Westworld.

I was rewatching Westworld, and just caught that in S3E3 the lab scene where Bernard is running a self-diagnostic shows an adjacent room where a lute player is playing the show theme.

That’s delightfully hilarious and mind-blowing. It means, of course, that the viewer (me) and the characters within the show are part of the make synthetic narrative, constructed by “lazy” humans (as discussed in an earlier scene) who recycled the same content when they figured it wouldn’t matter. But of course that insight itself is planted in the world in the world (and maybe in the world), so then is it not a lazy thing at all (since such an accident can’t happen in the show script, since it can’t be a recursive mistake), but rather a deliberate signal to me. Could the signal be merely that like me, the characters are not subject to such laziness, because the replication is not a flaw (as Maeve presumes) but actually a deliberate design feature? Of course, they can’t know that, but I am being allowed to.

There are other options but I will stop there.

It’s very clever.

By the way, from the moment I saw it I have always assumed the ending of the Sopranos is that me, the viewer, was killed. And thereby, finally Tony is free, from the one true thing he didn’t even know was a risk but was always there: me. There was some remarks years later by the show creator suggesting something else, but he was wrong 😜