Every day, the show’s cyborgs undergo trauma. At night, they forget everything. Illustration by Simon Roussin

“This story line will make Hieronymus Bosch look like he was doodling kittens,” Lee Sizemore brags. He’s the head of the “narrative department” at Westworld, a frontier-themed vacation park where customers act out their darkest fantasies. I have vivisection! Self-cannibalism! A special little something I call the “whoroboros.”

Self-cannibalism and the snake that eats its own tail: that’s a fair description of “Westworld,” a come-hither drama that introduces itself as a science-fiction thriller about cyborgs who become self-aware, then reveals its true identity as what happens when an HBO drama struggles to do the same. Created by the husband-and-wife team of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, “Westworld” is explicitly, and often wittily, an exploitation series about exploitation, full of naked bodies that are meant to make us think about nudity and violence that comments on violence. It’s the kind of trippy conceptual project that would be unbearable if it weren’t so elegantly made. So far, it works, mostly—not because it’s perfect but because it gets under your skin. This is largely owing to a spectacular performance by Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Dolores, one of Westworld’s robots, an unspoiled farmer’s daughter, that stock figure of every raunchy vaudeville joke. Her struggle with her own identity, as she evolves from the object of the story to its subject, feels something like a sister act to Jessica Rabbit: she’s not good, she’s just drawn that way.

The source material for “Westworld” is Michael Crichton’s campy nineteen-seventies thriller, in which Yul Brynner plays an unstoppable black-hat robot who kills the guests in a kind of symbolic slave rebellion. In adapting it for television, Nolan and Joy have made a few wise moves, including trimming the film’s alternative fantasy worlds, Rome World and Medieval World. They’ve also transformed the black hat from a cyborg into a human, who approaches the theme park as if it were a video game. And, crucially, they’ve shifted the story’s sympathies from the visitors to the cyborgs, known within Westworld as “hosts.” These hosts, who believe they are cowboys and Indians, hookers and virgins, are far more layered than the tourists who exploit them and the technicians who service them. They’re slaves who don’t know they’re slaves, providing immersive—and ultraviolent—entertainment to paying customers, in settings such as saloons and a dusty frontier wilderness. Every day, the hosts are raped, shot, and tortured. Then, at night, they go to bed and forget everything, to start all over again.

This unsettling motif is one of the most effective aspects of “Westworld”—we keep seeing the cyborgs waking from nightmares they can’t understand, or shuddering with trauma until a technician soothes them with a command. It’s a multivalent metaphor, a play on the “brain wipes” that appear in a lot of science fiction, like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” swirled together with the rebellious-fembot anxieties of a movie like “Ex Machina.” At times, the cyborgs reflect the Marxist concept of “false consciousness,” as brainwashed creatures whose desires are programmed into them; sometimes their grisly flashes of memory, which occur after a digital update, feel more like P.T.S.D. At its richest moments, “Westworld” glimmers with political resonances, as the best speculative fiction can; in its way, it’s about vulnerable citizens forced to repress atrocities so that their nation can drape a patriotic story over its ugly history. In one eerie scene, an unconscious cyborg who is being repaired wakes up on the operating table, grabs a scalpel, and escapes. She’s trembling, panicked, naked, with no idea where she is or what’s happening—she’s never seen anything except the frontier set—and when she stumbles into an empty gray warehouse she finds herself staring at hundreds of corpses, piled like logs. They may be cyborgs, but to her and to us they seem like bodies in a mass grave. Her knees buckle, and she gets hauled away and put back into the story.

If the entire series felt like that scene, as destabilizing and beautiful as a nightmare, it might become as dazzling as “The Leftovers” or “Hannibal,” the kind of ambitious shows that push past their premises into something profound. Four episodes in, however, “Westworld” is more about just how hard it is to create such a show. In this context, the Western setting is a logical one, given that it reflects TV’s own frontier days, when prime time was wall-to-wall cowboys. By 1958, there were twenty-eight Western dramas on the air. “Bonanza” ran for fourteen years, “Gunsmoke” for twenty. These shows were the original “Law & Order”—the base coat for TV drama and the source material for children’s games. Their violence was controversial but also all-American and wholesome, since Westerns were America’s proud form of self-mythology: laconic heroes saving the world from bad guys in the name of protecting pure white women, over and over.

“Westworld” is about what it means to take those generic plots and mold them into something modern: a prestige product that satisfies the taboo desires of a niche consumer base. Like HBO showrunners, Westworld’s designers “pitch” plot arcs. They “massage” story lines. They plant backstories to deepen characterizations. When glitches appear, they panic over the need to halt production, much as “Westworld” itself did, when it shut down during shooting for a rewrite. They are uneasy, at times, about the ethics of their labor. In real life, “Westworld” can’t just be good—it needs to be a hit, too. It’s HBO’s bid for a franchise to succeed “Game of Thrones,” following two pricey flops, “Vinyl” and “True Detective.” For both the show and the show inside the show, the key is to reproduce the alchemy that HBO perfected when it slid the Bada Bing into “The Sopranos”: to provide adult entertainment in both senses.

A friend who was a little girl during the fifties remembers those early cowboy shows as being more poisonous than the open sexism in the culture. In every episode, men had adventures—but when a woman showed up the fun stopped. That’s not true in “Westworld,” where Wood’s Dolores is by far the most promising character, a traumatized Eve who seems poised to become an avenger. Blond and creamy-skinned, a painter and an optimist, she’s engineered for customers to fall in love with and to want to protect; that impulse carries over to the HBO viewer. A lead designer (an appealingly melancholic Jeffrey Wright) meets Dolores on the sly, to deliver tests of her programming that feel more like therapy sessions. “Have I done something wrong?” Dolores asks him, as servile as Siri. In the tradition of Asimov’s Three Laws, she assures her creators that she could never harm a living creature. But, when she smacks a fly dead against her neck, her smile stays dreamy. She can lie and she can kill—that’s how we know she’s becoming a real girl.

The second most interesting character is Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton), the mistress of a bordello, and the two women appear destined to team up: virgin and whore, white woman and black woman, innocent and cynic. This is not to say that the show is feminist in any clear or uncontradictory way—like many series of this school, it often treats male fantasy as a default setting, something that everyone can enjoy. It’s baffling why certain demographics would ever pay to visit Westworld. Would straight women be titillated or depressed by cyborg hookers? Why would a lesbian guest—coded, obnoxiously, as less than hot—behave with a prostitute exactly as a straight man would? Where are all the gay male bachelor parties? The American Old West is a logical fantasy only if you’re the cowboy—or if your fantasy is to be exploited or enslaved, a desire left unexplored. (For a taboo-breaking joint, Westworld has few kinks.) So female customers get scattered like raisins into the oatmeal of male action; and, while the cast is visually polyglot, the dialogue is color-blind. The result is a layer of insoluble instability, a puzzle that the viewer has to work out for herself: Is Westworld the blinkered macho fantasy, or is that “Westworld”? It’s a meta-cliffhanger with its own allure, leaving us only one way to find out: stay tuned for next week’s episode. ♦