The Watch - Ep 103: 'Westworld' Finale

Episode Date: December 5, 2016

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald unpack Sunday night’s 'Westworld' finale (0:45). Then special guest Jason Concepcion joins in to further discuss the ambitious first season (21:24), what to expect in Season 2, and Westworld’s most and least valuable players (37:29). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Oh my God, that's Jason Bourne. Matt Damon returns to his iconic role as Jason Bourne in Jason Bourne, now available on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray. Experience Jason Born in DTSX technology for the most immersive, lifelike audio experience available at home. Also wanted to thank American Express. Card members, you do not want to miss this. Now, through December 31st, there is a big reason for you to shop small

at local stores in your neighborhood. Learn more and enroll your eligible card today at Americanexpress.com slash shop small offer. That's Americanexpress.com slash shop small offer. Terms apply. I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm an editor at the ringer.com and joining me in the studio. He just finished his final narrative. It's Andy Greenwald. Get me rewrite. Woo, we did it. What's up, man?

We did it. The Westworlds. We did a whole season of Westworld. We did. We never, you know, honestly, I never thought I'd see the day. Did you? Would you think they were just going to keep making episodes? Like a 100 episode season?

Actually, well, for a minute. Can we put on the Wayback Machine? People thought this show was never going to happen. I know. I know. This was going to be like Catherine Bigelow's much-story show about geniuses on the Upper West Side, right? Or HBO's Lewis and Clark, or HBO's Steve McEGee. Queen show or many of the other shows that they put a lot of money into and then said nah but no they

said yeah and we got 10 episodes of Westworld and now we're going to talk about it um I thought the last night's episode was great tell me here's why preach your case wait get on that bully pulpit in the same church that has the trap door in the confession it's not a trap door it's an elevator well that's what they always say um the best thing about last night's finale of the first season of Westworld is that it sets up the second season of the Westworld. Yes. Now, we said that last week. We said that was our number one goal for the finale of this sometimes frustrating season.

I'm going to do a little bit of reverse psychology. It's not even reverse psychology because if I was doing that, I'd be tricking you. I'm going to explain to you what you think. Oh, okay, okay, Ford. I think that probably one of the problems you have with this show is that there are no characters. There are no characters not necessarily in a – as a fault of the writing, there are no characters

because the characters can change from week to week. They are pretending to be people, like in the case of Ed Harris, or they are actually programmed. Wait, I'm just stop you. You mean pretending to be people in the sense that Ed Harris, William,

is playing a character when he's in the park. Mm-hmm. And one of the strongest things about last night's finale, by far, I thought, was the way the camera shot and considered Ed Harris when he was out of costume.

And even just a little bit of, the way Ed Harris walked. Yes. Even though he's supposed to have a broken arm, but he walked like a little guy. He appeared like a small, he appeared to be a much

physically smaller man, which I don't know whether you credit his brilliance as an actor or the way they shot him. And Harris actually went and had surgery to take six inches off his height.

That is a great, great American vespian. Sorry, I cut off your train. No, no. So, okay. So you have people who were playing characters

and then you have uh, and then you have, uh, androids that were programmed to be characters and multiple characters. whether they were Dolores the blushing farm girl, Dolores, I don't know what's going on, someone lead me somewhere,

and then Dolores the Wyatt character. And that was the case for many of the characters. For Teddy, for Mave to some extent. Okay, so basically at any given point, you have no idea who these people are. And added to which, the idea of, and this is still a flaw of the show, consequences, which are usually the thing that actually,

this is, I would say, the secret sauce of HBO prestige dramas. Because you watch these shows, and no matter how famous the person is, no matter how important they order the story, they can die. Something bad can happen to them. If they do something wrong,

something could come back to get them. We see this over and over and over again Game of Thrones, but you also saw it on the Sopranos and Deadwood. In many ways, that was the special sauce of all prestige drama when TV basically decoupled itself from what it had always been, which is a perpetual continuation machine. We got to keep making the donuts.

As soon as you learned that that was no longer the case, that people who were integral to the story, integral to your enjoyment of the show were expendable, people were immediately drawn closer. Well, this is, now this goes in, in some sort of circle maze. We wind up back almost to the very beginning of that because if you can shoot someone in the head and then Felix can come up with his magic pen,

his like tied bleach brush and just wipe away the bullet hole in your head, then what matters? Let me, let me, you do, that is exactly how I feel. So you're watching, you're like, oh, no, that was a great scene where Anthony Hopkins did this beautiful speech and Jeffrey Wright shot himself in the head and it's like, wait, I have my pen. And he's like, he's fine. It just grazed him. And so what's the point of the scene?

He just greased him even though he shot him in themselves in the head. And yet the episode built to that gunshot like it was some sort of dramatic change in the story when in fact it wasn't. It was just a dramatic scene. And I don't think that anybody felt that way because if you'd been doing any of the reading about, if you've done any of your required reading,

you know, if you read Joanna Robinson, if you had read Slash film, if you had read Reddit, you know that this is not the end. for these characters. That said... Okay, so wait, so the reason why I thought last night's episode was so great, and we'll let you go maybe why it's not. I just want to just put one little caveat into what you were saying about the one thing

you can count on is that when you hire a 78-year-old Oscar winner to be... He's not going to want to do a second season. That's a one season, baby. Now, you know, I know people come to this show sometimes, our podcast... For hope? Just pull back the curtain on the Hollywood machine, you know, because no one knows the inside of this town like we do. we I mean we we never talked about it but there was no chance in Hannibal Lecter's

ninth hell that Tony Hopkins was ever doing a second season of the show in the storage space that Hannibal Lecter had in Baltimore seriously like when you ask oh why is Anthony Hopkins on a TV show because they paid him a lot of money to do one season yeah there's no question yeah good good because because here's the thing the programmer is now dead yeah okay Ed Harris is now a torp in the esedomassiz masochistic twerp in a tux who gets happy when he gets shot in the arm for real.

Yeah. I think we've all been to that Christmas party. Dolores is this great destroyer now, acting out the Wyatt narrative. But Mave is sort of New Testament. And she's like, even though she had this programming, and even though she was like the last bit of programming in that on the magic tablet, because it's like they just give those away and you can just reset the entire park apparently. on that tablet

it said mainland infiltration was the last piece of code Oh I didn't see that And the suggestion there I think being Like the great revolution Would happen if he sent Mave out into the world And she I don't built her own robots

Or she's the twin to Dolores She's wide and the real world And now she's staying right But now she's staying And even though she knows it's just a construct Even though she knows it's just a plot point On a television show even She goes back because

she's still, I don't even know necessarily that it's about her daughter as much as it. She's like, I still feel like I am responsible for those people back there. Or she's super into Samurai's, I can't wait for season two. Look, I mean, I love feudal Japan. That's just my thing. What a great investment, by the way, for everyone. So now next season, which there will be, obviously, I wonder, and, you know, I personally think that this show should leave the West behind.

I think that the man in black is now a guy in a suit. There is no reason to, explore more Western mythology because I don't think the show ever did that particularly well anyway. I don't think it felt like it didn't, one of the problems with the show was like

the ones that we were having in the beginning was why would anybody go here just to be a rapist murderer? What is it about the old West? And it's even the best players like Jimmy Simpson comes back and he sees the loop and he's like for all my money and for all the emotions that I had

I wind up seeing this woman pick up the can for somebody else. Yeah. So, I mean, it's just, or drop the can for somebody else. That's... She would drop the can for anybody. That was her programming. But I just think that now that you're in a world where you've got, you know, basically a total

recall basement attack going, like space basement attack going on. And a lot of boardroom shenanigans. A lot of shenanigans. A freezer locker, empty of naked robots. We have whoever designed Charlotte's just billowy pants suit. I know. Kudos. Vue Wang wept and apparently other worlds because when Mave opens up that piece of paper, it says Park One, which it suggests there are multiple parks.

Multiple parks. I don't know. So I am excited for season two and I thought last night's episode was a really entertaining episode. Just to bring it all the way back, this show is better when you talk about it. This show is better when I read other people write about it. We're going to have our pal Jason Concepcion is going to come on. I read his piece on the show from last week where he talked about how it's a show about writer's block

and I was like, I hope that someone from the Nolan slash Joy household is slipping Jason a check or a nice bottle of old Western whiskey because he is doing them such a favor drawing together these strands of ideas into something that seems compelling and smart that is in no way reflected in the show that I'm watching. So I'm going to talk about it in the abstract first

which is everything you're saying is compelling and interesting and fits together. And I'll take it one step further. You said because of the death of Ford that the programmer is dead. God is dead. I mean, it was the whole Michelangelo thing. God, the show is so clever. And I don't always mean that as a compliment that it absolutely sets itself up to rebut the worst arguments against it. Many times in talking to you about the show, I've talked about my frustration with Anthony

Hopkins character and how he doesn't seem to want anything and he has no motivation and he knows everything. Well, that's the problem with God in the Old Testament. He's just this force who creates things and then sometimes gets involved and sometimes doesn't with little consistency or understanding of it. So literally he was playing God in this and that was quote unquote the point. I don't think, and you can make that argument for many of the other things that happened, why they left me feeling cold but sort of worked in the larger scheme of things. You could even say the biggest criticism of this finale was where the fuck is the security system when dudes can just get just like we got locked out stabbed through the middle middle chest with no consequences for quite some time and yet the show

seems to rebut that as well because if you remember fourth hemisworth the security chief has also gone awall so that absolutely was a screw up and elsie are out there in the park we we know that arnold did something to her i'm pretty sure she's dead but i think that Hemsworth is now an adjunct member of the Ghost Nation! Thank God we get more... Now, what could get me back on board of the show if it was branded as Westworld Season 2, colon, ghost nation? Colon, rogue protocol.

Colon, we stabbed that guy through the colon. It is conceptually very impressive. It's clever. It's conceptually impressive. Almost all criticisms of it get rebutted, but... Let's talk about Felix. Okay. Let's talk about your man, Felix. The red-headed stranger.

No, Felix is the... Oh, no, sorry, that's Sylvester I'm thinking of. Yes, great, great names. Felix, who is apparently the nicest man in the world to robots. What is Felix? Who is Felix? What is the point of Felix? I mean, again, the show rebuts its own criticisms.

So Felix essentially functions in a more subservient role than any robot ever has in the history of Westworld, which you could say is the point, which you could say is why Mave tells him that, you know, he's such a bad human because he's literally an automaton that does anything she wants. That isn't good enough because this is a television show on television, on a network known for compelling storytelling and compelling characters. And Felix is, it would be an insult to blank slates to say this guy is blank. And yet he plays one of the most crucial roles in the show. Why is he helping them?

Why does he care? What does he feel about the carnage? How about the fact that he is the greatest traitor to a species that perhaps has ever, ever, ever, been noted in our real and fake history. But if he, if his only contact with the human world is Sylvester, maybe he's looking for something a little bit deeper than that. But now you're doing the extra work for them. I don't, I'm not saying it would take much.

I'm not saying the show needs to be, we need a web series on the Felix flashback episode, Coach. It doesn't matter. Westmore, season three, colon, rogue Felix. 90% of this 90 minute slog of an episode, okay, was voiceover exposition, was characters telling you what happened because there was no other way to communicate that information. And often while these characters were telling that information, characters like Felix were still on camera in the background doing actor business, like rolling their eyes, looking

slightly shocked, but not shocked enough to do anything because the speech wasn't over yet. It's a really unique show that is, you know, getting my dander up because I care so much about the construction of it. I am impressed by it. I don't care so much. I'm impressed by it. but every other decision is so catastrophically poor because it clearly doesn't matter to them. And frankly, I don't know if it matters so much of the audience. So I feel like I'm arguing in an infinite loop

at this point myself. No, I think what's interesting about it is the show. It's like because I think it became a phenomenon, because it costs a lot of money, because a lot of really big people were in it, we expected it to hit the ground running. And this is not unlike to me what happened with leftovers. just times 100.

Where leftovers, I was just like, what is this? And why is it so sad? And why is everybody smoking and cursing? And I don't even think leftover season one itself ever figured it all out. I think it had some really great episodes. But I still left that season being like, I don't get it. And even for as much as I loved, West left over season two, I still feel like it has a big unanswered question,

which is why they're doing a leftover season three. Let's put on our Bobby Ford hats for a minute, sit in our office with our player, Here's my thing is that don't you think Westworld could just have as much of a leap? This is what I'm saying. We don't know. And we can always hope. And that's why we watch television, whether we like the show or we don't, because things can always change.

And in a way that other fixed media cannot change. You know, from speaking to Damon Lindeloff about the leftovers, what I did not like about leftover season one is, in effect, what makes season two so compelling, which is he was in a dark place. The show was an accurate reflection of his sadness, depression, confusion, anxiety about where he was in life, about his career, about his world. And it came out as this tortured, tight, almost painful to look at mess, right? Some people really responded to it. Some people didn't. We said at the time we were watching it, and when we were criticizing it enough to be the, apparently the inspiration for the opening of season two, that we couldn't, it was hard to look away because there was something. raw and real and human here. It just wasn't coming together as a TV show. In season two,

you know, he let the light back in and he let the weirdness back in and he somehow found, the needle found the groove in season two, which is what's good about TV. I would honestly argue that like my thing wasn't the human, the raw human nature of that show, but it was where did they go and what's this? So you wanted the, you wanted more of the story, of this, of the, of the, you wanted more cold hard facts so you could then feel confident tethered to something as you flew out into the unknown. Yeah. This is, essentially the opposite. I mean, there's no question that this was a stressful experience for all those involved. This show, our show, the watch is not generally, I don't feel like it's not a good path to go down to be like the show psychologists. No, like who the people have made it. But it's fun to imagine. I mean, this is an incredibly difficult show to make, the degree of difficulty, not just for what they're trying to track in terms of the characters and the timelines and the loops and everything, but also, you know, purely from a production standpoint, and a budgetary standpoint, and the performers that they have to wrangle. this show was shut, the production was shut down for weeks or months.

You know, that's all in the public record. So it's no question that it, it's not surprising that it would come off feeling a little bit tight. But my feeling is that they focused on the parts that mattered to them and left aside the parts that didn't. And the stuff they left aside is almost everything that I care about in television. And it was very much on display last night. I mean, the episode was 90 minutes. It was full of, you know, over the top, slightly suck. buggy speechifying and enormous amounts of death and violence.

And I'm still not sure to what end other than the end that we feel is hopefully worth it. And we won't know for quite some time, which is to make a better second season. Yeah. I mean, I just really, I think when the lights went on on the beach. That was a beautiful scene. And I was like, this is really cool. Like, I was like, this is the idea that this was all supposed to feel a little bit fake. Yeah.

And that this was all for someone else's entertainment. ultimately Fords, but also to teach everybody something. You know, I think that it's interesting where you, and we should bring Jason on, but I thought it was interesting that they didn't really show the massacre at the gala. Because Game of Thrones would have. Game of Thrones would have been like, this is what this has been building to.

And I almost feel like, honestly, Game of Thrones would have done the massacre at the gala in the penultimate episode and then had an actual reckoning that would have set up the second season, I think you could make the argument that maybe they don't know what they're going to do with the second season, and that's why, because maybe they need to hire a big actor

to replace Anthony Hopkins. Can I make that argument? That's literally why. I mean, Game of Thrones would do that because Game of Thrones has a net. Right. It doesn't anymore, but Game of Thrones through the first four or five seasons

knew it could massacre major members of the cast in a shocking way, let's say, I don't know, a wedding, because they knew how much more story was still to come. And they could not just sell it to themselves and their ability to tell the story, but they could sell it to the network. So they have to hedge on it. Did Tessick Thompson get shot? Did Aaron, I mean, Ed Harris didn't get shot? They don't. They don't know what the second season is going to be. No one knows that. I mean, they have to regroup. They have to plan. They have to sell everyone involved on it. They probably don't have Tessa Thompson under contract and they will have to see if she's interested in coming back. So all of that uncertainty is baked into the production. I don't think that's a bad thing. No, me neither. But I thought that was a very distinctive difference the way it ended. I was like, that's really.

cool. And I was like, you know what? I feel like I wouldn't have, like the other shows would would have handled that differently. But also, we were sort of hoping against hope that we would get a glimpse of something, that we would get a glimpse to the outside world. Sort of did with the samurai. We got a glimpse of something bigger. And I appreciated that. And Felix saying it's complicated. But that we would maybe see something out in the world. But again, if you really think about it in terms of the realities of making the show. Apparently mothers still really love their daughters in the real world at least. Maybe not. Because the emotional trigger for that was, uh, may have seen a woman who fully brought her child to Westwood.

Which, by the way, she should immediately be arrested. Well, maybe that's part of, like, the, maybe that was just part of the, um, that was just part of the, like, the programming. Do you know what I mean? Like, those two people were supposed to be there. I just did Ford had to, it's, it's, there's a lot of stuff. I want to talk to Jason about it because that's where it gets into video game play a little bit.

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Jason Concepcion is here. Live from Samurai World, baby. What's up? How's the weather there? In Samurai World? Yeah. You know, it's temperate, surprisingly tropical. the armor is a little heavier than you expect.

How are you adjusting to feudal law, my brother? Guys, guys, here's what I want. I want more than anything else a high maintenance type series about the HBO budgeting department and the county department when they got the little pneumatic tube from upstairs saying, great news, building another world, and it's going to be samurai. You know that they probably asked for Mime World. What would be the cheapest world they could do?

Ed Zwick's last samurai set and just be like, we're back. We're back. They kept in cold storage. Jason, so really quick, let's start here. We have some specific questions for you, but first of all, I wanted to know, did you like last night's episode? Yeah. It was, it was fun in the way that the series as a whole has, I mean, it was like super tell and choy.

And it, like, as I said in the Slack earlier, it, it feels, it. felt especially like oh man what if they don't give us a second reason we just got to throw all the paint on the canvas but i enjoyed it like roolition let's go um i wanted to speak to you specifically about like the idea i want to actually first of all ask a little bit about mave's journey there because i thought that that was a lot of the year that we've talked about red dead uh redemption and some of the RPGs that it could be um but given that may've basically had a reverse heist for most of the show, and then is basically advancing through levels past security, and then she gets to the train.

Did you notice the architecture of, say, like, a first-person shooter happening when you were watching that plot? Oh, yeah. I mean, those guns, those little submachine guns, I think those are P90s, those have been in every shooter of the past 10 years. Some golden eye stuff. Some golden eye tech. Yeah, like they have, like, you know, they have these like plastic,

magazines so you could actually see the bullets go out of them and you can just look down and see how many bullets you have. Yeah, everything about, like, especially the, that lab shootout was very, very, very, uh, shootery just from the hallways and, you know, like the sliding doors that and guards that randomly show up and can't shoot you for some reason, you know, like, I thought that was pretty interesting that they, they, they shot at them, but never connected, you know, um, with the, I have a question about the Mave stuff. So, yeah. I feel like in general TV writing, particularly like dramatic writing, is you have to, you have to push people down a pathway.

I mean, this is actually, this is the connection to video game stuff, right? Like I remember from my gaming days that the conflict in role-playing games was essentially the idea that it has to be a shoot. Like you have to get people from A to B all the way to Z. But you have to make them feel like they have free will and free choice around that, right? and there would be some iterations of beloved series like Final Fantasy where people would reject the game because it was beautiful to look at it. And his voice fluttered when he said Final Fantasy. My lip quivered, but that you were being pushed along one track, right?

So the trick is to have people, to push people along the track and make them feel like they're making the choice. Now, everything I'm saying is essentially Mave's plot. That said, if Ford was just programming her to do these steps, there are a lot of what-ifs there. It seems like a lot of performance for what could have very easily been a result. But isn't that the same thing as playing Resident Evil or Max Payne where you're just like, well, what if I just decided to stand here? I mean, like, what if she just decided to not move? But also, how much of it was based on Felix being more of an automaton than anyone in the park? How much it was based on...

I did want to ask Jason because obviously with all the like manipulation on the galaxy note that they had that seemed to control everything. But that was basically sliders, right? That was like changing, you know, you play FIFA and you make your random five foot four, Irish guy into Messi. Who are you talking about? You projecting you so much? By the way, I do that every year. Half Irish, half Jewish.

Celtics incredible winger, Patrick Christopher Ryan. No, but like I thought that, so one idea that I had while I was watching that is if this is all Ford's programming, maybe the tablets are fake. Like they're doing it, but the code is already there and they're actually, they are programmed to do all this, like, I'm going to turn your aggression up to a hundred. but his aggression's already up to 100 because Ford programmed him to do it that way, do it that way. And that was just like an, it's basically a simulacrum of I'm in control now.

I have this, this tablet. You know, like this kind of, this gets at my core criticism of the show, which is they just need to explain how the tech, how the wider world and tech in general works. Like how did Ford write the consciousness? code. How, you know, like, how does the business of Westworld actually work financially? Like, what's the difference between the first-gen robots with the metal underneath, you know, like the Terminator-type robots, and what's the difference between, like, the flesh and blood robots? Do they have to eat? Do they go to the bathroom? Do they drink water? Like, this is stuff, like,

I feel like we need to know in order for the show to be able to become the show that I think it really wants to be. You know who would have done a good job at that is if like they had done an Aaron Sorkin episode where basically it had started with Felix arriving at work. Okay. And it had like first 25 minutes of social network style like here's the algorithm. Here's how this works. Here's how this works. You can't do that but you got to do this. And it's just like fast, fast, fast, fast, fast. But it was such a stately kind of somber show that actually and again like this is what I know if you heard, but Andy and I were talking about how. ends and how in Game of Thrones, we would have seen the massacre at the gala because they, and Andy

was like, yeah, because they know where they're going. They know they have a next chapter. And in Westworld, they might still be figuring out some of the yada yada. Isn't necessarily a bad thing. No, of course not. I mean, that probably happened with leftovers. It could result in a much better show. Can I, can I ask you guys one thing just to make sure I'm on the same page? Because I think I, I think I understood something, which is very unlike me on this show. The reason Mayve died in a first, fire last week while having sex on a table was because the goal was to destroy their bodies so they could be rebuilt without the explosives in their spine. Sure. Yes. If that, if there are actually explosives in their spine. Because they remade them this week, right? We saw them getting dipped.

Yes, they were from scratch. Which seemed like an enormous expense that by the way, no one's minding the store. Also, for his expensive or like for his height, like, it seems like Felix is basically the Jose Okendo of Westworld. Like, he can do anything with that computer. He's, he can play. He can play all those different positions. He's Ben Zobrist. He has more winds over replacement than literally any other person in a white leather smock. We should we should do like a pictorial listicle of just like the faces of Felix looking absolutely shocked and agog at like whatever is happening around him because he basically spent that entire episode like with his mouth slightly agape staring in horror like as robots

slaughtered human beings and various things of that. I don't think they slaughtered human beings. Wait, by the way, if you really want a hero narrative to pull from the show, let's talk about Felix again. Because my man could barely make a robot bird fly in a non-upside-down position just six short weeks ago. And now he's single-handedly responsible for the downfall of the human race. And respect. I would give you that, Andy. Thank you. Thank you. But the actual, the Andre Iguidalla of this show is still Logan. Logan, man. Because Logan became the voice of the audience. He was just like, what are you doing? Why am I naked and on a horse?

So what is the implication there that he is going to send Logan back into town naked with a feather in his hand? And people are going to be like, oh, Logan lost it in Westworld. Yes. And then at Harris, or then Jimmy Simpson is going to take over. Well, or he was beginning to cede a narrative that Logan was untrustworthy.

Because up to this point... Seed the narrative? Because up to this point, Logan seemed like just the paragon of business acumen and proprietorship. He was literally on the train like, I can't wait to go murder and bang. Yeah. He can't wait to go murder bang. That is specifically a skill set he brought to the park.

Okay, okay. I guess so. I just really, I mean, I saw that in the Van A Fair interview that Jimmy Simpson did, he was like, I'm not on season two. So I assume that Ben Barnes has gone as well, which poor a little out, man. Okay, wait, sorry, Jason, we're all over the place. I want to ask you something here. You are a fan. We all know this.

We know you, buddy. You are a fan of large interlocking, sprawling narrative arcs. You're a Game of Thrones guy. You are also a gamer. You like stories told him different. He hosts a gaming podcast called Achievement Oriented with Bellenberg. On what? Channel 33.

What podcast network is that? The Ringer Podcast Network is that? Sounds good. It's really good. I will subscribe. All that being said, and even as someone who, you know, you will dabble in the Reddits and the whatever's, do you think that this show, the Westworld television Joe and HBO is a load-bearing mechanism that will last.

Like, do you think there is enough here to keep your interest on all levels, not just as a because, you know, because it has elements of things that interest you? Do you think this has the groundwork been laid for a more successful, fully enriching experience, such as the ones we've mentioned? Oh, yeah. I mean, there's kind of like load-bearing concepts hidden deep under like the layers. of robot orgies that are like, you know, fascinating, when to deploy violence to achieve political ends,

you know, like the stuff I was talking about, but the world building stuff, like how the tech works, this is all stuff they can talk about, they can flesh out how the actual game design of Westworld works, the nature of consciousness, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's all fascinating stuff. And I think if they, now that they,

they kind of have like a proof of concept, which I, you know, I think you could say that season one was like a very entertaining proof of concept. They, I think, much like the leftovers, they could go into season two with something that is really good, just pair away the stuff that doesn't work. One more question about just your take on this. I mentioned to Chris, I loved the piece you wrote last week. I loved how you wrote about the show being basically a parable about writer's block. Could you repeat that a little bit here? in case people who haven't read it all, they should read it on the ringer so we can discuss it. But then I do want to get into this idea of, I just, I read that piece and I loved it

and I just felt like they owe you a thank you. You've done them a favor. Like you've done this work for them with something that I don't enjoy. I don't know if it deserves it, frankly. The basic idea is that, you know, I was reading this book on creativity like a long time ago. And they had a chapter about how Robert Lewis Stevenson and various other authors, they'd come up with their stories by just kind of like sitting at night and kind of that twilight before sleep and they would just like let these imaginary characters take an imaginary stage and just do things.

And it struck me as that that is exactly what Ford and Arnold did once upon a time. They created all these characters. They let them do stuff. But like all along the way, Ford is sending out these like mixed signals about it. He builds in consciousness. He understands that they're conscious,

and he builds these kind of like little back doors that make them even more conscious, but at the same time, like he's constantly wiping them, and he keeps them in these very tight loops, and he treats them very callously. And, you know, it's like it's as, it's much in the same way

than an author would treat their characters. You know, it's like George R.R. Martins constantly asked, like, do you hate your characters because of the things you put them through? And it's much the same with Ford. He puts them through a lot of the same things. And at the same time, he doesn't seem to have any kind of like real ideas anymore.

He had this kind of explosion of creativity back when they created the park. You could argue that it was all his creative partners stuff that he, well, originally it seemed like he pushed him out. But it's obviously much more complex than that. And now it's just kind of like 30 years of stasis, which I think is like is a thing that happens to a lot of very successful. creative people who creates something that makes a lot of money and becomes a business proposition. I know that's happened to this podcast.

Clearly. One person does all the work, the other one is just coasting. I agree. But to what you're saying, I think that the show itself as a fixed unit, an hour or now an hour plus for a week, 10 weeks a year, I don't know if it is designed to be able to do all of this.

And what I mean is what you're saying about Ford and authorship on its own is fascinating to me. And I think the Ford Arnold dynamic, the idea of this partner's creative partnership and how he attempted to recreate it basically, but in an optimal version, these are strands of a wonderful,

rich, emotive, compelling story. But because of the nature of the show that they've chosen to make and the nature and demands, and to be more generous, the nature and demands of contemporary television, which demand all of it. You need to have the high-level smart stuff

and you need to have the gun battles, you need to have everything in between. There's just not enough, there's not enough real estate to really get into that. So when I read your piece, I'm like, oh, that would be so good. But I just think you're doing these beautiful

acrobatic loop-de-loops that make me enjoy the show more, but you're doing it in a circus tent that is not in Westworld. Okay, so I think you're right. But I do think that Westworld should be able to do on the, you know, some might say bloated,

some might expense, say, say expensive end. What the weirdest 22-minute comedy is able to do too, which is basically like television can be anything. And television can be more or less a puzzle. It doesn't have to be what like it traditionally has been in the prestige era. I would say though, one of the first things we talked about when we first started talking about Westworld is this a loop too? Yeah, this is the loop. Is this show needs a Luke Skywalker? And I hope that in the second season, whether it's the Regina King character. Or Honolo. It needs, it needs someone who is going to go on a journey that is actually has, um, that is relevant.

To the present day. Now, I think what Jason wrote about last week was amazing. And I think it actually, you could take a step further and that the entire show is a commentary on the fallacy of characters and the fallacy of story and like just how malleable all that stuff is. But I do think that the first, that the second season needs to begin with a very clear, this is a character who is a real person whose arc is going to be the second season. and you can believe us when we tell you

that they are not going to get reprogrammed or get shut down at the end of the season. Because do you know, because deconstructing the fallacy of character is a good idea. And do you know when it's a great idea? When you have characters. In your college dorm room when you are high A.F.

You know what it is a bad idea? When you have the Ferrari keys to an HBO drama series with a $100 million plus budget, you don't need to do those donuts on that. particular lawn when you can actually do something good with it. Let's end with this, Jason. Where do you want to see the show go next season?

Where do you want to see it set up? I mean, obviously, there is a samurai world, but like, what do you want to see? Do you want the opening scene of the second season to be some guy at a skyscraper in Dallas getting the Delos bat phone call and be like, what? And it's like, guess what, bro? You're the head of the company now? You want the King Ralph version of this world. Or do you want it to be 20 years in the future or eight years in the past or whatever it's going to, like, what do you want to see next?

I need some context about what the outer world is like in order to really kind of feel like there's a real grounding to what goes on in Westworld. You know, like it's just the world building stuff. For the core of the show is this, a dude created life. He created like conscious computer life. and that would have a ton of consequences. There'd be all sorts of companies that would want to buy this. There would be a lot of things that would happen if a person could create artificial intelligence, real conscious life in a computer.

And so why is no one freaking out about this? Like, you know, why is everyone okay with it just being subscribed to a theme park where people fuck robots? Like, you know, there's a lot of other questions, and I think those are the things that need to be fleshed out in order for the stuff that goes on in Westworld to really have a greater impact. And, you know, to give them credit, the story that I'd heard is that when they shut down production, one of the reasons was so that Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy could really, like, design that theory of consciousness that I think we probably saw spelled out last night. So it's not like these people are averse to putting in work to doing the hard questions. Before we let you go, let's just, this is the end of the season. let's do a quick roundtable. I just want all of us to say our MVP

of Westworld season one, and if you got it, the LVP, least valuable player. That could be a performer or a character or a concept. I'm putting you all on the spot here. I would say the MVP is by far, Jeffrey Wright, just because he was the person

who transcended the limitations of playing a robot, basically. Like, you literally did not know what was going on with him, even if it was pretty clearly broadcast. And he was actually the one who was able to brought, like, actually appropriately broadcast both human and the human pathos, but then also the reaction to finding out that that pathos is like a fiction.

Before you stop, the only reason I just want to jump in to say I agree with you, just so you don't have suspense. I think Jeffrey Wright was the MVP. I think for the last 20 years, he should have been on the short list for just the best actor working. Yeah. And very rarely got the opportunities to work at that level. I mean, when you joined Boardwalk Empire, he was the classiest thing in a dive bar, basically, and it just almost seemed wasteful. And I had the same reaction when I saw him on this.

And I want to give Nolan and Joy all the credit for this. Because I did think, and they were playing off this too. They're probably playing off our expectations that once again, Jeffrey Wright is cast in essentially a thankless role. He was the intermediary between other characters and would be unable to own the show himself. But if you look back at the season, his was the arc that was by far the most interesting. most compelling thanks. I also do want to say a runner up to Tany Newton, who I think in the second half of the season, once she sort of starts to put her plan together,

has like a great run. They probably should have told her that everyone else was going to call him Bernard, and so she shouldn't be super British on that one word. Because that was kind, I kind of bumped up against that. Jason, who is your LVP? Probably Sylvester. Sylvester is still standing in a lab, like

with a guy who just got killed for lubing up. Making the face that I made when I said Final Fantasy a second ago. Jason, who's your MVP and LVP? Jeffrey, right? I mean, he's like one of those people that's just never been better than anything he's ever done. And then my LVP is Lee Seismore headwriter. It's like, I just didn't understand why he existed in that world. I mean, if they ever did make a Tropic Thunder too, like that Lee Seismore comma headwriter would be a terrific addition to the cast of whatever movie they're making, I, boy, they're so many LVPs here. I mean, I want to, I love Tessa Thompson, so I don't want to say that she was

the least valuable player. I kind of want to say whoever just explained what her character was doing to her. Like maybe it was just, she showed up and then sometime in hair and makeup, someone came by to just like, some PA came by and said, you know, let me just quickly download you on what we're looking for here. We're kind of looking for corporate sex pirate. That didn't work for me. But I don't know. Help me out here. What are the other things that I didn't like this season? Like, I don't know. You didn't like anything with Teresa and any of like the board stuff. You know, I suggested we do LVP, but at this point it almost feels uncharitable because, for example, like I didn't like what Jimmy Simpson did.

And then now that I see what he was asked to do, I think that was impossible. Interesting though that he'd actually, he figured it out before they were ready to tell him on the set. Apparently Ed Harris didn't know until the very end. Oh, because he probably wasn't watching the Star Cross. storyline. They probably didn't know. But they were shooting it differently. Yeah. But, um, do you guys think, do you guys think Ed Harris was acting or did they just go, here, put on this suit and go walk around in this area and do whatever you want?

Here's what I think. They told him something or they told him just enough that worked for him. They were like, we loved your work in the rock. His, his face in those performances and was some of the dialogue that he had to deliver. Hopkins always had a little smile on his lips because he was thinking about the extension to his Malibu Beach House he was going to put on because of the season. I wonder if I can buy an actual mountain. As an 80-year-old British stage actor, he has been shoveling the shit for so long it smells like roses to him.

Ed Harris, like, I feel like he just was in his head he was just saying, I'm a cowboy. I guess I'm a cowboy. I guess I'm a cowboy. And when he finally had something more interesting to do in the finale, he stepped up. But, God, you know what?

Let me break my loop. I just, I really do want it to be better in second season. I think it will be. I think it's going to be really exciting. I just have, they're not going to be like back. now that we're back in Escalante, you know?

Like, they're not going to do that. They're going to have, like, the entire, like, they're clearly, like, and they could still be, like, P.S. It's Mars. Guess what else? It is the most human thing of all to still hope in the face of reality. Jason, thank you for joining us, man. Thanks, guys. Okay, so I guess we're pretty much going to wrap it up there. We'll be back on Thursday to talk a little bit. I think we should do a pre-roval.

one conversation. Yeah, I'm seeing it next Thursday. Oh, look at you. I got my tickets already. I'm definitely going to see this movie, but I think we need to do a pre-like, where are we? All right. Because some of the stuff that's come out this week, let's give a little homework. The Hollywood reporter ran a story last week, basically saying...

The whole work is... Think about how Tony Gilroy has a better life than us. Yeah, Tony Gilroy, our hero, the unsung architect of the born franchise, including its low-key greatest moment. That's not true, but we love the Bourne legacy. Tony Gilroy basically took over this movie to, quote-unquote, fix it, and pocketed at least $5 million to do so, and Disney's being weirdly open about this. So I think it's very interesting to see what this movie's going to be and what it means about franchise

blockbuster filmmaking. So I would say the homework is the Hollywood Reporter story about Tony Gilroy and Kyle Buchanan's piece on Vulture about how maybe these movies need veterans after all. And I know that people have been asking, we will do shut up and dance on Thursday, too. I am sorry that I have not caught up and I will watch. I like the best thing, guys, is when Chris says we're going to do something in a microphone while looking at. at me. With the same look, he gave his FIFA avatar. He's about to score a goal. Be the best. One of us has to be. You have to be the best, son.

I need the best version of my partner. That's my Scottish football manager voice. Goodbye. Great job, Bransky. Before we go, just want to thank American Express. American Express card members. You do not want to miss this now. Through December 31st, there is a big reason for you to shop small at local stores in your neighborhood. Learn more and enroll your eligible card today at Americanexpress.com slash shop small. offer. That's Americanexpress.com slash shop small offer. Terms apply. Also want to say thank you to proper cloth at propercloth.com. You can easily create a custom shirt size in seconds just by answering 10 easy questions. No measuring is required. They guarantee a perfect fit. Remakes are absolutely free and

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