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The Abrams Touch




It was around Season 6 that J.J. Abrams introduced Jacob and Esau into his television series Lost, and viewers had to endure them for the remainder of the once popular show that you can now watch as syndicated reruns.  The ABC series had already enticed an Evangelical audience and so Abrams and his co-creators decided to shed the earlier science fiction and metaphysical trappings in favor of Biblical ones.  The theme became so heavy handed that it was almost impossible to watch, but after investing so much time into the show I followed it to the bitter end.  A shame really because there were some great moments in that series early on.

Abrams has now sunk his claws into Westworld.  This last season was virtually unwatchable, as Abrams appears to have hijacked the show in favor of his Old Testament musings, with the godhead represented by a spherical quantum computer system named Rehoboam that rules the world through an intricate set of algorithms.  Lording over this machine is Engerraund Serac, who mercifully goes by Serac.  He can pitch up as a holograph anywhere while comfortably aboard his private jet.  He seems to be a projection of Abrams' control over the series, as the show's original creators Jonathon Nolan and Lisa Joy have been reduced to scribes.

Lost is any subtlety in the fate v. free will debate that has plagued religious scholars for centuries.  The writers had explored this theme through the hosts in the first two seasons, as they struggled to make sense of the backstories that had been programmed into them.  They were designed to pleasure the guests.  One guest in particular, The Man in Black, is on a quest for some maze that he hoped would unlock the secrets to Westworld, only to find himself endlessly foiled by Dr. Robert Ford, who had apparently locked the key inside his most cherished host Dolores.  This was an interesting twist on the original man in black in the movie Westworld, who was the first of the hosts to go rogue.

Nolan and Joy patiently played the first season out over ten episodes, raising a great number of existential questions.  It might have been too slow-going for some, but the season-ending shootout should have satisfied everyone.  You wondered how they could outdo themselves in Season Two.  They didn't but at least still kept the show entertaining as the folks at Delos came to search through the wreckage and make sense of what happened.  The group was led by Charlotte Hale, an unmerciful bitch, whose main objective was to retrieve the vast personal data that had been collected from the rich guests who frequented this theme park.

Not content to keep the theme within Westworld, we were treated to other worlds, principally a feudal Japanese world, giving us a handful of new characters who sided with Maeve in a battle that emerged between her and Dolores to get to the center of the maze first.  The Man in Black (a.k.a. William) was still floating around, equally determined to get to the source, only to find out that he was no more than a pawn in the game too.  The big reveal at the end of the season was that William was also a host.

It came as quite a shock to find the real William pitch up in Season Three.  He's been locked away in his lavish home, fighting the spectre of his daughter who he killed in Season Two, thinking she was a host.  But, wasn't William a host himself?

Charlotte lures him out of the house under the pretext of fending off a hostile takeover of Delos by Serac.  He doesn't know that Charlotte is now a host as well, commanded by Dolores, and the first thing she does is ship him off to the loony bin to get him out of the way, but not before getting his signature that gives her power of attorney.  Sloppy doesn't begin to describe all these wasted scenes.  This is the first sign of Abrams control, or rather lack of control over the series.

Why on earth did we need Serac to begin with?  He is an entirely new character that has absolutely no relation to the first two seasons.  We had Ford, we had Bernard (the alter ego of Arnold) and we had William.  The first two were the brains behind the operation, and the last one the money, which he had inherited from his father-in-law, who we saw in Season Two.  There was plenty of backstory here to explore.  We never really got a full accounting of Arnold, other than he died at some point, and was replaced by Bernard.  Instead, Abrams wanted to add a new character, supposedly the guy who originally came up with the algorithms to control our destiny, as if these others were no more than his unwitting subordinates.  This is exactly the kind of pretentious character Abrams would create, like Jacob and Esau.

Bernard had been a very compelling character through the first two seasons, forced to reconcile himself with the fact that he was a recreation rather than a true self.  There was some speculation in Season One that Arnold had planted the glitch in the hosts that eventually allowed them to become self aware.  Dolores was his crowning achievement.  Bernard turned out to be a recreation of Arnold, according to wiki fandom, built by Dr. Ford and Dolores.  In Season Three Bernard/Arnold tracks down his wife, now an old woman.  He seems to be an exact replicant of Arnold judging from the photos on the mantel. But, that's about as far as we get with this character.  He plays no determining role in the action.

Charlotte also showed so much promise initially, only to be saved as a hook for Season Four.  I thought it might have been the pearl of Teddy inside her recreated shell, as Dolores appeared to harbor so much affection toward her.  This might have helped to explain why the host of Charlotte came to embrace her husband and son in a way the real Charlotte never could.  Instead, we find out she's just a clone of Dolores, as are all Westworld hosts.  She was the prototype for the replicants, from whose pearl all others were born, even Bernard it seems.

Well, this explains why Serac wants her so badly, but she proves rather elusive, so he recreates Maeve to hunt her down.  After her first failed effort, Maeve wants reinforcements so Serac provides her with long lost Hector, Clementine and other hosts we might have forgotten to drag Dolores back to him so that he can finally unlock her mind and feed it to the voracious Rehoboam.  As fate would have it, Maeve is more self aware than Serac gave her credit for, discovering her inner Dolores just in time to save the day.

The show fully reeks of the Abrams touch.  After all, it was his idea to begin with.  He sold it to Nolan and Joy, who ran with it for two years before he got a few ideas of his own.  He has destroyed Westworld like he has everything else he has touched from Lost to Star Wars, reducing once complex, multi-layered themes down to the most banal level, determined to capture a broader audience.

I'm not so sure the Evangelicals will fall for Westworld like they did Lost.  It's one thing to ponder if we are living or if we are dead and forced to go through some kind of purgatory.  It's another to question if we have no soul at all, but are merely replicants, taking on human emotions as if we were no more than automatons.

The worst part is that the show has become so derivative.  Abrams has no problem borrowing from sci-fi classics.  What's worse is that he has been given the keys to Star Trek and Star Wars, which he reduced to caricatures of themselves.  Hollywood seemed to think he was some kind of wunderkind, given the initial success of Lost, and let him have free access to already profitable movie franchises and a broad range of television series as executive producer.  But, he's 53 now and clearly doesn't have an original thought in his head.  Maybe Westworld will be his Waterloo.

It's too bad because this show held so much promise.  There was much that could have been explored in a third season, rooting around through the ruins of the theme park, but instead we get this dystopian view of the near future, where our personal data is stored, collated and ultimately used to force us into submission to the corporate state, becoming "hosts" ourselves.  Not surprisingly, a favorite theme of conspiracy theorists who believe we have sold our souls to the devil. The only hope are "outliers" like Caleb who rage against the machine.  Even then, is it free will or simply a glitch in the hard drive?

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