The new series from the creators of ‘Westworld’ is more confusing than compelling, taking us to a strange futuristic future where humans and robots are locked in a race for survival.
It turns out it’s not quite as easy as it seems.
One of the key elements of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 is that the Ministry of Truth lies and omits to inform the citizens, but the lie becomes the truth on the day of a major speech. How that plays out in Westworld — a new HBO series that debuted on May 17 — has not been made quite clear.
As the first episode unfolded, viewers were introduced to the park’s main characters and showed a brief clip of the park’s theme song. We also were introduced to the park’s technology: self-aware and self-aware robots and other, non-robotic robots, and a few humans. But it was not clear what technologies were within the park, or if they were within the park or beyond the park.
“It’s a little bit of both,” says co-creator Lisa Joy, who co-wrote the series with Jonathan Nolan. “You have Westworld, and you have Westworld that’s not quite Westworld. It’s a little bit of both.”
The first episode reveals that guests at the park are guests from the present, some of whom were once human, but have been implanted with a memory chip that gives them superhuman strength. The episode also reveals that one of the park’s robots was once a human being, but was implanted with a memory chip that gives him superhuman speed and strength.
“You begin to realize there is a lot of tension between human and robotic,” Nolan said in an interview. “That there’s a really big divide there, and the human side feels like it’s under siege. But you also start to understand that the robots are not very nice. They take advantage of humans in many ways. They think they’re better than us. They think they’re superhumans. They think they have no limits. They think they have no conscience. They think they can just do anything to us.
“They’ve gone to great lengths to try and dehumanize us, and when we show up at the park, they’ve made it so that we’re not even worthy of being guests.”
The park’s theme song sounds just like something from another, more familiar sci-fi series — it borrows a few phrases from Star Wars. But that theme