A&E
Women to Watch: Powerful Female Characters on Television
By Ally D’Antonio ’20
December 8, 2016
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TV Show: Westworld (2016-)
Network: HBO
Seasons: 1
Actress: Thandie Newton
Background Information:
Westworld is a theme park, where, for a fortune, you can live out your wildest fantasy. You can be the white knight, riding in on a horse to save the town and get the girl, or you can be the devil himself, whose only desire is to hurt and destroy others.
To make this world complete, there are hosts, robots and other inhabitants of the theme park whom guests interact with. During these interactions, guests can create stories, go on adventures and do whatever they desire most.
Guests can control the hosts, who lose their memories after each adventure ends.
When the show starts, a few of these hosts start to remember things from their past “loops” or adventures, which are all supposed to be wiped from their memory.
The hosts start to gain consciousness and become aware of their surroundings, which puts them in grave danger and causes them emotional and physical pain.
The two characters that become the most aware of their situations are Maeve Millay(Thandie Newton) and Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood), two female hosts with vastly unique experiences.
Why you should watch:
Maeve and Dolores’ journey to autonomy is beautiful and complicated. This journey makes the show worth watching.
Maeve is the owner of a brothel in the small town where the adventure in Westworld begins, and Dolores is the daughter of a rancher there. Maeve is the first to become aware that she is living in a world that is not real when she wakes up in a repair shop outside of the park. She quickly becomes dissatisfied with her life and becomes more upset every time she dies.
However, she starts to get bolder, and eventually, she starts to take control of her life, as well as the lives of others. She refuses to play anyone else’s game, and starts making her own rules. Maeve tries to change the game which becomes a feature of living in Westworld.
On the other hand, Dolores wants the game to end, once and for all. She has the most complicated history, as the oldest host still active, and she has been programed to become independent and to piece together what is wrong with her world. When she discovers that her reality as she knew it is not real, instead of taking Maeve’s approach, and trying to rewrite herself and her narrative, Dolores starts to understand that the only way to save herself is to tear down the fantasy.
These two conflicting stories complement each other, making the program, with a good, unique story and relateable themes, all the more compelling.