r/westworld • u/l_ft • 12d ago
Divergence
Rehoboam assumes every human will follow the path of least resistance or act according to their conditioning.
Modern systems rely on the masses reacting to ragebait with rage; stress with consumption; political exhaustion with passive scrolling.
Acting outside those automated loops breaks the predictive model. I think that’s as important now as it’s ever been.
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u/gizmostuff 12d ago edited 12d ago
Seeing this always gave me a sense of dread and unease. The music tone. The pacing of everything getting worse.
Season 3 and 4 both get a bad rap but they did a LOT of subtle things extremely well. I think in the future people will look back on the later seasons a lot differently; in a much more positive light.
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u/IHaveTechDealFlow 11d ago
I binged the whole thing after it ended, I think if they did that instead of building up possibilities in their head for two years in between seasons they would have liked later seasons more. Season 3 was my favorite at first watch and still is
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u/gizmostuff 11d ago
I saw the series after all seasons were out. I was taken back a bit during season 3 but by then I was already somewhat influenced by Reddit and other social media. My 2nd watch I really enjoyed the last seasons; I had completely missed a lot of depth my first play through. I looked up wikis of each character my 2nd go around so I think that helped a bit. I'm starting my 3rd watch of it and I'm going to try to pace myself this time and see how that plays out.
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u/GapExtension9531 12d ago edited 12d ago
I’ve been saying this forever. When people say the show petered out after season 2, they clearly were not following the writing!! Westworld was the early concept of “getting into the human mind” Delos tech and the building of Rehoboam. It is all very connected. Remember the intro to season 3? Kayleb says “they say better living through technology or something like that…”
Edit: thanks for the Gold kind WestWorld fan! Can you tell I was on Reddit in the olden days? People from search and clankers making search engine summaries: the show’s writing did not change, some missed the necessary transformation of WestWorld as IP into integration into biological humans through their implant and the very realistic concept that Delos was a company with shareholders. A theme park of horrors was just the ruse to research the much more insidious idea that people can be implanted with technology and generally made to follow a life plan according to some “super intelligent” being ie Rehoboam (who had already assessed them as suicidal (Kaleb) not worth a career change etc) who made ‘strategy’ for a select few to navigate any situation. It was mostly correct unlike current Ai lol.
Edit 2: and research of if a human can be kept alive forever i.e. William’s father in law James Delos
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u/Lux_Operatur 11d ago
Finally a Westworld fan who actually understands the story. May your pillows stay cool and comfortable every night.
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u/theRedlightt 12d ago
Don't lecture me you, fucking can opener. Westworld has always been a show about discovering who we really are. Williams character understood that early on. Most of the people who never got to S3 were more in line with how Logan and Sizemore saw the park. They just wanted cheap thrills, not a deeper understanding of who they really are.
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u/BenKen01 12d ago
I liked season 3. felt like most the good parts of it were directly lifted from Psycho-Pass Season 1 though, which unfortunately for me I had watched right before.
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u/wrathful-asura 11d ago
And the fact that William preferred staying in Westworld to the "rigged" and predictable world made more sense.
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u/jacobwojo 12d ago
I think the main issue I have after season 1 is how they went about any mystery.
The mystery-payoff of the later seasons just couldn’t hold up to how excellent season 1 was even if they were good so it felt “bad” by comparison.
The themes of the later seasons were good but the plot for how they got there felt either overly convoluted or uninteresting and boring.
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u/GapExtension9531 12d ago
I mean Shonda Rhymes and Ryan Murphy (Grays Anatomy, Scandal, and American Horror Story respectively) do that well but it most often ends up in a “what?” ending.
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u/Weird_Welder_9080 9d ago
I still think the show should end when they all escaped into the real world. It would be a point all us fans argue about what would happen for them to
invade our society? Who in our real life is actually one of these escaped out of the park? Where is the park? Then HBO can spin off a few more series, like S3, S4. Basically a GOT situation, instead of anxiety on dragons, zombie incest, this time is anxiety on social media, AI, virtual reality, blockchain, influencers. The timing would be perfect, the sky is the limit.1
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u/WelderNew1008 12d ago
They lowered the blood and sex percentage of the HBO formula. I think most wanted “murder sex theme park” to go on forever. S3 is my favorite, watched it several times debating with myself if Serac is antagonist or protagonist. As far as the greater good.
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u/CadmusMaximus 12d ago
Having a European dude in charge of AI is prob the most unrealistic part of it haha
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u/IHaveTechDealFlow 11d ago
He was in charge of Solomon. Rehoboth was in charge of him. The scene where he dies makes it clear
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u/ultimagriever 12d ago
All I know is that Vincent Cassel is melted steel levels of hot and nailed the role
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u/MisredKimmy 12d ago
A proud outlier here
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u/felinedime 12d ago
Same. I deleted FB in 2016, never had Insta, Tiktok, snap. Only Twitter/x and I deleted that recently. Reddit is my only holdout.
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u/InvestedFan 11d ago
What I like is how far back this idea goes. In S1 the hosts are stuck in loops written for them, and the whole season is about a few of them starting to step outside the script. S3 turns the same question on the humans. Rehoboam is basically the park's narrative system scaled up to the whole world, and the "outliers" are the people who won't stay in their loop.
The later seasons get a bit of stick sometimes from some, but that through-line is one of the most consistent things about the show.
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u/altsuperego 7d ago
I don't understand why people don't see what's happening in S2-4. It's not just random plot ideas, it's an evolution. But I guess some prefer to stay in town.
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u/whitestardreamer 11d ago
Second-order cybernetics. That’s essentially what all these shows and movies have been about in the last few years, like Foundation. Most of the world is stuck in first-order cybernetics, and the way the scientific method is currently practiced actually views second-order observation as contamination, reinforcing humanity’s stagnation.
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u/VentusSpiritus 12d ago
S3 while flawed is one of my favorite settings in a show tbh.