Whenever I’ve watched to news lately, I feel like I’m watching the 2016-22 version of “West World.” I’m old enough to remember the original movie (yoikes!) — quite interesting and ahead of its time, although the special effects were both more- and less-laughable than the current decade’s edition. The 70’s movie was a sci-fi western, and the plot was as straightforward as could be.
The 2016 season of the series was fun and easily comprehensible. The actors were great (no disrepect to Yul Brynner). The production values were awesome; you could see every penny up on the screen. It’s been 50-some years since the original movie came out, and the plot premise seems far more plausible, being as the sentient robots are — in many ways– just on the horizon. Which gives the series’ scary plot twists an even more ominous feel.
Even in the first season, though, the plot could sometimes be a little hard to follow. But I could still sort it out by telling myself, mainly “Dolores: good; Teddy: probably good; Man in Black: Elon Musk, prob not good; Bernard: principled scientist; Maeve: complex” Then at some point in Season 2, with all the brain ball-bearing transfers, and moving between the “real” world and the “artificial” world, I was finding it difficult to keep up. I had to read synopses on reddit and Vulture, just to get an idea of what was happening, and wasn’t sure even they got it right.
At some point in Season 3 I found myself asking, “Is that real Bernard talking to robot Bernard in the clone body of Teddy, replaced by fake Maeve and the hands of real-world Dolores? The show felt impossible to follow, but I still liked looking at it. I just let the complexity wash over me and stopped trying to track it. And then maybe I would read something or hear something that explained a little bit of it to me, and that was good enough.
By season 4, to be honest, I had stopped watching. There didn’t seem to be any point. I didn’t care anymore who was mechanical, human, good, bad or any combination thereof. It seemed a little bit like the writers were just rolling a bunch of dodecahedron dice to move the plot along. I wasn’t learning anything, or pondering what makes something ‘artificial’ or ‘real’ or what is life on Earth for, or who would, could, or should, survive an upcoming dystopia.
Anyway, this is also how I feel about the news these days: Is that a real politician talking to an AI other guy, in a story about a groyper who’s looksmaxing as an antisemitic snowflake at the request of a cloned terrorist dictator who will be escorting a select portion of humanity to another planet as long they believe the right things? I’m so confused I can’t even watch any more. And it’s not just because of AI slop; it’s also because the viewpoints are so cross-referenced, convoluted, and mutable, that I can’t keep them straight.
*Sigh*