In its first season,Westworldwas a show about breaking out of repetitive cycles.

In its second season, the showwasthe repetitive cycle, encircling its characters in familiar story beats.

Big moments kept repeating.

She got shot a hundred more times in the finale, as she watched her daughter run away.

Repetition as an idea is interesting.

As a narrative gear, its…well, repetitive.

This season juggled timelines, but that trick had resonance the first time.

In season 2, the twisting timelines wound up serving the repetition.

He went to the Forge in the past, and he went to the Forge in the present.

He killed Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and resurrected her; she killed Bernard and resurrected him.

I suppose there is a clever philosophical explanation for all this.

Ive been pondering the finale ever since Sunday, and I have come up with simpler theory.

In season 1, theWestworldcreators were playing with cliches.

Every Host was an archetype awakening to a new awareness.

They saw how limiting their characterizations were.

The Damsel in Distress was tired of distressed damselhood.

The brothel madam was done being abused by any man in any world.

Anthony Hopkins Ford was the paternal creator ready to get out of his creations way.

Season 1 ended with this worlds god shot through the head.

The old world was finished; the cliches were exploded.

And I think the show had no goddamn clue what to do next.

So they built their own bespoke cliches.

Things were happening for no reason.

(My colleague James Hibberdliked it a bit more than I did, though nobody liked the speeches.)

ButWestworldrevealed an empty vision in its finale, less cerebral than self-loathing.

The trouble started when Dolores and Bernard went into a digital worldspace, where they met The System.

The System had been spent infinite femtoseconds trying to decode human consciousness.

(Peter Thiel will be crushed!)

The problem was that the System was trying too hard.

I needed to know why they make the decisions they make, it explained.

The longer I looked for an answer, the more I realized: They dont.

They are deceptive simple.

Once you know them, their behavior is quite predictable.

Now, maybe we were meant to take the Systems words with a grain of salt.

Ofcoursean emotionless supercomputer would reduce humanity to a lame statistical algorithm.

When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

ButWestworlddoubled down on this idea, suggested it was an ongoing motif.

From this, he deduced that humans werent all they were cracked up to be.

Im not sure how seriously we should take any of this, really.

If you drill down, there are complications.

In general, season 2 turned out to be pro-Ford, in a way that was eerie and reductive.

She was the proverbial bug that became the feature, the best character in season 1.

The individualist was Chosen, too.

All hail Ghost Daddy, God of Exposition!

It can joke about bad writing farewell, Sizemore!

but it cant conceive a character with dimension, with the danger of new possibility.

Every character is a single-service entity.

In hindsight, the weirdest thing about season 2 was how unwilling it was to embrace its own chaos.

Season 1 ended with the intimation that the Hosts were awakening.

Season 2 walked back that possibility as far as it could.

How can a show have so many pointless characters?

Its bad enough to have a show with characters who live out storylines built on boring repetition.