<em>Westworld</em>: A Cut Above

Every week for the second season of Westworld, three Atlantic staffers will discuss new episodes of HBO’s cerebral sci-fi drama.

Spencer Kornhaber: For all the queasy bloodshed and queasier cross-cultural politics of this episode, part of me wishes we’d been in Shogun World all along. Maybe that’s because it’s recently felt as though Westworld had run out of ways to stage high-brow homages to cowboy flicks. Or maybe it’s just that slicing is more cinematic than shooting. In any case, the change of scenery was welcome; the hour had the feel of a Star Trek: The Next Generation voyage to some unexplored planet.

Then again, in Westworld, the very concept of novelty is often a ruse. The show points out how the familiar can be disguised as the new, and that the advances of the technological future might only cinch us tighter in our loops of nostalgia and narcissism (as if that’s not ). Much of the excitement of this hour—both for viewers and the characters themselves—was in recognizing the clone character under the pancake makeup, or in hearing a familiar tune rendered in shamisen. There’s a depressing irony here, well familiar to Western pop culture: To craft a less “tame” experience for consumers, Lee Sizemore simply slapped orientalist clichés on old storylines.