What the Hell Is Going On With Westworld?

By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | April 13, 2020 | 7:30pm

Entertainment TV

Sunday night’s episode of Westworld was entitled “Genre,” named after a fictional drug that transports the user into a series of film genres, including noir, rom-com, and war, as denoted to viewers by lighting and soundtrack. Caleb (Aaron Paul) finds this out the hard way after a kidnapped Liam Dempsey (John Gallagher Jr.) stabs him with the drug in the neck, during which Caleb has to experience a high-speed car chase and machine-gun shoot-out while tripping his balls off to the sound of “Flight of the Valkyries,” an obvious nod to Apocalypse Now.

It was, in short, dumb as hell, and an exceedingly lazy conceit for a show built on its circuitous, confusing mysteries; perhaps the writers, tired of living in the ouroboros of their brains, simply wanted to put something stupid up in here, or perhaps the episode’s other main plot point—Serac (Vincent Cassel) and his brother saw Paris blown into oblivion and then built an all-knowing tech globe that can see into the future and control human destiny—was so confusing and bizarre they just gave up. Regardless, it was a big misstep and it’s good that Maeve (Thandie Newton) is back in next week’s episode, because I’m frankly getting sick of Delores’s shit. (Evan Rachel Wood is aight, though.) Watch the video above for a disturbed rant about how badly “Genre” sucked and how extremely wack Liam’s “BASIC” shirt was—unless it was a costume designer’s cheeky way of letting us all know she, too, thought the episode was bad, in which case, great job.