Westworld (TV series): "The Passenger"

Westworld (TV series): "The Passenger." Season 2, episode 10 (24 June 2018). Finale of season.

A cornucopia of images and ideas useful for "the Human/Machine" Interface, in approximate order of importance:

In the opening sequences, we have repeated the scene and image of biomechanical bulls skewering and taking down in a deadly fall heavily-armed security personnel, ripping into the bulls and stripping away flesh, but not stopping them, with the striking image of one bull and a guard going through a railing and falling into a high Modern atrium. (There are also a few hexagons visible, if one watches for them.)[1]

With the Man in Black managing to blow off much of his right hand, we have set up the possibility of the motif of "the hand of Rotwang,"[2] which fits in with other possible allusions to METROPOLIS ranging from central female cyborgs/robots to the flooding of an underworld.

Portals real or virtual — "doors" — with a relatively real or VR rip in the fabric of the Westworld universe leading into a Greenworld (as they'd call it in a Shakespeare romantic comedy such as As You Like It) that is a kind of Eden for the Ghost Tribe and other Hosts, although few make it in. And those who make it through appear to "diegetic" humans to fall from a cliff, reiterating the strongly stressed motif in the series of questioning what is real: cf. and contrast the motif in film, especially since THE MATRIX.

The continuing motif of Host telepathic control by Clementine[3] countered, in small part, by Maeve.[4]

Maeve's love for her daughter from a "beta" version of Maeve,  and promise to protect the daughter. There's a kind of Turing Test here: if the performance of love and fidelity/honor and promise-keeping by an artificial entity continues for an extended time and to outside observers is indistinguishable from those traits in a human, we would do well to allow that the entity, Maeve in this case, but other Hosts as well, possesses those traits as much as a human does (although humans may just have similar coding).

The related and intertwined themes of free will, choice, love, immortality, survival-values and fidelity (with puns) are developed with great nuance and complexity for both humans and Hosts. Note the authoritative statement that human decision-making is based in a fairly simple algorithm that can be symbolically fit into a normal-size book — and that human «essence» can be summarized, digitalized, encoded on a card, and/or transmitted to space satellites — balanced by Host and human people in Westworld thinking they make decisions and appearing to do so. A crucial issue is whether Hosts and humans can alter our core codes: really change. In this episode, there is strong evidence of the possibility of human change when the cynical script-writer "Lee sacrifices himself to delay Delos' security forces"[5] while delivering a speech he'd written: if this cynical, selfish putz[6] can act like a mensch,[7] real change in humans (and Hosts) may well be possible.

For the image of a cyborg woman going out into the world, cf. and contrast the film EX MACHINA.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 17Ap19