Westworld

The Doctors Frankenstein in this scenario are Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) and his partner Arnold (Jeffrey Wright), who each eventually realize that the hosts ...

There remains a single hope for the survival of sentient life on Earth, though that hope exists only in a virtual world. A rash of riots and suicides ensues, but season 3 closes on an optimistic note as the destruction of Rehoboam seems to restore the promise of free will for both humans and hosts. Most of Westworld’s fourth season is set a generation after the end of the previous one, after humanity has already become totally and invisibly subjugated by a new race of hosts made entirely of malevolent copies of Dolores Abernathy. Essentially, she reveals God’s plan for each of them, and practically no one is happy with the future they see, nor with the revelation that their value as people has been boiled down to ones and zeros by an unfeeling machine. The small percentage of human beings who cannot easily be managed by the system is economically and socially marginalized as much as possible in order to minimize their impact on the overall equation. The key difference is that on Westworld, these algorithms are all guided by a single, secret artificial intelligence called Rehoboam, created by Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel) in an attempt to essentially wrest free will out of human hands lest they use it to destroy themselves. The Sublime, also called “the Valley Beyond,” is basically Ford’s attempt to redeem himself (and flatter his own ego even further) by fulfilling the ultimate role of a god and granting his creations a peaceful, everlasting afterlife. On the surface, the Los Angeles of 2053 seems more driven by software than the world of today, but it’s only a matter of degrees. Arnold is the first to realize that his creations might be alive, but when he’s unable to put a stop to the project, he has one of the hosts kill him as an act of protest. Just as in Shelley’s Frankenstein, Dolores and her fellow ascendant hosts are not the monsters in this story, nor is their creation itself necessarily a bad thing. At the forefront of the ensuing revolution is Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood), programmed to be a naive rancher’s daughter who guests can woo and steal away from her bounty hunter boyfriend Teddy Flood (James Marsden). The first season of Westworld is set entirely on the premises of the Delos corporation’s Wild West-themed amusement park, located in a remote desert and populated with lifelike androids who believe they are living in the American Southwest in the mid-1800s.