<i>Westworld</i>: What's in 'The Valley Beyond'?
Every week for the second season of Westworld, three Atlantic staffers will discuss new episodes of HBO’s cerebral sci-fi drama.
Spencer Kornhaber: “Up until this point, the stakes in this place haven’t been real,” the Man in Black says to his dim sidekick, and his observation applies to Westworld as much as to Westworld. For the most part, intellectual curiosity rather than emotional investment has been viewers’ primary drive. We on the couch may have sympathized with the hosts, but it’s hard to feel that lives that can be rebooted are in dire need of protecting. The human characters have generally been so oafish (Lee Sizemore) or so inscrutable (Robert Ford) that it’s tough to care much about their fates. Season 1’s battle between Ford and Delos over who really controlled the park just pitted one kind of creep versus another.
Yet tonight’s refreshingly informational episode widened the show’s scope, and with it, the reasons to become obsessed. Westworld, we learned, exists in a world resembling our own—somewhere near a coastal metropolis (more fodder for that the park is in the South China Sea?), and some time probably not too distantly in the future (are we
