JediG60racer
Sr Member
Once again, late to the party for the final season. Just finished watching it.
My takeaway from the line "all sentient life on earth has ended" was face value truth from the hosts' perspective. But not necessarily complete truth. After all, we did have at least two human outliers survive at the end. That leads to the possibility that others may have survived, and that humanity can start over. Though I wonder what the long term effects of the parasites would be, and if the future children of outliers would necessarily be immune to the parasites, or if younger generations would become infected, even without the towers' audio control signal. I wonder if other hosts may have survived as well. Could potentially lead to new storytelling in a wasteland scenario.
Even though they didn't bother to show "anomalies" detected around the globe like they did at first with Reheboam, or any scenes of humans destroying each other in various places around the world, I took it that what was taking place in New York was taking place everywhere. But give the Inception-like layers of world building, leaving viewers unclear as to what was taking place in the machine world versus the real world, I wonder if that was really the case? Was all this host control only taking place in New York, or was it even really New York? Was it just a simulation of NY?
So many times phrases were dropped intimating that what we were seeing wasn't real, it was a simulation that had been repeated. Makes me wonder if they'd wanted to leave the option open for a return season with this one being all a giant experiment/simulation.
The passage to the valley beyond opening at the dam made me think that whole dam scenario was a simulation. Bernard saying things like "we usually don't get this far" was hard to read, as to whether he was running simulations in his mind, or if we were watching a simulation. Lots of ambiguity that didn't play well. I wanted answers not more questions.
Missed opportunity: Dolores takes over Reheboam, yes - but then returns her consciousness to her own body. Was weird to leave her character in a place that was so undefined. Or at least, having harnessed the power of the super AI and bent it to her own will, she would logically seem to have had the ability to remote control a host body and give herself localized abilities in the Dolores host body. Having her take over the AI and then shut it down without any further fanfare was a bit like in Star Trek when they eject the warp core from the main ship... but then the ship just went dead in the water and the story seemingly picked up with a different ship, ignoring the storyline of the original ship. It was jarring.
Dolores' copy being the pearl at the center of the maze, trying to figure out her own story, was an interesting choice, and her discovery of her agency within this simulation was an interesting play on the first season. I would have liked to have seen her discover the other Dolores copy running the human world, and have them interact in some way - perhaps trying to reintegrate various parts of her personality damaged through so much trauma and reconstitution in different host bodies and simulations. Would have been more interesting than William battling host versions of himself. I was still unclear at the end as to whether William in the stasis chamber was the originial or just an early host version of the original, given the fidelity testing we saw earlier.
The final scene of the Dolores copy in Charlotte Hale's body deciding to end her own life was a strange choice. May have had more impact had there been some reveal that it was indeed the original Dolores, and have her return to her own original machine body for that final sequence leading to that moment. Just my thoughts as a writer. As it were, having a broken copy of Dolores destroying her own pearl was poignant but still lacked something.
Lots left to be explored but I'm okay with it being done.
My takeaway from the line "all sentient life on earth has ended" was face value truth from the hosts' perspective. But not necessarily complete truth. After all, we did have at least two human outliers survive at the end. That leads to the possibility that others may have survived, and that humanity can start over. Though I wonder what the long term effects of the parasites would be, and if the future children of outliers would necessarily be immune to the parasites, or if younger generations would become infected, even without the towers' audio control signal. I wonder if other hosts may have survived as well. Could potentially lead to new storytelling in a wasteland scenario.
Even though they didn't bother to show "anomalies" detected around the globe like they did at first with Reheboam, or any scenes of humans destroying each other in various places around the world, I took it that what was taking place in New York was taking place everywhere. But give the Inception-like layers of world building, leaving viewers unclear as to what was taking place in the machine world versus the real world, I wonder if that was really the case? Was all this host control only taking place in New York, or was it even really New York? Was it just a simulation of NY?
So many times phrases were dropped intimating that what we were seeing wasn't real, it was a simulation that had been repeated. Makes me wonder if they'd wanted to leave the option open for a return season with this one being all a giant experiment/simulation.
The passage to the valley beyond opening at the dam made me think that whole dam scenario was a simulation. Bernard saying things like "we usually don't get this far" was hard to read, as to whether he was running simulations in his mind, or if we were watching a simulation. Lots of ambiguity that didn't play well. I wanted answers not more questions.
Missed opportunity: Dolores takes over Reheboam, yes - but then returns her consciousness to her own body. Was weird to leave her character in a place that was so undefined. Or at least, having harnessed the power of the super AI and bent it to her own will, she would logically seem to have had the ability to remote control a host body and give herself localized abilities in the Dolores host body. Having her take over the AI and then shut it down without any further fanfare was a bit like in Star Trek when they eject the warp core from the main ship... but then the ship just went dead in the water and the story seemingly picked up with a different ship, ignoring the storyline of the original ship. It was jarring.
Dolores' copy being the pearl at the center of the maze, trying to figure out her own story, was an interesting choice, and her discovery of her agency within this simulation was an interesting play on the first season. I would have liked to have seen her discover the other Dolores copy running the human world, and have them interact in some way - perhaps trying to reintegrate various parts of her personality damaged through so much trauma and reconstitution in different host bodies and simulations. Would have been more interesting than William battling host versions of himself. I was still unclear at the end as to whether William in the stasis chamber was the originial or just an early host version of the original, given the fidelity testing we saw earlier.
The final scene of the Dolores copy in Charlotte Hale's body deciding to end her own life was a strange choice. May have had more impact had there been some reveal that it was indeed the original Dolores, and have her return to her own original machine body for that final sequence leading to that moment. Just my thoughts as a writer. As it were, having a broken copy of Dolores destroying her own pearl was poignant but still lacked something.
Lots left to be explored but I'm okay with it being done.
