Westworld

Its very difficult to get through. I wouldn't watch it again.

Many people felt the same and quit watching and restarted S2 a few times during the initial broadcast. It's just not a great hour of TV at times, about mid-way through it just becomes a chore to get through. The ending was "passable" enough to watch, but those couple episodes leading to it including the Samurai stuff were a big stomp to the balls. Talk about meaningless.

First half of S2 was playing odds and evens between awful and good episodes. Then they took a hard turn and wandered off into the desert, thought up twists the day of filming, and stuff happened.

pharmakos said:

I liked the samurai episode tho, but I had read about it before the season started and was prepared for it. I can see how it would have been disappointing if you kept hoping for some Man in Black the whole time.

Click to expand...

Samurai episode would've been okay had it actually tied into the show somehow. But in the end the entire thing was 100% pointless. It was just the producers who wanted to do some samurai shit.

It's similar to Kiksuya. It was probably my favorite episode of the entire show. But, it had very little that tied it into the big picture (more than the samurai one though). And that made it just feel like wasted time.

The whole season was less about telling a cohesive story and more about the people involved in the show jerking themselves off.

What? That episode had a ton to do with the big picture. We found out who the maze is for.

The only good episode of season 2 was the one when Ed Harris went Clint Eastwood on all the bad guys in the town. That may have been the best episode of the entire series. But man, after that episode, it was a slog. The samurai episode felt like it was just shoehorned into the story. It didn't fit at all. In all honesty, between turning Dolores into a psychopath, and the whole "do the hosts have independent thought or not?" the show was a snooze fest. By the end, the writing was so bad, I was expecting Jurassic Park to make an appearance. If they make a season 3, I won't be watching.

I was not as critical of the season as most people, but when the final episode had a Matrix Architect style scene where they active refused to explain anything, and then a portal to the sky opened, I got pretty down on the season.

I didn't mind the Samurai World stuff as it was just a filler world building that was fun to watch, and the Akecheta story was a nice contained episode. Too many shows are 10-13 hour movies, and forget to make an actual episode of TV with a beginning, middle, and end. See every Netflix Marvel show.

velk said:

Seems like it shouldn't have any impact, that set was pretty much only used for flashbacks anyway, and they are presumably out of the park for next season.

Click to expand...

i believe they planned to shoot on the set next March or May.

S2 was marred by several flaws. First let me preface everything by saying there were a couple of questions by the end that, although they had acceptable answers if you thought about it, seemed like plot holes on the surface. It is fine when the 'bigger picture' of something is left ambiguous but usually not its minor details. In Westworld's case it felt needlessly messy.

Too much time jumping and far too many twists. Season one had two or three twists & timelines shaping its overall effect. The second season suffers from, "Yo you like timelines? Fuuuck yeah son here's a million of 'em!" More about unpredictability and less about storytelling, every episode had some kind of twist. That went against the first season.

The eighth episode was really good television. So was the ninth. The character and story developments were not half bad. They were consistent with where it ought to go but it was... I dunno. Bland. Examples are Lee Sizemore, Clementine, season one had a rhythm built for the end. S2 did not deliver the same expectation. The dialogue at times, including jokes and philosophical shit, was not as interesting.

I just thought this show suffered the same fate as True Detective. "Hey, I have this really awesome idea for one season of a show. Fuck, you want another season by next year? I guess I'll just shit something out and throw it at the wall."

etchazz said:

I just thought this show suffered the same fate as True Detective. "Hey, I have this really awesome idea for one season of a show. Fuck, you want another season by next year? I guess I'll just shit something out and throw it at the wall."

Click to expand...

I don't know how you come to that conclusion, when the season ends with a huge cliffhanger and robot uprising. It would be like watching the end of season 1 GoT and thinking "That was a good season of television, but they clearly only had enough ideas for one season."

yeah, S2 was disapointing after S1.

As individual episodes they had a few of them that were good. The samurai episode and the indian episode... the ones that felt like a complete waste of time were their best -episodes- I thought. As a season, it was relentlessly bad. There was no coherent story at all, and they spent too much time trying to pretend like there was. And the way they ended it was very bad. They intentionally have stepped DOWN an entire tier... S3, if they ever make it, is a good cop bad cop procedural that belongs on network television?

I mean.. th' fuck?

It was the mix that was the problem. If they'd done EVERY episode like the few that were "waste of time" episodes then you could look at the season as a whole and go "oh, they watched black mirror!". If they'd stuck to season 1 and had a specific plot in mind that they arrive at through indirect story telling, it would have been better. I doubt it would have been as good as S1. You can only pull that time warp twist once. And part of the problem that S2 was bad is that they tried very hard to pull it twice. It was a gimmick, not a foundational aspect of the story. Mixing the two obviously didn't work, and S3 will be simplistic action/thriller garbage if it's anything.

Rengak said:

I don't know how you come to that conclusion, when the season ends with a huge cliffhanger and robot uprising. It would be like watching the end of season 1 GoT and thinking "That was a good season of television, but they clearly only had enough ideas for one season."

Click to expand...

Oh, it only takes lots of ideas to make a show? Sweet, guys, we're all gonna be HBO showrunners!

Brando said:

Granted I think a lot of this ties into your own interpretation of motives but I came away from the episode with Ford making it clear he had been following Akecheta for a long time and based on what he had become was somewhat of the genesis for what Ford planned to do. The Samurai episode like much of S2 was indeed a complete waste of fucking time but I have to respectfully disagree on this one.

Click to expand...

It would have been interesting to have that story interspersed throughout more of the season, or even season 1, if that was part of the story all along and such an important part of the puzzle. Instead, it felt like a bad patch job hoping to get things to make sense. I remember even my girlfriend who is able to empathize with The Walking Dead characters even commented that they seemed to be forcing too much in too quickly trying to get you to care about characters and it just didn't work, nor did it feel like a natural part of the story or even the style of the show. If that was part of the story, it should have felt like it was always part of the story. But again, to me it's clear the first season was the original story and then they had to try to extend it out, and on short notice, and too many flaws and seams showed through.

Rengak said:

I don't know how you come to that conclusion, when the season ends with a huge cliffhanger and robot uprising. It would be like watching the end of season 1 GoT and thinking "That was a good season of television, but they clearly only had enough ideas for one season."

Click to expand...

So because season 1 ended with a cliffhanger, you believe they had all of season 2 already planned and written? God damn you're dumb. GOT had several more novels to draw from to make the other seasons. There was clearly no thought beyond season 1 of Westworld for what they wanted to have happen, and if season 2 was their best idea, I put it up there with the new Star Wars movies in terms of shittiness.