Am I missing something? They terminate the Delos hybrid remotely and then incinerate his living quarters? It just seems like a massive PITA. Replace all that shit and fix the fire damage each time. Why bother. Just because they thought it would look cool?
I'd understand if there was some biological hazard they had to contain and didn't want spreading to the outside world but William was happy strolling in there each time with no protective gear e.t.c
I thought the same thing while watching. Unless Delos has a magical way of restoration everything in the room instantly, it's just not worth the time and effort spent to rebuild the room, when all they literally have to do is walk in, turn off the robot, and take him out of there, and then bring in the new robot and turn him on.
shareWhat they are trying to do is match the new session to the original session with Delos, and that's how they measure success. That means the condition of the room must be exactly like it was at the beginning of the original session. But we see Delos in there moving things around, consuming tea, scotch, etc. Any variation of the room in its beginning state could affect the rest of the session, and they wouldn't know for sure if it was the room or something wrong with Delos that caused the session to go differently. So they completely wipe the room and the machines are able to precisely recreate its contents it in a way that would be difficult for humans to do.
There is one exception- the humans he interacts with are always changing across different trials. Like William aging over time and the assistant who appears on the screen to tell him there is a visitor. This could be a clue as to why they cannot successfully recreate Delos.
Delos are rich and its easier to replace everything than to track all the items in the room whether it could be missing or damaged. Do note that each experiment takes days.
shareI think it's just a matter of making things easy. The latest incarnation of James Delos spends 35 days in his little hospital suite. You have to destroy the brain module anyway, for reasons of privacy and confidentiality (one can assume such laws will exist when it becomes possible to copy a human consciousness). So rather than clean the room and replace whatever's worn or damaged they just torch the whole thing. They've probably got prefabbed wall segments and furnishings, exercise bikes, etc., stacked to the ceiling in some storage room on the same floor. Their work crew can bolt everything together and put up the new room like a well drilled pit crew. The Delos Corporation has more money than God - fast and efficient is more important than cheap.
shareI don't think the Delos corporation cares too much about laws. Especially privacy ones heh.
It still doesn't make sense to burn imo. Is it easier to to say, pick up a cushion and throw it in the bin then put a new one in it's place. Or cremate it in situ and clean up the mess then replace? Scale that up to beds and stuff, just unnecessary hassle.
Removing everything seems more efficient that cleaning up after a fire.
Technically they don't even need to replace the artificial body. Only the brain module. I was just trying to come up with a logical explanation for what's basically an excessive disposal method. The showrunners seem to be following the rule of cool here. Although in all fairness, there are plenty of examples of this kind of wastefulness in real business. Especially huge companies that don't need to pinch every penny.
But yeah - soot and ash are a massive pain in the аѕѕ to clean up. Unless the windows and floors are made of special material it doesn't stain or bond to, you'd never be able to get the discoloration out completely. And the inside of the enclosure would smell faintly of smoke for quite a long time. Hey, maybe the ceiling in the room opens up, then a crane lifts out the old chamber and lowers in a brand new one with all the furnishings pre-installed! :)
Ha. A brand new module each time, fully stocked with all that gear. That would be some impressive opulence. I like it.
shareAcross 20~30 years, they only brought James Delos back 149 times. This means that there is a large time gap between each experiment. And each time, they incinerated the entire room, leaving no trace, because the experiment was top secret.
shareI just don't buy it. They don't need to incinerate all that inside the room. They could remove it and then burn it somewhere more convenient.
shareSo, I think you didn't realize that all the objects in that room were traces. They all matched with James' private preference.
shareSorry, could you elaborate?
shareThat room is designed for James Delos. Any one with clever mind could figure that out from those objects - the style of the furnitures, the music album, those photos, the brand of the cigarette, etc.
shareYeah, we know that. What I'm wondering is the logic in destroying it all in that manner.
shareOK, I thought the logic is obvious - the experiment to bring James back is a top secret. They don't want anybody else to know that and then leak it to the world. For security measure, removing James' body and then burning it somewhere else is risky because someone might spot it during that process. For same reason, leaving the room like that during those time gap is also a risk - someone might spot those objects in the room and figure out what the hell is going on.
shareI think you're confusing my logic questioning. How top secret is is exactly? We know of at least one technician working on the project. Could they be a host? Maybe. The multiple 'receptionists'. Could be purely CGI or hosts. There's going to be multiple people analyzing the data. Though as I mentioned, could be hosts. The guys cleaning up after the fire, refitting the room e.t.c. Hosts or drones.
I don't think it would be risky moving the body and all the stuff. There's tunnels all over. They could easily move it that way and no one would know. In fact, I think if they were being ultra top secret, would you really have an incinerator burning all this top secret stuff in the same location of your top secret lab? All that heat and smoke would have to be vented somewhere. Someone, somewhere is going to clock that on some monitoring system. Of course they would be smart to turn off any fire monitoring/suppression system in that area. There is still a risk it could be picked up by someone.
It would make far more sense to move everything through the tunnel system and burn it elsewhere. Do you see what I'm getting at?
I am quite amused by the idea that those burning could trigger some kind of heat & smoke detecter of the area and would expose the secret location of the lab. I guess you will also suggest that the secret message in a spy movie should start with "Read and Burn" and have a warning attached "Keep away from the smoke detector" :)
shareIt just doesn't strike me as remote enough for them to just be burning stuff on the sly. We don't really know layout of Westworld and where that lab is in relation to other stuff but they appeared to get there on foot so it's not like it's in the middle of nowhere like they said. I would just be a bit more apprehensive about the possibility of giving away the location however unlikely.
shareWell then, if you must find another reason for the burning then I do have a different theory but not sure how convincing that would be. The team were trying to find the reason why those experiment failed, so they took every factors into account, including the environment. Each time, they burnt the entire room and then tried to recreate everything more perfect. Obviously, that didn't help.
BTW, I guess the flaw is not something looks unreal but the fact that James doesn't drink black coffee with milk. So, every time he poured milk into coffee, he got shocked to realize that he was not himself, which triggered his rejection of reality. The following conversation was just a show, in order to escape - it said what James suppose to say and then pretend to be surprised after William showed him the script. But William already knew that it had started to degrade. He went to talk to James, just to show some courtesy before terminating him.
Assume each attempt lasted about a month - they started out shorter and ended up longer, so take one month as an average. 30 years = 360 months. 360/149 ~ 2.4, which means about nine or ten weeks (2.4 months) total for each trial. In other words roughly five weeks after the termination of one experiment to analyze the data gathered and prepare for the start of the next. 149 attempts gives you a pretty rigorous schedule throughout those thirty years. They were going nonstop!
share@chrisjdel, I think you are right about those experiments were going nonstop - they were bringing James back every 10.5 weeks. But you are wrong to assume that each attempt lasted a month. As second time we saw William visited James, it was 7 years later. Although, before the termination, the operator revealed that the trial "made it to day 7 this time, that's progress". So at that time, there were more than 9 weeks left till next experiment. Comparing to one week stable period, 9 weeks was indeed a large time gap.
So there was a delay of some years before the trials started. And at first the stable periods were much shorter. I was just doing a rough calculation. Trying to analyze the stability of a massive neural network with only five (or even ten) weeks to prepare for the next iteration would be a grueling schedule. This is scientific research Nascar style.
shareYou're right. It was excessive. The show has plenty of intelligent moments. At times, it has to appeal to the "fire is cool, bro" crowd. Ratings, baby!
shareWhat if James were to leave his next incarnation a note or something?
That is why the room is destroyed in total.
OK. That is possible. Does still seem a bit over the top when they could just strip the room instead.
shareThey control the room. So give him a handful of "obvious" places where no one would ever, ever dream of looking. Considering he had the same conversation over and over with William he'd probably write the exact same note and choose the exact same spot to hide it every time.
shareI don’t think it’s mere happenstance that we are introduced to the room with The Rolling Stones song, Playing With Fire, spinning on the very high-end sound system. Fire is somehow integral to what we’re being shown. I don’t know what it is, yet, and I don’t need to know. Nolan and Joy have delivered every time, so far, and I’m confident they always will.
shareWhy not just replace the brain module every time? The body's synthetic and doesn't matter anyhow. They could have "revived" him in a simulated computer environment or as a drone.
shareNo, the whole point was to establish a functional connection between the mind and its new body. What they found after many iterations was that his inability to adapt to his circumstances was the real problem. Not the mind-body interface which should've been working.
Notice how his condition deteriorated sharply after each conversation with William. The tremors were pretty much gone in that final attempt but as soon as William came in and told him a bunch of things about events since his death which upset him, he started to glitch. The hardware was fine. The weak mind inside was the issue. When William said they could probably figure out how to create a viable version of him, I take it he meant altering parts of his consciousness until they got something that was stable - i.e. the new James Delos would be a somewhat different person than before. But William had come around to the belief that his father-in-law (in any form) was not a man worth saving.
There is actually nothing to suggest that the synthetics' bodies have the same relationship with their brain modules as us - fully biological naturally evolved creatures.
Not sure what you mean by that. A neural network processor modeled after the human brain which is connected to the body, takes sensory input from it, and is able to activate its motor functions has the same relation to the synthetic body that our biological brains have to our natural bodies. The main difference between a synthetic (call it a host, android, whatever) and an organic is that we're made of different materials. But like function = like result. Chemical composition isn't fundamentally important.
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