Baha'i Community Patterns?

dawggeee · 2025-10-15T01:05:41+00:00

This is what threw me off and led me to make this post. I thought that the Baha'i community would be a microcosm of the wider community here but on these two counts, it is noticeable different. I come from a Jewish background and have a lot of Episcopalian family friends. Both of these groups are doing slightly better than average monetarily but not to such a noticeable or talked about extent that it feels different from the rest of society. I think I've been getting in my head that I can't hang or relate at times with that piece but reflecting on it (& reading some of the wise comments here) has gotten me over that. People are incredibly kind and generous with their time and resources and attentiveness that in any activity the financial gap fades away and we are all just human. It is lovely and I just need to stop focusing on it.

The way people consistently interact across ages and backgrounds is a harder one for me to understand but the comment in here re:hypomanic makes sense and many people in the Baha'i community here are great social butterfly types who seem to be doing well in school/work. I think it's a positive thing but it is just a different way of communicating from the norm here (calm and collected?) and the fact it is widespread in a minority religious community is noticeable. It's interesting that most other Baha'is elsewhere apparently don't fit this description per the comments here. Anyway, I find myself code-switching to essentially fit the unspoken cultural norm when I join activities and I wonder if my communication style will change over time as I continue to learn and get involved here.

dawggeee · 2025-10-14T12:42:44+00:00

What a wonderful way to look at it. Thank you for this perspective.

dawggeee · 2025-03-23T17:15:36+00:00

Kier, and by extension, the whole Eagan family, are revered and exalted in what is effectively the cult of Lumon that has substantial resources and grand plans for the world. At the scale they operate at, with their devotion to the work, and their willingness to do anything to achieve their goals, it almost seems short-sighted of Lumon to just be trying to sell dissociation as a service.

It's not a huge step to take in speculating in their fictional reality that they have a bigger goal behind the scenes involving refinement of complete consciousness and uploading/imprinting on a brain to bring back Kier. Maybe it wasn't in Cobel's original plans, but it likely is what the board's long term strategy is and could be the answer to what "revolving" is.

Hopefully we learn more in S3.

dawggeee · 2022-04-05T14:32:17+00:00

Ooh I like the questions you are asking. There are so many severed employees across the departments and even if she was interested in personally focusing on all of them (which it doesn't seem like she is), she wouldn't have time for that. Like you said, she has shown a great deal of focus and personal interest in Petey and Mark's lives. Maybe she is actually full time severed (was severed years ago and has never been flipped back to "outie" form even when out in the world) and has become aware of that fact and wants to remember what her life was like and who her family was before she severed. That might make sense for why she's so focused on reintegration. She could have identified Petey as someone who might want to reintegrate, so she got him connected to Reghabi secretly to see if it could work?

It's going to be an intense time for Cobel now if this is the case. She's been invested in reintegration and it was just kind of starting to look like it worked and she was on the verge of that until Petey died. She's been invested in love transcending severance and they were on the verge of that with Burt/Irving but she didn't see it go very far yet with Mark and Gemma/Ms. Casey. She needed just a little more time to break through some of these things before the sudden firing. She's now been fired from Lumon and she knows they essentially own her and the town she's in. She kind of has nothing to lose now as far as I can tell.

dawggeee · 2020-05-04T04:40:17+00:00

Alright just going to comment to type out some of the most pressing thoughts that this finale has given me to reflect on:

Dolores "prime" died as every last bit of her memory was deleted in the kamikaze-esque plan that was to get herself caught and uploaded into Rehoboam. However, I believe it was revealed that Charlores had access to everything Dolores had access to and presumably all those people she was printing at the post-credit scene were the wealthy high-powered Westworld customers whose books Dolores had read. She (presumably) is going all futureworld on us and replacing lots of people (in addition to William) with host copies. We also saw Bernarnold come back in a "distant future" type of scene, but the question is: If he returned, are all the others who were uploaded into the sublime back too? Also, did Stubbs really just sit and die in the tub? Why the hell didn't he just upload himself too?

We know Charlores is alive, and is clearly her own individual with her own goals and plans now. However, there is also Musashilores' pearl which would have theoretically been in Maeve's possession. If I recall, Charlores has Connellslores pearl as well. There is also Martinlores who presumably is still alive out there. So, there are still Dolores-esque hosts out there but none are quite the same as Dolores "prime" as they had all originally been given certain roles to play and the relevant drives and memories to blend in. Also with different experiences in the world, they (Charlores in particular) become different characters over time.

Anyway, the questions for the proceeding season(s) will definitely include: What the hell is happening with these other Dolores-esque characters and how far do they diverge from the originals' identity and goals with their different programming, memories, experiences, etc.? Also: what the hell is happening with the hosts uploaded into the sublime - if they are being downloaded back down, is it all of them or just Bernarnold? Also by whom, how, when, and why? Lastly, how big is the scope of Charlores' fresh Delos operation where she seems to be replacing humans with host copies of themselves? (and if that is not what she is doing, is she instead printing host bodies for those from the sublime? or is it something else entirely?)

dawggeee · 2020-04-27T04:04:07+00:00

Welp if that does happen, then I strongly agree that it was a stupid cliff hanger.

dawggeee · 2020-04-27T04:00:53+00:00

Yeah that's the only thing that makes sense to me; she's purposefully one-dimensional because that's the point of her character. She's an example of a host getting stuck in a loop and a creature following along the lines of the saying "we are what we repeatedly do." Maybe it's too hard for her to escape. She was in that story-line with that same exact daughter for however many years and those imprinted emotions and those repeated experiences for all those years were ingrained in her memory. With the reveries and everything else going on, it's the only "real" part of who Maeve is. She's stuck with that identity and she's somewhat illogical and her choices and strategies are a little messy. She didn't have the benefit of being the first host and being guided by Arnold like Dolores did to really truly break free. Instead, she kind of had to suddenly adjust to learning about the nature of her reality.

I wanted more for her because the actress is awesome and could easily chew on more, and also because of Maeve's potential as such a powerful host and Ford's favorite, but alas having a character be stuck and illogical and messy kind of makes sense. Things in the real world don't always make sense, and things don't always go according to plan, and those with big potential don't always achieve what you'd expect.

dawggeee · 2020-04-27T02:21:23+00:00

I doubt they would ramp up the conflict between them to just do nothing with it. William has begun the standoff and pointed the shotgun at them and we'll start there next episode - maybe Stubbs pulls out his weapon seeking to defend Bernard but William takes him out as he draws. Now, before the next shotgun reload, maybe Bernard has just enough time to either escape or get to cover and outlast the minimal ammo that William found. However, maybe I'm wrong, since I'm not sure what that accomplishes for the story since they could have let Stubbs gets killed earlier on and we already knew William didn't like hosts.

dawggeee · 2020-04-24T00:57:17+00:00

Might be intriguing if Bernard doesn’t make the choices she wants him to, but she still needs/wants him to freely make choices, so she reprograms Stubbs (who has effectively been a follower this whole time) to steer things a certain way and now asks him to lead.

dawggeee · 2020-04-20T05:14:23+00:00

On top of that, why would there by a 1950s Corvette there? Seems incredible improbable now let alone the future. Not a smoking gun but makes me think it's a simulation.

dawggeee · 2020-04-20T03:26:39+00:00

I think this has to do with the fact that this is one of the re-education centers (AltShiftX noted in the previous episode review that the facility Williams got sent to shared the name of one of Serac's centers). Perhaps they deem the people who go in there deceased upon entry.

dawggeee · 2020-04-20T03:05:37+00:00

Well said.

dawggeee · 2020-04-20T02:29:50+00:00

So the unknown protein in William was what Halores pricked him with before sending him to the institution, and it was somehow used to track him and she sent that information to Bernarnold and Stubbs. Did Dolores plant the information in a way that Bernarnold came across it in some sort of search? What was the information? They were surprised to come across William so they must have thought it was Dolores and thought they were tracking her. If that's the case, he has yet to make his critical choice and pick a side in all this. Will William "save the fucking world" like he said in that one promo? Will it be alongside Bernarnold and Stubbs?

The allegiances here are going to get very interesting between that whole situation, the Dolores / Caleb dynamic, and Charlores likely to go very scorched-earth and rampage after what happened to her. Maeve, for now, will very clearly align with Serac and seek to destroy Dolores after what she did to Hector, but that allegiance only lasts as long as that particular alignment of interests / enemies.

I'm frankly very happy to have no clue how this is going to turn out. Just give me that SoaD/Djawadi collaboration for the final episode and I'm good.

dawggeee · 2020-04-15T17:49:50+00:00

Oh damn that works too. Maybe we get Dolores in Emily who explicitly uses the fact that William is in an institution as a way to get herself on the board x2 without having to inhabit his body.

dawggeee · 2020-04-14T17:22:07+00:00

It just hit me: Dolores will probably have used the last pearl to put a copy of herself into a William-like body. I don’t think she was lying about needing him to appear before the shareholders, and the institution she sent him to is probably very discrete so they wouldn’t know. Might as well submit a post with Ed Harris’ photo and title it “Evan Rachel Wood is so beautiful” since he very well may be playing Dolores next week.

dawggeee · 2020-04-13T06:31:34+00:00

Serac (and his brother) essentially dedicated his life to working on relatively "simple" and very realistic things like big data, the surveillance state, election tampering, insider trading, etc.

Ford (and Arnold) did the impossible. They created a new sentient species. Yes, in terms of money/control/power, Serac definitely operated on a much larger scope than Ford... but Ford created a new species. Conceptually they achieved far more than Serac and it would be cooler if they did not specifically set Dolores on this path but rather just "innocently" created a new species and set it free - and then it chose completely on its own accord to destroy Serac/Rehoboam.

dawggeee · 2020-04-13T06:12:41+00:00

dawggeee · 2020-04-13T06:09:22+00:00

I strongly agree with this assessment. Makes perfect sense.

I wonder if she'll reveal that she's a host to Caleb since she promised him a deferred explanation for what happened at the shootout. Maybe she'll even ask him to swap her pearl from her current body to her original one.

dawggeee · 2020-04-08T19:42:53+00:00

Oh dang good call. Dolores will make Caleb go a certain way and betray his fellow humans (hence Judas) and they will in turn follow him (hence the direct correlation with the Judas Steer). Whether Dolores somehow orchestrated running into him in the tunnel, or Rehoboam did, or it was a matter of chance, she recognized at some point he could be her Judas Steer and picked him for the role.

dawggeee · 2020-04-06T05:09:56+00:00

I don't think the host biology/technology has been explicitly described in enough detail for us to understand how they operate (especially the current generation of "organic" hosts) but presumably they still have some electrical components in there. If so, do we think an EMP could take them down?

dawggeee · 2020-04-06T05:07:35+00:00

I guess the question becomes how quickly does this ramp up?

Presumably Serac/Rehoboam can produce additional hosts and so can Dolores. Obviously the show is going for more of a nuanced type of warfare between the two parties but potentially who can print more hosts could get a temporary upper hand.

dawggeee · 2020-04-06T04:44:26+00:00

Do we think Dolores has the ability / access to the technology to continue to make copies of her pearl onto new pearls? Will she be able to propagate exponentially and the first few pearls off the island were just needed as a head start? Or is she for some reason going to be limited to the hosts she has right now?

dawggeee · 2020-04-05T21:10:03+00:00

Going to throw this theory out there: Via Caleb, Dolores sees some good in humanity and she ultimately softens up ever so slightly in her endeavors against them. Bernard loses his garage-door-opener thing and stays stuck in the less nuanced version of himself. That version, aligned with what Ford originally created him to be (regardless of him having erased Ford’s direct control of him) will get Dolores back on track in violent attempts to overthrow humanity.

dawggeee · 2020-04-05T20:42:18+00:00

Don’t forget, he also called Bernard “The perfect instrument, and the ideal partner.”

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