Just finished the series, what a mess
What a messy journey and maybe even messier ending. The more episodes I watch the less compelled I felt to finish the series but was curious enough to see how they would wrap it up to watch until the end.
Each season has a somewhat of a core theme and there's a lot of subtext throughout all of them (at times more subtle than others, will get into that later). I think all of them approach very interesting ideas/themes, the huge difference is in the execution.
Season 1 being centered around the idea of what defines consciousness, free will and raises some questions about humanity as a concept, that might need to evolve (which might become a discussion relevant in the real world, considering the direction we're heading). For me, this is the only season that handles its core theme with the nuance a matter with this complexity requires and delivers its message with subtilty and poise.
Season 2 imo is about identity, whether you're more than the sum of your memories and whether our consciousness is something that can be replicated and transferred. It was alright I think, started leaning more into pointless action sequences and visual spectacle than coherent meaningful storytelling, but there was still somewhat of a cohesive narrative that tied in with the questions raised in season 1.
Season 3 clumsily tackled determinism vs free will, with a super AI computer predicting/deciding peoples' life paths and I think calling back to the idea of free will, working as a parallel to the hosts in the park who just followed their programming, raising the question if we're so different after all and if the society they live in is that different from the park. This season was a nosedive in terms of quality imo, the "over the top action sequences replacing story telling and a properly developed narrative" was tuned to 1000, looking more like a terminator bootleg series than anything that should serve as a continuation of the story from previous seasons. The whole idea of the super computer deciding people's fates is so dumb, so poor. They could have taken an infinitely more interesting approach, actually comparing the loops and systems we are stuck in on our day to day in the real world and have a genuine discussion about free will and determinism that applies and is relevant to our real society. But no, let's make this literal, having a super computer deciding everyone's fate and having Aaron Paul be a bootleg John Connor fighting the rise of the machines or whatever the fuck they were going on. All type of subtlety and nuance went out of the window this season. The dialogue is very poor, the actors are the same but they alone cannot make up for a shitty narrative and shitty dialogue.
And finally we arrive at season 4. This season somewhat mirrors the "are we so different from hosts" question, now asked from the perspective of the hosts, who are now on top of the food chain. Hale Dolores has planned an evangelion instrumentality project for hosts, but more importantly than that, we see her frustration as hosts start to exhibit the same type of behavior from humans that caused her to rebel and enslave humanity, posting perhaps the question of whether these thoughts and behaviors rather than coming from being trapped in the flawed systems of the society we live in, are instead an inevitable consequence of consciousness and human nature. I think this season is a small step up from season 3 that I found abhorrent, the dialogue is somewhat improved, the narrative is a bit more cohesive and explores the season's core theme a bit better. We get the what seemed to me like a really pointless arc of the original Dolores figuring out she was inside a virtual world where she wrorte the scripts for all the humans who are under the control of Hale Dolores. The conclusion was as satisfying as we were going to get at this point, honestly I found it pretty terrible, nothing to take away from it. Host William like "inherits the will/nature" of original human William, makes everyone under Hale's control start a free for all, which leads to a final confrontation between him and Hale Dolores (btw what was the point of Maeve fighting Hale and dying? Didn't their goals allign by the end? What was that even about?) where Hale comes out on top, kills Host William and choses to give original Dolores the choice of accepting extinction or creating a virtual world, to then commit suicide in perhaps the goofiest suicide scene I remember watching. Dolores chose survival, creating a virtual world for both hosts and humans (I guess? I think that was her decision considering the discussion with imaginary Teddy) and now everyone will somehow live in this virtual world (if you could call that living). I really don't see how this ending wrapped up either the narrative, how it fit into the themes explored throughout the show or the arcs of any of the characters that fit into these themes, Dolores included. It felt like some random shit they came up with to wrap it up. Certainly, a big departure from season 1 and even season 2 to some extent.
I don't particularly like rating things out of 10, but if I had to do it for the westworld seasons it'd be something like:
s1 - 10/10 - definitely one of the best seasons of a show I've ever watched
s2 - 7/10
s3 - 4/10
s4 - 5/10
I don't know what happened between seasons, I have a hard time believing it's the same people behind all of them. I believe the core themes of each season and the story they wanted to tell could have resulted in 4 spectacular seasons, if we had the same people executing their vision for all of them. As it stands, I don't think it was worth going for this long for what seems like a very high production value show. Apparently there is a movie coming out, I don't have high hopes for it.