She has more information than anyone else about the situation, as shown by her knowledge of the hidden bunkers staffed by the creepy, skinless drone hosts, but she’s not in control.īut it turns out the park is just a means to an endĪlso, which Peter Abernathy? Dolores’ father was played by two hosts in the first season. Speaking of Charlotte Hale: The character who most seemed to be the plotting villain of last season is now on the run and looking for a specific host named Peter Abernathy, Dolores’ father, for Delos before they will extract her. His status as a host can’t be that much of a secret. Bernard visits a bunker with Delos bigwig Charlotte Hale that checks his DNA when he touches the handle. Some park workers know that Bernard is a host, but most of them are either unaware or are pretending to believe he’s human. Many of the characters from the first season are dead, and new characters are introduced to take their place. The season picks up right where the story left off in season one, with the hosts hunting down the human survivors of the massacre, and the park employees struggling to regain control of the park. While five episodes have been made available to critics, my thoughts above and the recap below were written after having watched only the first episode. This is an interesting place to take the ideas and themes of the first season, especially since the non-linear nature of the first story seems to have been ditched for a much more standard structure.
“Any pieces you leave behind belong to us now. “We’re not broken: you are,” the text on the updated Westworld site states. Not even the park employees were aware of this aspect of the park, as Bernard seems shocked when he watches the drone hosts swab the genitals of one of the characters brought in from the park. Those clauses are there because Delos wanted your DNA, and executives knew that you’d give it up if they provided the right fantasy. The first episode of Westworld ’s second season addresses those questions directly. “What’s more, it reserves the right to ‘use this property in any way, shape, or form in which the entity sees fit.’ If I ran Delos, I’d have some tough questions for the company’s creepiest lawyer about how this clause ended up here.”
“The terms state that once you enter Westword, the company ‘controls the rights to and remains the sole owner of, in perpetuity: all skin cells, bodily fluids, secretions, excretions, hair samples, saliva, sweat, blood, and any other bodily functions not listed here,’” Slate reported back in 2016. It’s right there in the terms of service. Yep, you give up your right to your own genetics if you want to go bang a sex robot in the wild west. The real value of these parks lies in the intellectual property that fuels them, and the vast collection of DNA the company now controls. That’s what people think they’re paying for, and Delos, the company behind the park, seems to be in a pretty straightforward wish-fulfillment business.īut it turns out the park is just a means to an end.
For instance, Westworld is a park where you pay a large amount of money to have sex with - or kill - some robots. We also probably wouldn’t be comfortable with much of it if we were asked in any other context.Īnd that gap between what you think you’re signing up for and how a company’s business model uses your participation has never been more important to discuss. We agree to a bunch of stuff legally through terms of service agreements, but we’re rarely aware of what we’re agreeing to.
Terms of service agreements always seem like the work of the devil.įacebook can say that users consented to having their data used certain ways by agreeing to its terms of service, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg clearly knows that they wouldn’t have done so if the question were asked in straightforward language instead of being hidden in the fine text.