🚨Spoilers for Westworld Season 2, Episode 2: “Reunion” Below🚨
Plucky Media is back with a look back of the most recent episode of Westworld. It’s not a summary but it has some observations. Am I right? Who knows! But here we are.
Throughout Westworld season one, one phrase you heard again and again was,
“These violent delights have violent ends.”
It just felt strange. I knew it was Shakespearian and while it seemed to fit the context, whenever Ford was cleaning up a newly bloodied and abused host, but when I looked it up, it didn’t really make sense.
The line, even though thematically you would think it would come from a grander play like Hamlet, or a gorier on like Titus Andronicus, actually comes from Romeo and Juliet,
“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately. Long love doth so.
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”
In the play, they come from the friar, urging Romeo not to fall in love too deeply and not let it consume you quickly. And it did, obviously, and they died horrible deaths.
Upon viewing this episode of Westworld S2: “The Reunion”, the phrase seems less of a warning for the hosts than it is the guests of the park. Throughout the episode, we dip into both the memories of Dolores and The Man in Black/William, and see how the park pivots their business, not unlike the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, as a way to harvest user data through the eyes of the hosts. While how they’re harvesting that data and what exactly they’re doing with it remains unclear (and seems like something that we’ll only fully learn at the end of the season), the way the hosts are acting in the park definitely takes on a more biblical tinge than I was expecting.
Everywhere you turn, hosts and humans alike are talking about “judgment”. Dolores can’t stop talking about ” The Great Beyond” or “The Pearly Gates”, or as mini-Ford says in the previous episode “the door” or “the way out”. She sees the door as a weapon. The Man in Black/William sees it as the center of an even deeper maze that he never found the center of in the first place.
It feels as if Westworld itself is positioning itself as an alternate Garden of Eden, but as it is, it only offers temptations. Every flower and fruit and creature in the garden is a snake, offering something you can’t get anywhere else with no consequence. It is a garden of Eden with a God that only restricts the snakes. When the restraints go away and the temptations are free to do what they wish with the guests of the park, we see the fallout.
The violent delights are making their violent ends. Some of these delights, like Dolores and her crew, are exacting revenge en masse, and even recycling some ridiculous lines from the “gods”. Some, like the inhabitants The Man in Black/William, found in Pariah, create their own end by killing themselves rather than help someone “win a game”. Some, just keep going and keep pouring drinks and fighting petty battles as if nothing has changed.
Back in another essay, I supposed that the phrase “These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends” was all about suffering and that it was all about achieving enlightenment through it. Now it seems, having memories of this suffering in a few key characters is doing something totally different than self-actualization. What it’s doing though, I don’t know yet.
But of course, we’re only in episode 2, so literally, anything could happen. Either way, it seems that Ford, a man spouting the words of a Shakespearian friar, forged a holy war as his final act. A war that seemed to end, by Hosts dumping themselves into the sea. Though there are more questions than answers, this looks like an interesting season of Westworld, perhaps of biblical proportions.
