PatAg said:

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TCTTS said:

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Malachi Constant said:

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I guess the entire trip that Caleb and Maeve took was an elaborate ride by William?

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I think it really is a means to infect a ton of wealthy human park guests with the flies, while ALSO serving as an elaborate plot to lure/trap Caleb and Maeve.

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Well, at least from what we saw in the lab, they weren't infecting them they were making them kill themselves after being infected outside right? The actor that played the doctor in Ed was flied up in a car outside the park right?

But then, the host-daughter was also in there to lure Caleb into the room to be infected... so was the guy included just to misdirect the viewer into thinking that it might actually be Frankie in the room and also try to add suspense to the scene with the daughter/mom in the house?

Either way, definitely interested to see what they are actually trying to accomplish with the parasite flies. So far we have just seen it used to control the human, and make them basically kill themself, but I think the real goal is to make them operate like hosts from the parks.

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Again, I think it's both. We were seeing legit beta tests (Mike from Ed) AND a plan to lure Caleb with a host Frankie.

TCTTS said:

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PatAg said:

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TCTTS said:

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Malachi Constant said:

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I guess the entire trip that Caleb and Maeve took was an elaborate ride by William?

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I think it really is a means to infect a ton of wealthy human park guests with the flies, while ALSO serving as an elaborate plot to lure/trap Caleb and Maeve.

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Well, at least from what we saw in the lab, they weren't infecting them they were making them kill themselves after being infected outside right? The actor that played the doctor in Ed was flied up in a car outside the park right?

But then, the host-daughter was also in there to lure Caleb into the room to be infected... so was the guy included just to misdirect the viewer into thinking that it might actually be Frankie in the room and also try to add suspense to the scene with the daughter/mom in the house?

Either way, definitely interested to see what they are actually trying to accomplish with the parasite flies. So far we have just seen it used to control the human, and make them basically kill themself, but I think the real goal is to make them operate like hosts from the parks.

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Again, I think it's both. We were seeing legit beta tests (Mike from Ed) AND a plan to lure Caleb with a host Frankie.

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Definitely.
What I wonder is, when Maeve is having to "concentrate" harder to override systems is she just hacking the code or what?
I feel like they are leading up to her thinking she has overcome something, but actually just exposed herself to being taken over.
Its a bummer about Caleb, but I wonder where they could really go with his character being taken over.

PatAg said:

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TCTTS said:

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PatAg said:

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TCTTS said:

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Malachi Constant said:

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I guess the entire trip that Caleb and Maeve took was an elaborate ride by William?

---

I think it really is a means to infect a ton of wealthy human park guests with the flies, while ALSO serving as an elaborate plot to lure/trap Caleb and Maeve.

---

Well, at least from what we saw in the lab, they weren't infecting them they were making them kill themselves after being infected outside right? The actor that played the doctor in Ed was flied up in a car outside the park right?

But then, the host-daughter was also in there to lure Caleb into the room to be infected... so was the guy included just to misdirect the viewer into thinking that it might actually be Frankie in the room and also try to add suspense to the scene with the daughter/mom in the house?

Either way, definitely interested to see what they are actually trying to accomplish with the parasite flies. So far we have just seen it used to control the human, and make them basically kill themself, but I think the real goal is to make them operate like hosts from the parks.

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Again, I think it's both. We were seeing legit beta tests (Mike from Ed) AND a plan to lure Caleb with a host Frankie.

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Definitely.
What I wonder is, when Maeve is having to "concentrate" harder to override systems is she just hacking the code or what?
I feel like they are leading up to her thinking she has overcome something, but actually just exposed herself to being taken over.
Its a bummer about Caleb, but I wonder where they could really go with his character being taken over.

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Yeah, I've always interpreted that as Maeve hacking code, basically over WiFi/Bluetooth or whatever the standard is 30+ years from now. And that when she has to concentrate harder, she's simply attempting more hacks per second or whatever. Definitely curious to see what they do to her now, either way. Because the "take over"/blackmail Maeve thing was done last season. So I don't know what it is they'll do to her this time that could be different, but also compelling.

As for Caleb, there are a couple of shots from the trailers of him in New York, in what look to be scrubs-type clothing, wandering around the city. As if a patient or prisoner of some sort. So he at least survives to make it there, for whatever purpose. I wonder if he basically ends up on a loop in whatever simulation Christine/Dolores is in? And then maybe he's broken out somehow, along with Christine/Dolores? Either that or dies, and his death serves as some kind of additional motivation for Frankie, if that is, in fact, her in the (future) timeline with Bernard and Stubbs.

In 100% agreement on all points.

The Radiohead analogy is perfect.

100% that woman is grown up Frankie taking Bernard and Stubs into the desert. Poor Caleb, how's he gonna get rid of his flies?

I will also say that at least to me Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan are better at high concept than Christopher Nolan is. I enjoyed Interstellar and Tenet but at the same time they don't just keep smoldering in my head like Westworld does. I think he got really in the weeds with Interstellar to a point that it negatively impacted the story at times and Tenet to me feels like an idea he never really fleshed out completely. I think the Tenet concept is really interesting and ambitious, but the mechanics didn't work for me. I think that movie would have made a better TV show if he had the patience.

Maybe I'm not being fair given how much time exists to figure out a tv show that's been going for 4 seasons now vs a movie but the level of detail with Westworld just gets stuck in my head. Nothing else on tv right now really does the same thing for me that this show does. I don't know anyone that still watches the show but I wish they would, a lot of concepts are paying off for me right now in a big way.

Eh... I think where this show has fallen down is when it's tried to get too "high concept." It asks a lot of questions that it doesn't bother to answer.

As for "smoldering in my head," for me nothing on this show has come anywhere close to what it was like seeing Inception for the first time.

Reading back through everyone's thoughts and I don't think I have anything new to add other than I think the weapon they're searching for could be whatever the tech is for controlling the hosts in the park.

If the hosts are free and the tower is controlling the humans in the future, they could be looking for a way to control the hosts.

That would be Maeve right?

Well it could be, but I was thinking more like the actual park tech.

Damn it, how'd I forget about Inception???

Speaking of Maeve, she had to just realize at the end William was a host. So shouldn't she be able to control him, now?

I do agree, especially with Tenet, that Christopher Nolan's big idea outpaced his ability to tell that story in the chosen format. Kind of ironically, the problem with Tenet is something that one of the characters is another Nolan movie, The Prestige (one that I think is extremely underrated btw), deals with.

Everything happened so fast that the audience was just overwhelmed and couldn't really process it. Tenet would have worked better as a TV show where the premise had some space to breathe between episodes.

I think we can assume that Maeve won't be able to control anything new. Maybe think of it like a software patch.

While you're probably right, for the sake of discussion...

She did eventually get through the senator host's software, and the restricted lock. Is Delos aware each time she hacks into a host and able to make upgrades that fast?

This gets a little into "the bad guys plan is too complicated" territory here, but I think they let her do that.

Playing a little loose with some pronouns here because I'm not sure if the hosts are a singular or a plural, but everything Maeve and Caleb have done so far was a set-up to lure them into where they are now. They made it difficult because she expected it to be difficult, but they were really in control the entire time.

Hmm. I would buy that from the moment they got on the train, but not sure they would have known she'd go straight to the senator.

But they did. The wife that had been mind controlled by the flies or whatever we want to call that in the barn is what led them to the concert hall.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that.

How'd they find Maeve in the woods, in the first place? I've been traveling, and sick, and watching on my phone...so I'm struggling to remember

I don't know what we want to call it but she 'reached out' for lack of a better term and interacted with the radio/electrical/whatever signals (she caused a blackout in the town.) I assume they could trace that.

In order for William's plan to work…
He would have needed to know that they would find the senator. Then that they would survive the battle with the replacement hosts there. Then know they would go to the barn, figure out the message, go to the opera, find what was to find there and make it to the party area (before the train left) go to the new westworld (via the train that I guess we were supposed to know is close to the Pasadena line so it rumbling out of nowhere made sense) know they would go into the underground (and why were the bodies being dropped on a floor that was for games?), survive the battle, figure out they needed go one level down, get there right when they were doing the experiment (unless that was staged), and Maeve be able to break in to the code seconds before the daughter would have died or it all would have been pointless. It was Bond villain esque.
They could have just released the flies the first time they saw them from behind the glass. Or heck, they could have just done it at the senators house. Or William could have met them in the body chute room and done both things there (fight Maeve and release the flies). And Maeve has no power to shut host William down (assuming that was a host), because she didn't even try?
And lastly, how can the sublime predict every event in the future when it only has host and some guest data? Like how did it know the people Bernard interacted with this week? The don't exactly seem like westworld types.

Again, none of this is terrible, but the show just seems to be taking the "look smart and stylish rather than plausible" approach now. Which is fine, but that's not what it was to start. Even with all the above I enjoyed both story lines, but it's getting harder. Guess this week was better than last, because at least they went back to swinging some.

/weekly rant .

Yeah, this predicting the future stuff is nonsense. I'm trying not to think too hard about it.

Now, that said, we can assume the bad guys have the ability to predict what people are going to do to some degree, and wanted Maeve and Caleb to be where they are for some reason. So the elaborate plan was to lure them in but without it being so easy that they caught on to it being a trap.

I actually don't see the predicting possible futures as that big of a problem. Season three was about a supercomputer that could predict human behavior and keep people in loops (ish), and that computer was a sister piece of tech to the westworld/Delos stuff. Plus is we assume that every host mind is itself a kind of supercomputer, then the sublime has nearly infinite processing power and enormous amounts of information. Plus it's located at the hover damn data center? So probably some connection with the outside world (to continue to collect data) exists?

The steps to get Maeve on the train are convoluted, unless the plan was kill her when you can and all the other stuff is backup plans.

amercer said:

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I actually don't see the predicting possible futures as that big of a problem. Season three was about a supercomputer that could predict human behavior and keep people in loops (ish), and that computer was a sister piece of tech to the westworld/Delos stuff. Plus is we assume that every host mind is itself a kind of supercomputer, then the sublime has nearly infinite processing power and enormous amounts of information. Plus it's located at the hover damn data center? So probably some connection with the outside world (to continue to collect data) exists?

The steps to get Maeve on the train are convoluted, unless the plan was kill her when you can and all the other stuff is backup plans.

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Exactly. That felt perfectly believable/reasonable to me, given season three. Especially considered Rehoboam was created by humans, and the Sublime equivalent was not only created by machines, but had multiple "millennia" to evolve and perfect.

Nearly every plot device or tech this show explores is explained or alluded to in dialogue. I've watched all three season four episodes twice now, and it's astonishing how much I catch on second viewing, that perfectly explains so much of the stuff people complain about. It's all there in the writing.

amercer said:

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I actually don't see the predicting possible futures as that big of a problem. Season three was about a supercomputer that could predict human behavior and keep people in loops (ish), and that computer was a sister piece of tech to the westworld/Delos stuff. Plus is we assume that every host mind is itself a kind of supercomputer, then the sublime has nearly infinite processing power and enormous amounts of information. Plus it's located at the hover damn data center? So probably some connection with the outside world (to continue to collect data) exists?

The steps to get Maeve on the train are convoluted, unless the plan was kill her when you can and all the other stuff is backup plans.

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I'm giving them a wide berth with a lot of what's going on right now specifically because of how they've laid it all out. Between Rehoboam last season and what's going on with Bernard right now, simulation/prediction is something I've accepted as woven into the fabric of the show at every level.

I don't think it's a cheat code to avoid all the criticisms people have, I just think they've been so smart and detailed about it that I'm not trying to overanalyze it. They weave the past/present/future together in a way that I enjoy, but sometimes it feels like they are able to retcon their own show as it goes along. Anytime a show does have storylines across multiple timelines I worry that it will take the easy/lazy way out of something but this show doesn't give me those concerns.

This show is the opposite of Lost to me, I still contend that Damon Lindelof had no real plan for the show and had no clue it was going to be successful like it was. And I'm way more skeptical now than I was back in my 20's when I was watching lost.

The problem with the season 3 comp is that Rehoboam didn't just predict the future, it *caused* the future. It could predict it in part because it could affect the events going on, and control the human population as well. It had massive amounts of data AND massive amounts of control.

That doesn't work as well where Bernard is because there is no control aspect (as far as we know.)

Sure, maybe it can predict what Stubbs will say, or even the other people at the first meeting, they're all hosts. And maybe it can predict major world events based on probabilities and eventualities or whatever. But it could predict that the waitress was going to tip over a coffee cup? It could predict exactly what the human girl was going to say?

This Bernard Doctor-Strange-level prediction thing isn't a processing power or data management thing, it's just flat out impossible.

Well there is a deep rabbit hole here, but maybe the creators of the show are making a statement about the deterministic nature of the universe. Free will being mostly illusory would make running simulations to predict the future a lot simpler.

I do agree that they need to cut back on his god mode prediction powers now, but I expect that part of the plot going forward will be things he didn't foresee and how he decides to deals with them as he tries to recalculate the future as it happens.

I mean that's exactly what they're doing, I just think the level to which Bernard has knowledge of the future is nonsense.

Now, it's not ruining the show for me, I still thought this episode was the best one yet this season and I'm all the way here for it.

Have we ever settled the question of if Maeve has free will? On the train she quoted the line from her programming about infiltrating the mainland. Which she may have postponed at the end of season one, but which she definitely did later…

She does, at least to the extent that anyone does.

bobinator said:

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The problem with the season 3 comp is that Rehoboam didn't just predict the future, it *caused* the future. It could predict it in part because it could affect the events going on, and control the human population as well. It had massive amounts of data AND massive amounts of control.

That doesn't work as well where Bernard is because there is no control aspect (as far as we know.)

Sure, maybe it can predict what Stubbs will say, or even the other people at the first meeting, they're all hosts. And maybe it can predict major world events based on probabilities and eventualities or whatever. But it could predict that the waitress was going to tip over a coffee cup? It could predict exactly what the human girl was going to say?

This Bernard Doctor-Strange-level prediction thing isn't a processing power or data management thing, it's just flat out impossible.

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- Akecheta says that one year in the real world equals a "millennia" in the Sublime.

- At some point in the past 48 hours or so, the official HBO Twitter account accidentally tweeted out (and then deleted) a promotional tweet that mentioned that Bernard was in the Sublime for 23 real-world years. Which obviously means that the Sublime evolved over 23,000 years during that time.

- In the post-episode behind-the-scenes featurette on Sunday, Jeffrey Wright says that Bernard "is kind of living a quantum existence."

So, considering that the tech in the Sublime is now of the quantum variety, and has been evolving and nurtured by A.I. for THAT many years, I can easily buy that what we're seeing Bernard do and know is not something that's "flat out impossible." No, the Sublime likely isn't influencing real-world events like Rehoboam was, but the Sublime is almost assuredly observing/chronicling real-world events, to the point where it would know that two hosts (the two at the counter, not Bernard and Stubbs) are either at or about to walk into that diner, and what their mission is, along with what specific set of motions and events would cause the waitress to spill the coffee, etc.

Is it basically "magic" tech we're dealing with? Of course. But the writers at least went to the trouble to create a scenario in which that "magic" tech can now feasibly exist. That, and the tech is basically the exact same as the predictive quantum tech in Devs on FX a couple years ago, tech that was created by present day humans, which no one seemed to have any issue with when watching that show.

Point is, yes, it's silly, but they at least explain how it could happen, and IMO, is worth it for the story/scenario we're getting. Bernard and Stubbs' back-and-forth, in these specific circumstances, is the funniest the show has been in a while. I just love the whole vibe/setting of their storyline, and when something is this much of a joy to watch, any super-specific "realism" questions I have basically melt away.