Westworld starts out what seems like an old western show before revealing that everything is constructed.  I find it an interesting way to mix the wild west genre with sci-fi. The first episode holds a lot of symbolism,  such as the fly.

When I saw the woman in the blue dress, Dolores, sitting in the chair nude with a fly crawling on her face, I saw that something was wrong.  Seeing the dissonance when she was getting up from bed smiling and when the fly was crawling over her eye, I could tell that Dolores was not alive.  This was even proven when after the first few minutes when the villain shot Teddy, a man who was made sheriff, and dragged Dolores away, Dolores wakes up in bed reenacting her actions ‘yesterday’ with no memory of what happened before.  Afterwords, it’s shown that the world and the people living in it are fake and constructed by a company to entertain people who wants to play around in a fantasy western world.  The fake people are puppets specifically made for acting out their roles in a story the company constructs.

I find the company similar to a video game company.  In a video game company, there are people in charge of creating the game world for players to explore, creating non-player characters for players to interact with and give life to the world, and people who repairs any bugs or issues the game may have.  In Westworld, this is what the people working there are doing, from constructing the puppets for use or to store away, to creating the world for the puppets and players, to making sure the world runs as it should and issuing updates.  Their actions as puppets starts to behave strangely makes sense in a same way a game developer world act to a glitch in the game.  I notice that though the puppets acts on their programming, some are becoming more ‘alive’ than others.

The puppets acts on a basis of routine where they do the exact same thing every day with no memory of what happened before.  Several times, the fly can be seen flying onto the puppets with little to no reaction, showing how lifeless they are.  From the beginning of the episode, however, the villain already realizes that his world is a game as well as certain aspects such as being invulnerable since he’s an important villain that can’t be killed except by the players how come into Westworld for fun.  As the show goes on, several inconsistencies happen that, depending on the puppet and it’s programming, either react but then forget when the next ‘day’ comes, break down like a computer reacting to a confusing task, to going off rails on what they should do turning out different results.  On example of this was how in one time, Teddy was made sheriff,  however when he starts to act differently and ignore the man who made him sheriff, a weather puppet were made sheriff and went along with the ride along with his wife, effecting even the end of the show. While this raises concern for the company running Westworld, as they don’t want their players to be in danger, this shows that the puppets the company created are gaining more awareness of the world around them and themselves.