There Are Spoilers In Our Westworld: Virtù e Fortuna Review – Episode Discussion
So this week saw the latest episode of Westworld season 2 air. In this one we are introduced to a new world, Dolores has a major battle to prepare for and Maeve continues on with her search for her daughter.
I was really looking forward to seeing this week’s episode of Westworld. After last week’s one ended, I was really curious about where we might be headed with this week’s episode as things look like they’re really escalating. I was also really curious about where that Tiger we saw a few episodes ago came from and in this episode we get an answer to that.
The start of this episode sees us introduced to a mystery woman that we don’t know and haven’t seen in the series before. The setting is not in the Westworld we’ve always known and not even in the teased Samurai world we’ve been getting glimpses of for some time now. Instead, it seems like we’re in some type of colonial era India where people are going on romantic hunting trips in the jungle.
The new character has a bit of a romance with one of the males in the park, but then they’re attacked and he’s killed. Looking back on it, I’m not to sure if the male she was with is actually a Westworld robot or if he’s a human. I’m not really sure or might have missed something. But either way, he’s dead, but she survives and kills one of the bots. She runs off into the jungle and is chased by a tiger all the way into Westworld. We see that the fence between the worlds is broken and much like when in Jurrasic Park when the dinosaurs got through the fence, so too does the Tiger. We see the woman and the tiger encounter each other one last time, then not at all again until the end of the episode. At the end of the episode we see that the woman has survived and is with some very dangerous Indians. But nothing more than that. I’m super curious about who she is and what her story will be in a few episodes time. Just like Ed Harris’ Man In Black character, is she the only other human still playing the game?
On the side of the story is Dolores, she spends much of her time putting together an army to fight the people coming in to clean the park. As we know all the bots have gone mad, so the humans are coming to take them all down. Dolores knows this and makes quite a few preparations. Mainly she sacrifices quite a few of her own bots to lure the humans in, where she had bombs ready and blew them all up. Dolores as a character comes across quite cold in this episode, she doesn’t seem to at all care about her fellow bots at all, not one bit!
During the battle there was a side story with Dolores and her father. Basically Dolores’ father is corrupted and it’s up to Bernard to fix him. But Bernard doesn’t seem all that good himself and I guess messes it up under pressure once the battle starts. Dolores’ father gets captured by the humans and like something out of Terminator 2 Dolores chases the car, taking bullet shots to her body and takes a couple of the humans down, but they still get away anyway. I found the story with her father to be a little boring, I mean he’s a bot, just like all the others. Why does she care so much about fixing him? I know that he’s the father, but really what can he do there?
Maeve features in the episode quite a bit towards the end. There’s some scenes with her and Hector, where it is noticed by their human companion that they share some affection for each other. The human goes mad that it’s not part of their programming and Hector puts forward an argument that he has his own thoughts now. I guess there’s something here in this scene about if an AI bot has a mind, can it also love and feel things to? What even is its programming, if it has the free will to do what it wants? It’s really very interesting and I look forward to them further exploring it as the episodes progress.
Overall this was another great episode for the show. I’m really curious about where Maeve is going to end up and where her arc is headed with her search for her daughter. What’s happening with Dolores at the moment is also interesting, although she did lose quite a bit of her forces in that attack. How will she keep going and what might the humans do next to take her down? The new character is someone I really want to see more of and I hope we get much more from her in the next episode. Looking forward to seeing what happens in the show next week. Also, what’s with the Samurai stuff at the end? What will they do with that?
