The hosts are changing in “Westworld” and nothing makes sense anymore

Although I could probably talk quite literally forever about how the rules of Westworld (emphasis, italics: the rules of the show are opaque, the rules of the theme park are straightforward because there are few) are incredibly opaque and poorly laid out. In fact, I spent my Halloweekend yelling at strange men in bars about how nothing makes any sense. I’m REALLY fun at parties, in case you were wondering.

One thing I do think the hosts adhere to is Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, or at least the first law, which is simply that robots may not injure human beings. So, like, cool. We’re told pretty early on that the hosts can’t kill people, but people can kill hosts. This makes sense. People aren’t gonna pay 30k a day to hang out in a wildly dangerous environment in which they could catch a stray bullet and die.

But in last night’s episode, we saw like a dozen different hosts beating the hell out of human guests. So like… what gives?

Like, Prince Caspian gets the HELL beat out of him, and he’s not the only human who gets his ass handed to him by a host. While I guess the obvious answer is that the hosts can hurt but not KILL people… this seems like a truly insane thing to build into a theme park? I totally understand that people going into this environment want to live on the age, but what privileged rich person wants to go somewhere they could potentially be brutalized by a robot? This is just BIZARRE if it’s no big deal.

Or maybe Prince Caspian is actually a robot, too.

In the other corner of “very violent hosts,” we’ve got Dolores, who’s gone from “oh no I’ve never hurt a living thing” to “I’m basically a sharpshooter” in a couple of days. I guess the hosts aren’t living, so maybe the first statement is still true… technically.

This is obviously representative of Dolores’ increased sentience, and her growing ability to lie as she seeks the maze, opposite the Man in Black. That said, the fact that the people who run Westworld noticed a host harmlessly wandering away from his story line an episode ago, and sent someone to retrieve Dolores when she initially left her loop, and intervened… yet they’re somehow NOT noticing that Dolores has gone completely off the reservation is completely mystifying.

Can’t wait for everybody to inevitably get murdered by all these robots when they all go off script, since they apparently don’t follow the rules anyway, amirite?