Westworld: Answering 9 Burning Questions from That Puzzling Finale. This post contains frank discussion of Season 1, Episode 1. Westworld, titled “The Bicameral Mind.” If you’re not all caught up on the twists within twists, now is the time to leave! Well, that was a fascinating hour and a half of television.
It's already been a good year for horror. Here's everything else that will send a chill up your spine in 2016. Welcome to HBO Shop, official store for HBO! Shop merchandise, apparel, accessories & DVDs from popular HBO Series like Game Of Thrones or Boardwalk Empire. This post contains frank discussion of Season 1, Episode 10 of Westworld, titled “The Bicameral Mind.” If you’re not all caught up on the twists within twists.
The biggest narrative reversal of the night was one nobody predicted: Ford’s redemption. I’d have to re- watch the season to see if I buy this as Ford’s plan all along. Protesting too much? An elaborate cover?) But whether Ford’s arc changed midway through the season thanks to re- writes or not, Hopkins delivered the character’s good- bye with effortless panache.
Home Box Office (HBO) is an American premium cable and satellite television network that is owned by Time Warner through its respective flagship company Home Box. The official website for HBO Movies, featuring videos, images, synopsis information, and schedules. HBO's official website contains schedule information, original video content, episode guides, polls, bulletin boards, and more! Metacritic's Best New TV Show of 2016. Few shows have the confidence to be laugh-out-loud funny, moodily dark, wacky and surreal, and unflinchingly honest—all. We rank the highest-scoring TV one-offs of 2016, including limited series, TV movies, and TV specials. The Home Box Office offers some of the world's best movies before anyone else. Movies are what made HBO famous and help fill the gap in between amazing.
It was Hopkins, in the end, who was asked to do much of the expositional lifting in “The Bicameral Mind,” and I can think of no one better. Speaking with Thrillist last month, Evan Rachel Wood described Westworld’s first season as “an amazing prequel and a good setup for the actual show.” That means what we watched was essentially prologue for a series that will, in theory, be about sentient robots gleefully slaughtering, or gently protecting, humanity in the various parks owned by Delos. Will they make their way out into the wider world? But for now, let’s break down what actually happened in the confines of the park and endeavor to tie up as many dangling threads as possible.
What Did Arnold Want?: To understand what Ford wanted, it’s first important to make sure we completely get what his long- lost partner, Arnold Weber, wanted. It may seem clear enough, but it’s worth going over. Before the park opened, Arnold’s work was driven by his own personal tragedy—the loss of a son—which left him understandably jaded about the human condition. Ford explained the difference between the two Westworld founders back in Episode 4: In the beginning, I imagined things would be perfectly balanced. Even. had a bet with my partner, Arnold, to that effect. We made a hundred.
Of course, almost no one took us up on them. I. lost the bet. Arnold always held a somewhat dim view of people. He. preferred the hosts. He begged me not to let you people in, the. Delos. This speech is admittedly a little confusing. Who was refusing to take Arnold and Ford up on their hundreds of hopeful story lines, if Arnold had already died before the park opened? Test guests? Anyway, the point is that Arnold started to view the hosts as potentially more evolved versions of humans.
His “maze” game (more on that later) was constructed to prove that hosts had true consciousness and were alive. If they were alive, Arnold didn’t want to doom them to unending enslavement in the park. He got very close to waking Dolores up, but not close enough to convince Ford that opening the park was folly. So he programmed Dolores to slaughter all her fellow hosts, then kill him.
In the style of The Manchurian Candidate, he used music—Debussy’s “Reveries”—and a phrase—“These violent delights have violent ends”—to put Dolores into assassin mode. This wasn’t an act of free will or consciousness; this was programming.
In other words, as Dolores put it several episodes ago, Arnold wanted her help to “destroy this place.” He figured if he committed suicide via host, Ford would be shocked into seeing things from his point of view. But Arnold underestimated his partner’s God complex, and Ford opened the park despite the death of his best friend. What Did the Man in Black Want?: Looks like the Man in Black wasn’t quite the romantic I hoped he’d be. Fully twisted by his heartbreaking experience with Dolores, the modern- day version of William is just looking for “real stakes,” and a way to change the “game” so the hosts can fight back. The Man in Black may not have gotten the girl—but, lucky him, by the end of the episode, he gets his other wish.
What Did Ford Want?: What does Dr. The same thing (almost) Arnold wanted all those years ago. Since the park opened, Ford has come around to Arnold’s life philosophy. Three decades of watching guests like Logan and William blaze a bloody trail through Westworld would be enough to kill anyone’s taste for humanity, right? Ford told Bernard back at the start of the season: We’ve managed to slip evolution’s leash now, haven’t we?
We can cure. any disease, keep the weakest of us alive, and perhaps one fine day we. Lazurus from his cave. Do. you know what that means? It means we’re done.
That this is as good as. He gives a similar speech to the board in the finale. Ford, in other words, is so over humans. Realizing his mistake, he decides to finish what Arnold started and fully wake hosts like Dolores up. I thought all along that Ford wanted to maintain the status quo.
That his clashes with the board were because he wanted them out and free rein to play God in his kingdom. That’s certainly what he implied to Theresa before her killed her in Episode 6. But, as it turns out, it was the board’s (or Charlotte’s) wish to “simplify” the hosts that turned them into Ford’s adversaries. Thirty years ago, it was Ford who wanted to strip the hosts of any semblance of advance consciousness. To “roll” them “back,” as Arnold puts it, and have them under his control. This time, it’s Charlotte looking to keep the robots under her thumb. But Ford, now in the Arnold position, wants to help protect his creations.
To free them. So he repeats his partner’s plan. First, he puts Dolores on a path. He wanted me to play,” Dolores tells the Man in Black. She could have been talking about Ford or Arnold here. Ford re- instated the reveries, using Arnold’s old coding. The new narrative was Ford’s suicide. Only this time, it was Dolores’s choice to pull the trigger on her maker.
Ford intentionally didn’t use the trigger phrase. Though some Westworld fans may choose to argue over this during the long wait until Season 2, for the record, I absolutely believe Ford is dead. That was not a robot replicant of Ford on the stage. That was the man himself, sacrificing his own life—just like his partner did—to forge a path for a new race of intelligent life: the hosts. He’s the Sean Bean of Season 1, and we’ll miss him.
And now it makes sense why Dolores was on such a brutal loop of repeated misery for three decades. It wasn’t just a punishment for killing Arnold and falling in love with William. As Ford tells Bernard, suffering is the key to waking the hosts up. Both Dolores and Bernard have been enduring pain for a long time now in the park. Whether it’s painful memories of a dead child or the harsher loop of getting repeatedly assaulted and murdered, these two were primed to wake up. Enough suffering should propel Dolores to consciousness, and all it took was one major shock to get her there.
What Is the Maze? Whether or not this was always the show’s plan (the maze imprint on Kissy’s scalp in the pilot still makes no sense to me), in the finale, we learned that the maze is a thought experiment by Arnold to introduce consciousness to a. Kickstarted by the “reveries,” the maze program uses lingering memory in a host to create humanity. Memories (especially painful ones) are the crucial first step.
A nice echo of Jonah Nolan’s first major contribution to pop culture: Memento. Arnold, it seems, introduced the reveries in order to get Dolores and other hosts to remember their past traumas. Remembering the ways they’ve been abused helped the hosts evolve, and their past suffering was the key to their maturation. And the last step—the top of the pyramid and the center of the maze—is the bicameral mind. It means hearing the external voice of Arnold (or his code) as your own inner voice—not a “God.” Dolores never quite got to the bicameral- mind stage with Arnold, but Ford got her there after working long and hard to guide her to the center of the maze. But how? And the Bicameral Mind?: We already knew suffering and trauma were key to waking up a host’s consciousness. We saw that happen with both Maeve, when she lost her daughter, and Bernard, when he realized he had been forced to kill Theresa.
But after years of violence and sexual assault, the final triggering trauma for Dolores was a matter of the heart. Ford introduced the reveries at the start of this season and, throughout, he has been moving chess pieces on the board in order to get Dolores to track her 3. William. He distracted her watchdog, Teddy, so Dolores could wander off her loop. He had Bernard bury her old gun.
He dressed her up in the striped shirt and pants she wore during her encounter with William, during which, this episode indicates, she actually did fall in love with the visiting white- hatted guest. All along, I thought Dolores was a weapon Ford was sending to destroy the Man in Black. But the truth is quite the opposite.
He was a key himself, one Ford was sending to wake Dolores up. Her journey this season got her primed to remember William as the romantic hero of her own narrative. Confronting the cold reality that William was “just like everyone else” is what rudely awakened Dolores to the reality and frailty of humans. In a neat bit of narrative reflection, harsh truths about her made William the man he is today, and harsh truths about him finally woke Dolores up for good. Once she understood William’s true nature, Dolores moved quickly to the next phase: improvisation.
We see her defy her programming and give the Man in Black the kicking he deserves. And with a few more painful, Arnold- centric trips down memory lane, courtesy of Ford, we see Dolores finally achieve bicameral- mind nirvana in the scene where she’s speaking to “herself.” She no longer hears Arnold or Ford guiding her.
This time, Dolores is running the show. What’s Maeve Got to Do with It?
While Ford is obviously behind Dolores’s awakening, some fans are a little hazier on whether he was the one pulling the strings on Maeve. I’d argue yes. I know it’s Arnold’s name on all that coding, but I believe it was actually Ford tinkering with the system.
A Complete Guide to the Horror Movies Still to Come in 2. Thanks to the success of The Conjuring 2, The Purge: Election Year, Don’t Breathe, Lights Out, and even The Shallows, the horror genre has been a rare bright spot in a bleak year for Hollywood — and we’ve still got four more months to go. The frightful spread before us features everything from mad gore to 1. So whether it’s art- house “tone poems” or an exorcism movie from the director of San Andreas you crave, we’ve compiled a complete preview of all the horror movies yet to come this year. September 2. Yoga Hosers: Two years ago, Kevin Smith initiated his True North Trilogy with the genre- mashing freak feast Tusk, in which terrible things were done to both men and the image of the proud walrus. Now, Smith’s long- awaited assault on bratwurst, Nazis, and Canadian teens is finally getting a wide release. The director’s daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, stars alongside Lily- Rose Depp (daughter of Johnny) as .
This one likely won’t make any new fans for Smith, but the die- hard fans should have a lot of fun. Antibirth: Body horror is on full display with Antibirth, the debut feature film from Danny Perez that boasts a deeply quirky pair of indie- film stars in Natasha Lyonne and Chlo. This one is for the purely weird set: Lyonne and Sevigny play hard- partying friends with minimal future prospects, and after a particularly wild night out, Lyonne’s character wakes up with no memory of the night before and a very unexpected pregnancy, one that starts to advance at a terrifying rate. Her body transforms in gruesome ways, and viewers aren’t spared any of the seeping fluids as she turns into a vessel for some sort of supernatural spawn.
It’s got Lyonne’s signature dry humor and early Cronenberg- style visual grotesqueries. If you’re one of those people that just likes “think- y horror,” eh, maybe not the one for you. September 9. Demon: The movie, which we mentioned as one of our most- anticipated thrillers of 2. Toronto International Film Festival last year, but its premiere was tainted by tragedy after director Marcin Wrona was found dead of an apparent suicide in his hotel room. The young Polish director left behind a brief but well- regarded filmography, and Demon was no exception. It tells the story of a couple getting married in rural Poland, and on the night before the wedding, the groom disturbs some remains on his property, which results in a restless spirit latching onto him as a human host. As you can imagine, the festivities start to get pretty weird after demonic possession becomes an unexpected entry on the matrimonial schedule.
Demon should be a welcome tonal shift from the rest of the American fare on this list. September 1. 6Blair Witch: The legend returns.
The Blair Witch Project introduced the world to shaky- cam found- footage horror all the way back in 1. Paranormal Activity and V/H/S have taken tiny budgets and made big money for movie studios. There were rumors last year that a new Blair Witch movie was in the works, but nothing was confirmed until Lionsgate showed up at Comic- Con in July with a whole movie in hand — which it screened for fans who thought they were going to see a film called The Woods. The new movie, simply titled Blair Witch, picks up right where the first one left off, with the brother of one of the original characters setting out into the doomed woods to find out what happened to his sister. There was that movie Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 that came out in 2.
Lionsgate is surely hoping their studio horror picture can emulate the success of recent hits Don’t Breathe and Lights Out. September 3. 0The Blackcoat’s Daughter (originally titled February): Bloody Disgusting called this movie, which stars Kiernan Shipka and Lucy Boynton in a quiet little boarding- school possession- horror film, a “Satanic masterpiece.” Shipka and Boynton play Kat and Rose, a pair of girls whose parents have mysteriously failed to pick them up from school for winter break. Emma Roberts appears as Joan, whose story line seems separate from the two other girls’, but who resolves to travel to the boarding school for mysterious reasons and possibly starts to affect terrifying visions in Kat as she draws closer. Osgood Perkins, son of Psycho actor Anthony Perkins, wrote and directed the movie, and its icy- winter backdrop should properly usher in the autumn chill. October 7. Under the Shadow: The final entry from our must- see indie- horror list, Under the Shadow is a supremely tense horror film from Iranian director Babak Anvari. It’s about a woman trapped with her daughter in an apartment in Tehran as the Iran- Iraq War starts to encroach on their doorstep. Her husband has been called to the front and most of the city is evacuated due to the shelling, but Shideh (Narges Rashidi) and her little girl are trapped in their home by what could be a malevolent djinn — or could be a bout of paranoia that is breaking them both down into a state of madness.
The fun comes in figuring out which. Anvari was adamant about writing a script in Farsi to stay true to the cultural experience and to properly explore the mythological terror of djinn in Iranian lore. The comparisons to The Babadook from 2. The Greasy Strangler: The term horror encapsulates a broad definition of films. There’s horror comedy, psychological horror, shock horror — sometimes movies even fall into the horror folder not because they scare you, but because they just make you feel terrible things.
The Greasy Strangler is one of those kinds of horror movies. It’s gory and gratuitous and offensive enough to be kicked out of every other genre, and because it makes you go “Oh my God, gross!” it finds a home in the open, welcoming arms of horror. Strangler traffics in the absurd more than anything else. If you like excess everything and are a moviegoer who simply hates the sterility of big- budget superhero movies, the bear- poking “because we can” approach of director Jim Hosking’s feature- film debut should make you feel like you’ve sufficiently thumbed your nose at the Man for an evening. It could also make you throw up. Friend Request: This one likely won’t satisfy beyond cheap thrills, but we’re talking about horror here, and that means sometimes you take the budget movie with the unknown cast because that’s what’s around.
Friend Request is another entry in the subgenre of Internet Horror; it looks very similar to the movie Unfriended from 2. In that movie, a girl named Laura Barnes commits suicide after a humiliating video is shared of her online, and then her angry spirit returns to terrorize the classmates who betrayed her by putting it up.
In this movie, a girl named Marina Mills streams a video of her own suicide online after being rebuffed by a classmate (named Laura) on social media. Then the angry spirit of Mills returns to take away everything that Laura loves. The most recognizable face belongs to Connor Paolo, who had recurring roles in Gossip Girl and Revenge, but beyond that, it’s a slate of newcomers cutting their teeth in an off- brand horror movie, which is a noble Hollywood tradition.
October 1. 4Jack Goes Home: Jack Goes Home looks like one of those indie- ensemble- horror movies that’s either really going to work out and feel surprising and fresh, or it’s going to get all convoluted and fall flat. Jack is a young guy played by Rory Culkin who just found out his dad is dead and is going back home to live with his mother and put the pieces back together.
When he gets there, he discovers a tape recorder with a message inside from his dad instructing him to go to the attic, and his dad’s voice is so filled with terror there’s just no way Jack should ever go in the attic to find out what’s up there. But he goes anyway, and that’s when things start to get real creepy for Jack and his suspicious mom, played by Lin Shaye. The movie was written and directed by Thomas Dekker (John Connor from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) and co- stars Daveigh Chase, Nikki Reed, Britt Robertson, and Natasha Lyonne, who is having an incredibly productive year being in movies with her friends. October 2. 13. 1: It’s the latest from Rob Zombie, everyone, so exercise the proper judgment. The movie, of course, stars Zombie’s wife, Sheri Moon, and even- more of course, it’s about five carnival workers who are “kidnapped and held hostage in an abandoned, Hell- like compound where they are forced to participate in a violent game, the goal of which is to survive twelve hours against a gang of sadistic clowns.” So, it’s a nightmare grab bag from the man who brought you House of 1. Corpses, the death- metal equivalent of a scary movie.
If you’re a horror fan, you know what you’re getting with a Rob Zombie movie, and if you’re not a horror fan, this will likely hold no appeal for you. It promises to be a visual feast, and bless Zombie for continuing to make the art that speaks to him. Ouija: Origin of Evil: The first Ouija movie from 2. So now we have a sequel. This one is a little shinier than the first, adding the element of being a period piece set back in 1. Parker Brothers and exploded into the mainstream.
For Origin of Evil, a widowed mother and her two daughters run a shady s. Writer and director Mike Flanagan, who has two more horror movies out this year, Hush and Before I Wake, has suggested he’s going for quantity over quality. But he did also direct the very spooky Oculus from 2. So even if Origin of Evil isn’t appointment horror, Mike Flanagan still shouldn’t be counted out. Besides, there should be enough jump- scares to earn the price of the ticket.
October 2. 6Rings: Threequels are tough to pull off, especially when they come 1. The first Ring was a very respectable take on the Japanese movie Ringu and was genuinely scary. But that original little creepy girl, Samara? She was played by Daveigh Chase, who you can see as a grown- up now in Jack Goes Home, and Naomi Watts has moved on to other scares as well (see below).