Okay. The new TV season has started, and one of the new shows is really promising.
It's called "Westworld", and is based on the 1973 film of the same name. The original film was an entertaining, but not too deep affair; Ultimately, it was based on a scenario where the animatronics in a theme park glitch out and start to kill the guests. It featured Yul Brenner as the iconic gunslinger, a robot designed to engage park guests in gun duels and lose to them, who over the course of this movie becomes a Terminator-like figure.
The TV series is a very different animal. Produced by the same team as Person of Interest, it is on a very good track to become one of the best SF shows on the telly right now. Unlike the film, the park visitors do not really play a role in this show; the real drama is centered around Evan Rachel Wood's Dolores (the oldest AI running), Jeffrey Wright's Bernard (Westworld's chief programmer), Anthony Hopkins' Ford (Westworld's creative director), and Ed Harris' Man In Black (The scariest mother****er in the show, later more on him).
(Story spoilers in this section)
The pilot episode does spend a lot of its 60 minute runtime (this is an HBO show, so no 42-minutes-is-an-hour bull**** here) setting up the rules of the park. AI NPCs (called Hosts) are programmed to be unable to hurt a fly (there's a great visual early on where Dolores is waiting in one of the Host maintenance areas for a diagnostic, and a fly crawls across her eyes without provoking a reaction), and each have a bunch of storylines attached to them that they can play back on demand (Like the town sheriff, who waits at the train station to recruit people for a bandit hunt in the hills; All he needs to complete the picture is a floating exclamation mark above his head). As usual, everything seems fine at first; the admin team is currently in the middle of a patch rollout that would improve the lifelikeness of the Hosts (over the objections of the head writer, who thinks that a bit of artificiality and uncanny valley is actually a good thing) when problems start to appear. Some of the hosts start glitching out; Dolores' 'father' (played enormously well by Louis Herthum, a guy you can't remember but almost certainly have seen in other TV shows before) finds a photograph of one of the guests in a modern city and is unable to process it, the sheriff has an unscheduled epileptic attack, a robbery scene in which two host bandits have a falling out that ends in one of them dead ends with the wrong one dead, that sort of thing. A decision is made to recall the patched hosts and revert them to earlier builds, which leads to the admin team having to run a massive bandit attack on the town which easily rates as one of the best action scenes in recent memory.
In the midst of all this, Ed Harris' Man In Black makes an appearance. He first shows up in a scene featuring such a great reversal of audience expectations that I won't spoil it even here. He is presented as a sort of primordial evil, and it is here that the show really grabbed my attention. You see, back in 1973, we didn't have the vocabulary to describe his role in this, as there is no equivalent to it in a theme park setting. However, there is one in modern MMOs: He's the sort of guy who has played the game since the first public betas, who has done all the storylines and quests dozens of times, and has become a sort of super beta tester looking for the holes and glitches in the game on the assumption that one of them might lead him to a new storyline.
Oh, I should probably talk a bit about production values too. They're great. Westworld itself looks like you expect a Hollywood western town to look to a T and is sharply contrasted with the glass and gloss of the admin areas, all Apple-chic and modern, the soundtrack is being handled by Ramin Djawadi and his usual greatness (There's a theme here where some scenes are scored using modern music as played by the spaghetti western orchestra; a version of Black Hole Sun played on an automatic piano starts this, and it culminates in a massive shootout scored to a westernified version of Paint It Black). Acting is also uniformly good; There's a scene between Anthony Hopkins and Louis Herthum that is absolutely riveting to watch, and Evan Rachel Wood does a really impressive job in making Dolores (who is designed to be the generic good girl of westerns) one of the most interesting characters in the piece.
So yeah. TL;DR: Westworld is very good. Go watch it, and hope that it continues Johnathan Nolan's run as the guy doing the best TV SF.
