Note: This review contains spoilers for the episode “Journey Into Night,” as well as the first season of Westworld.
The first season of HBO’s futuristic, violent Westworld was a success with critics and viewers for a myriad of reasons: its taut writing, excellent acting from a quality ensemble cast, lush production design, and the tough questions that it posed about what it means to be human (albeit in the context of whether androids can actually be human-like) all added up to a compulsively watchable first season. The first season was topped off with an unforgettable finale, in which the park’s co-creator Robert Ford (Sir Antony Hopkins) was brutally killed by android host Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood)—setting the stage for an android massacre of well-to-do humans during the gala premiere for Westworld’s new game “narrative.”
“Journey Into Night” picks up almost immediately after the massacre; android Programming Director Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) and Delos Executive Director Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) are on the run from some of the newly liberated android hosts, along with a small group of gala guests who (of course) are only there to add to the body count. Dolores, meanwhile, has her paramour Teddy (James Marsden) by her side as she hunts more humans. The Man in Black/William (Ed Harris) seems to be the only one having any fun, which is appropriate since he is generally awful.
Maeve (Thandie Newton) schemes to get back to her daughter, which includes an interesting and creepy interlude where she forces narrative writer Lee (Simon Quarterman) to strip naked—very meta, considering that Maeve spent much of last season naked and being examined by park techs as she manipulated them for her own gain. Oh, and some more higher-ups from Delos are on the scene–they want to figure out how they can prevent this sort of thing from happening again. It’s not good for business, after all!
There is a lot going on, and much of it is graphic and unsparing in its depiction of violence. There are naked bodies. There are dead bodies. There are naked, dead bodies. There is one stomach-churning sequence early in the episode where a park tech “reverse-scalps” a dead Native host to retrieve information. The episode ends with Bernard and the Delos higher-ups looking over a newly constructed lake that is full of dead hosts; Bernard may or may not have killed all of the hosts, but the flashbacks that we see from his perspective offer few clues.
After all of last season’s slow-burning “what does it mean to have consciousness and/or be human” explorations, this episode feels less like a continuation of that thoughtfulness and more like a Game of Thrones-style bloodbath. I understand that the show’s first season was, in many ways, leading up to this kind of killing spree by the hosts, but at what point does the depiction of graphic violence become too much?
The main issue is that showing all of the creative ways to kill humans and display dead/mutilated bodies end up overshadowing the more important aspects of the show—the very things that attracted viewers to Westworld in the first place. Hopefully, this episode is not representative of season two as a whole, and Westworld will find its way out of the maze of depicting graphic violence for the sake of it. It’s a much better show when it actually engages with questions about humanity, technology, and consciousness, rather than just throwing buckets of blood and viscera at viewers.