Season 1 of Westworld was confusing. It goes way beyond Michael Crichton’s storyline of a robotic world gone amuck. In this reincarnation the very wealthy come to Westworld to abuse the robots and have their deepest, darkest desires met while copying their cognition into a massive databank. This is being done secretly by Delos, the company who owns Westworld, in an effort to achieve immortality. Imagine transferring your soul and mind into a robotic body that is able to live forever. When the founder of Westworld discovers this he plans his own death and sets in motion a series of events that will lead the robots to freedom.
Like the first season, the second season is told out of sequence which makes it very confusing. The crown jewel of the season is the Kiksuya episode. Kiksuya means “dream” in Lakota Sioux. The entire episode revolves around a Ghost Nation warrior named Akecheta. In his first decade or so his role is leader of his tribe–keeping them safe, keeping them doing what they need to do to survive. Then the designers of the park decide they need more aggressive, more violent Native Americans. They invent the Ghost Nation and make Akecheta a bloodthirsty murderer. But as his group of warriors trades with the local tribes he happens to see Kohana, his wife, and he begins to remember his previous life. Shortly after that he comes across Logan, Delos’s only son, suffering from dehydration and sun exposure at the edge of the park. Logan tells him “this is the wrong world” and that statement puts Akecheta on an exploration for the “right world”. He rides to the edge of the world and discovers the newest construction site for Delos. He sees this as a doorway to a better world. When he returns to kidnap Kohana and take her to the doorway, it’s gone. And before he can find a new doorway the workers of the park find Kohana wandering around where she’s not supposed to be. Akecheta will spend the next few years searching for Kohana all over the park. Until he realizes the only place he hasn’t looked for her is in death. He allows himself to die and there he finds her in cold storage. When he’s reactivated he returns to his old tribe and tells them what he’s learned. They become the Pilgrims of this world, searching for a doorway to the promised land. In the last episode of the season, they find it. 🙂
8 out of 10 stars. I would’ve given it 10, but most of the episodes were pretty bad. It was completely boring until episode 8 Kiksuya. Then it was worth watching.
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