Summary
HBO’s cancelled four-season sci-fi Western seriesWestworldgets a low realism score from an expert on Wild West history. Set in a futuristic Western-themed amusement park wherein realistic androids help the wealthy live out their most hedonistic fantasies, HBO’s once-acclaimed series put a science fiction spin on the classic tropes of Western films and television shows.WestworldSeason 1, episode 5 featured a mission from host El Lazo in which Evan Rachel Wood’s android Dolores joined a party of robbers, including human guests William and Logan, in attacking an army wagon carrying a load of nitroglycerin.
This wagon robbery mission may have been exciting for park attendees William and Logan, butWestworldgot some facts wrong when it came to how such an event would have gone down in the real Old West, at least according to one expert. In a piece forInsider, Michael Grauer breaks down this key scene from the episode titled “Contrapasso,” pointing out inaccuracies in the kind of wagon used in the park scenario, and how well the wagon would have been guarded. Check out his remarks below (around 14:45 of the clip):
There were of course Confederates and even members of the Confederate government that refused to surrender and remained renegades. Ultimately outlaws. They crossed the border into Mexico and then some of them crept back over into the frontier regions in New Mexico and Arizona, West Texas.
Four armed gun robbers basically are going to rob a contingent of soldiers of anything, it doesn’t make any sense. And they’re driving an army ambulance which was not used necessarily for medical reasons, but it was used for transport of people, so they’re not using the right wagon, first of all. It’s not a freight wagon. Any freight that came to a US fort or was used in transport, they used hired teamsters and often sent a party of soldiers to guard that shipment. There would have been a lot more soldiers. Not terribly many but certainly more than that.
Hiring a mercenary, that was not uncommon at all. It’s important to remember that well after the Civil War a lot of Confederate soldiers who had actually become prisoners of war were offered the opportunity to either stay in a in prison camp during the Civil War or to be sworn into the US Army and sent out West. What they called galvanized Yankees. After the war is over, after their obligation was fulfilled, they may have become mercenaries because they had a specific training set that could be useful to criminals for sure.
It’s probably a three or a four [out of ten].
Westworld Isn’t Trying To Be Realistic - It’s A Fantasy Within A Fantasy
Inside the world depicted byWestworld, park creators devise scenarios meant to give guests as intense and thrilling an experience as they’re able to stomach, as though the whole park was a big, three-dimensional, immersive video game. As such, the series is less interested in realistically depicting the historical West than drawing uponWesternfiction to inform a self-contained false reality that happens to look and feel like a Wild West setting.
Given thatWestworld’s Western setting is itself a fictionalized reflection of reality – a fantasy within a fantasy - it’s as if Grauer is really criticizing the designers of the park for getting their facts wrong, when he means to slam the show’s creators for failing to notice they were using the wrong wagons.Westworld’s in-world designers perhaps should have consulted a history book before moving forward with their wagon robbery scenario, in which, at least according to one expert, almost everything is inaccurate.
Westworldwas canceled in late 2023.
The showWestworldis, of course, purely a science fiction fantasy, and can be forgiven for whiffing on historical accuracy from time-to-time. The series ultimately did not get canceled byHBOfor such crimes against realism, but for losing viewers at an alarming rate, while becoming increasingly convoluted and impossible to understand.
Westworld
Cast
Westworld is a television series set in a futuristic Wild West-themed amusement park where advanced android hosts cater to human guests' desires. The series explores the themes of artificial consciousness and human morality as the lines between reality and artificiality begin to blur.
