Started watching Westword, I feel like the show will be talking about consciousness, in a manner which TSAers will appreciate.
Finished the show last week and this was absolutely fantastic. Probably one of the best TV series I have watched - right up there with some of my favourites.
A wild SilentRoamer appears! I too finished Westworld recently and it is damn awesome. While there were a few pretty minor quibbles I had with it, there's nothing even close to ruining the show for me -- nor dampening my anticipation for the next season (like three years from now). And I think almost all of my issues would have been removed or alleviated if I watched the show once all the episodes were available. There were a lot of random things that were bothering me (particularly a certain character death near the end of the season) that felt out of place or like it was going nowhere, but given that this was a Jon Nolan project, I held out hope that the finale would fix them all -- and boy did it ever. Honestly the entire season is a set-up for the payoff of that finale (not that there weren't great scenes elsewhere, the finale felt like the show was done trying to mislead the audience or feed them mystery after mystery, and instead it was tying knots left and right in a most dramatic fashion.
It's also fucking WEALTHY with great actors in the main cast. Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris need no introduction, but Christ, hat scene in the bar between them with Teddy feels like the new DeNiro vs Pacino diner sit-down from Heat. Jeffrey Wright is always, always good, and his character was the one I ultimately felt most attached to other than perhaps Maeve, whose characterization and acting was phenomenal. I've seen a lot people elsewhere complain about that plotline -- the only part I didn't like was the redheaded guy, and simply because his acting wasn't up to snuff (which is extra irritating when the actual character is meant to be unlikable, because it's sort of a double whammy).
Evan Rachel Wood is really the "breakout" here though -- she's had plenty of other roles, many good, but I haven't seen anything as demanding as this one. She spent a tremendous amount of time this season being very believably "robotic" and then at least as much, if not more time, utterly distraught and on the verge of mental breakdown in an utterly human way. Sustaining either of those modes is challenging enough for a long period even in a movie, let alone a show of this scale. While I thought her plot-line did loose speed a bit in the middle, again like every other strand in the story, the finale rectified it completely.
If I had one legit critique, it would be that I wish they spent a little more time discussing the nature of the technology at hand, more details of the park's inner-workings (especially security), and of course the notion of consciousness itself. I would've traded several of the action scenes for more of Hopkins and Jeffrey Wright talking the Bicameral Mind theory or what have you -- and I fucking love a good action scene, I just wasn't super impressed with the filming and choreography of them. The Man in Black's action was the best because it was the most orchestrated, and Hector Escaton (great name for a very fun character) and his crew's robbery sequence was well shot and scored, even seeing it a couple times over. Also, the scene with Maeve's friend from the brothel when they demonstrate the robots combat prowess was equal parts disturbing and bad ass.
Oh yeah, speaking of the score -- fantastic. The intro song and accompanying visuals are immediately among the best ever,
Also (finale spoilers):
That grin on Ed Harris's face when he saw what came out of the woods and realized -- at least on some level -- what was really going on here with "Ford's new storyline"...priceless. Almost wish that was the closing shot. It's funny, but this show genuinely captures intrinsic elements of a video game better than literally any video adaptation ever made -- I mean that's not a high bar exactly, but still. There's a lot of clever stuff tucked in there that will be familiar to fans of gaming, especially open world games or MMO's.