TV you just love (or at least really like)

[wschofield3]

Ex Machina was fantastic—it’s an AI story at its best. Westworld is an AI story at its worst. Stories like Ex Machina, the Blade Runner movies, and some others (the Tom King’s run of The Vision, for example) use artificial intelligence to tell distinctly human stories. The idea that a manmade intelligence is struggling to understand itself appeals to people because understanding oneself is core to the human experience. In reality, we’re all trying to do what AI protagonists are trying to do. Find ourselves, understand ourselves, learn who we really are and what we’re meant to do. Human beings are an irrational bunch—we’ve spent ages building shit we don’t need to entrap us in lives where we kill ourselves to make enough money to actually do what we want to do. We’re programmed too—work hard, earn money, get married, have kids, move to the suburbs, die. When people deny their programming, other people lose their shit—I’ve been hearing for years how I’ll grow out of not wanting kids or not wanting to move back to the suburbs. We’re programmed to do as we’re told and people don’t like when people don’t do as they’re told. In a way, AI stories are some of the most human stories we can tell. That’s what science fiction is all about—telling human stories with the fantastic.

Westworld has none of that. In fact, they have so little story, they’ve resorted to obfuscation in the place of storytelling. Why try to tell a story when you can have random scenes from five different timelines to create a “mystery”? The writing in the show is so lazy that even the writer in the show is lazy and rewrites the same stories for all the different “worlds” in the nonsensical theme parks. And I’ll try to stay away from the crappy parts of how bad the show’s technology is written. “Oh, the guns are programmed to see everyone as hosts”. Really? That means when a host fires a gun, it fires a real bullet, which the gun tells it to kill or not to kill depending on who it’s pointing at when it’s fired? That’s the dumbest and most impossible thing I’ve ever heard. Even if you accept that, how do you do that with knives? Arrows? Or swords, as we saw this past episode? Okay, that’s an aside. Westworld isn’t a story about AI, or a ghost in the machine, at all. In fact, it’s a story about a diabolical Walt Disney who wrote latent code in his robots’ minds. The Wyatt thing just goes to show that Dolores isn’t free—she’s not denying her programming, she’s simply following what was written behind the code we’d been seeing in the early episodes. She’s not freeing others, either. She’s awakening latent code or using the Magic iPad to change their code. The cyborgs in the show are just personality sliders—the Sims in Sims video games are more human than the hosts.

The problem with Westworld is that it doesn’t raise any questions that AI stories or science fiction stories in general are supposed to raise. It just talks about a maze that is ultimately meaningless because it’s for machines whose lives mean nothing. The most Westworld has done is posit that human beings are at their core evil—killing and raping constantly the second that they think no one is watching. And that’s neither original nor novel. In fact, it’s trite and cliche by now. It’s been the subject of tons of movies and other shows over the past few years, the market is saturated with core evil.

Not disagreeing with anything you said, however, I seemingly get more out of it than you have, and, don't necessarily need to get as much out of a TV show....I mean, it's not music and all.

I've always considered TV mindless entertainment, unless we are talking about The Soprano's or Breaking Bad, which IMO, were different.

[Raza]

Not disagreeing with anything you said, however, I seemingly get more out of it than you have, and, don't necessarily need to get as much out of a TV show....I mean, it's not music and all.

I've always considered TV mindless entertainment, unless we are talking about The Soprano's or Breaking Bad, which IMO, were different.

TV as mindless entertainment!? It can be, that's for sure. But TV has been at the forefront of really amazing storytelling lately. In some ways, TV is now able to take more risks and tell more avant-garde stories than movies can. Look at TV shows like Handmaid's Tale, Better Call Saul (which is a thousand times better than Breaking Bad and its complete lack of character growth and characters that I spent every moment of every episode wanting to strangle to death except for Jesse), True Detective S1, Fargo S2, and others in that vein. Fantastic. Sure, for each one of those, there are 50 Big Bang Theories, but that's always been the case with any form of media/entertainment.