‘Westworld’ Recap: Newcomers and Hosts Experience a World Beyond Their Own
Warning: This recap for the “Chestnut” episode of Westworld contains spoilers.
The “stranger comes to town” setup is one of the oldest storylines in the Western genre, one that’s fueled every cowboy yarn from Shane to The Quick and the Dead. So it stands to reason that Westworld would want to put its own stamp on that particular narrative device, and did so at the top of its second episode, “Chestnut,” introducing a pair of new faces into the already-sprawling cast. And those new faces belong to humans, rather than the artificial theme park citizens who dominated last week’s series premiere. Say hello to Logan (Ben Barnes) and his pal, William (Jimmi Simpson), who have come to Westworld in search of fun and adventure.
Actually, Logan mainly wants to get laid and raise hell; William’s the one who seems after genuine fun, with maybe a little adventure on the side. That these two wildly different personalities are supposed to be buddies may be the most unrealistic thing about a show set in an amusement park populated by robots. But then, William doesn’t seem to place much value on their friendship either, frequently regarding Logan with a mixture of fascination and intense distaste. Guess the nice thing about vacationing in a resort as expansive as Westworld is that you can ditch your jackass companion in favor of artificial companionship.
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Though these two strangers are new to viewers of the show, fans of Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie will recognize them as variations on the characters played by Richard Benjamin and James Brolin. Back in ’73, Brolin was the returning visitor, while Benjamin played the wide-eyed newbie. They both ran afoul of Yul Brynner’s deadly Gunslinger, who stalked them all through the Old West and into the Roman and Medieval areas of the park. That’s a trajectory this pair seems unlikely to follow, at least at this point in the show’s slow-burn storytelling model. Instead, their primary function is to function as the walking embodiments of the two types of people who come to Westworld: those who get off on inflicting pain on the park’s residents and those who can’t help but see them as human beings.
And we’re starting to see the dawning of humanity in some of them, at least. Certainly, Thandie Newton’s bordello madam, Maeve, is experiencing strange stirrings in her manufactured subconscious that are either dreams or fragments of buried memories from one of her past identities. In these visions, she’s protecting a little girl from a raiding party, only to have Ed Harris’s Gunslinger show up on her doorstep. But even more horrific sights are to come when she escapes the lab where she’s being worked on by two snarky Westworld employees and stumbles into the abattoir where the battered, bloody bodies of that day’s victims are prepped for their return to service the following morning.
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Rather than direct our attention elsewhere, this unnerving sequence forces viewers to regard these bodies and take in the violence that’s being done to them, as well as the careless way they’re being handled by the staff. It’s bracing imagery, and speaks directly to an idea that the series has advanced so thoughtfully, if occasionally heavy-handedly, during its short run so far: If Westworld is successful because of its verisimilitude, what does it say about humanity that we’re so eager to be awarded the consequence-free opportunity to hurt beings who look like us? To put it in Battlestar Galactica terms, would this many people still pay the no-doubt exorbitant rates for a Westworld weekend getaway if the robots resembled vintage chrome Cylons instead of skin jobs?
While William was being introduced to this grand game, and Maeve was introduced to the world behind the game, the Gunslinger continued his methodical mission to discover the game within the game. Specifically he’s searching for the entrance to “the maze,” something that he’s warned he’s expressly forbidden from participating in as an outsider. But the three-decade veteran of Westworld continued to drop hints that he may not be that a distant relative of the native robot population, even going so far as to say that he almost feels like he was “born” there. In all this talk about who is human and who is not human, the Gunslinger could prove to be the bridge between those two worlds — the beginning of an evolved species that could save or doom the rest of us. Or maybe he’s just a superserious gamer out to get his name inscribed forever at the top of Westworld’s “High Scorer” list.
Westworld airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.
