by Allison Hart

HBO’s “Westworld” delivered audiences with an unsettling premise this fall: a look inside the world of a theme park staffed completely by AI, where humans can do as they like with absolutely no real world consequences. In its first episode, following all expectations, one of the female robots is brutally raped by a human.

The robot, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), is dragged into a barn by a man in black (Ed Harris), though the audience is privy only to her terrified screams. Upon first viewing, this appeared to be the same old “Game of Thrones” formula; rape character motivation, as plot device, as nothing more than another act of violence against women.

By the third episode, however, it’s clear that all is not as it seems in this robot-filed amusement park. Each robot is supposed to have their memory wiped of human interaction when they go to sleep, and yet Dolores starts having flashes of past events. Another robot begins a pre-programmed scene which, of course, includes a sexual assault, but Dolores remembers the recent attack and kills the other robot, beginning her own unscripted journey through her heavily scripted world.

Then there’s Maeve (Thandie Newton), the robot brothel owner in Westworld who begins to have visions of a past life as a homesteader. Eventually, becoming conscious of the human techs who work on her and the existence of an outside world, Maeve plots a rebellion against those who have demeaned and manipulated her, working the system that built her in order to destroy it.

HBO is a network with a tricky history as far as sexual assault is concerned. Network executive Casey Bloys raised eyebrows this summer at the Television Critic’s Association summer press tour when he claimed the violence on HBO is equal across all kinds of characters, despite the frequent and gratuitous scenes of sexual assault in Game of Thrones, the network’s biggest hit by far.

For this reason, the way that violence against women is treated on Westworld comes close to spitting in the face of GoT and shows like it. The women in question are driven by literal narratives within the park, meant to follow one course of action, never deviate from her given pat. Yet Dolores and Maeve aim to forge their own paths, trusting the memories that keep flooding back and reveling in the trauma that they bring. They are motivated by rape and violence only in that they seek to stop it, not to avenge or forget.

Maeve is particularly plagued by memories of the murder of her daughter in a past story, but tells the techs who help her escape that she wouldn’t dream of erasing them. The pain is too strong to ignore and too important to the sense of self she has formed.

Dolores’ story is the more literal of the two, she joins with a human named William on his own quest to find himself. He marvels at her self-awareness, at the level of humanity displayed when she saves lives and even when she takes them. He mentions this to her again and again as she saves his life in favor of others. “People can change the story of their lives,” she tells him when he asks about her ability to kill, “I imagined one where I didn’t have to be the damsel.”

The eventual reveal that William is the man in black is key to the idea that Westworld is Illuminating the effects of trauma in ways new to TV. The assertion by pop culture producers that rapists can only be the most evil of men has consistently glossed over the reality of rape for many people. The fact that Dolores has been dragged, beaten, and brutally raped by a man who claimed to love her, who the audience viewed as pure-hearted, is far closer to the truth.

Even after this revelation Dolores fights him, for herself and for everything that she deems to be true in this world, just as Maeve does in her search for freedom from the park. Over the course of a season they have developed a true sense of awareness, of their own conciseness, of its limitations, and of the motivations of others. Dolores and Maeve each fight for their right to survive with every action, clinging to horrific acts they’ve endured as guiding lights.

Westworld is proving that its creators take the lives of these women seriously even if the audience at first would not. The violence that at first seemed so typical and insulting becomes a landmark for TV’s rape victims, highlighting al the ways they’ve been failed until this point. For as Maeve says to the techs who once controlled her, “A little trauma can be illuminating.”