Plot points from the Westworld premiere are discussed below. If you didn't watch it last night, you should. This is probably the best HBO premiere since Boardwalk Empire.
Imagine waking up and living the same day over and over again: the sun heats your face, you wish your father well, you interact with strangers as you make your way out to paint a beautiful landscape, and then, at the end of it, you are murdered or raped or both—or worse—only to wake up again, the next day, bereft of your memories, waiting to go out and paint and interact and die again.
This is the hell of Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood), a robot living and loving and dying in Westworld day in and day out for the pleasure of rich people looking for a new thrill. She and the rest of the robots are programmed to forget the pain each night, ready to work anew every morning for a fresh crop of tourists.
But something changes as the Westworld premiere plays out. Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) notices it first, when one of the brothel employees, in the shop for a tinker, demonstrates a never-before-seen tic: a movement of her hand tied to some long-repressed memory. Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) has updated the programming of the "hosts," as the robots are known, messed with their electronic brains just enough to let them dip into their past lives—and deaths. Why he has done this isn't entirely clear just yet—is it a regularly scheduled upgrade or something slightly sinister, an adjustment of the hosts' cybernetic souls designed to mimic, or possibly even bring about, evolution?
The upgrade introduces a bug and suddenly the robots are freaking out all over the massive landscape of Westworld, prompting head of safety Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen) to initiate a park-wide recall of the upgraded machines. Not all of them can be saved: Into a basement storage facility goes Dolores' "father," a robot whose previous programming leads him to quote threatening lines from Shakespeare at Dr. Ford.
Louis Herthum provides the performance of the premiere in the guise of Mr. Abernathy, a truly "woke" robot whose drive to defend his daughter comes into conflict with his awareness that the man in front of him consigns her to violent death every evening. Sitting naked on a chair—all of the robots being worked on sit naked in chairs, thus fulfilling the HBO nudity quotient—his face contorts in rage and you wonder, just for a moment, if his programming is about to fail, if he's about to meet his maker. But the moment passes and all that remains is sadness, one that increases as he's walked into his new warehouse home by Bernard, another decommissioned husk that has outlived his usefulness.
One final note: I can't help but highlight the name of the putative villain of Westworld*, Hector Escaton (Rodrigo Santoro). Given showrunner Jonathan Nolan's previous fun with names—remember the duplicitous climate scientist Dr. Mann in Interstellar, caught fudging his data by our heroes?—the name jumps out. Escaton means "end time," after all; one wonders if we're about to see Westworld's eschaton immanentized over the next nine episodes.
*The park, not the show; the villain of the show seems to be the sadistic Man in Black played by Ed Harris. Though his mystery-box scenes suggest he may have somewhat more profound motivations as the show progresses.