Yeah, I am not impressed.
Withholding too much information & keeping us hostage to curiosity just to have the last two episodes spoon-feeding us everything and just to shove in as many twists as possible.
DON'T READ IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED THE WHOLE SEASON, INCLUDING THE FINALE.
Arnold committing suicide to stop the park from opening makes no sense. We've been taught that the elegant parts of the hosts' code is written by Arnold, he also wrote the part of the code that gives the hosts a path to consciousness; the "reveries". Hypothetically speaking, he would've been a lot more helpful staying alive and making sure the hosts aren't updated with the "reveries" code or anything similar. Instead, he programmed Doleres/Wyatt to kill him to stop the park from opening.. ok? What does that prove? that the hosts do what they are told, nothing else.
According to Ford, Doleres was to Arnold the "new child who would never die", but then Arnold realized that her "immortality would destine her to suffer", so Arnold told Delores to kill everyone saying "he could bring all of them back, but not me". Is that really your plan Arnold? to hope Ford is affected by your death and not bring any of the hosts back and not open the park? This is fucking stupid.
And by the way, the directors were trying to shove as much artsy/beautiful scenery as they could, it got annoying eventually. A good example of that is the way Arnold chose to be killed and how he was killed. Sit down, play music and get shot and killed "beautifully", Ok. Your plan is stupid Arnold, and I wasn't gonna forget about that by getting killed in an artsy way.
Maeve is programmed to escape? wow, seriously? What if Felix (the good dude) and Sylvester (the bad dude) didn't co-operate with her? Ford's plan would've been busted wide open a lot earlier. Is Ford really that dumb? Keep in mind that in order for Maeve to break out she needed Sylvester to cooperate with her in every step of the way, including the "don't implement a bomb in Maeve's back" bit.
I was willing to NOT nitpick over how the rest of the staff never seemed suspicious and how non of the code tinkering triggered alarms, that includes the fact that Maeve's core code was rewritten to enable her to hurt humans with no warning being issued! So much for a park that's tightly controlled! But the writers insisted on being sloppy and stupid. Maeve being programmed to escape in a way that she needed this much inside help to succeed is RIDICULOUS. Intelligent Ford's plans shouldn't depend on taking such a big risk. This is the same guy who killed Teresa and Elsie to ensure his plan was moving as he wanted. Overall, the amount of sloppiness that I had to let slide throughout the season is huge, especially how incredibly sloppy the security measures inside the building are, the core code was tinkered with by such minor employees and no one noticed ffs! All was forgivable until I foud out that Ford's plan for Maeve's escape is even sloppier.
so I went back and watched some parts of the finale, Sylvester told Maeve "There was someone who has been accessing your code so you can wake yourself up out of sleep mode, someone named Arnold", later on Maeve tells Bernard "Before I started altering myself, someone else has beaten me to the punch, I want to know who and why". Bernard didn't get the chance to tell her who altered her, but didn't Sylvester answer that already? It was Arnold = Bernard with Ford's instructions. If not, that means whoever altered her to escape was dumb and stupid because his/her plan depended heavily on humans being cooperative and completely secretive. It would also make the story messier than it already was, how is it possible that such dangerous alterations go unnoticed? Unless Ford was behind it of course...
Which I believe he was, let's not forget, earlier in the season, in the episode in which Bernard killed Teresa, Charlotte Hale told Teresa, with Hector tied in her bed, that their plan to kick Ford out required a "blood sacrifice". Later on when Ford lured Teresa into his den he told her that her death would be a "Blood sacrifice". Ford quoted exactly what Hale said in a private conversation in the presence of Hector, heavily implying that Ford missed nothing the hosts experienced in his absence. How could Ford not miss small things, as small as conversations, but miss dangerous alterations to Maeve's code? A possible answer is that he didn't miss it, because he was the one behind it. Not to mention, the timing of Maeve's escape, that resulted in the distraction of much needed security guards and keeping them busy and trapped inside the building while the rest of the hosts were commiting a mass massacre is further evidence that it was all a part of Ford's bigger plan.
Now let's talk about the maze, it isn't for the guests, it's for the hosts. Ok, why was it carved inside some of the hosts' scalps? Why did Maeve fall dead on a maze? I want to say it was a metaphor of Maeve finding consciousness but that was before the reveries were slipped into the hosts' code by Ford. The function of the reveries is confusing as hell. Sometimes it's an important tool to find a path to consciousness, and sometimes it's not! Make up your mind, writers!
Another example of a needless confusion created by the writers was the Delores/Maeve interaction in the second episode, it was implied the phrase" these violet delights have violent ends" triggered something in Maeve, the same way it triggered something in Doleres and made her kill a fly at the end of the first episode. But guess what? the phrase was meaningless to Maeve, because as we learnt by watching the finale, Maeve's escape was programmed. So her interaction with Doleres was there just to trick us, viewers, so that we are slapped with another forced twist; "her escape plan was programmed and not actually her choice lolz". Fuck off.
The show creators tried to put a lot of emphasis on how Maeve was "waking up" at the beginning of the show. It started with a change that was triggered in Dolores when Abernathy told her "these violent delights have violet ends", after he's been changed by finding a picture of the outside world. Similarly, Maeve was shown to have been struck by the same phrase and something inside her was triggered. Even Elsie had similar concerns, she literally said : "let me pull the hosts who had contact with him [Abernathy], like the daughter Dolores. Because if this is not a dissonant episode, then whatever Abernathy had could be contagious. So to speak".
It almost seems like the writers had a change of heart and decided that Maeve's first independent choice should be the one she made in the final moments of the season, pretending everything else she did was programmed while completely implying otherwise, and that's cheap and lazy of them. I've said said at the beginning of the show that we could easily guess where the story was headed, at least the story of the first season, and I think the writers knew that as well. So they tried to escape the predictability by forcing a needless twist that added nothing to the story, because the end result is the same, Maeve would've made her completely independent choice even without the twist that undermined what the writers tried to teach us in the first few episodes.
Back to Ford, he realized he made a mistake by not listening to Arnold and his idea of correcting the mistake is.... freeing the hosts and help them find consciousness by slipping in the reveries code? How about you just wipe out everything you made and close the park? If X doesn't exist, then X can't suffer. Honestly, the best way to help the hosts was to destroy them, their narratives and their codes, that what Arnold wanted and did after all. He killed them all and killed himself after hoping Ford wouldn't bring them back and wouldn't open the park. But no, apparently Ford despised humans, and thought giving the hosts free will is better than Arnold's plan, and that's fine, but Ford is really not correcting his mistake by doing this. He's not even admitting to his mistake in the first place by doing this, his actions implied he didn't. Why are the writers trying to tell us otherwise? So.fucking.sloppy.
Ford said: "I was so close to opening the park that to acknowledge your consciousness would have destroyed my dreams. Wasn't it Oppenheimer who said that any man whose mistakes take 10 years to correct is quite a man? Mine have taken 35." After that Ford shows us his the last narrative that he's been working on, and guess what, it isn't correcting any mistakes. His last narrative fullfilled his "desire to create something of lasting beauty". Once again, doing what he wants, not what Arnold wanted. Ford clearly has no problem with the hosts gaining consciousness and becoming "alive". On the other hand, Delores becoming alive shook Arnold to the core and pushed him to kill himself to stop Ford from opening the park with more hosts that could become alive one day.
By the end of this rant I've remembered that a friend of mine told me to watch the show, he also told me about the budget and whatnot. More importantly, he told me the show was delayed, and parts of it were rewriten. I haven't checked but I wouldn't be surprised if that's actually the case. There is lack of focus, confusion and some glaring flaws that could be the result of rewriting scenes.
