Here, the Man in Black (now played by Ed Harris) is a human, and Teddy is also a Host, unable to stop the gunslinger as he drags Dolores off. But the Westworld pilot reverses this dynamic.
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If you’re familiar with Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie of the same name, where a robotic gunslinger dressed all in black (played by Yul Brynner) was the chief villain. Teddy will save the day, and all will be well. And when he arrives in town and becomes immediately smitten with Dolores, you think you know where this is going - especially when her family is attacked by a villainous Man in Black. He seems like one of the human Guests, who come to Westworld to hang out with and/or abuse the robot Hosts.
The opening sequence of Westworld posits James Marsden’s Teddy as the series’ hero. You fixin’ to come in here and get in Teddy’s face? HBO Westworld very much knows what it has in this performer, and it’s fun to watch her stretch her acting muscles. Wood has always been an actor capable of tremendous performances - as many TV fans have known since her role as a young teenager on ABC’s family drama Once and Again, which ran from 1999 to 2002 - but she hasn’t always been well-served by those who work with her.
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In various scenes where she’s brought in for tune-ups, Evan Rachel Wood gets to go from weeping terror, to completely non-emotional affect, to full monotone (even sans her Wild West accent) in a matter of seconds. 2) Everything about Evan Rachel Wood’s performance is dynamiteĭolores is the kind of dream role actors kill for. It’s both a signal that Dolores is not quite human, and a neat image you just know the pilot will circle back to in the end (and it does!). The Hosts are programmed not to harm living things - not even tiny insects. Dolores, one of Westworld’s robotic "Hosts," sits, still, as a fly crawls across her open eye.
This is the opening shot of the pilot, and it’s a nice way for the show to drop a gauntlet for where it’s going.
1) Dolores lets a fly crawl across her eye Look at that fly. It’s also full of moments that are really, really cool and fun to puzzle over. Plus, it tells a more or less self-contained tale of the park workers dealing with a glitch in the system by finding a way to clear the park of malfunctioning robots without alarming customers or causing them to call for returns. The pilot neatly sets up the show’s conflicts and introduces a bunch of characters who live in two separate worlds (the Wild West theme park Westworld, populated with robots who recreate the park’s setting, and the behind-the-scenes humans who keep the park running). (I may have my misgivings about where the series goes from here, but that’s another matter.) "The Original," the pilot of HBO’s new sci-fi drama Westworld, is a really solid piece of television.