Westworld (TV series): "Les Écorchés"

DRAFT (WORKING, IN PROGRESS)

Westworld (TV series): "Les Écorchés".[1] Season 2, episode 7 (3 June 2018).[2]

Important episode, usefully summarized, correctly, and giving correct quotations on The Verge.[3]

Bernard’s [i.e. Bernard Lowe][4]half of that story begins inside the simulation world of The Cradle, right when he sees [Robert] Ford[5] again for the first time. Bernard quickly puts the pieces together — Ford had created a copy of his own consciousness, and tasked Bernard with uploading it to the Cradle — but Bernard’s biggest eye-opener is about the park itself. Westworld hasn’t just been a theme park, he realizes; it’s been an experiment and observation chamber, allowing Delos, Inc. to gather all the data it needs to duplicate the consciousness of its various guests. Data gathering in the name of marketing may have been the starting point that William (Jimmi Simpson) initially suggested, but the project has become something much more sinister. “The humans are playing at resurrection. They want to live forever,” Ford tells his protege. “They don’t want you to become them. They want to become you.”

The central — but not only — meaning of "fidelity" in the previous episode, "Phase Space" is specified, in the words of the Verge plot summary,

Dolores hung out with the Bernard consciousness inside The Cradle for years, Ford explains, serving as Bernard’s own personal Turing test. Once she couldn’t tell the difference between Bernard Lowe and Arnold Weber, Ford knew he was ready for the real world. ¶ The revelation clarifies that the letterboxed opening shot of the season, in which Dolores appeared to be talking to Arnold, was actually her conducting a fidelity test on Bernard inside The Cradle’s virtual world. But Ford admits that Bernard, like all hosts, is an idealized and romanticized representation of humanity — “more just, more noble” — and when put up against the cruelty of real people, will almost always be destroyed. ¶ “Unless we open the Door,” Ford says.

The dialogs between Bernard and the cyberspace-preserved consciousness of Ford help determine the field of the debate of the consciousness and free will of the Hosts, and/but also of humans, and issues of immortality and social bonds as opposed to freedom and/or limiting freedom. Some useful quotations:

RDE, Initial Compiler, 5/6Ap19