[6.4/10] I don’t mind mystery box storytelling for the most part. Sure, it can be a crutch, but in the right hands, it can be a nice way to create momentum for a movie or T.V. show, especially when you need some time and leeway from the audience to establish your setting, premise, and character.
And I absolutely do not mind surrealness and strangeness and impressionistic sequences on T.V. and at the movies. One of the great features of screen-based works is that they can combine sight and sound to make the impossible seem real in a way that’s difficult for other mediums. Using that implicit sense of reality to peel away at the edges of the normal and everday is a feature, not a bug.
But you need substance to make both of those things work, and I’m not convinced that “Contrapasso”, and maybe even *Westworld* as a whole, has enough to make it count.
Because moreso than even the prior series of hint-laden episodes, “Contrapasso” lives in the realm of the cryptic colloquy and vague mysterious suggestion of what’s to come. The conversation between Ford and The Man in Black in particular is, to paraphrase Logan in this episode, one big pseudo-philosophical circlejerk.
There’s some juice that comes from seeing these two major character occupy the same frame for the first time in the series. But they say nothing of any actual substance to one another. Every word they utter is cloaked in mystery and foreshadowing and first semester English lit analysis. It’s unimaginative to suggest that every character in every television show has to talk like a real person, but having Ford and The Man in Black just toss weightless aphorisms at one another with no point but to seem heady and portentous makes “Contrapasso” feel like the show is just marking time until something big happens down the line to pull the show into focus.
The same goes for Dolores’s impressionistic visions beckoning her to the maze or to find herself or god only knows what. It’s another bit of threadbare symbolism that doesn't even have the benefit of just looking cool visually the same way that, say, Maeve’s recollections in the prior episode do. Bits like seeing the moon become an operating lamp, or seeing your own doppelganger sit across from you are clichés that can’t amount to the burrowing Lynchian vibe that *Westworld* seems to be going for here.
It all quickly goes tiresome and makes you wish the show would just pull the trigger (so to speak) on some of its mysteries or reveals at the halfway mark of the season, rather than dragging them and out and trying to fill the empty space with more doubletalk and overdone symbolic imagery.
The theme all this nonsense is meant to support is one of deciding who you are in your own story. As has been the case throughout this season, there’s a parallel between one of the hosts and someone in the “real world” here.
The host is, as has also often been the case, Dolores, who gets to set aside her farm girl getup, put on a cowboy hat and strap on a pistol as she becomes part of the action and not just the object of it. The change in dress is, once again, heavy-handed in its symbolism, but at least the show takes the moment seriously. It’s a bit paint-by-number when she and William are in a tight spot and Dolores is able to shoot her way out of it. It’s even worse when she says “I was tired of being a damsel” in case someone in the cheap seats didn’t get it. But it’s character growth, and I suppose I’ll take it.
William is meant to have a bit of the same thing here, albeit not in as dramatic or well-cracked a way here. He finally ditches Logan and his impulsive, wanton ways, being moved by Logan’s dig that in the real world, William poses no threat, someone who only rose to the vaunted position of Executive Vice President due to family connections. It’s meant to seem like William too is becoming a protagonist in his own story and not just a bystander.
By the same token, there’s some underfed thematic material about good and evil just being constructs from Logan, which only serve to underscore how he’s pretty one-dimensional and flat as foils go. Westworld is a fine setting in which to explore the idea of what people do in the face of something approaching absolute freedom, and what that says about good and bad, but it comes off like window-dressing here.
What the episode does seem to commit to with more conviction is the young repair tech, who’s fiddling with a robotic bird in his spare time. “Contrapasso” continues its utter lack of subtlety by having the tech’s coworker berate him for trying to rise above his station, with the spoken implication that the tech is trying to get a promotion, to get to be a programmer rather than a “butcher.” The episode is on the side of people trying to seize their destinies, whether its Dolores or William or a low-level stitcher-upper or The Man in Black himself, but it veers between making that idea all too clear or burying things in portents and purple prose.
That’s why this episode is so underwhelming. We’re supposed to be minorly excited when the town of Pariah turns out to be run by Lawrence (i.e. the guy TMiB has been dragging around and seems to kill off here). It’s supposed to be a dramatic revelation when the subordinate programmer who’s been backing up Bernard discovers that someone’s been smuggling data out of the park to a satellite. And it’s supposed to be shocking when Maeve sits up at the end of the episode and speaks to the young tech by name.
But we have next to no context for any of these things. It’s all “be shocked or impressed now,” get an explanation later. You can play that game for a while, and if you make the characters interesting enough, or the themes compelling enough, you can buy yourself some time to deliver on the idea that what’s in the mystery box, or what ideas you’re trying to get at with some outlandish imagery, is worthwhile when you see the whole picture.
But halfway through the season, you have to start showing that this is headed somewhere, somewhere worthwhile, and “Contrapasso” can’t help but feel like an hour’s worth of smoke and mirrors while *Westworld* saves its genuinely meaningful stuff for a later day.
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