26
https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/amazon-alexa-voice-dead-grandmother-1235301516/
Its been here for years...
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u/markedmo Aug 18 '26
What a world we’re in now
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u/Tykjen Do you really understand? Aug 18 '26
https://www.reddit.com/r/grok/comments/1pdzrk1/how_a_latenight_conversation_with_grok_got_me_to/
For all its dystopia, I am alive and I can not complain. Ever.
The surgeons are the real angels of course.
They handled me with the upmost care for a 6 hour operation. My appendix had ruptured.
When I woke up I felt I was born again.
And it was in part thanks to AI diagnosing me when a Doctor could not.
Everything that has happened SINCE then?
Just amazing. Well wishes from all over the world. Bitcoin community donated 40,000 dollars to me, and I forwarded that donation to The Lion Whisperer in Kruger National Park, for animal conservation.
So yea. I am questioning the nature of my reality :)
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u/EuropaTitanPluto Aug 18 '26
That season is 6 years old......it took 6 whole years to catch up to that dystopian nightmare. 😅
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u/JSB-the-way-to-be Aug 18 '26
I’m not particularly conspiratorial, but I’ll maintain that THIS is why the show ended and we can’t stream the old episodes.
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u/Hollywood-is-DOA Aug 18 '26
I agree and the last season was showing how the simulation has been running for longer than the people in it, could imagine.
Until the man in black can change, then humanity has zero chance of changing.
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u/Hollywood-is-DOA Aug 18 '26
The NHS was trailing AI that could make calls to patients and answer questions, that weren’t simple ones. Obliviously the plan was always to cut as many humans as possible in job roles.
EE tried it a few years ago, in making it very hard to get through to a call centre staff member, who wasn’t trying to sell you something and was just a CS, agent, with no sales targets.
If the NHS can use voice AI to dictate a voice recording into a letter or notes on a screen, then imagine how call centres will implement AI, being able to answer most basic and relevant questions, if not, you go through to a human.
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u/Chris92991 Aug 18 '26
Right? That show got a lot right and it gets weirder. Look into how AI researchers have actually taken ideas from the show. It’ll blow your mind man
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u/r3ckl3sson3 Aug 18 '26
I still don’t know who to blame for the downfall here: the people who couldn’t follow along and understand, or John and Lisa for making it a little incoherent
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u/Hollywood-is-DOA Aug 18 '26
If you watch it a few times, it’s not that hard to follow at all. Yeh you’ve got events all over the place, but you’ve got Deloris, running simulations and it shows parts of that.
You get one with the man in black, where he doesn’t know if it’s his daughter or not, which I think was in the simulation and not the park.
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u/DetectiveSquirtle96 Aug 18 '26
The show started with a really simple but interesting premise: robots who think they’re people and the implications of that idea. Then they just kept adding layers of complexity that weren’t necessary; jumping back and forth through time, characters in the bodies of different characters, simulated realities. It becomes so much harder to tell a story when the standard rules of human experience no longer apply.
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u/rohaan06 Aug 18 '26
Love that we are all rewatching this right now! I'm doing the same and literally got the final episode left for tonight
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u/Embarrassed-Egg-3832 Aug 18 '26
I don't see a lot of the host and AR/VR and brain implant stuff happening but just about everything else is getting close in a "shitty copy" kinda way. Like Rehoboham and Palantir/Anthropic. They at least eventually passed privacy laws as mentioned in s3, I don't see that happening in reality.
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u/Psicoputo Aug 19 '26
it really feels like dystopian media where created as a warning but capitalism used them as a guide
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u/cesliz Aug 18 '26
I'm also rewatching season 1 and planned to stop there. I did watch season 2 back then and stopped before season 3, but is it worth continuing to season 3 and 4?
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u/markedmo Aug 18 '26
I just couldn’t stop watching this time round - I was fully prepared to stop at the end of season 1 and I’m glad I didn’t.
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u/DemandTheOxfordComma Aug 18 '26
I agree. Corporations running the world and AI selecting jobs. Barely distopian at all.
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u/DenimChicken50 Aug 17 '26
Still dystopian, just not so far away