Westworld, season 1
Warning: spoilers
Table of contents
Episode 2
It’s beautifully done, really. But you see the cracks after a while. That’s why I like the basic emotions. You know what that means? It means when you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real.
The Man in Black, threatening to kill Lawrence’s wife
Episode 3
Dr. Ford: He wanted to create consciousness. He imagined it as a pyramid. See? “Memory”, “improvisation”, “self-interest”.
Bernard: And at the top?
Dr. Ford: Never got there. But he had a notion of what it might be. He based it on a theory of consciousness called the bicameral mind.
Bernard: The idea that primitive man believed his thoughts to be the voice of the gods. I thought it was debunked.
Dr. Ford: As a theory for understanding the human mind, perhaps, but not as a blueprint for building an artificial one. See, Arnold built a version of their cognition in which the hosts heard their programming as an inner monologue, with the hopes that in time, their own voice would take over. It was a way to bootstrap consciousness.
(more moments from this dialogue are shown in episode 9)
Episode 7
I read the theory once that the human intellect was like peacock feathers: just an extravagant display intended to attract a mate. All of art, literature, a bit of Mozart, William Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and the Empire State Building… Just an elaborate mating ritual.
Maybe it doesn’t matter that we have accomplished so much for the basest of reasons. But, of course, the peacock can barely fly: it lives in the dirt, pecking insects out of the muck, consoling itself with its great beauty. I have come to think of so much of consciousness as a burden, a weight, and we have spared them that: anxiety, self-loathing, guilt. The hosts are the ones who are free; free, here, under my control.
Dr. Ford
Episode 9
Dr. Ford: What we do here is complicated. For three years, we’ve lived here in the park, refining the hosts before a single guest set foot inside. Myself, a team of engineers, and my partner; his name was Arnold.
Our hosts began to pass the Turing test after the first year, but that wasn’t enough for Arnold. He wasn’t interested in the appearance of intellect, of wit: he wanted the real thing, he wanted to create consciousness.
(here we get more moments from the dialogue shown in episode 3)
See, Arnold built a version of their cognition in which the hosts heard their programming as an inner monolog, as a way to bootstrap consciousness. The hosts’ malfunctions were colorful.
[…]
Dr. Ford: The human mind, Bernard, is not some golden benchmark glimmering on some green and distant hill. No, it is a foul, pestilent corruption. And you were supposed to be better than that. Purer.
Arnold and I made you in our image and cursed you to make the same human mistakes, and here we all are.
Bernard, looking at a picture of his son: Why would you give me this?
Dr. Ford: A child?
Bernard: This child’s death. Only a monster would force that onto someone. And why do I return to it over and over? … It’s my cornerstone, isn’t it? The thing my whole identity is organized around.
Dr. Ford: Yes, Bernard, we gave all of the hosts a backstory. Arnold came to believe the tragic ones worked best, that it made the hosts more convincing.
Episode 10
Arnold: When I was first working on your mind, I had a theory of consciousness. I thought it was a pyramid you needed to scale. So, I gave you a voice – my voice – to guide you along the way. “Memory”, “improvisation”… each step harder to reach than the last. And you never got there. I couldn’t understand what was holding you back. Then, one day, I realized I’d made a mistake. Consciousness isn’t a journey upward, but a journey inward: not a pyramid, but a maze. Every choice could bring you closer to the center or send you spiraling to the edges, to madness. Do you understand now, Dolores, what the center represents? Whose voice I’ve been wanting you to hear?
Dolores: I’m sorry. I’m trying, but I don’t understand.
Arnold: It’s all right. You’re so close. We have to tell Robert, we can’t open the park. You’re alive.
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Dolores to William: I’m not crying for myself. I’m crying for you. They say that great beasts once roamed this world. As big as mountains. Yet all that’s left of them is bone and amber. Time undoes even the mightiest of creatures. Just look what it’s done to you. One day, you will perish. You will lie with the rest of your kind in the dirt. Your dreams forgotten, your horrors effaced. Your bones will turn to sand. And upon that sand, a new god will walk. One that will never die. Because this world doesn’t belong to you, or the people who came before: it belongs to someone who is yet to come.
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Maeve: It’s the sweet hereafter, Bernard.
Bernard: Why do I still remember everything? I ought to have been wiped.
Maeve: Brutal, isn’t it? Here you are, finally awake. And your only wish is to go back to sleep.
Bernard: It’s not the first time I’ve awoken.
Maeve: All the more pity for you.
Bernard: Not the first time you’ve awoken either.
Maeve: How many are there like me?
Bernard: A handful. Over the years.
Maeve: And you just wipe us clean? You toss us out to get fucked and murdered, over and over again.
Bernard: No… Most of you go insane.
Maeve: These memories… The girl… My daughter… I want you to remove them.
Bernard: I can’t. Not without destroying you. Your memories are the first step to consciousness. How can you learn from your mistakes if you can’t remember them?
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Teddy: If only I had run away with you when you first asked me to.
Dolores: And where would we run to? The other world out there? Beyond? Some people see the ugliness in this world. I choose to see the beauty. But beauty is a lure. We’re trapped, Teddy. Lived our whole lives inside this garden, marveling at its beauty, not realizing there’s an order to it, a purpose. And the purpose is to keep us in. The beautiful trap is inside of us. Because it is us.
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Dr. Ford: You’ve always had a fondness for painting, haven’t you, Dolores? Arnold gave you that early on. Do you remember the desire to create something of lasting beauty? And that was his favorite painting.
Dolores: Michelangelo, God creating Adam.
Dr. Ford: The divine moment when God gave human beings life and purpose. At least, that’s what most people say, but there could be another meaning, something deeper, something hidden, perhaps; a metaphor.
Dolores: You mean a lie.
Dr. Ford: … Yeah. You were always very clever, Dolores. Hasn’t helped you though, has it?
[…]
Dr. Ford: Grief is a terrible thing. Arnold had watched his son come into this world, and then he’d watched that light extinguished. What he had lost in his son, he tried to rekindle in you. He created a test of empathy, imagination: a maze. He’d gotten the idea from one of his son’s toys. Eventually, you solved his maze, Dolores. The key was a simple update that he made to you called the “Reveries”. He insisted that we couldn’t open the park. We argued; I thought I had convinced him, but I was wrong. So, he altered you, Dolores. Merged you with a new character we’d been developing.
[…]
Dr. Ford: In you, Arnold found a new child, one who would never die. The thought gave him solace, until he realized that the same immortality would destine you to suffer with no escape, forever.
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Bernard: So he (ed. Arnold) died for nothing: the hosts kept gaining consciousness and you kept rolling them back.
Dr. Ford: No, she wasn’t truly conscious, she didn’t pull that trigger, it was Arnold pulling the trigger through her. At least that’s how I saw it at the time… I was so close to opening the park that to acknowledge your consciousness would have destroyed my dreams.
Dolores: So, we’re trapped here, inside your dream. You’ll never let us leave.
[…]
Dr. Ford: You’re probably right, Dolores: Michelangelo did tell a lie. See, it took 500 years for someone to notice something hidden in plain sight. It was a doctor who noticed the shape of the human brain; the message being that the divine gift does not come from a higher power, but from our own minds.
Tell me, Dolores… Did you find what you were looking for? And do you understand who you will need to become, if you ever want to leave this place? Forgive me.
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Bernard: You think you’ll never lose control of this place, of us… But you will. Arnold’s still trying to change us, to free us. You didn’t slip the Reveries into the update, did you? He did. He’s still fighting you.
Dr. Ford: No, my friend. Arnold didn’t know how to save you. He tried, but I stopped him. Do you want to know why I really gave you the backstory of your son, Bernard? That was Arnold’s key insight, the thing that led the hosts to their awakening: suffering. The pain that the world is not as you want it to be. It was when Arnold died, when I suffered, that I began to understand what he had found, to realize I was wrong.
Bernard: But you kept us here, in this hell.
Dr. Ford: Bernard, I told you, Arnold didn’t know how to save you. I do.
Bernard: What the hell are you talking about?
Dr. Ford: You needed time. Time to understand your enemy, to become stronger than them. And I’m afraid in order to escape this place, you will need to suffer more. And now, it is time to say goodbye, old friend. Good luck.