"These violent delights..."

"... have violent ends." The line from Romeo and Juliette, spoken to one of the two principle robots with emerging consciousness, Delores, by her father, remembering a fragment of his persona from an earlier narrative/"build", and then repeated by Delores, in fragmented memories of her own. The first half of the point is made by Ford, in conversation, when he says that he'd originally thought the narratives the "guests" preferred would be positive, even peaceful, but that he'd been wrong, and that it was the "violent delights" that were sought after.

In one sense, this may be no more significant than children crashing their toys, but as it's portrayed it appears much more malevolent, tapping into some kind of basal savagery. That too, of course, is a common enough trope for human propensity for evil (original sin, monsters of the id, etc.), but the idea of displaying such a theme in an artificial world, in which all possibility of consequence, not to say retribution, is removed, is a brilliant way to isolate it, much like a controlled experiment. (Which I think is the reason for setting the simulation in a period of imagined relative lawlessness.) The Park, it turns out, has an advertising slogan: "Live without limits".

But then the second half of the line portends consequences, no? The second season will see to that. There is, in any case, the possibility that the players or "guests" in such a simulation are largely self-selected by their propensities. And of course there's that initial choosing of hats.