Last season had the element of mystery in that you didnt know who the characters were, their history, who was human, and scope of the world. And at least I did know the out of order story telling was going on for the first half of the season. The interesting parts are over.

maybe we just dont get it?

Holy shit this second season went way downhill. Unwatchable

I watched the 1st episode of this season a while back, but haven't felt compelled to continue

By resurrecting Ford, the show somehow pulled out a "reveal" even more obvious than "Bernard is a host." It's probably it's greatest accomplishment so far.

I think this show generally hovers between a 5.5-6.5/10, with just a couple of scattered scenes rising to "Woah" status for me, but I think I will keep with it for a while, if not until the very end. I recently heard someone on a podcast compare their enjoyment of the show to their enjoyment of crossword puzzles, and I realized that holy shit that's how I feel. I couldn't tell you a single character whom I'm rooting for, but I do like tuning in every week to see if my theories (or my favorite pet theories) play out; I don't flip to the daily crossword for character development, either, but I feel a sense of accomplishment when I figure out a tough clue or I tip my cap to a clever clue I wasn't able to figure out.

I am so very tired of the comparisons to Lost you see coming up in every recap of this show. Yes, Lost was a puzzle-box style show with time jumps. But Lost was full of actual people that we grew to know and care about--or to dislike. Among the crazy theories or what the smoke monster actually was or why the plane crashed, we actually had debates about who the best characters were. Would you go to bat--like, really duke it out--for any character on Westworld?

We'll see how it goes, but at this point I really, really wish Season 2 got rid of the time jumps.

Agree with this 1000 times over. The time jumps at least served a narrative function in Season One, even if they were at times purposefully obfuscatory (because we're living in endless loops, just like the hosts, right?). But now they're just gratuitous, and they're bordering on nonsensical--like the start of last week's episode, where Dolores is actually controlling Bernard. Obviously that's meant to be a jump backwards, since it's pre-Malcolm X Dolores, but then that doesn't really make sense since she's aware of her consciousness here--unless she gained her consciousness and then lost it before the start of S1?

Overall, though, I think I agree with ST. When it gets to Sunday, I'm never really excited to watch this show, but by about five minutes into each episode I'm *interested*. So I'll keep on until that stops. And they do have a driving motivation here for most of the characters (getting out of the park). But it's starting to feel like maybe the writers aren't entirely sure where it's going, like the mystery is actually just a lack of coherent story.

And I'm still not clear on how the hosts can shoot guests now when previously it seemed that host guns/bullets couldn't penetrate guest skin. Am I remembering that correctly?

I am not 1000% sure, but if I remember correctly, the guns were programmed to shoot low-velocity pellets instead of bullets (sort of like paintball guns), and hosts were programmed to "feel" them like regular bullets. They either started loading real bullets or got rid of the programming once the revolution started.

If you're scratching your head wondering how the same sort of failsafes could be in place for the motherfucking swords in Shogun World, you're not alone.

I hadn't even gotten around to thinking about Shogun World (I suppose it just worked like a programming command line, do not slice guest, since there's not really the accidental stray bullet problem). But yeah, okay, that's basically what I remember too--so then where would they get the bullets from? Where's the "Dolores discovers an arms dealer warehouse" scene?

With Ford-in-the-Machine, they can throw in 2 lines of dialogue that explains all of this stuff. They actually already started that this week with the stuff about the Cradle sending out messages to the park--Matrix Ford is making sure the guns behave like real guns now, or he sent Dolores a message about where to find live ammo. They can now change the rules of the show on the fly (which they've already done a few times anyway) and that makes it tough to be compelling.

Yeah that's really what I'm finding here, they've changed the rules so much that I'm less and less interested in what happens to the characters.

So much this.

The best thing about this show is the theme song. Every time I hear it, it's stuck in my head for days. What a melody.

This show would be so much better if the episodes were like 40-45 minutes instead of an hour.

thats true also

boring

its great, but not better than Ed Harris

His character is good but he'll come down a peg when we all find out he's a host.

Yeah, of course he is

Your mom’s a host

This is in some ways obviously true but also if becomes a big reveal then I'm out.

We watched Succession last night and demoted Westworld to leftovers territory. So far, great choice.