How "Westworld" Failed the Western

The term "robot" was first coined in the 1921 play "R.U.R.," a tale of imagined artificial workers rising up against the masters who created them. The work, by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, was written and performed in the early days of the Soviet revolution, and--especially in the Czech language--the allegory was crystal clear: after considering the word labori, or "workers," Čapek went with a variation on robota, Czech for "heavy labor" and the root word for robotnik, or serf. That first robot story, nearly a century ago, had more than a semantic influence: nearly every robot story since has been, in some way, the story of a worker revolt--about beings who are treated like machines, and about their resistance to the masters who dehumanize them. Since the very beginning of "Westworld," the HBO show in which the guests of a Western-themed amusement park play out sadistic fantasies on the park's robot hosts, we've known that an uprising was coming. At the end of the season's first episode, we saw Evan Rachel Wood's Dolores, in violation of the programming that prevents hosts from killing living creatures, swat a fly on her neck; it was only a matter of time before the park's android workers would find a way to stand up to the human guests who exploit them.