My Vacation is Trying to Kill Me! (Part 2)

This essay is a follow-up to Star Trek: My Vacation is Trying to Kill Me!

Data and Worf in the Star Trek episode “A Fistful of Datas”

The Star Trek holodeck episode “A Fistful of Datas” has major overlapping themes with Michael Crichton’s 1973 schlock adventure flick Westworld. Both feature high-tech modernists wandering into a simulation of the American West, expecting to swagger around in buckskins while having gunfights. But in both stories, the simulation’s safeties fail, leaving protagonists at the mercy of Colt-wielding synthetic outlaws who can’t be killed.

Smarter critics than me have observed the recurrent theme of killer entertainment in Michael Crichton’s bibliography. Both Westworld and Jurassic Park feature amusement parks where people go to gawk at merciless killers, only to find themselves on the receiving end of that violence. But Crichton also addressed this theme less overtly: White explorers in “darkest Africa” in his novel Congo, for instance, or thrill-seeking stormchasers in his screenplay Twister.

Putting Westworld and “A Fistful of Datas” together, considering what I wrote previously about the moralistic tone implicit in holodeck episodes, I’m struck by the judgment inherent in both. Each story shares the image of high-tech moderns wanting to participate in what they consider a more savage time. Both present the “American West” in overlit desert colors, contrasted with the adventurers’ dusty earth-toned clothes.

Equally important, both stories feature moderns expecting to witness savagery, but not get hurt. Both stories assume the presence of safeties ensuring that living humans won’t get killed, or even hurt that badly. But then the safeties fail, because of course they do. There’s no story if our protagonists can’t get hurt. Our modern heroes must fight for their lives against undying synthetic humans which they, or their technological overlords, created.

For Westworld to make any sense, we must accept two assumptions that don’t withstand much scrutiny. First, we must accept the premise, common in Marxism and other early-modern philosophies, that natural humans are naturally violent and destructive, and social evolution has been a constant movement away from that. Current anthropology doesn't believe this, of course; evidence suggests we’re getting more violent, not less. But the story remains persistent.

Second, we must believe the Freudian supposition of thanatos, the innate psychological drive toward death. We must believe that youth seek adrenaline-producing behaviors, like driving recklessly and picking fights, while the elderly embrace religion and other transcendental ideas, because deep down, we secretly want to die. This premise doesn’t withstand scrutiny simply because we need only look around to realize these behaviors are neither universal, nor inexplicable.

Teddy (James Marsden) and Delores (Evan Rachel Wood) in Westworld

Westworld, Jurassic Park, and the more action-oriented holodeck episodes share a theme: tourists go to watch others die. Consider the innate frisson of watching that goat lowered into the T-Rex enclosure. Whether we accept primal human savagery or “nature red in tooth and claw,” we want someone, or something, to die for our amusement. Things become less amusing when death redirects its attention onto us.

Crichton’s body of work broadly distrusts science, technology, and modernity overall. He repeatedly assumes scientists will create (or, in stories like The Andromeda Strain, invite) catastrophes that threaten human survival. But Crichton, like Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry, ultimately shares the humanist principle that humanity deserves to survive. Whether faced by Yul Brynner’s Man in Black or a rampaging velociraptor, humans are finally the good guys.

The 2018 television remake of Westworld doesn’t share that presumption. The first-season arc, which (Spoilers) reveals that the evil, marauding Man in Black is actually gentle, lovestruck William, depicts what happens when the safeties remain active too long. Given godlike power over synthetic humans, William becomes cruel. He indulges the violence of the setting until it permeates him, confident in his faith that it can’t hurt him.

Until, of course, it does.

Meanwhile, like Star Trek’s Moriarty, the synthetic humans become aware of their artificial environment and the digitally replicated nature of their experience. They realize the ways they’ve been abused, raped, murdered for decades. Star Trek, with its humanist presumptions, handled this by appeasing Moriarty with a second-level simulation. Westworld, stripped of such presumptions, decides that somebody has to pay.

Viewed another way, Crichton and Roddenberry both assumed that humans are innately good, and getting better. But both demonstrated something very different, that tweaking the rules slightly reveals humanity’s poorly-buried violent streak. Worf and William enter their respective simulations believing death is aberrant and truth will win if spoken confidently. But when the safeties fall, and death becomes normative, it’s a very different game.

And in some games (the stories imply), losers deserve to be punished. Good people don’t play games, they remain in the real world.