The worst thing the Man In Black does in Episode 5 is slash Lawrence across the throat and dangle him from a tree like a stuck pig, collecting the blood that drains down from his neck. There’s no evidence that he’s getting any pleasure out of what Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” called “a little of the old ultraviolence.” His $40,000 a day entitles him to all the grotesque privileges the park has to offer and perhaps more, because he seems to enjoy benefits beyond what a normal guest is granted.
As a technician pointed out earlier in the season, the Man in Black can do whatever he wants. The West in McCarthy’s novel is abstracted, too, in the way it amplifies the atrocities of scalp-hunters who trolled the United States-Mexico border in the mid-1800s, but the comparison ends there. Which leads me to this counterintuitive thought: Is the Man in Black really a villain?Įvery week, including this one, the obvious answer would appear to be “yes.” He’s like Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s novel “Blood Meridian,” a figure of fearsome intelligence and implacable evil who rapes, tortures and kills his way through a condemned Western landscape. But the more time spent in Westworld, the more the seams begin to show, and the behavioral patterns and loops start to look just as mundane and predictable as the domestic routines they’ve left behind.
#Dolores loop hero villain android#
It’s a fantasy of Old West freedom, and a potent one for thrill-seekers who give themselves over to it passively, chasing their animal desire for realistic shoot-‘em-ups and readily available android sex.
The paradox of Westworld as a theme park is that guests come seeking a taste of freedom - no laws, no standards of decency, no limits beyond the horizon - but are, in fact, submitting themselves to a world that’s controlled, surveilled and quite literally programmed.
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