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Snakes in Movies   Westworld (Season 1) (2016)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   I know, this isn't a movie. It's a great 10 episode HBO TV series that's based on the original Westworld movie. It has all the interesting plots and fine acting we have come to expect from an HBO series, plus a couple of rattlesnakes and a woman with a full-body snake tattoo. Westworld is an amusement park in the future where rich people pay millions of dollars to experience a simulation of the wild west populated by androids or "Hosts" who look and behave exactly like humans. Guests are promised "a world of desire and indulgence you never thought was possible." They can live out their fantasies with the Hosts with no consequences. Mostly they just kill them or have sex with them. The show gives us a very dark view of humanity. Most of the guests and the humans who program the Hosts and manage the park are terrible people. At least the bad androids have an excuse - they have no choice, they were programmed that way.   In Episode #2 "Chestnut" Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the co-creator of Westworld and the Hosts is walking in the Mohave Desert. He meets a young boy and then sees a rattlesnake on the ground. Ford moves his finger back and forth and the snake follows the finger. The boy asks if he did that by magic. Ford says everything is magic except to the magician. Then he waves his hand out and the snake crawls away. This is the first time we see how much control Ford has over his robot creations, including the snake, without talking to them or using an electronic device to control them as everybody else does. Later we see that Ford can somehow control the Hosts with his mind alone. The first rattlesnake we see is a noticably fake prop, but I've seen much worse on film. At least it's not CGI. But seeing a real "fake" robot animal that looks fake in a series full of supposedly fake robots that look perfect because they're really not fake, makes me short-circuit and stutter like a broken Host if I think about it too much. Fortunately, the rattlesnake that we see crawling away is a real live one.   In Episode #4 "Dissonance Theory," we see a Western Diamond-backed Rattlesnake crawling in some rocks. Then there's a quick cut to a shot of a more distant snake with blood on it lying on a dead fallen tree. The Man in Black (Ed Harris), a Guest and a ruthless killer, hacks at the snake with a giant knife, for no particular reason I can determine. He's wandering the park looking for a maze. He's been visiting the park for 30 years and he's gotten bored with killing androids who can't hurt him. He thinks the maze will take him to a more exciting level of the game. A young girl told him in a previous episode that he needs to follow the Blood Arroyo to the place where the snake lays its eggs, but he can't find any. (Rattlesnakes don't lay eggs.) After cutting up the rattlesnake, he sees a woman bathing in a river. She has a large red tattoo of a snake wrapped around her body. The snake's mouth is open around her right eye, as if it's about to swallow it, but the head has not been filled in with red ink like the rest of the tattoo. (In the final episode we see that the tattoo extends all the way from her right foot up to her eye.) She's called "Armistice" (Ingrid Bolso Berdal) and she partners with a notorious outlaw. The Man in Black realizes that she's the clue he's been searching for and rescues her outlaw companion from jail to convince her to tell him the story behind her tattoo. She tells him that when she was a little girl, bandits killed everone in her village and she had to cover herself with her mother's blood to play dead so they wouldn't kill her too. Over the years, she has hunted and killed almost all of the men responsible for the massacre. Each time she killed one of the men, she painted herself with their blood, which is why her tattoo is red. The head is not colored in because she has one more man to kill, the worst man of them all, named Wyatt. He's "the head of the snake" that must be cut off to kill it. (Not true, it's just another false myth about snakes.) However cool it is, her story is as artificial as every other Host's story. It's just one of the many story lines invented to entertain the Guests that have been programmed into the androids by Westworld engineers. The engineers have in turn been written into the story line of the series by the Westworld script writers in order to entertain the show's Guests, I mean Viewers, to satisfy their demand for the consequence-free gratuitous nudity, sex, and violence they have come to expect from an HBO show. Wow, this show really is dark. (And the second season gets even darker.)