2x09 Vanishing Point

[5.8/10] Here’s my big problem with Westworld. Beyond its insistence on sealing up that mystery box time and time again, it becomes dependent on shocking its audience with its reveals, and after those reveals come episode after episode after episode, they’re just no longer anywhere near as impactful as they need to be to sustain the show on that basis.

For instance, we get two big developments in this one. First and foremost, William kills his daughter. Maybe it’s a psychotic break, maybe it’s just supposed to be a new sign that he’s given into his darkness, but whatever it is, he’s convinced she’s a host and whether or not he has official confirmation of that, willing to turn a machine gun on her.

Second, we find out that the reason for his wife’s suicide was him admitting, in a moment when he thought she was unconscious, that he has that darkness inside him, that it’s the real him, and that he doesn't belong in the real world with her, but in his pretend world where he can let those dark impulses run wild.

The problem, then, is that none of these reveals carries any weight. As to Emily, the fact that we never see the results of the techs testing whether she’s a human or a host shows Westworld playing coy enough that it doesn't really matter what happens with William, because either she’s a host and it’s all for naught, or there’s some kind of later fake out or reveal to come that will tie this together.

Worse yet, it’s just a dumb move by William. I hesitant to criticize a show for characters acting with stupidity -- people in real life act with stupidity all the time! -- but the fact that he thinks the woman who looks and acts like his daughter is a robot is a pretty paltry reason to risk killing her even if there’s a .000001% chance that it’s her in the flesh. Maybe you can write it off as William having become so far gone, so wrapped up in this world and his game, that he’d be so wanton about something so important, but in the moment, it strains credulity.

The same goes for the death of his wife. I am the rare bird who has nigh-unlimited good will for Sela Ward from her time on House M.D., and lord knows that Ed Harris has elevated the material time and time again on this show. But the cheap family melodrama that Westworld tries to pass off as a legitimate domestic crisis is overwrought to the point of being laughable.

We know that there’s something dark lurking within William. We basically already had confirmation that his wife’s suicide was due to the darkness she saw in him. There’s still juice to be squeezed from actually dramatizing that rather than just hearing about it second hand, but other than giving Harris the chance to perform a decent monologue, these segments don’t do much beyond affirm what the audience already knows.

It doesn't help that we’re only now introduced to William’s wife, at least as she was when she left this mortal coil. A good show could craft a compelling family conflict in sixty minutes, but Westworld gets bogged down in the endless back-and-forths between members of William’s family that are plainly insufficient to support the kind of profundity and devastating unveilings that “Vanishing Point” tries to pull off.

We also continue with more nonsense between Bernard and a mind-encased Ford. As I said in a prior write-up, there fertile ground to harvest with a knowing being finding themself infected with another soul who overwrites their free will. But Ford is just such a bundle of double-talk and dime store philosophy at this point that it doesn't amount to anything when Bernard pushes back on him and eventually expels him from his mind.

That said, the one impressive scene in “Vanishing Point” takes place between Maeve and Ford. Ford reveals yet another interesting thing about the show’s most interesting character -- that the story he wrote for her was simply to leave, to escape Westworld and move on. But she bucked her programming, and chose to go back because of the connection she felt for her daughter. It’s a sign of genuine freedom, genuine liberation from Maeve, even in her incapacitated state, and shows in her a fortitude and integrity that suggests (along with the fact that she’s the second actor credited in the title sequence) that she’ll make it out of this mess somehow.

Teddy, on the other hand, will not make it out. (Or maybe he will, science is magic on this show!) I like what the show has tried to do with Teddy in this season. The notion of an inherently good character, who is forcibly made bad, but who eventually bucks up against his programming the same way Maeve did, because deep down he cannot stand to wear the black hat, is an interesting one.

But it’s just so damn rushed. One episode Teddy is too sweet to kill the people who betrayed his programmer-mandated one true love, the next he’s had his programming shifted and kills without compunction, and the next he cannot resist his true nature anymore and would rather kill himself than be a tool of Dolores’s ruthlessness.

The scene where he confesses his continued love for Dolores, but his inability to go on like this, is well acted, evincing a genuine connection between the characters that makes Teddy’s end all the more tragic. But the path from Point A to Point B is so abbreviated and so sudden that the acting has to do all the work, because the show doesn't lay the narrative groundwork to justify Teddy having this sort of lethal change of heart.

I like the signs and messages, from other hosts and even humans, that Dolores has gone too far in her revenge and needs to check herself before she simply becomes the rage and wanton destruction that she accuses her creators of. But you can’t just use secondary characters as rapidly changed and then-changed back cannon fodder if that’s what you want to achieve.

Nevermind the nuts and bolts silly things about this episode. Why so much of “Vanishing Point” has to take the form of ponderous conversations between characters, I don’t know. Why the episode has to belabor the backstory of William’s family to such diminishing returns is a real mysery. And god help me, why the show needed to specify that the guests brains were scanned via their cowboy hats is a detail is completely beyond me, since it adds nothing either narratively or thematically and seems to exist to answer a question no one in the audience was really asking in a world where consciousness can be backed up on a big hard drive.

“Vanishing Point” is an episode of weak reveals that’s meant to be a character study. It’s meant to be the story of how William, and to some extent Dolores, is so far gone that they hurt and even indirectly kill the people they claim to care about. But the way that idea is dramatized is so overdone and so clunky that you groan rather than feel the tragedy of those moments. There’s no palpable pain in this episode, just a show decking itself in the simulacra of it, and hoping the audience won’t notice the difference.