Spoilers ahead!
Nailed on right there Red. Thanks for managing to digital reach into my mind and decode and decrypt, re-encrypt and whatever the fuck else.
It is literally that. After writing my post, I watched the one with The Man in Black and his daughter and was thinking this very same thing. It is rather symbolic that this episode (or the one before), has the train in it, deadset and motionless, with no steam at all.
It is of course following the film a bit, but it told the story and the morals of the tale in mostly the first series. There were moments in the first series where you were like, 'Okay, cool, we're getting a good little story going here'... But then to be jarred by it resetting or changing timelines again; but then, all that lead to the inevitable reveal and there's not many other ways that they can use that device now.
They had the mini stories within Westworld, and they were good... But I'd have enjoyed it more if they elongated the main story arc over the first two serials and utilised AH a little bit more. It's like one of those shit posters you print out on your printer, look close and you can see it isn't a poster, just a lot of a4 pages with join marks... I think they call that Rasterbating.... That's what this is, Rasterbating.
His (AH) walk-on parts were jarring in itself, and you could tell that they'd filmed around him. And you can tell he's out of contract now because did you hear the jarg AH impression in the second series? I mean, it possibly could be his voice, but did it fuck have the right tone... It probably is to be fair, but it just smacked of lack of forward-thinking where they've had to call back to a 'dead character' in that manner.
Because, yet again, it feels more and more like Johnathon Nolan just rocked up for the first series (with story bible), supervised a few episodes, and then left saying 'See you in four years for the finale series - don't fuck it up!!!'.
And they've... pretty much fucked it up straight away.
