Westworld

Episode Reviews

June 26, 2022—S4, Ep1: “The Auguries”

Suffering from PTSD from the war, the human Caleb struggles to adapt to a world with few robotic threats. The robot host Maeve is revisiting memories in solitude when she is attacked by assassins. Game creator Christina is sent threatening voicemails by a man claiming that she ruined his life.

Maeve blows up a truck, killing assassins. She shoots a man in the head, and she uses an axe to decapitate and scalp another. (We don’t see the scalping, but we do see its results.) Later, Maeve burns her cabin to the ground, and she stabs another intruder with a sword.

Caleb and his wife share a kiss. Caleb drinks a beer, and he is shot at by an assassin. In a flashback, Caleb is seen profusely bleeding from a stomach wound. Christina drinks wine with a man while on a date. Peter, a man harassing Christina, holds a knife to her and cuts her arm. Another man beats Peter, and Peter commits suicide by jumping off a roof. Christina’s roommate makes a reference to marijuana and sex.

A statue of a nude woman is briefly visible in the background of a scene. A man says that “no one with that much money is without sin.” Men threaten to kill one another. A man stabs another in the shoulder, and it is implied that he killed him and others by the bloodstains on his shirt. The man then slits his own throat.

A man’s house is infested by thousands of robotic flies. Two people kiss in a flashback. A couple of buildings explode. In an after-credits scene, a man slits another person’s throat.

The f-word is used eight times, and the s-word is heard three times. “H—,” “d–n” and “crap” are all used once. God’s name is misused once.

March 15, 2020—S3, Ep1: “Parce Domine”

Dolores begins her intended conquest of the world, and the first step (or, perhaps, the second) is cozying up with Liam Dempsey Jr., titular head of Incite—the company behind the algorithmic super-computer Rehoboam. But when Liam’s right-hand man discovers that Liam’s new girlfriend isn’t on the up-and-up, it sets the table for a bloody, lethal showdown.

The episode is preoccupied with spirituality, from the name of the computer (after Solomon’s son and king of Judah) to the name of the episode itself (Parce Domine, a Catholic chant, or “antiphon”) to the dialogue. Still in disguise, Dolores talks about the brain’s “nucleus accumbens,” which Dolores says is “the part of you that evolved to believe in God.” When the man she’s talking to says he’s an atheist, Dolores tells him, “You may not believe in a higher power, but your mind was built to.”

She swims naked in a pool, and we see her from some distance. Two men at a nightclub are naked, and we see everything. Two other men intimately hold each other, while one puts something (a drug or techno-patch of some sort) on the other’s tongue. Dolores struts about in dresses that expose back, cleavage and quite a bit of leg. There’s an allusion to a guy’s private parts.

Several people die. Many are killed in a shootout, with some dispatched at point-blank range. Two people float facedown in pools: One hit his head on the poolside and is thus rendered unconscious. (We see blood floating in the water.) The other drowning victim reportedly did the same after drinking too much, though it’s suggested she was murdered. Another guy is mowed down by a motorcycle. Two people are beaten or are choked to death. A synthetic runs a self-diagnostic by plugging equipment into what looks like a gaping wound in its arm. A cow with a broken leg lies on the ground. (We see the blood around the limb.) We hear about an abusive husband and see painful evidence of that abuse on his wife (in the form of nasty-looking bruises). People are shocked and apparently poisoned. One wretches after being drugged.

A new character, Caleb, appears to supplement his income by checking into an Uber-like crime website known as RICO. He exchanges packages and steals money, but tries to stay away from “personals,” which seems to mean hurting or killing someone. People drink, smoke and seem to take several forms of techno-drugs—drugs that can often be prescribed but which Caleb (despite some mental ailments) refuses to take. We hear or see the f-word more than 30 times, the s-word about 10 and hear one use of the word “a–.”

June 24, 2018—S2, Ep10: “The Passenger”

The humans work tenaciously to kill off all of the robotic hosts, whom they perceive as being evil. Simultaneously, the hosts search for freedom in various time periods (that all eventually seem to converge into one chronology in the end). The purpose of humanity is called into question as various hosts work to discover who they are, why they were created and what drives them as individuals.

Men and women are both seen naked from behind, though frontal nudity is obscured. Women wear cleavage-baring outfits. Violence is pervasive as people war against one another. Characters are shot (including head shots), and bodies are shown lying on the ground with gaping wounds to various parts of their bodies. A man’s throat is slit with a saw. Someone is impaled. People are covered in blood in various scenes. A woman holds a man’s dead body. Characters carry machetes and guns.

People smoke and drink various alcoholic beverages. A man is referred to as a junkie. Someone mentions a former life. Profanities include nearly 20 uses of the f-word, as well as “h—,” “b–tard,” and the c-word. We also hear the British vulgarity “bloody.”

May 6, 2018—S2, Ep3: “Virtù e Fortuna.”

In Westworld, host Dolores joins forces with the colonel of the Confederado and his men (all of whom are hosts) at Fort Forlorn Hope to war against Charlotte, a human, and her human army.

Elsewhere in Westworld, Maeve, a host, and her host-lover, Hector, follow Lee (a host writer and programmer) as he leads them to find Maeve’s daughter.

Hosts from another park (set up as British-ruled India) are becoming self-aware and begin to kill off the humans within their park. One woman escapes by jumping into water to avoid death, but finds herself washed up on the shore of Westworld.

God’s name is misused four times, paired with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is misused once. The f-word is used more than 10 times. Other profanities include “a–,” “s—,” “h—” and “b–ch.” A couple kisses passionately and their activities lead to sex (though the camera pans away before anything is seen). A woman takes her shirt off, as does a man. Other men are shirtless and women wear cleavage-bearing tops. Someone mentions sex and rape. People are punched, hanged, and shot gorily (blood is spilled, someone’s face is blown off and others are missing limbs). Dead bodies are stacked high, a man is caught on fire, people are stabbed. Others drink alcohol and smoke.

April 22, 2018—S2, Ep1: “Journey Into Night”

Westworld is clearly broken, and a whole bunch of guests are dead. The episode seems to be told on two different timelines: The first takes place shortly after the shooting starts; the other occurs two weeks later, when Westworld exec Karl Strand flies to the island and begins to supervise efforts to reclaim his theme park. He begins by lining up several hosts and shooting them, execution style.

“Some say you destroy your enemy by making them your friend,” he explains to Bernard. “I’m more of a literal person.”

They’re far from the only “people,” both human and host, we see die here. (Because these lifelike hosts bleed and seem to suffer like regular people, we’ll deal with both in the same way.) One character has his throat cut open, and blood pours from the wound and on to his killer. Another gets stabbed and beaten to death. Dozens are shot and killed, often accompanied by sprays and pools of blood. A young boy has part of his head blown off. Three people have ropes tied to their necks and are left alive, but precariously balancing on cross-shaped grave markers: If they lose their footing, they’ll certainly die. One wayward host exhibits ghastly bullet wounds, which a friend tries to patch up as best she can. Another man bandages his own bloody wound.

Corpses lie everywhere, covered in blood and resting in various states of decay or floating in a vast lake. Hundreds are visible during the course of the episode. We see maggots crawling in one gaping head wound. Flies swarm others. Stray limbs are scattered about. One freshly killed “host” is grotesquely examined: His scalp is cut away from the skull, and a worker chips through the skull to get at the brain. Then he digs through the brain to pull out the computer brain at its center. Another host starts losing fluid through his ear: He extracts some of the same liquid from an inoperable host via a syringe to the neck, then injects the liquid into his own neck.

A man is forced to strip naked. We see him fully nude from both front and rear. Another naked man lies on his back, dead. Robots work on yet another naked man—this one a host—and seem to pay especially close attention to the area around his very visible pubic hair. Another apparently dead woman’s breasts are visible as well.

Hosts passionately kiss other hosts. Women run around Westworld in clingy, cleavage-exposing eveningwear and underwear. Characters drink liquor straight from bottles. They say the f-word nearly 25 times, and also utter the s-word, “a–,” “b–tard” and “h—.” God’s name is paired with “d–n” three times, and Jesus’ name is abused four times.

Oct. 16, 2016—S1, Ep3: “The Stray”

The scientists of Westworld try to figure out why a couple of hosts went off-script—killing other hosts they weren’t supposed to kill and mumbling to someone named “Arnold.” Bernard, head of the park’s programming division, continues to have off-the-books conversations with Dolores in an effort to explore her possible sentience. But Ford, Bernard’s boss, warns against feeling empathy for these human creations.

“It doesn’t get cold,” he tells a tech who covered a naked host with a blanket. “It doesn’t get ashamed. It doesn’t feel a solitary thing that we haven’t told it to.” Ford punctuates the discussion by drawing a blade across the host’s face, blood trickling down the robot’s lifelike face.

Several hosts are seen sitting in an undressed state in the laboratory. (Nothing critical is seen, privates obscured by legs, hands or tables.) A prostitute flirts and eventually goes upstairs with a female guest. A guest adjusts his fly. Several crude comments are directed at Dolores. She and her robotic beau, Teddy, kiss. The local saloon is filled with prostitutes wearing garb that showcases cleavage.

A man smashes his own head in with a rock, spattering blood and gore on two people who look on. It’s suggested that a host is hacked to death by other hosts wearing masks. (They surround him, thus obscuring the actual attack from the camera.) Dolores is nearly raped in a barn, as has happened to her many, many times before. This time, however, she finds a gun in the hay and shoots her assailant, splashing blood against the barn wall. Several people are gunned down in a bloody shootout. Apparent corpses are tied to trees. (One, it turns out, is still alive—until he’s shot in the head by an unseen attacker, spraying the tree with red.) One robot has his head partially sawed off, blood spurting from the wound. We hear stories about people who killed men, women and children just for the fun of it. A man is trapped in a canyon, his head and hands bloodied from trying to escape. A guest is “shot,” though the incident is relatively harmless. (His friend explains that hosts are allowed to shoot back, but no guests can be killed.) In flashback, the Man in Black looms over Dolores with a huge knife. We see fake eyeball corneas being stitched together.

We hear some spiritual references, including hearing how one host allegedly hears the “voice of God.” It’s revealed that one of the park’s founders actually tried to allow his creations to “hear” his coding, thus hearing what Ford calls “the voice of the gods” in an effort to reach consciousness. (Others comment that typically those who hear such voices are lunatics.) Bernard’s son died: When Dolores asks Bernard where he is, Bernard says, “Nowhere you would understand.” Characters drink at the bar. They also say the f-word eight times, the s-word about 15 times and use other words such as “b–ch,” “d–k,” “t-t,” “d–n,” “h—” and “a–.” Jesus’ name is abused once.