2x02 Reunion

[9.5/10] One of the strengths of Westworld is how it jumps back and forth in time. The lifeblood of any good story is change, and drifting from the very beginnings of the park, to the time when Delos took it over, to the present during the robot revolt, lets the show highlight those changes, gently explain them, without merely having to gesture toward them or disrupt the tone and setting of the series.

“Reunion” is about the story of that transition. It’s about how Westworld itself went from being the brainchild of a couple of dreamers, to the investment of multinational company, to the hellscape of mechanical slaughter and real challenge it is today. It’s about how Delos’s involvement started out with one horny investment bro being wooed by the amazing and seductive wares the place had to offer, progressed to a surrogate son proving his mettle to his father-in-law, and advanced to become a battleground where a big corporation is sending in private security forces to protect its investment.

It’s about how Dolores went from being someone mesmerized by the city lights so far outside of her understanding, to being the special host who sensed there was something beyond the world that she saw and trekked through, to the leader of the rebellion who kills without mercy and aims to use that outside world as a weapon. It’s about how William went from being bored with glad-handing, to persuading and eventually pushing aside his father-in-law, to reconciling his own experience with the power Westworld possesses, to trying to find his way out of the real stakes and find the real meaning he’s been searching for since we met him in the “present.”

And it’s about how all of these stories are intertwined: how Dolores’s first night in the city connects with Logan’s amazement at what Ford and Arnold were capable of, how William’s great triumph of his corporate career coincides with Dolores appearing as a reminder of the way the park can reveal people, how The Man in Black’s grand crusade is only made possible through the mechanical woman who once entranced him instigating her rebellion.

These are all potent pieces of that change, but “Reunion” isn’t satisfied to merely dole them out piecemeal. It ties them together, shows where they blend into one another, and how the fates of these two individuals, of this place and this company, have been unwittingly bound together for decades.

Westworld is a show that loves its puzzle boxes, and much of the Season 2 premiere was spent recrafting and reloading them for another year. But when all those boxes are solved and opened, and all the requisite shocks are delivered, what you have left is character and theme, the people and the ideas that are necessary to give any sort of weight and meeting to the jaw-dropping surprises.

“Reunion” doesn't answer many of those mysterious questions, beyond filling in a few sundry, if significant details about how things got from Point A to Point B. Instead, it answers implicit questions about who Dolores and William are, about how they went from being the wide-eyed naifs we met last season to being The Man in Black and the quick-firing, merciless revolutionary who aims to topple the world that birthed her.

That’s what gives “Reunion” its power and makes it a cut above every other Westworld episode so far. The causes and effects the episode presents are believable and compelling. It teaches us more about the main figures in the show, rather than obscuring their true nature or their goals. It creates a plausible narrative that lets us see and experience the instigating events that would cause the two sweetest, most decent characters from the last season into the cold-blooded individuals they are today.

And beyond that, it’s just a well-written, well-made episode of television. The scenes progress with perfection, giving us just enough of the different stages of Delos’s (and William’s) interest in the park to understand how things have advanced without belaboring it. The episode is shot beautifully, with The Man in Black wandering into a candle-lit version of Pariah that seems haunted before anyone says a word, with a camera that follows our heroes like a ghost.

That also helps highlight the performances, which are some of the best in the series and show the range and talents of the actors. Ed Harris continues to be a surprisingly effect terse badass, who nevertheless shows excitement and fear as the situation escalates. Evan Rachel Wood has proven herself expert at communicating what time period it is when we see Dolores simply with her demeanor, crafting the contrast between the wide-eyed dove who gazes upon the city lights and the sharp-eyed maven who aims to take them. And Jimmi Simpson proves his mettle both as William takes a chance and convinces his skeptical but “cheeky” father-in-law to invest in Westworld, and as a man in transition when he confesses his view of Westworld to Dolores.

That view feels pointedly relevant in the age of big data. While my suspicions about the corporate world’s interests veered toward the usual science fiction tropes -- programmable soldiers, undetectable spies or duplicates -- “Reunion” posits a different use for the IP and data generated Westworld. They want information, the knowledge of what people want when they can act unfettered. William posits that Westworld in general, and the hosts in particular, are a mirror, and to the extent that they reveal people’s true selves, their true desires, it’s an endlessly lucrative thing for a company to derive that sort of info.

That hits close to home in an age where more and more of our lives are led online, where anonymity and thus outrageous freedom is within reach for more and more individuals. And yet despite that sense of unrestrained choice and escape from sight, our actions are, as has been increasingly revealed, more and more being tracked and more and more unprotectable in the digital world. There is an asymmetry, between the sense that we can hide behind a pseudonym and let our real selves run wild, and the reality that the value of the free services we consume is that our wants can be categorized, commodified, and sold to the highest bidder.

It blurs the line between the fiction of Westworld and the reality of life on the other side of the screen, and it’s the performances of people like Simpson, Wood, and Harris (and Thandie Newton, who performs a tantalizing run-in between Maeve and Dolores) who drive that idea home.

And then there’s Giancarlo Esposito, who turns a nothing role as El Lazio, the part Lawrence used to play, into one of the most foreboding, portentous scenes in the entire show. If you want a one-scene wonder, who can convey menace, mystery, and the tense of something uncontrollable but frightening, you can do far worse than enlisting the once and future Gus Fring. There’s so many tremendous scenes in this episode, but the mood-lit, unwavering monologue of Esposito’s host-gone-mad and his warnings, stands out even among them.

Because while “Reunion” is an episode about change, it is also an episode about warning signs, about the sense that there were hints, small events, that led to this place, and could have told our heroes (and villains) where all of this was headed. It was not merely a grand transition that turned Westworld from a fantasy into a warzone, that turned Dolores from a farmgirl into a butcher, that changed William from a gentle whitehat to the blistering, withered gunslinger he is now.

It was an accumulation of smaller moments, of sights and experiences that couldn’t be scrubbed from their memory, of little flows and eddies that brought them to this point. “Reunion” is devoted to those smaller moment, and the way they coalesce into the different people and different places who brought the dream of two men into the twin crusades of the two individuals, one human and one artificial, that threaten to change everything once again.

Pros
+The Flashbacks/background info added a lot of bridge information while still adding to the plot at hand (including the full introduction of the information broker aspect of the business)
+The Man in Black reconnecting with one old friend and being cheated by another
+Dolores seems to actually have some sort of plan
+The action was all fine as well

Cons
-Dolores is literally saying the same thing over and over "I'LL MAKE YOU PAY FOR WHAT U DUNNN................................ to robots that can be repaired, reprogrammed and shouldn't be able to remember anything past a few hours......."

Great episode and the flashbacks particularly added much to the story. Far better than the first one this season. I'm scared this show is going to become extremely monotonous and boring throughout this season. The first season was so great because we saw this interesting and thorough dissection of how our ideal dreams and world are selfish and have consequences to everyone else if we were unleashed and allowed to do whatever we wanted, this season it seems completely fixated on this revenge aspect. I understand that they want to show the extent of the pain caused to other but at the same time, the audience already understands this pretty well. The writing for Dolores has been the same, scene to scene and when you make a character monotonous and boring the audience will lose compassion for her. Dolores was amazing in season 1 because of the range she showcased, hopefully they will allow the same for her this season.