Westworld (HBO)

This show was pretty lame. Easily could have been a full-length feature film that clocked in around 2hrs20min. It was obvious they were dragging it out with trite exposition. The whole "omg let's provide piano renditions of popular rock songs - so deep" schtick got old real fast as it felt really manipulative, something the Instagram generation would gush over.

I had 4 different coworkers tell me every episode left them hanging on the edge of their seat, but I kept waiting for something of interest to happen. At best, it was like the worst parts of Lost - giving us a full palate of mysteries, but very little payoff until a very simple one at the end - it's all about the robots gaining full consciousness and rebelling against their creators. The pilot was pretty good, but the rest of the season never came close to matching it in terms of quality and interest. For shame.

I found I, Robot to be more compelling of a watch with a similar plot line.

Meh.

Also: what's up with the bad robots using the Infinite Ammo code near the end of the season?

Its source material was 10 unrelated short stories. It combined some of that with Asimov's robot detective novel flair.

I can understand that. I personally did not see the twist with Bernard coming, though I'm not one to actively try to figure out all of the twists after each episode either, so I thought that was an interesting mid-season twist to bring into play. You are right that the show is heavy in exposition in the bad way meaning that it likes to have a lot of sequences explaining everything rather than "a-ha" moments of action, but this is the first season and there's a lot of world and concept building that needs to be done. The show is essentially at the point where the 1973 film version of this comes into play where the hosts revolt in the park, so I'm curious to see where they take it from here. Hopkins was phenomenal, and so if he is actually dead then someone else is going to really have to step in to fill that void. There's a lot of potential for the show to seriously falter in Season Two, but since it's not coming out until 2018 I figure that they've got a lot up their sleeve.

Yeah, I thought that from the very first episode.  My guess would be that Ford somehow was filtering some of this to himself only, but even then that doesn't make sense.  Unless the park really does have portions that aren't under security (maybe for some form of guest privacy perhaps?) then staff should be well informed on the hosts becoming aware or oddities that aren't matching up.  I think Ford was very aware of everything going on and perhaps was aiding these things, but I agree that it still doesn't mean that other high level staff members weren't able to pick up on things going very wrong.

Season 2 just started filming.

I'm enjoying this season but how many seasons can they do this flashback stuff? I enjoy the fleshing out of secondary characters but I can understand some early reviews saying it's not focused in the first few episodes on the best parts of the show.