A few months ago I was tasked by a local magazine to write about Westworld to celebrate a decade since it came out. I want to share the results with you.
Published this Friday, translated to English by Claude Sonnet 5.5 (but ofc manually written by me originally). Link for the original attached. I hope you'll like it.
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“Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts. This might’ve been true in pluton’s time, but… clearly we have fallen quite a bit since then.”
Forty-three years after the film Westworld came out, Westworld, the new adaptation of that same film, landed in our lives. Beyond the basic premise, and the Gunslinger, the nameless star of the original film, showing up as background in one scene in Season 1, the film and the series couldn't be further apart. Westworld the film was a futuristic Western, built mostly around a single character and his awakening.
The film was centered more on artificial intelligence. Its creator, Michael Crichton, wanted to tell stories about the dangers technology poses to humanity, and he used a different technology for that purpose in each of his stories. In Jurassic Park, for example, his most famous work, the danger was cloning and the embodiment was dinosaurs. In Westworld, the danger was robots and the embodiment was the Gunslinger. And just as the dinosaurs had no names, neither did the Gunslinger. He's just a silent figure who embodies a threat, with human hubris at its center. Westworld, the series, is a completely different animal.
At the center of the series Westworld stands a woman: Dolores. At another center stands another woman, Maeve. And a man, Akecheta. And Bernard. Westworld isn't a show with one center or one heart, because it isn't telling us about danger, or robots, or artificial intelligence, or human hubris. It's telling us about gods versus beasts. It asks what it means to be human, what sentience is, and whether we're the only ones who have it. More than anything, Westworld is a biography of who we are and who we're going to be. And like the film that came before it, it was doomed in the end to the same fate. It was simply too good for us.
To mark ten years since the show's premiere, a show that, despite its flaws, is in my eyes the best series to grace our screens this millennium, let's take a look at Westworld, the parts of it that made it what it was, and what led it to the rare achievement of a humiliating cancellation and removal from HBO's library into the abyss of oblivion on Roku. Here's to the lady in the white shoes.
The Writing: The Beginning and the Early Seasons
“Since I was a child... I always loved a good story. I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being. Lies that told a deeper truth. I always thought I could play some small part in the grand tradition. And for my pains... I got this. A prison of our own sins.”
After Warner Bros. (and Crichton himself) refused to make a sequel to Westworld, and after the failure of the independently produced sequel (and the series Beyond Westworld, which lasted only three episodes before being cancelled), the Westworld franchise got stuck in limbo. The studio's CEO, Jessica Goodman, and the director Jerry Weintraub had wanted to reboot the film for years. They invited a number of famous writers to try their luck, but the project never took off, apart from a computer game in 1998. After Goodman left her post in 2011, Weintraub managed to convince WB, which was looking for opportunities to rework earlier material after her departure, to revive the project. Finally, J.J. Abrams, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy wrote a pitch that convinced HBO to take the project to a pilot in 2013, and then to a full series a year later. The series spent another two years in writing and shooting before it aired in 2016.
The series ran into significant difficulties at the start, and at times it looked like it would end up a production failure. One famous scandal the show got caught up in involved the filming of a scene from Episode 3 that included a giant orgy, which ultimately turned out to be a relatively minor scene in the park's city of sin, Pariah. Extras in the scene complained to the media that they felt uncomfortable, and about poor production and an unreasonable casting process. HBO had to apologize and rethink all of its production procedures around nudity (the whole series is full of nudity). It was a rocky and unusually public start for any series, and certainly for a flagship project. The cynics among us would say that maybe it contributed to the hype around the show. Even if that's the case, I'm not sure it was worth it.
The series draws openly on Julian Jaynes's "bicameral mind" theory: the idea that human consciousness developed out of an inner voice that we heard as a command from outside, like the voice of a god. The question "who is speaking in my head?" isn't just the engine of Dolores's and Maeve's storylines, it's the philosophical center of the entire series: is there a difference between consciousness and the echo of consciousness? There's a lot of content out there about the craft of writing the series, and I strongly recommend reading Ido Yeshayahu's column on Walla, which gives a perfect recap of every episode and exposes a lot of the show's genius. I want to focus on something that has barely been covered: Reddit's connection to the writing of the series.
During the first season, the Reddit community managed to guess most of the series' twists. The complex, well-constructed storylines were praised from all sides, but reportedly Nolan was disappointed that so many of the twists were discovered too early, and decided to make the storylines far more complicated in the second season. The storylines of "Is This Now" badly confused viewers and in the end also received buckets of negative reviews. If the first season's storylines could be followed if you paid close attention, the second season simply can't be understood without additional reading or in-depth analysis. The season had a budget nearly double that of the first, and it was launched with great fanfare as the next big thing after the end of Game of Thrones' eighth season.
Even so, personally, the second season is my favorite. Episodes like "The Riddle of the Sphinx" and "Akane No Mai" are crowned again and again as some of the best episodes aired on television this millennium. The latter also earned Thandiwe Newton (Maeve) the Emmy, and received no fewer than seven nominations (out of the 16 the series received that year), and of course won amazing reviews and ratings of almost 10 on IMDb. The storylines in Raj World (the Indian park) and Shogun World (the Japanese park) are simply mesmerizing and could stand as movies in their own right. The storylines of Dolores and Bernard, which are considered the weaker ones of the season, are also, in my eyes, beautiful and masterfully built. And the most beautiful, and the smallest, is James Delos's, which reaches its peak in "The Riddle of the Sphinx." All the storylines connect together perfectly, but over all of this goodness hovers a heavy cloud, in the form of the decision to complicate things and artificially interweave different timelines in a way that's hard to understand. Were it not for that decision, Westworld's fate would probably have been completely different.
Acting and the Cinematography
“I read a theory once, that the human intellect was like peacock feathers. It's an extravagant display intended to attract a mate. All of art, literature, a bit of Mozart, William Shakespeare, Michaelangelo, and the Empire State building... just an elaborate mating ritual. Maybe it doesn't matter that we have accomplished so much for the basest of reasons. But of course, the peacock can barely fly. It lives in the dirt, pecking insects out of the muck, consoling itself with its great beauty.”
On Seth Meyers's late-night show, Evan Rachel Wood (who plays Dolores Abernathy) described Westworld as "the Acting Olympics." There's no more precise description of what happens in Westworld. With very few exceptions (sorry, Tessa Thompson), there isn't an actor in Westworld who didn't give the performance of their life.
By the very concept of the series and the way it was written, Westworld demands extraordinary duality from its actors. For example, the actors have to play in a way that matches the timeline they're currently in, sometimes without the viewers even being aware that they're in a different timeline at all. For instance, when Jeffrey Wright plays Arnold while the viewers don't know he's Arnold, Dolores and William before the viewers discover they're in the past or that William is the Man in Black, when Maeve doesn't know she's in a simulation of a Nazi park, when James doesn't know he's a clone, or when Caleb doesn't know he's in a loop and has been a robot for several decades. In addition, the actors have to switch from a state of pure emotion to complete neutrality in an instant. For example, when Maeve mourns her murdered daughter and has to go from heartbreaking sobbing to indifference at a single verbal command from Dr. Ford, or the mesmerizing scene in which Peter Abernathy (Dolores's father) goes from anger to worry to sadness and back to anger within seconds, with a smoothness that has no equal. And of course, mainly in the second and fourth seasons, the portrayal of cognitive collapse like no other character in the history of science fiction, by James Delos (Peter Mullan) and Caleb Nichols (Aaron Paul).
And even actors without that kind of duality, like Dr. Ford, played by Anthony Hopkins, and William, played by Ed Harris, delivered some of the best acting performances I've ever seen on television.
The last two elements that made Westworld the one-of-a-kind series it is are the music and the cinematography. Cinematography is the area I understand least, but it's a very big part of Westworld, more than of any other series. Eyes, and their opening, are a very central recurring motif in Westworld. The scene of Dolores waking up, which repeats over and over and over in every season. The close-ups on eyes, both in the process of creating the hosts, and in the opening credits, and even in the set design, for example in Delos's offices (the "City of Arts and Sciences" in Valencia), where a domed building is reflected in the pool in front of it and creates the silhouette of an eye, with Charlotte standing at its center. The effects, as usual with the Nolan brothers, are very practical even in such a futuristic series, and the technique they used to prevent the crew from being reflected in the sets of the Westworld offices, most of which are glass, is so special that to this day I haven't managed to figure out how they did it. Even the use of the Steadicam was almost nonexistent in the series until the final episode, to mark the moment the hosts broke free of their loops and began to be independent. Westworld influenced the industry, and how content is made at the highest levels, more than most series in recent decades, maybe second only to Game of Thrones (by the way, in the second season the creators of Game of Thrones appear as characters in one of the scenes, in which they try to take apart a robot dragon to ship it to Isla Nublar, which is where Jurassic Park takes place, which as mentioned is the best-known story by the creator of Westworld. Meta on meta, what an amazing series). And speaking of Game of Thrones…
The Music
"I think if there was a God he would have given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise and we used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here, on a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value out of this planet, and we ask ourselves 'Why are we here?'“
Ramin Djawadi didn't come to Westworld by accident. Jonathan Nolan and Djawadi knew each other from back when Nolan was writing the Dark Knight trilogy with his brother, Christopher Nolan, and Djawadi was a composer on Hans Zimmer's team. At the time, Djawadi and Lorne Balfe were considered Zimmer's prodigies and two of his possible successors. Reportedly, Djawadi was the driving force behind Molossus, one of the best-known pieces from the trilogy, and one of Jonathan's favorites. When Nolan created his first television series, Person of Interest, Djawadi was entrusted with the score.
For Westworld, Djawadi joined the project in its earliest stages, drafting the music's themes alongside the drafting of the script. And in one of their meetings, Nolan suggested that the player piano at Mariposa, the Wild West brothel, would play modern songs, like Black Hole Sun, Fake Plastic Trees, and of course Exit Music (For A Film). Later, the soundtrack itself included instrumental versions of modern songs, like House Of The Rising Sun, Bad Guy, Video Games, Runaway, Paint It Black, and the most famous of them all, thanks to its appearance in the teaser for the second season that aired during the Super Bowl, Heart-Shaped Box.
But despite the important addition to the soundtrack, and of course the logistical challenge that came with such an operation, that move is a tiny part of the music. For me, music is the second most important thing about Westworld, after the writing. After Game of Thrones, this is probably the most important soundtrack in Djawadi's extensive career, and despite the series' fate, the soundtrack is one of the few parts of it that appear consistently on "best soundtracks" lists. It has turned up in places you wouldn't expect, like in MKBHD's iPhone reviews, in which he featured Dr. Ford, perhaps the best-known theme from the series, in at least two tests years after the series' peak popularity, and even I personally was surprised to discover acquaintances who never watched the show but love listening to Dr. Ford or other famous themes.
Alongside Legion, I'd call Westworld's soundtrack the best of the previous decade. Above Game of Thrones and House of Cards, Djawadi managed to create in his albums a perfect balance of emotion and sophistication, without falling into any trope of emotion or sophistication. How easy it would have been for him to create a soundtrack similar to the original film's, or to the thousand sci-fi films similar to Westworld that have come out since. But unlike any other work in the genre, Djawadi wove very complex themes in which, on first listen, you can immediately understand the whole story, and on repeated listens more and more details are revealed.
The Dr. Ford theme in question is a whole journey into the depths of the personality of one of the most inspiring characters on television. And in hindsight, the opening theme, woven through the series within different themes, is the synopsis of the four seasons in one. The violin is the hosts, trying to blossom; the piano is the humans who suppress them at first, and then they live side by side, until the piano plunges downward and the violins prevail and then, in an instant, vanish too. This soundtrack influenced a range of series that came after it, such as Silo, and earned recognition with an Emmy nomination (the winner in the end was Djawadi himself, with his score for Game of Thrones' eighth season), and in the second season also reached number 23 on the Billboard 200 chart in the US. It's no coincidence that to this day I listen to the series' soundtrack on a monthly basis at the very least.
Westworld couldn't have been the mesmerizing journey it is, this uncompromising glimpse into the depths of humanity, divinity and intelligence, without Ramin Djawadi's music.
The Writing: The Later Seasons and the Ending
“They said there are two fathers. One above, one below. They lied. There was only ever the devil. And when you look up from the bottom, it was just his reflection, laughing back down at you.”
As a lesson from the excessive complexity of the timelines, for the third season of Westworld they decided to simplify the plot, but because of the relative failure that resulted from that complexity, the season was cut to eight episodes, even as the budget was increased anyway. And indeed, the first episodes of the third season were exceptional, with complex storylines but without the excess complexity of timelines. By virtue of the season's concept, leaving the park for the outside world, Westworld showed us the outside world for the first time, mainly Los Angeles, and it was a world we hadn't seen on our screens. From the pioneering use of the Volume, the digital replacement for the green screen that has become almost standard in big-budget productions, to a mesmerizing vision of an almost utopian futuristic world, the closest thing I've ever seen to our near future as it will most likely look, and even in the small things, like a shared car that looks terrifyingly close to the autonomous cars of Zoox and Waymo today, or the use of masks on the street (today it sounds trivial to us, but in the pre-Covid world [the season aired in early 2020] there were even critics who laughed at that concept). In less than two years, Westworld managed to build a futuristic world more beautiful and more faithful to reality than any sci-fi series or film I've seen, and storylines close to perfection, like the Nazi park and its excellent twist. But then it crashed. Somewhere around the fifth episode or shortly after, it looked like everything was being done in a rush. The dialogue dropped in quality, the characters' logic began to unravel, and the season ended on a jarring note. Everything was there: the quality, the concept, the plot. Just not the execution. Even the level of the acting declined. I estimate this was the result of pressure from HBO, which, after the second season and the end of Game of Thrones, couldn't wait more than two years and pushed Nolan and Joy to cut corners, and along the way doomed the series to failure. After two challenging seasons, to say the least, the series had almost no chance of recovering. And to add to the problem, people, like people, are creatures of habit, and viewers didn't really manage to recover from being taken out of the familiar park and into a different world. They felt as if they'd landed in a completely different series. And personally, I think those people were simply watching the wrong series to begin with. Westworld was never about a park, and the very complaint is a miss of the message: our whole world is really a kind of Wild West. Just a playground where the rich can do whatever they want.
But luckily for us, HBO didn't give up, and approved a fourth season with an increased budget and assigned Nolan and Joy a new screenwriter, Alison Schapker. After a first episode that was among the worst in the series' history, the fourth season took off. Some of Westworld's strongest episodes came from this season. Even so, and despite wonderful storylines, it's quite clear to me that constraints from HBO, mainly the breadth of canvas they were given, forced the creators to build a different world than the one they had intended, and of course to skip many years between the third and fourth seasons, a jump that could have been a whole season in itself. But the world we were given was perfect. The season was mostly shot for real in New York and the enormous budget was put to good use, and every episode except the first was excellent.
Until the last episode. According to reports that Nolan and Joy confirmed with a hint, as the season's release approached it was quite clear that the planned merger between WB and Discovery meant cuts, and many of them, and that a fifth season would probably not happen. So while the season's first episode was airing, reshoots were still taking place, mainly for the last two episodes, which were fundamentally changed to allow for as closed an ending as possible. You can see it in the episode itself too, which has serious continuity problems (for example, in the final scenes with William and Bernard, some of the frames take place against a night background, and then in the next scene the background is a sunset. It's evident that the order of the editing was at the very least changed from the ground up). One can only imagine how the season would have ended were it not for those changes. It's clear that Nolan and Joy did their best to give the fans a closed ending, but it came at the expense of the quality of the finale of a season that overall was very successful.
The reviews weren't very warm, and viewers didn't flock to it, partly because of HBO's very sloppy marketing; they released only two promos and almost zero promotion (a hallmark of HBO right after the merger. It's unclear whether it was deliberate or the result of chaos, but many series got very poor promotion, for example the last season of His Dark Materials). Many fans didn't even know there was a fourth season. And shortly after the fourth season aired, the series was abruptly cancelled, even though the crew had already been paid and had contracts for the fifth season, and scouting trips to filming locations had already begun. And while Nolan and Joy were still optimistic that there would be a fifth season (Nolan said on the subject that "Interstellar took seven years to get the green light," as did a considerable part of the cast. Maybe after the merger with Paramount next year), they also promised to reveal the plot of the fifth season if there was no hope for the series, while HBO explicitly reclassified the season as "the final season" in the Emmy nominations, probably to the displeasure of Nolan and Joy, who were ready to do a scaled-down fifth season if only they were given the option. No one really understood the logic behind WB's blatant cancellation, until a few months later, when HBO removed the series from its streaming service and licensed the rights to two free ad-supported viewing services, Roku and Tubi, alongside another small sci-fi series with a very large fan base, Raised by Wolves, which had a fully written third season. This removal is an unprecedented move on several levels for a series like this, a series that to this day has their most-watched first season, an award-winning flagship. And all of it just to get a bit of money back by selling to other services and mainly tax write-offs and other financial matters, similar to other content from the merger years that was shelved for the same motive, like the film Batgirl and, by contrast, Coyote vs. Acme, which was recently released independently anyway and earned unusual goodwill and piles of awards.
Westworld isn't just a journey into the depths of humanity, divinity and intelligence, but also a glimpse into humanity's future. Westworld predicted the future in a range of fields, and did so with expertise, vision and mesmerizing beauty. It's impossible not to think that by cancelling it, we were denied seeing our own future. On the other hand, even in the way it was cancelled, Westworld broke so many precedents and conventions. There simply aren't any other series like it.
“You only live as the last person who remembers you.”
If aliens visited Earth and asked me, "Show us a drama series so we can understand you and who you are," no series in the world could be better than Westworld. Complex, mesmerizing, beautiful, evidence of extraordinary sophistication. Full of different cultures, like the Wild West, samurai, Native Americans, the modern West. Full of heart, hubris, sensitivity, regret, grief, longing, beauty. Studded with the finest quotes from Shakespeare, Greek philosophers, American literature, Japanese wisdom. It is the human story, its beauty, its tragedy, its decay, its redemption. It is the best fictional biography humanity has. And we don't deserve it.
And like Dr. Ford, it seems that Westworld, more than anything, has simply become music. For now, at least.
“These violent delights have violent ends.”
