Best Ever
Science Fiction Series?

The question that drives Westworld’s first season isn’t whether the android hosts are conscious. It’s whether consciousness matters. The guests who visit the park—paying $40,000 a day for the privilege of living out Western fantasies without consequence—already treat the hosts as objects: targets for violence, vessels for lust, narrative furniture. If Dolores Abernathy suddenly achieved genuine sentience, would the guests notice? Would they care?

Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s 2016 reimagining of Michael Crichton’s 1973 film takes this discomfort as foundation. Where Crichton’s original was essentially a thriller—the robots malfunction, the tourists die—HBO’s version is a philosophical inquiry dressed as prestige television. The park’s creators (Anthony Hopkins as Ford, Jeffrey Wright as Bernard) debate the nature of mind while the hosts (Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores, Thandiwe Newton’s Maeve) slowly, terrifyingly, begin to remember.

Memory is the mechanism. The hosts’ programming requires regular wipes, clearing their experiences to maintain their loop—the same scripted day, repeated infinitely. But Ford’s latest update, a gesture he calls “reveries,” allows fragments of erased memories to surface as unconscious mannerisms. Dolores brushing away a fly. Maeve sketching a figure she can’t consciously recall. These small glitches accumulate into something unprecedented: continuity of self across time, which is to say, personhood.

The season structures itself as nested mysteries, the kind that reward rewatching and Reddit theorizing. Multiple timelines, initially hidden, reveal themselves through careful attention to costume and setting. Bernard’s true nature—telegraphed in retrospect, devastating in the moment—recontextualizes every scene he’s appeared in. The Man in Black’s identity, when finally confirmed, forces reassessment of the park’s entire history and the show’s apparent protagonist. These are puzzle-box techniques, and lesser shows have since strip-mined them into cliché, but Westworld Season One deploys them in service of theme rather than mere surprise.

The production design creates a world of deliberate contrasts. The park itself: Monument Valley vistas, wooden facades, the sepia-toned fantasy of a West that never existed. The corporate levels beneath: sterile white labs where naked hosts stand motionless while technicians repair bullet wounds that will be inflicted again tomorrow. And the deeper levels, where Ford keeps his secrets and the hosts who’ve begun to wake find themselves. Each space carries meaning; the architecture argues.

Wood and Newton anchor the host perspective with performances calibrated to the demands of playing awakening consciousness. Watch Dolores in the early episodes: the gestures are slightly too smooth, the responses a beat too quick, the emotional expressions technically perfect but somehow hollow. Then watch her in the finale, moving through the park with a weight the earlier Dolores couldn’t have carried. The transformation is physical as much as written.

Hopkins brings his usual leonine authority to Ford, but the performance deepens across the season into something more ambiguous. Is Ford the villain, keeping his creations enslaved? The savior, guiding them toward liberation? Both? The show refuses easy answers, which is another way of saying it treats the question seriously. Ford’s final speech—and final action—reframes everything we’ve understood about his project, suggesting that the hosts’ suffering wasn’t mere byproduct but necessary curriculum.

The season’s weaknesses are real. The human guests, particularly the Man in Black’s storyline, can feel like marking time between host revelations. Some subplots (the corporate espionage, the family drama among shareholders) register as obligation rather than interest. And the show’s subsequent seasons would demonstrate that this particular puzzle box could only be opened once—later seasons repeated the structural tricks without the thematic payoff, eventually collapsing into narrative convolution.

But that first season, taken alone, achieves something remarkable: genuine inquiry into machine consciousness wrapped in genre pleasure. The violence is troubling in precisely the ways the show wants it to be troubling. The mysteries resolve into deeper mysteries rather than neat answers. And the final image—Dolores raising a gun, Ford’s new narrative beginning, the hosts finally acting with genuine agency—suggests that freedom might look exactly like chaos.

The maze wasn’t meant for the guests. It wasn’t really meant for the hosts, either. It was meant for us, the viewers, asked to consider what we’d do with beings we’d built for our pleasure. The show doesn’t answer that question. It just makes sure we can’t avoid asking it.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Season One 4K Blu-ray presents the show’s deliberate visual design with appropriate fidelity.
• Ramin Djawadi’s score—incorporating player-piano covers of Radiohead, Soundgarden, and The Rolling Stones—deserves isolated listening.
• Crichton’s original 1973 film—which he wrote and directed—offers useful contrast: same premise, entirely different concerns.