Westworld: Season One (Review)

Westworld 
2017 HBO 
Season One 
Score: 9/10

"Shall we drink to the lady with the white shoes?"

I had the flu last week. I hate the damn flu. The flu immediately makes itself known as something that will, if you are not in fairly decent shape and health, kill you. If you are in fairly decent shape and health, it makes you want to die. Night is the worst. Sweating through the sheets, then freezing in them, chills racing through your body, then suddenly feeling like you are baking in an oven. The dreams are near satanic.
You probably shouldn't watch Westworld in between fever dreams.
Yet, that's what I have just done. As soon as one character asked another, "Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?" I should have bowed out until my internal temperature was somewhere south of 100. And yet, I didn't. I plowed ahead. Now I'm not sure if anything is real.
Yes, Westworld blew my mind. Nothing on television, or in the theater for that matter, has done that for quite a while. I watched the original Michael Crichton Westworld film when I was a child, and this ain't that. Westworld takes the idea of a near-future wild west-set theme park full of cyborgs who think they are human, and douses it in LSD. The idea was already seemingly LSD inspired, so that's saying something.

Westworld explores the aforementioned theme park from the perspective of its creators back in the control area, and from that of its paying guests and the cyborgs themselves out in the middle of it. As for which one is which, and who's who, get ready for the show to pull the rug from under your feet every time you've got any idea of what's going on.
The crazy thing is, all of this is being brought to you from Jonathan Nolan, the guy who wrote Momento, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight, so there's a cold logic to almost everything that happens. You go back and realize the show was telling you exactly what was going on the whole time. Darnit, show.
Thankfully, though, Westworld is more than just a narrative thrill-ride--it explores deep and complex themes of existence and consciousness in ways that somehow seem fresh, even though it would seem that by the latter 2010's, those themes have been done to death. All of this is not being done coldly and without emotion, either--Nolan's wife, Lisa Joy, who worked on Pushing Daisies and Burn Notice, is co-running the show. On top of that, a bunch of ridiculously talented actors are bringing this story to life. Yes, that's Anthony Hopkins in the above picture, and he's bringing his A-game. And he's going head-to-head with Jeffrey Wright, who can pull an A- in his sleep. As if that wasn't enough, Ramin Djawadi, the guy who does the music for Game of Thrones, is Westworld's composer. He's done seven season of Game of Thrones--there are no kinks to work out here...at this point, he's a master of his craft, and he's found ways of bringing in variations of modern songs into the soundtrack to mess with the viewers heads even more.
The direction and atmosphere are superbly haunting, as well. Ghostly, flickering, dimly lit halls in the control complex, Old West days that loop over and over again, silhouettes of skeletal trees looming in the moonlit fog, haunted consciousnesses. Oh, and do you like Michael Crichton? The man could spin a yarn, even if his characters were all ciphers spouting technobabble. You've got all the markers of great Crichton (being that he created this world in the first place), from a classic John Hammond-esque creator, to a skeptical park security head, to low-totem pole park employees with a grudge and a knack for sending things spiraling into chaos. I mean, I could basically feel a classic Ian Malcolm chaos theory iteration quote in the air between each episode. How is this show even happening? It's perfect! It's like a fever dream come to TV-enabled life!
Well, it's almost perfect. The show gets a little too clever for its own good in its final two episodes, biting off one more twist than it can chew (I mean, if that character was actually that character all along, why didn't anyone actually recognize him as that character?!) and feeling a little too wrapped up in itself. So close! I can't think of many seasons I television I thought were perfect. The fifth season of The Shield? The first season of the Sopranos? It's so easy to mess up at some point during an entire season of television. The first season of Westworld is nearly perfect.
Then again, now that my fever's gone, did the show ever really happen? Did I dream Westworld? Or did Westworld dream me? In the middle of the flu, I left my house to visit the grocery store I worked at in high school. People ran to and fro filling up their baskets. Empty shelves haunted the aisles. I asked the manager why they didn't have any pork chops. He said they were going out of business. He didn't even recognize me. Did I ever even work there? Are my memories of late night walks down corridors of cardboard boxes and gleaming cans, mumbling to myself and drinking Yoo-hoo's real? Has anything ever actually happened?
Maybe I'll find out on April 22nd, when HBO premieres Westworld: Season Two.