10 TV Shows That Made You Love Killers

There’s a bit of a trend on this list so far. So many of these empathetic killers are those who have been robbed of any kind of just social framework within which to live their lives. Dolores fits into this mold perfectly - not because she belongs to a dispossessed group of people, not because she’s been disadvantaged by war, but because her own personhood is constantly being questioned.

Dolores is a robot in Westworld, a park where guests can live out their wildest fantasies, doing what they want to these robots without consequences. Once Dolores gains consciousness though, enough to know that she and her fellow robots are being taken advantage of, she starts ruthlessly gunning down the people who cross her path to freedom.

Her wrath is uncomfortable to watch for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the park-goers she’s killing are essentially playing what they think of as a video game. And, in video games, we mow down tons of people-shaped collections of pixels with a certain level of artificial intelligence. In many ways, we resemble the villains in this show much more than the robot protagonists.

At the same time, Dolores’ ruthlessness is completely understandable. She gains the self-awareness to realize that she has had every kind of harm inflicted on her without any justice or protection in sight. Even if she starts mowing down audience surrogates, we understand why she feels she must forge her own path with fire and destruction. She knows others will take every chance to deny her personhood and her cruelty is the surest way she can find to make sure that doesn’t happen.