Summary

• Westworld gets low marks for historical accuracy, even though it takes place in a sci-fi facsimile of the Old West.
• An expert criticizes the show's inaccuracies in a key wagon robbery scene, focusing on unrealistic choices and lack of historical accuracy.
• Despite its cancelation, Westworld remains an intriguing sci-fi Western series that blends fantasy with futuristic themes of artificial intelligence.

HBO's cancelled four-season sci-fi Western series Westworld Season 1, episode 5 featured a mission from host El Lazo in which Evan Rachel Wood’s android Dolores ed 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, but Westworld got 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 for Insider, Michael Grauer breaks down this key scene from the episode titled “Contrao,” 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 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 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 by Westworld, 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 upon Western fiction to inform a self-contained false reality that happens to look and feel like a Wild West setting.

Given that Westworld’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.

Westworld was canceled in late 2023.

The show Westworld is, 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 by HBO for such crimes against realism, but for losing viewers at an alarming rate, while becoming increasingly convoluted and impossible to understand.

Source: Insider