Westworld season 2 episode 10 review: Epic finale makes Inception look linear
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Your support makes all the difference.There are some season finales that aren't a 'finale' as such but rather simply another instalment, a 'last episode for now'. There's nothing wrong with these more muted finishes, but Westworld's season 2 finale was not one of them.
Up to this point, the season had excited me and bored me to tears. It had tested the boundaries between intricate and convoluted, and strayed over another from drama into melodrama. It nearly lost me on several occasions, and episode 10 felt like do or die, especially as the entire season was built toward what was to be a big climax.
Fortunately, the show stepped up. The feature-length finale, 'The Passenger', paid off all of its stories and then some, providing a much-needed sense of closure on so many aspects of the show while opening avenues for new intriguing possibilities.
The way Westworld cycles through different forms of reality and different physical shells for its characters often comes at the cost of the show's dramatic stakes. No-one is ever really dead and no-one has a clear, defined identity. This can make the story struggle to function as a TV show at times, but is also a sobering glimpse at a possible future that could be ahead of us, where the binary of being alive or dead gets muddied and where beings and their consciousnesses can be bounced around like USB sticks.
'The Passenger' was the finale to both seasons 1 and 2 really, a closing chapter on the hosts' park rebellion and an opening line on a new one.
The scenes in Shogunworld and The Raj should have been a thrill but left me feeling oddly cold this season, and I will be delighted to now get out into the real world in season 3. As we as humans in the real world sleepwalk into a future where technology has left us anxious and depressed, it will be interesting to see whether the bloodshed of the Westworld rebellion are enough to make the show's world think more seriously about whether technological innovation is actually progress, whether aspects of futurism are best off kept in the past.
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