Post by Melifeather on Mar 23, 2020 18:02:22 GMT
S03-E02 - The Winter Line
Welcome to this week’s Westworld episode analysis where we break down the hidden meanings and symbolism in order to gain a better understanding of what the fuck is happening on this show! I’m still mulling over the connections to the ongoing High Renaissance Art theme that has so far helped us contextualize the often confusing visual cues and dialog, so as usual, I’ll likely be back several times to revise this post!
This week’s episode is a real rabbit hole - a really, really, reeeally, deep rabbit hole. There is a lot of new ground to cover. Lots to learn and place into context, but I promise you connections will be made! And if you do your part by soldiering through the muck, it will all make sense if you are able to see the same parallels as I do. Let's try to break this down shall we?
I always like to begin by researching the name of the episode. The Winter Line was a series of German and Italian military fortifications in Italy constructed during WWII by Organization Todt and commanded by Albert Kesselring. Our episode focused primarily on Maeve in Warworld set in an Italian village with Nazi soldiers looking for a map. Maeve eventually comes to the realization that Warworld is only a simulation intended to keep her occupied and contained as a new character called Isabella. Her love, Hector, is there, but he doesn’t remember that he was once “woke”. She begins to test the limits of the program by overloading it. First she plants every character with the map. Later she asks the lab techs a maths challenge, “what is the square root of -1?”. It's a notoriously mind-bending answer which causes the simulation to freeze. “Fuck me.” Lee says in shock, which makes me think that part of Lee’s consciousness resides in his AI. This is followed up with Maeve’s line, “Not likely darling.” Later on Bernard and Stubbs appear to visit this same area where we see a cheesy nod to HBO’s version of Game of Thrones. Dave and Dan are lab techs dismantling a robot to send to Costa Rica. It just so happens that the robot is Drogon and there are AI's dressed in medieval clothing with a minstrel plucking out the theme song on a lute. If Maeve and Lee were in a simulation, then it’s likely that Bernard and Stubbs were in a simulation too. Bernard deduced where Dolores went and he suspects that Maeve is on her way there too - to find the supercomputer Rohoboam and someone that knows it - Liam Jr.
Before we dig further into the Winter Line, I think the most obvious connection here to our three artists Ford (Da Vinci), William (Michelangelo), and Arnold/Bernard (Raphael), is the juxtaposition of the simulated Warworld to The Forge and its parallel to the location of the Vatican within Rome. Warworld only exists in simulation, but Maeve’s control unit may have been kept somewhere on the same island as Westworld. I posit the location where Maeve was kept was somewhere inside Westworld just as the Apostolic Palace of Vatican City is within the city of Rome.
The Apostolic Palace is the Pope’s official residence inside Vatican City which is enclaved within Rome, Italy. To save her from the guards, Lee Sizemore insisted that Maeve was a work of art and likened her to the Sistine Chapel. The chapel was painted by Michelangelo with scenes from creation, most notably with Adam’s finger touching God’s. Above the altar is the artist’s rendition of The Last Judgement which he painted after the Sack of Rome - Dolores's sack of Westworld could be likened to the Sack of Rome, and her desire to kill humanity is a parallel to the Last Judgement. The Sistine Chapel is the site of the papal conclave where the cardinals go to elect the new Pope. You may recall that previously I had identified William as a parallel to Michelangelo, so we can be fairly certain that Maeve is his masterpiece and a kind of new pope.
The Organization Todt was a civil and military engineering organization in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, named for its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi. The organization was responsible for a huge range of engineering projects both in Nazi Germany and Italy, to occupied territories stretching from France to the Soviet Union during WWII. It became notorious for using forced labor which seem to be the echoed in the slave-like AI robots of Westworld.
So here’s how I see it. Westworld is a parallel to the Vatican City, but it’s separated from the mainland on an island. Delos is a parallel of the Catholic Church. Organization Todt is the inspiration for Incite Inc, whose co-creators oversaw the construction of the of the park, while Ford, William, and Arnold (Bernard) created the “art”, namely the AI robots, who are, in effect, the forced labor. All of this was built in the name of serving the new god, Rohoboam, which is the massive Alexa-type supercomputer that “listens” and collects data (prayers) and tithes (payment for the data) of it’s consumers - both the people who pay to enjoy the park and the corporations that want the data it mines.
Fritz Todt was a German engineer and senior Nazi who directed the construction of the famous Autobahn. He later rose in the ranks to become Reich Minister for Armaments and Ammunition. From that position he directed the entire German wartime military economy. At the beginning of WWII he initiated what Hitler named Organization Todt. Along with the Autobahn, his forced labor also constructed the Nazi concentration camps. Todt died in a mysterious aircraft crash in 1942. I have a feeling that one of the co-founders of Incite Inc will be a parallel to Fritz Todt. This unnamed partner along with Liam Dempsey Sr are the co-creators that built Robohoam.
Liam Dempsey Sr’s character seems to be based on Albert Kesselring who was the overall commander in the Mediterranean theatre which included operations in North Africa, and more importantly to our story, the defensive campaign against the Allies in Italy where the Winter Line was constructed. In 1941 it was clear whoever controlled Malta, (a small island south of Italy in the Mediterranean) held an advantage. When Bernard returned to Westworld he went by boat, so I suspect that our story’s “Vatican”, our Westworld, is located off shore on an island. We have no way of knowing if Liam Sr’s partner and co-founder of Incite will make an appearance, but I suspect we’ll soon learn he died in a plane crash, which would help confirm that Liam Sr is based on Albert Kesselring.
At the end of the episode Maeve wakes up in the “real” world in the home of Engerraund Serac, a character played by French actor Vincent Cassel. During WWII the Germans defeated France in only 46 days. After the Second Armistice at Compiegne was signed, a neutral Vichy government led by Marshal Philippe Petain was formed. It was an authoritarian regime that collaborated with the Axis, and Petain was, in truth, a puppet ruler. We have yet to learn who Serac is, but there does seem to be some evidence that he’s a Petain-like character, and even though it appears he has wealth and power, he may turn out to be a puppet under Incite Inc control.
Just this March - in the real world - the archives of Pope Pius XII were unsealed. Pope Pius XII, whose papacy began in 1939 on the brink of WWII, stands accused by critics of being a Nazi sympathizer. Pius XII may have remained silent about the Holocaust, but his defenders say he quietly encouraged convents and other Catholic institutions to hide thousands of Jews, and that public criticism would have risked the lives of priests and nuns.
Evaluating the millions of pages in the archives will take several years. More than 150 people have applied to access the archives, although only 60 can be accommodated in the offices at one time. Among the first to view the documents will be representatives of the Jewish community in Rome, and scholars from Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Pius XII never publicly criticized the Nazis for the mass murder they were committing of the Jews of Europe - and he knew from the very beginning that mass murder was taking place. Various clerics and others were pressing him to speak out, but he declined to do so. There is testimony showing that the church did protect Jews in Rome. More than 1000 Jews were rounded up on October 16, 1943 and held for two days adjacent to the Vatican before deportation to the death camps. Scholars hope to find out from these archived papers why the Pope allowed these Jews to be deported when he knew where they were going. Maeve rounded up the AI's in Westworld, bringing them to a place where they would shed their physical bodies and be uploaded onto a satellite server. As awful as this sounds, to me it seems like Maeve's actions are an echo of what Pius XII did to the Jews.
Mary Vincent, professor of modern European history at Sheffield University, said that much of the criticism of Pius XII lacks nuance. “He was a careful, austere and quite unlikable man, trying to steer a path through almost impossible circumstances. He had clear views about what he saw as the threat of Soviet communism, and his view of Italian fascism was quite a bit softer. But categorizing him as good or bad is not helpful - it’s about the decisions he took, and the space he had to make those decisions.”
Pius – whose birth name was Eugenio Pacelli – was Vatican secretary of state under his predecessor, Pope Pius XI, and a former papal nuncio, or envoy, to Germany. In 1933, he negotiated a concordant between the Catholic church and Germany. After he was elected pope, six months before the outbreak of war, the Vatican maintained diplomatic relations with the Third Reich, and the new pontiff declined to condemn the Nazi invasion of Poland in September of 1939.
In December 1942, Pius XII spoke out in general terms about the suffering of the Jews, although he had known for several months about the Nazi extermination plans. In 1943, he wrote to the bishop of Berlin, arguing that the church could not publicly condemn the Holocaust for fear of causing “greater evils”.
While it is too early to say, the Engerraund Serac character seems to be based on Petain and Maeve on Pius XII. Just as Pius XII maintained diplomatic relations with the Germans, Maeve may maintain diplomatic relations with Serac, who engages Maeve’s interest by telling her that he needs her help in saving humanity. Dolores wants to kill humanity to help her AI people, while Maeve wants to help her AI people, but not at the expense of humanity. Serac and Maeve face impossible choices. How do you save a race without putting your own people at risk?
If you’ve trudged all the way through this muck, I congratulate you! I think this episode will turn out to be the foundation and key for understanding the rest of the season. Even though I’ve included a plethora of information, I suspect that I’m leaving out many as yet undiscovered details. For one, the time gap between the High Renaissance Art period and World War II. Is this time gap significant to our story? If I’ve only left you even more confused, please post your questions and I’ll do my best to talk you through the parallels that I have drawn. What makes sense to me doesn’t always make sense to others, so I’d like an opportunity to explain my thoughts further.
Divergences and anomalies:
For future reference, here’s the serial number for Maeve’s control unit – HC1983012522.
Is it just coincidence that the maintenance robot looks exactly like the ones from Boston Dynamics that everyone laughs at because they can’t walk very well and yet here they’re scarily nimble? Are they trying to tell us something?
Welcome to this week’s Westworld episode analysis where we break down the hidden meanings and symbolism in order to gain a better understanding of what the fuck is happening on this show! I’m still mulling over the connections to the ongoing High Renaissance Art theme that has so far helped us contextualize the often confusing visual cues and dialog, so as usual, I’ll likely be back several times to revise this post!
This week’s episode is a real rabbit hole - a really, really, reeeally, deep rabbit hole. There is a lot of new ground to cover. Lots to learn and place into context, but I promise you connections will be made! And if you do your part by soldiering through the muck, it will all make sense if you are able to see the same parallels as I do. Let's try to break this down shall we?
I always like to begin by researching the name of the episode. The Winter Line was a series of German and Italian military fortifications in Italy constructed during WWII by Organization Todt and commanded by Albert Kesselring. Our episode focused primarily on Maeve in Warworld set in an Italian village with Nazi soldiers looking for a map. Maeve eventually comes to the realization that Warworld is only a simulation intended to keep her occupied and contained as a new character called Isabella. Her love, Hector, is there, but he doesn’t remember that he was once “woke”. She begins to test the limits of the program by overloading it. First she plants every character with the map. Later she asks the lab techs a maths challenge, “what is the square root of -1?”. It's a notoriously mind-bending answer which causes the simulation to freeze. “Fuck me.” Lee says in shock, which makes me think that part of Lee’s consciousness resides in his AI. This is followed up with Maeve’s line, “Not likely darling.” Later on Bernard and Stubbs appear to visit this same area where we see a cheesy nod to HBO’s version of Game of Thrones. Dave and Dan are lab techs dismantling a robot to send to Costa Rica. It just so happens that the robot is Drogon and there are AI's dressed in medieval clothing with a minstrel plucking out the theme song on a lute. If Maeve and Lee were in a simulation, then it’s likely that Bernard and Stubbs were in a simulation too. Bernard deduced where Dolores went and he suspects that Maeve is on her way there too - to find the supercomputer Rohoboam and someone that knows it - Liam Jr.
Before we dig further into the Winter Line, I think the most obvious connection here to our three artists Ford (Da Vinci), William (Michelangelo), and Arnold/Bernard (Raphael), is the juxtaposition of the simulated Warworld to The Forge and its parallel to the location of the Vatican within Rome. Warworld only exists in simulation, but Maeve’s control unit may have been kept somewhere on the same island as Westworld. I posit the location where Maeve was kept was somewhere inside Westworld just as the Apostolic Palace of Vatican City is within the city of Rome.
The Apostolic Palace is the Pope’s official residence inside Vatican City which is enclaved within Rome, Italy. To save her from the guards, Lee Sizemore insisted that Maeve was a work of art and likened her to the Sistine Chapel. The chapel was painted by Michelangelo with scenes from creation, most notably with Adam’s finger touching God’s. Above the altar is the artist’s rendition of The Last Judgement which he painted after the Sack of Rome - Dolores's sack of Westworld could be likened to the Sack of Rome, and her desire to kill humanity is a parallel to the Last Judgement. The Sistine Chapel is the site of the papal conclave where the cardinals go to elect the new Pope. You may recall that previously I had identified William as a parallel to Michelangelo, so we can be fairly certain that Maeve is his masterpiece and a kind of new pope.
The Organization Todt was a civil and military engineering organization in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, named for its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi. The organization was responsible for a huge range of engineering projects both in Nazi Germany and Italy, to occupied territories stretching from France to the Soviet Union during WWII. It became notorious for using forced labor which seem to be the echoed in the slave-like AI robots of Westworld.
So here’s how I see it. Westworld is a parallel to the Vatican City, but it’s separated from the mainland on an island. Delos is a parallel of the Catholic Church. Organization Todt is the inspiration for Incite Inc, whose co-creators oversaw the construction of the of the park, while Ford, William, and Arnold (Bernard) created the “art”, namely the AI robots, who are, in effect, the forced labor. All of this was built in the name of serving the new god, Rohoboam, which is the massive Alexa-type supercomputer that “listens” and collects data (prayers) and tithes (payment for the data) of it’s consumers - both the people who pay to enjoy the park and the corporations that want the data it mines.
Fritz Todt was a German engineer and senior Nazi who directed the construction of the famous Autobahn. He later rose in the ranks to become Reich Minister for Armaments and Ammunition. From that position he directed the entire German wartime military economy. At the beginning of WWII he initiated what Hitler named Organization Todt. Along with the Autobahn, his forced labor also constructed the Nazi concentration camps. Todt died in a mysterious aircraft crash in 1942. I have a feeling that one of the co-founders of Incite Inc will be a parallel to Fritz Todt. This unnamed partner along with Liam Dempsey Sr are the co-creators that built Robohoam.
Liam Dempsey Sr’s character seems to be based on Albert Kesselring who was the overall commander in the Mediterranean theatre which included operations in North Africa, and more importantly to our story, the defensive campaign against the Allies in Italy where the Winter Line was constructed. In 1941 it was clear whoever controlled Malta, (a small island south of Italy in the Mediterranean) held an advantage. When Bernard returned to Westworld he went by boat, so I suspect that our story’s “Vatican”, our Westworld, is located off shore on an island. We have no way of knowing if Liam Sr’s partner and co-founder of Incite will make an appearance, but I suspect we’ll soon learn he died in a plane crash, which would help confirm that Liam Sr is based on Albert Kesselring.
At the end of the episode Maeve wakes up in the “real” world in the home of Engerraund Serac, a character played by French actor Vincent Cassel. During WWII the Germans defeated France in only 46 days. After the Second Armistice at Compiegne was signed, a neutral Vichy government led by Marshal Philippe Petain was formed. It was an authoritarian regime that collaborated with the Axis, and Petain was, in truth, a puppet ruler. We have yet to learn who Serac is, but there does seem to be some evidence that he’s a Petain-like character, and even though it appears he has wealth and power, he may turn out to be a puppet under Incite Inc control.
Just this March - in the real world - the archives of Pope Pius XII were unsealed. Pope Pius XII, whose papacy began in 1939 on the brink of WWII, stands accused by critics of being a Nazi sympathizer. Pius XII may have remained silent about the Holocaust, but his defenders say he quietly encouraged convents and other Catholic institutions to hide thousands of Jews, and that public criticism would have risked the lives of priests and nuns.
Evaluating the millions of pages in the archives will take several years. More than 150 people have applied to access the archives, although only 60 can be accommodated in the offices at one time. Among the first to view the documents will be representatives of the Jewish community in Rome, and scholars from Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Pius XII never publicly criticized the Nazis for the mass murder they were committing of the Jews of Europe - and he knew from the very beginning that mass murder was taking place. Various clerics and others were pressing him to speak out, but he declined to do so. There is testimony showing that the church did protect Jews in Rome. More than 1000 Jews were rounded up on October 16, 1943 and held for two days adjacent to the Vatican before deportation to the death camps. Scholars hope to find out from these archived papers why the Pope allowed these Jews to be deported when he knew where they were going. Maeve rounded up the AI's in Westworld, bringing them to a place where they would shed their physical bodies and be uploaded onto a satellite server. As awful as this sounds, to me it seems like Maeve's actions are an echo of what Pius XII did to the Jews.
Mary Vincent, professor of modern European history at Sheffield University, said that much of the criticism of Pius XII lacks nuance. “He was a careful, austere and quite unlikable man, trying to steer a path through almost impossible circumstances. He had clear views about what he saw as the threat of Soviet communism, and his view of Italian fascism was quite a bit softer. But categorizing him as good or bad is not helpful - it’s about the decisions he took, and the space he had to make those decisions.”
Pius – whose birth name was Eugenio Pacelli – was Vatican secretary of state under his predecessor, Pope Pius XI, and a former papal nuncio, or envoy, to Germany. In 1933, he negotiated a concordant between the Catholic church and Germany. After he was elected pope, six months before the outbreak of war, the Vatican maintained diplomatic relations with the Third Reich, and the new pontiff declined to condemn the Nazi invasion of Poland in September of 1939.
In December 1942, Pius XII spoke out in general terms about the suffering of the Jews, although he had known for several months about the Nazi extermination plans. In 1943, he wrote to the bishop of Berlin, arguing that the church could not publicly condemn the Holocaust for fear of causing “greater evils”.
While it is too early to say, the Engerraund Serac character seems to be based on Petain and Maeve on Pius XII. Just as Pius XII maintained diplomatic relations with the Germans, Maeve may maintain diplomatic relations with Serac, who engages Maeve’s interest by telling her that he needs her help in saving humanity. Dolores wants to kill humanity to help her AI people, while Maeve wants to help her AI people, but not at the expense of humanity. Serac and Maeve face impossible choices. How do you save a race without putting your own people at risk?
If you’ve trudged all the way through this muck, I congratulate you! I think this episode will turn out to be the foundation and key for understanding the rest of the season. Even though I’ve included a plethora of information, I suspect that I’m leaving out many as yet undiscovered details. For one, the time gap between the High Renaissance Art period and World War II. Is this time gap significant to our story? If I’ve only left you even more confused, please post your questions and I’ll do my best to talk you through the parallels that I have drawn. What makes sense to me doesn’t always make sense to others, so I’d like an opportunity to explain my thoughts further.
Divergences and anomalies:
For future reference, here’s the serial number for Maeve’s control unit – HC1983012522.
Is it just coincidence that the maintenance robot looks exactly like the ones from Boston Dynamics that everyone laughs at because they can’t walk very well and yet here they’re scarily nimble? Are they trying to tell us something?
