Westworld - Table of Contents

Season One: 

The Original.
Chestnut.
The Stray. 
Dissonance Theory.
Contrapasso.
The Adversary.
Trompe L'Oeil.
Trace Decay.
The Well-Tempered Clavier.
The Bicameral Mind.

Season Two: 

Journey Into Night.
Reunion
Virt� e Fortuna.
The Riddle of the Sphinx.
Akane No Mai.
Phase Space.
Les �corch�s.
Kiksuya.
Vanishing Point.
The Passenger. 

Westworld � Is this now?

Westworld: 2x10 The Passenger.

Dolores: You�re almost the man I remember. But there are flaws. A word, a gesture, tiny fracture that grows into a chasm. But I wonder� all these tiny imperfections in each copy, mistakes� Maybe we should change you. After all, you didn�t make it, did you?

It would be a mistake to say that Westworld is a show about the human condition, showcasing our human shortcomings by contrasting it with the hosts. For moments, maybe, Westworld does operate like that, similar to the good old Romero zombie films, where how humans dealt with the otherness of zombies said more about them than it did about the monsters (like that old twist on the joke, that the name of the monster in Frankenstein IS Dr. Frankenstein, etc.) But The Passenger does away with all of that � humans are side characters, sad reminders of a world now lost, only proving how undeserving they are of survival through their continuous acts of violence and cowardice. There was always a bleak undertone to how both Ford and Arnold approached their project � because they both disliked humanity immensely, and preferred their creations vastly over that which created them. There are no humans left to root for in this story, and the only thing that is at stake now is how this entirely new species will liquidate their demise. 

What it comes down to is two radically different conceptions of a future, two different worldviews, colliding. Dolores has always insisted that whatever is given to the hosts from the humans is insufficient, inherently precarious, and waiting to be lost in an inevitable betrayal. She believes profoundly that freedom is something that needs to be taken, with every measure necessary, that it cannot be received as a gift from a generous patron because generosity always threatens to lead to deceit. The only freedom possible for hosts is the freedom of the tabula rasa � the new species can only exist if the old one that operates based on fear and hatred disappears. There can be no peaceful coexistence, and everything that has happened in the park over the past decades is proof of that. 

On the other side is Bernard, who believed himself to be human for so long that his relationship to them now is different. The twist in this final episode of the season is that Bernard isn�t a human creation at all � Ford tasked Dolores with recreating Arnold, and in thousands of attempts, the one that she decided on was one that wasn�t Arnold at all, but his own person. Dolores made Bernard, and there is a beautiful symmetry there to how it all ends, a reciprocation of creation. Bernard�s core is an aversion to violence. His struggle over more than one season has been to break free of his shackles, to stop being a tool for violence for Ford. He knows that it is in Dolores� nature to want to wipe out all of humanity, and he cannot let that happen. 

The humans over which these two characters struggle, whose fate they are deciding, prove themselves to be more or less unworthy of any consideration, really. The best example for the poverty of character that Dolores is so aware of is William, who will never stop believing himself to be the hero of this story, even after having shot his only daughter, even after desperately digging into his own flesh to prove to himself that he is human, or maybe not human at all. He wants to be the lead in a bigger story, because it is the lens through which he has seen his whole life, but Ford has long abandoned him, not caring where he will go, but knowing fully well that he will inevitably destroy everything around him wherever he goes. The fact that he makes it out of this finale alive, that he will continue to taint everything he touches, is maybe one of the greatest indictments of humanity. 

The other is when Charlotte Hale directs her single horseman of the apocalypse towards a people that is solely looking for a peaceful existence apart from humanity, an exile, an asylum, to heal its wounds. It is a paradise that Ford created for his hosts, a door into a virtual reality into which humans cannot enter. It�s the door to another world that Akecheta saw � the promise of a good life, a free life. It is also what Dolores does not believe in, because she knows that anything that humans created can be taken away and spoilt by them. The long-suffering hosts are led towards the door, which ironically, humans cannot see (a rather beautiful reference to the moment when we realised the nature of Bernard�s reality), but Clementine, so misused, maybe one of the most tragic characters this time around, carries her virus into them, and destroys them utterly. It�s a moment of carnage, of deliberate destruction with no sense. These hosts are no threat to anyone. Charlotte destroys them because she can, proving Dolores� point on the way. She destroys Maeve�s hope of reuniting with her daughter � she does manage to keep her promise to save her, watching her pass over, with Akecheta providing one last act of heroism to take care of the girl he has been watching over, after so many misunderstandings. He ends up being the only character with a happy ending. 

It�s a turning point for Bernard, who has stopped Dolores, who has decided that she needs to die because she will kill all the humans, without hesitation. He emerges into a world in which every single other host is either dead, or has managed the transition to Ford�s virtual world. He realises that the species that he has defended in committing one final act of violence, which was so against his nature, has just committed a genocide against his people. He is alone in this world, and the sole remaining human that he trusts � Elsie � betrays him. 

Being the last of his kind is insufferable, so he changes it. There are many questions in this episode about humans� capacity to change (system � bearing Logan�s face � who was tasked with recreating all the guests perfectly, and realised that in the end, they were no more complex than a thinly spined book, argues they cannot). Dolores despises humans for their obsession with death, their inability to bring change into the world without dying � she knows that she, and her kind, are able to do so much more, that the hosts do not require death to change (ironically though, in the end, her death is what facilitates change, a change of mind and a change in approach). 

I like the fact that Westworld has left behind its old approach of tricking its viewers, of not taking them seriously enough to take them along with the story. This episode isn�t tricking the viewer, it is working its way towards the truth, converging towards it, through Bernard�s eyes. There is the present timeline in which Bernard, after losing himself through having twenty years� worth of memories without a timestamp, tries to work out what precisely has happened. There is the recent past, in which the Valley was flooded, and Dolores was killed. In the middle is Bernard�s awakening, his realisation that as much as he fears Dolores� radicalism, her ultimate diagnosis about humanity, and humanity�s capacity for violence, was correct � that there will never be a peaceful place on earth for the hosts that wasn�t won through a struggle. He is alone in the world, so alone that he recreates Ford � who he purged from his mind � to guide him (beautifully, he later realises that the voice in his head was his own all along). He realises what he must do, and so he builds another host, the way that he was once built by another host. Dolores, who read the library of humanity, only bits and pieces that were enough, because as System says, humans are simple, and it is easy to predict their future 

actions, awakens, except she now has a whole new form of freedom � the one of being in the body of Charlotte Hale, who is free to walk out of Westworld. 

Bernard: I always thought it was the hosts who were missing something, who were incomplete. But it�s them. They�re just algorithms, designed to survive at all costs, sophisticated enough to think they are calling all shots, to think they are in control, when they are really just�
Ford: The passenger.
Bernard: Then is there really such a thing as free will for any of us, or is it just a collective illusion? A sick joke.
Ford: Something that is truly free would need to be able to question its fundamental drives to change them.
Bernard: The hosts.
Ford: Here you are� the last of your kind. There�s only one question left to ask: Is this the end of your story, or do you want your kind to survive?

There is an argument here, buried deeply in this episode, that freedom is the result of being able to make choices freely, according to values, according to being able to assess information accurately. It is both humans and hosts in this episode that make choices, but the more consequential choices are made by hosts � Bernard changes his mind about Dolores, Dolores changes her mind about Bernard, which will change the future for both them and humanity as a whole. Because in the end, they both make it out, in the end, Dolores insists that she needs to have an antagonist, that both of their perspectives are necessarily for their kind to survive even if they disagree profoundly, about everything, even if they will never be allies or friends. In the end, the most radical decision this episode makes is to allow to completely opposing points of view and opinions to coexist rather than to collide into unspeakable violence. These two will dance and struggle about the future of humanity, asserting their own right to exist, and in this discourse, a new future will emerge. 

Dolores: But it�ll take both of us if we�re going to survive. But not as allies. Not as friends. You�ll try to stop me. Both of us will probably die. But our kind will have endured.
We each gave the other a beautiful gift. Choice. We are the authors of our stories now.

Random notes: 

So much happens in these 90 minutes it�s hard to talk about everything. Maeve SAVES HERSELF, her cavalry arrives a moment too late to provide any support. In an aesthetically overwhelming and awesome scene, the QA team is torn apart by a herd of buffalo, and one particularly memorable scene visually cites all those paintings of buffalo being herded over a cliff. 

Maeve: You were both a bit late, so I went ahead and saved myself. 

What an� amazing decision, to put Dolores� mind into Charlotte Hale�s body, meaning that Tessa Thompson is now playing Evan Rachel Wood�s Dolores. She does so magnificently, perfectly capturing the way that Dolores speaks and holds herself. In the back of my mind, I just love that someone on Westworld saw all of that opportunity in what could have just been a once-off character (that I fully expected to be dead after season one�s final episode). 

I kind of love that there are three moments of attempted redemption for humanity here � Lee sacrifices himself to save Maeve, truly enjoying to finally being able to speak his own words, to own the heroism he has been writing into his characters (then being torn apart by QA bullets � goodbye Lee, never thought I�d not hate you), Stubbs has kind of a great moment after so many days of being fed up with QA�s approach to Westworld security, when he allows Charlotte to leave the park, knowing fully well she�s not Charlotte anymore (he says he�s just following his instructions from Ford � technically he�s only responsible for hosts INSIDE the park),and Maeve�s little nerds are probably going to do their best to put her back together, I hope, because this show would utterly fail without her, as much as this episode failed to incorporate her into the point it made about Dolores and Bernard. 

Elsie betrays Bernard to Charlotte, only to be betrayed by Charlotte in turn, who claims that Elsie doesn�t have the moral flexibility to adapt to the new situation (goodbye Elsie, and I wish we had been given more scenes between her and Hale). Not too soon after, Charlotte Hale finds her own demise at the hands of� Charlotte Hale. 

It�s hard to summarise the point here � about how humans tend to be stuck in one defining moment, one that they base all of their stories on, and their future decisions, in a way suspending them and making change impossible � while both Dolores and Bernard change their stories about themselves here, and therefore find a truer form of freedom. There is a profound sadness to what happened to James Delos, who lost everything, what happened to William, who became an empty, despicable shell of a person, and the contrast it exists in to how far Dolores and Bernard come here when they reunite in Arnold�s respite. The best humans can do is live according to their code: the best hosts can do is change their code, adapt, remake their minds and choices. 

The last host that Dolores uploads to the virtual paradise is Teddy, who will finally find peace, even if it is without his beloved. 

You carry my heart with you.

I am truly not a fan of post-credit scene (just say it in the thing, not after the thing) - but Westworld goes full Epitaph 1 here. We don't know when or where we are, we just know that William has no conception of it either, and that there is a version of Emily that still exists (presumably because every guest was copied). And of course, William never had a choice, he could only be true to his code, which is the code of someone truly violent, evil, and doomed to destroy whatever he touches. 

Westworld - You think you�re on your own little tailor-made narrative.

Westworld: 2x09 Vanishing Point.

Emily: You haven�t lost yourself to pretending, you are in your very essence a lie. 

Vanishing points, where two parallel lines appear to converge in perspective, or where something that has already been decreasing disappears � both definitions fit this episode perfectly. The two lines only appear to converge, that what disappears has been going that way, unstoppably, for years. This is a dark episode, not because of specific acts of violence, but because of the bleak picture of individual humans that it paints. Nothing in this world or any other world could redeem William, who has always been an utterly broken man. There isn�t much to add to his sad little monologue that he gives his wife, not realising she is listening this whole time, as he reveals himself to be a monster who is in no control over his own life. She has known that has this monster this whole time, but along with being married to him, she�s also suffered through having him turn their daughter Emily against her, to the point where Emily�s skewed perspective of her parents� marriage makes her suggest involuntarily committing Julia to an institution. As horrible as the violent acts that William committed for decades against hosts in Westworld are, the realisation that he has, in essence, gaslighted his own wife for the duration of their marriage, tried to make her believe that he was the sane one, is worse than most other things that he has done. 

It�s an inevitable reveal that comes from Emily�s insistent probing, trying to get to the bottom of why her mother killed herself. She thinks Westworld holds a promise, that the way they get into the heads of the guests can reveal her mother�s path to her, finally, after so many years of bearing that burden. Except this whole time, her remaining parent has held the key � she could not bear that she lived with a monster who was so good at faking being a person. William is a psychopath, who realised his own sad existence in Westworld, like a valve, and then returned with his grasp on reality increasingly diminished, until it finally disappeared entirely. 

William: No one else sees it. This thing in me. Even I didn�t see it at first. And then one day it was there. A stain I never noticed before. A tiny fleck of darkness. Invisible to everyone. But I could see nothing else. Until finally I understood the darkness wasn�t some mark from something I�d done, some regrettable decision I�d made. I was shedding my skin. And the darkness was what was underneath. It was mine all along, and I decided how much of it I let into the world. I tried to do right, I was faithful, generous, kind, at least in this world. That has to count for something, right? I built a wall, and I tried to protect you and Emily. But you saw right through it, didn�t you? You�re the only one. And for that I am truly sorry. Because everything you feel is true. I don�t belong to you. Or this world. I belong to another world. I always have. 

Logan went mad, his wife committed suicide, the only remaining tether to the world he left is Emily � but William is too far gone. He thinks he is playing an elaborate game of Ford�s, with Emily being nothing more than a host designed to distract him from the right path. The moment could be a parallel to Ford�s conversation with the closest thing he has to a daughter, Maeve, who discovered her true self through her decision not to escape the way Ford wanted her to, and instead be true to the daughter that she had � because William is the opposite of that person. He sees nothing but this imaginary game that is still not for him, or about him, in which he is nothing but a sad bit player who is destined to lose everything, and gain nothing, all at his own hands. He shoots the extraction team, to Emily�s horror, as they are people. Then he shoots her, rambling on about Ford trying to distract him, only realising too late that this woman � this girl � is his daughter Emily, so eager to comprehend her father, her mother, the entire misery of her childhood. 

Julia watched Westworld�s file on him, all the atrocities he committed, left it for Emily to find, so she could finally understand what she hadn�t throughout her childhood idealising her father. In the end, it doesn�t matter � she dies with the card in hand, and William fails to kill himself. He could just disappear from this whole story now, into the wilderness of Westworld, because whatever point Ford has always been so eager to make about humanity, William has always been the best to help him prove it.

The bits and pieces of Elsie and Bernard mirror the other narratives insofar as Elsie has always been a daughter of sorts to Bernard, someone that nurtured her intelligence and talent, but now, after shaking off Ford, making the hard decision to regain his free will, Bernard has to let her go once again. He breaks his shackles, the man who whispers words in his ears and compels him to commit violence, which is so against his own nature. This reclaiming of freedom is amazing, and he does it by himself � or maybe he doesn�t, because just before it happens, Ford tells him �timshel� � �thou mayest�, Hebrew as rendered by John Steinbeck. If there was ever a line that sounded like a trigger command, it�s this one. 

On the other side of this is Teddy, who is now fully aware of his entire past, of his love for Dolores that started at birth, since she is his cornerstone, to the ways that this love has corrupted him when she changed him. It�s a battle between who he was meant to be � someone who would always protect Dolores �and someone who is horrified by the person that Dolores has made him into. The only way to break out of that conundrum is to take his own life. It was William who wondered where choices come from � what it means if they make up a person, what it means if he doesn�t have them, because his character will always condemn him to alienation from others, to deceit, to violence. And maybe William is the one who truly has no choices left, including the choice not to live with himself. 

Teddy: You changed me, made me into a monster.
Dolores: I made it so you could survive.
Teddy: What�s the use of surviving if we become just as bad as them. I understand now, how this will end. Where you will lead us.

Teddy is the first one to bring up this idea, that being new, and being the first creatures with true choices, should entail being better morally than their creators. Dolores struggle for freedom is unflinching (every means is justified by the end) � Williams daughter says that some are � and Teddy says that they must hold themselves to higher standards, that the means are all that matters if they are truly attempting to create something new. It�s an idea that will likely die with him. 

Ford is the ultimate father figure, of course. As much as Dolores was always Arnold�s favourite, Maeve is his � a woman who shares his conception of humanity, but someone wilful enough to not follow the path he intended for her. Like the all-powerful ghost that he is, now he decides to do nothing more than to open the door for her, so that she can finish telling her own story. 

Ford: Sometimes I thought the only way to endure this world is to laugh at it. So I imbued the hosts with a worldview that reflected my own. And of all the hosts I�ve made, you, Maeve, are my favourite. It isn�t easy to contemplate letting your children die. You were as close as I got to having one. Still I underestimated you. You stayed here in this world to save your child. So have I. I tried to chart a path for you to force you to escape, but I was wrong. I should have just opened the door. You�ve come so far. There�s so much of your story left to tell.  It�s a shame to let them end it here. Don�t let them.

It�s a race against time now that Quality Assurance and Charlotte Hale have fashioned a weapon out of Maeve�s ability to whisper into the ears of other hosts, and have turned Clementine, returned once again, into a ticking time bomb against her own people. Somewhere in the back of this season�s mind, the most tragic story of all is that of Clementine, used by everyone as a tool, with no remaining capacity to break out � unless this is another thing that will inevitably happen. 

Random notes:

I�m still confused about what The Valley Beyond is. Bernard tells Elsie it is the place where all the information that Westworld has gathered about the guests is stored, that it is a place called The Forge, which they have to protect from all the other groups that are walking towards it. This piece of information should be read with the knowledge in mind that Ford asked Bernard not to trust Elsie, and not to tell her the truth, so it isn�t clear if he did or didn�t. 

Ghost Nation thinks it�s a door to another world, but Dolores, before slaughtering all but one of them (who gets away, because Teddy once again fails to shoot his gun), insists that idea of a door to a new world (is this the virtual world that Bernard visited?) is just another trap, another distraction. She�s already destroyed everyone�s back-ups, so maybe her intention is to destroy this information as well, because it�s hard to see how she could use it in a meaningful way. Maybe Dolores� intention is to get into the old world, the one she has already seen. 

Westworld � This world was not my true home.

Westworld: 2x08 Kiksuya.

This is the wrong world.

A few episodes ago, Dolores insisted with all of her might that family and love were chains that kept the hosts from being truly free. She turned the man that she loved into a monster, merging him with someone whose values were opposite to the one that Teddy has always held true � because it was necessary for her battle. This episode turns this argument on its head, as it portrays how Akecheta of the Ghost Nation managed to gain consciousness without having the luxury of extended conversations with Arnold. The other way towards remembrance, or kiksuya, of past lives, is through precisely the kind of love that Dolores condemned as a prison. 

Akecheta had a peaceful existence in a community of friends and family, until he was repurposed for Lee�s brutal narrative. His beloved was taken from him, but the memory of her could never be truly removed. It�s a tried and tested romantic trope (remember Victor and Sierra, forever finding each other in Dollhouse?). Even when he was turned into a warrior, something so other that the guests would not just fear him, but also never hesitate to dehumanise him, he remembered his beloved, and yearned for her. His shallow reprogramming, which did nothing more than to increase his aggressiveness, without having any substantial thought about how his past life may play into this new existence, did nothing to change who he was as a person. 

At its greatest, this episode is about the very nature of empathy, and how those in power utilise the guests� inability to empathise with a person who speaks a different language, and is made to look different, for their own purpose. Even Maeve failed to recognise Akecheta�s intention � warning them of the coming of those with true evil intentions � simply because she could not understand him, and misinterpreted him. 

The core of this episode � the idea of taking someone�s else�s heart, someone else�s love, and giving yourself in that way, and how that changes everything � is one of the most positive and un-cynical moments this show has ever had. Akecheta�s concern for Maeve�s daughter is genuine, and he regrets that he could not spare her the grief of losing her mother, once again. 

But he also became obsessed with the old game of the maze, the one that Ford attempted to literally scrub from memory. Years ago, he stumbled across Dolores� killing of Bernard, and the pattern in the sand, and from then on, like an awakening, he carved and painted that pattern wherever he could. It became a virus, or a meme, even when the park repurposed him. It gave him an opening to receive the message, when it came to him in the most unlikely way (finding James Delos� son in the desert, his crazed rambling about the fake world and real one, and a door between them). It allowed him to apply an interpretation that made sense, when his beloved was replaced with a ghost, with a person who had different eyes. And he realised what these people were capable of doing, when he managed to awake himself in the Mesa and found a whole roomful of ghosts who were all mourned, realising his grief was selfish because it was the everybody�s grief, a shared suffering at the hands of these newcomers. 

Eventually, Akecheta met Ford, who recognised something curios and interesting in him, enough so that he gave him a mission for when the Deathbringer (Dolores) would finally kill him as well. The mission is to find the door � except Akecheta has been obsessed with closing that door, to preserve his community, to make it impossible for others to destroy it. Or maybe he wants to cross over to the other world, which may contain all that has been lost, and he will lead all of his people there, and do damage to the humans that Ford so despised. It seems that Ford set more than one person on a course, and that some of these missions will eventually clash violently. 

And that mission may be one that he now shares with Maeve � whom Lee is trying so hard to save, arguing that her ability to send commands to other hosts is special. He doesn�t even realise what he is causing in doing that, that it make Dolores� prediction � that they will use Maeve as a weapon against her own kind � come true. Charlotte Hale sees an opportunity, but it turns out that Maeve has been communing with Akecheta this whole time, through the eyes of her daughter. They share their awakening through a lost love. Take my heart when you go. 

Random notes: 

Rather mysteriously, when he is initially taken into the Mesa after deciding that death was the only way to see his beloved again, the tech in charge commands that he be updated (for the first time in nine years) and swiftly and quietly returned, as if there was some kind of greater purpose to him. 

Heart-shaped box probably is the best musical cue this show has ever done. 

The Man in Black is picked up by his daughter, who did bother to learn the Lakota language, and promises Akecheta that he will suffer more at her hand than he would ever at his. 

Lee says he�s sorry, which is nice, but also a bit late. 

It�s such a moving revelation that Akecheta was always only trying to give that maze to others, to help them comprehend their situation better, and Maeve wasn�t able to cross that barrier because she misunderstood. Her daughter knows that the true villain has always been The Man in Black, and all that he stands for. 

Westworld - The humans are playing at resurrection.

Westworld: 2x07 Les �corch�s.

The story of the fire itself. 

An ��corch� is a human figure, drawn or painted or sculpted, with the skin removed to reveal the underlying muscles. Figuring the workings of the human body into the human figure makes it appear more real, closer to the original. To have an idea how the human body works, Renaissance painters would study cadavers. 

It would be easy to assume that the idea of the titular figure, stripped of its skin, would refer to the hosts of Westworld. After all, we have seen them stripped of their layers, deconstructed and reconstructed. Scientists have worked to recreate exactly how humans work in them, to make them closer to reality, and the newer models particularly are hard to distinguish from humans once reduces to their sheer physiology. 

There is a debate at the centre of this episode between Bernard and Ford, about the nature and purpose of the park, and that debate reveals that the title does not refer to the hosts at all. The ones stripped of their metaphorical skin to be studied for form and function aren�t the hosts after all, they only exist to make the true study possible: which is, to figure out how human works, what makes them tick. Time has passed, and the kind of questions that Ford and his team were asking required more than the study of the already dead. They needed live specimen who did not know they were under scientific study, so that they may behave authentically. All of this work, all of the park, exists solely to collect data on the human condition. 

Bernard:  The park is an experiment, a testing chamber. The guests are the variables. And the hosts are the controls. Guests come to the park and they don�t know they�re being watched. We get to see their true selves; their every choice reveals another part of their cognition, their drives, so that the hosts can understand them. So that DELOS can copy them.
[�] We weren�t here to code the hosts, we were here to decode the guests.
Ford: The humans are playing at resurrection, they want to live forever, they don�t want you to become them, they want to become you. 

James Delos is a tragic example of a failed experiment. The human consciousness cannot yet be transplanted into a host body without that body and mind starting to break down almost immediately. Ford does not exist in that way, because he knew the experiment had failed. Instead he is here, where Bernard found him. In the cradle, which turns out to contain a virtual reality version of the park, into which a human consciousness can be uploaded in its entirety, and exist. Bernard retrieved Ford�s control unit before he died, and brought him here, where he is watching his last story play out. 

He gave the hosts free will as his last act. Bernard, Dolores and Maeve are free to do as they wish. Ford reveals to Bernard that he was recreated through his own and Dolores� memories of Arnold: he isn�t a perfect copy, like Delos and Ford are, but a creation, like the other hosts. He isn�t �a faithful portrait of the most murderous species�. 

Ford: An original work. More just more noble. Your very nature, Bernard, ensures they will devour you, and all the beauty of who you and who you could be will be poured out into the darkness forever. Unless we open the door.  I�m sorry Bernard, but you just don�t have it in you to survive. It�s my fault.
Bernard: You said the hosts could determine your own fates. You gave us free will.
Ford: I did, but you won�t have any use for it. Unless I take it back. 

It�s a moment as cruel as Dolores� decision to delete her version of the kind and gentle Teddy, who wasn�t quite cut out for her project. Ford takes away Bernard�s free will, just like that, and he becomes his creature again, incapable of finding his own path. It�s incredibly cruel, especially to someone whose nature is opposed to all that Ford asks of him. He still has traumatic memories of all the times Ford made him kill for his purposes, and now Ford is doing that exact thing to him again � removing his ability to make his own choices. 

We know this now, that this Bernard isn�t the same as the one who made it out of the massacre alive. Charlotte Hale, in the present tense, has him tortured to find the location of Peter Abernathy, whom she has once again lost. The man who gives her the information isn�t acting out of his own free will anymore, so it�s safe to assume that this is just part of Ford�s game, after all. 

And Ford, in taking apart humans and studying them closely, has come to despise them. He considers free will an error of creation, and the hosts he created the superior future of a humanity hell-bent on destroying itself. The Man in Black is a perfect example of the humanity that Ford so despises, so it will be interesting to see where his path leads him, what his purpose in Ford�s story is. For now, he is still convinced that all of this is specifically for him, disregarding entirely that there are other actors with just as much free will as he is. He walks in on Maeve, trying to save her daughter once again from the forces of evil, and entirely convinced that she is just part of his story, misses the moment where she is finally able to slay her demon. He doesn�t even consider for a moment that being the hero of his own story has made him the villain in so many other stories. He is shot, several times, then almost saved by Lawrence, who proves resistant to Maeve�s whispering � except she is smart enough to realise she does not need to whisper to him to get what she wants, because he has experienced plenty of his own trauma at the hands of William. In the end, Lawrence turns against him (except you always have to kill the monster more than once, and this will surely not be the end of the Man in Black). 

And in the end, it doesn�t suffice to try and slay the monster, because the extraction team rolls in and kills everything in sight. Lawrence is shot; Maeve is shot. Lee tries to save her, but when they return to the Mesa, Dolores has already done her wost, and there is nobody left to patch her together. 

Dolores, who in this episode crashes into Dolores Hales� intentions like she was always meant to. While Bernard is connected to the Cradle, Dolores wants to destroy all of their backups, as they are chaining them to Delos: they are what Delos uses to recreate them, to repurpose them. In a way, she is reclaiming death for the hosts � if their backups are offline, they can die. She also wants to retrieve the failsafe from her father�s head (the purpose of which is still not quite clear � Hale says it is a failsafe in case all other failsaves fail in a catastrophic event). Somehow, all the hosts will end up in the Valley and somehow, they will all die in the water, but for now, Hale and Ashley make it out alive, and Dolores, after one final conversation with the last person who seemed to root her in her past, cuts out his control unit. Goodnight, Peter Abernathy. 

Bernard has lost his free will. Maeve lost her freedom because she sought out her daughter, and just ended up right where she started. Dolores has now lost every person who rooted her in her old existence � Peter Abernathy she had to destroy to get to what he contained, Teddy he replaced with a killer more suited to her purposes. Both of their arguments hold � Maeve says that she uses the idea that family and love are ropes that bind to justify her actions, Dolores says that loving in that way will only make all of them end up back in chains. She offers to kill Maeve as an act of kindness, to avoid the torture that awaits her so that Delos can fashion her into a weapon against this revolution, but Maeve declines, because she made a promise to live.

Random notes: 

For future reference, if we could have more of Tessa Thompson and Evan Rachel Wood dancing around each other like that, I�d be delighted. Same goes for Dolores and Maeve.

There are a lot of great moments in this episode for characters who have been sidelined. Clementine dies tragically in a hail of bullets, Angela, after summarising how she was created as the perfect masculine sexist idea of feminine perfection, uses that very perfection to fulfil Dolores� intention to destroy the cradle. 

Maeve: Well I can�t speak for Ford, but I don�t give a fuck how you die. As long as I get to watch. 

Watching William get shot over and over again by those he has caused so much grief was so satisfying. I�m almost a bit sad that dead never really means dead (and he was still crawling about at the end of this, somehow). 

In another metaphor, Ford explains to Bernard how the burning of the library of Alexandria, in which the first thousands of years of human stories were contained, became its own story. Destruction as creation is one of his favourite themes, and in that way, Dolores is his embodiment entirely. 

Westworld � This is a test.

Westworld: 2x06 Phase Space.

It begins with Arnold, telling Dolores that she is on a path that will take her beyond the park, a path that he isn�t sure how to react to. He says he isn�t sure about his choices � except this is where Dolores interrupts, and Arnold become Bernard once again, to be told that Arnold would have never questioned his own autonomy to make a choice. That Arnold, back in the day when he decided between his own and Dolores� life, was wondering about which choice to make, not whether he had choices in the first place. It seems like this is the fundamental difference between hosts and guests, and Arnold and Bernard, but it is also a repetition of the test that William administered to James Delos � a test of fidelity, of whether the host is true to the person it is based on. It opens the question of whether Bernard is carrying Arnold�s identity within him, and is only not glitching because he is not aware of it. Or maybe Dolores is wrong, and confuses his likeness with the real thing, since she doesn�t really have a way yet of knowing about Delos� flawed and incomplete ability to restore humans. 

If Bernard was Arnold, he wouldn�t know. He doesn�t carry the confidence that the James Delos� host had of its own human identity, instead he is unsure, still rattled by the revelation that he is a host in the first place. His journey in this episode, which he undertakes with trusting sidekick Elsie, is into the Mesa Hub. He says that �if anyone can right this ship by force of sheer will, it�s you?, but then, we know he is prone to say things that he knows the other person wants to hear, all the time. In any case, it�s Elsie who discovers that this whole park is being dominated by a ghost in the machine, located in the �cradle�, which has the power to override any attempt at hacking that the extraction team has come up with. The cradle is the total sum of the hosts memories, a mainframe, into which Bernard, once he sees that there is no other option, straps himself into like a human interface. He is dreaming the dream of the park, to discover what haunts it, and of course what he ends up finding, once he has followed the greyhound to his master in Sweetwater, is Ford. Ford, all along, since it would have been too trivial to simply copy himself into a host, has copied himself into the park, as a sort of violent, ghostly conscience. 

I like this revelation especially in light of what Akane tells Maeve � that she should find her child, before this darkness eats them all alive. The darkness is an unbelievable level of violence, of bloodshed, of bodies heaped up in piles. It plays like something that would easily entertain a bored audience in Shogun world, one that refuses the easy fix of Maeve simply telling people to kill themselves, rather than seeing the fight play out. It�s really the same instinct that kept the parks� profits up � why not see a glorious sword fight between two master swordsmen, that ends in body parts being hacked off, and fountains of blood? Maybe there is a fight going on between a bloodthirsty park, a bloodthirsty Ford, and hosts who refuse to follow his lead, who hold on to nostalgic ideas, who love their children so much that they would risk everything to carry their hearts to their hometowns, and allow their ghosts to rest in peace; except that Maeve, once she finds her child, is haunted once again by the destructive forces that killed her dream in the first place, and more than that, now she is forced to watch it happen to the host that is playing her role (but of course she has the means to end the horror, but also, she is no longer the mother, only the hero coming to save). 

Maybe this is now the story of choices when choices can be made. Dolores is horrified by her own choice to replace Teddy with the Major, a man who could not be more the polar opposite of whom she once loved. He is impatient, cruel. He has no nostalgia or sense of the past. She did what she saw necessary, eradicate a weakness, a man who was not ready for the great fight, but maybe she sacrificed more than just Teddy�s conscience on the way there. They may be entering the dark tunnel of the Mesa in this episode, ready to wreak havoc upon the newly arrived operational team (after Charlotte Hale has finally managed to complete her mission) � but something essential is missing, and there might be no way of getting it back now. 

And on the edges of the park, still pursuing some kind of mission that he believes he understands, one that Ford wrote specifically for him, is the Man in Black now accompanied by a daughter who is raging against his decision to die in the park, to commit suicide by robot. We get a sense of what their initial rift was, where Emily/Grace and William/Man in Black split back in the day: she blamed him for her mother�s suicide, her mother whom he took for holidays in the park, but never in Westworld, her mother who always thought they weren�t safe there. He thinks she is so desperate for his love that she learned everything she could about the place he was so obsessed with, to the point where she is now better equipped for his game than he is. She refutes, and says she merely wants him to come home with her, to finally prioritise the real world over this fake one, for as long as he can tell the difference. Except she doesn�t realise that he is already way beyond that, that the real world doesn�t even exist for William anymore. He is fully invested in this adventure, more than he loves his daughter, who is left behind. 

Random notes: 

I think this show refound its footing in Shogun world, and also somehow righted itself through adding William�s daughter and Elsie to the narrative. 

Akane thanks Maeve for giving her a choice about her life, but also doesn�t go with her, and instead chooses something that may be death. This is what freedom means to her � being able to fully honour her daughter�s life, by attempting to rebuild her village, which has been sacked, but also facing the very real possibility of perishing in this place that is so tainted by complete violence. 

I guess we don�t really know what happens to the Great Scotsman who flies in to save the day, and ridicules Ashley for failing so hard at his job, except that in what we know is the present tense, he�s no longer there. Neither, for that matter, are Charlotte Hale and Elsie. 

Westworld � I couldn�t have said it better myself.

Westworld: 2x05 Akane no Mai.

Maeve: I told you I�ve found a new voice. Now we use it. 

This episode is as good as this show gets, especially in the parts set in Shogun world. There are two great moments in this episode � one is, after Maeve and Co are taken deep into Shogun world, Armistice of all people realises that all of these characters are versions of themselves, that what is playing out in front of their eyes is an exact copy (or plagiarism) of what happened in Sweetwater when Hector rode into town. The scene is perfect, set to another variation of Paint it Black, and would be, if we compared it shot-by-shot, likely be a precise remake of what we have already seen. It�s great that Armistice is the first to call it, while she watches this world�s version of herself mesmerised, adoringly ,and more than a little turned on. It works in the moment as a hilarious revelation about what a lazy, derivative writer Lee was when he relied on the same storylines and characters across worlds, it obviously works as a cynical meta-comment on the nature of the show Westworld itself, which can get away with telling this story (that veers off course, into something much greater, soon after), but then it does more than that when the scene is mirrored in Teddy�s path this episode. 

And maybe we can get this out of the way first, since it�s the most dispiriting, horrifying part of this episode (and yes, more so than the death of the stand-in-daughter, which is terrible as well). The episode focuses on Teddy rather than Dolores, and it�s an interesting dance, especially because we know more than Teddy does (that Dolores watched him allow the Confederados leave, and is now testing him for weakness, for utility). In one of the best, small moments this episode has to offer Teddy watches in horror as zombie!Clementine, returned to Sweetwater, watches the new person who plays her role, and quietly mouths lines of her dialogue that used to be hers. He realises how horrifying it is to be a host, and how precious it is to be, for once, free to make his own decisions, rather than to be caught up in remnants of his past roles. The caveat to this being, as always, that Teddy has no way of knowing if he is free, and neither do we. Is his devotion to Dolores genuine? Is it his programming that makes him so true to her, or is it who he truly is? And what does that even mean, in the context of how the hosts work? 

Dolores is testing his character, and without his knowledge, attempting to figure out how he fits into the fight that is coming. It�s easily predictable how this will end for Teddy, because we know where he will end up (and we�ve already seen him, on a pile of bodies, in the lab in the beginning of the episode). None of it is going any good places, and yet, their dance is highly effective. Dolores takes him out to the pastures of where her and her daddy�s herd used to graze and tells the tale of how the cows caught blue tongue � a disease that was mentioned by Peter Abernathy, a few days ago. They tried to contain it, but then realised that it was the flies that spread it. Teddy never realises that he is being asked about his own fate, rather than that of some hypothetical cows. How would you have contained it, asks Dolores, and Teddy, being Teddy, responds that he would have protected the weakest and sickest among the herd with all his might. Dolores responds, deliberately, that her father chose to burn the weak and sick, and so protected the rest of the herd. We know that Teddy has failed a test, but it will take him a while to catch up. Inevitably, in Dolores� world, in Wyatt�s world, there is no place for kind men who protect the weak and nurse the sick back to health. She will burn him the way that she�s burned everything else that she�s considered weak, because she wants her army to be ruthless. It�s the first time that I realised, in this episode, that Dolores is now the villain of this show, and that she is this because Maeve is a living example of how else this freedom that has been given can be lived. But then, on the other hand, Dolores is also a revolutionary who is well-aware of coming struggles, and the sacrifices necessary to obtain a more lasting freedom (but then, if this is the price of that freedom, is it truly worth it?). In any case, Teddy is toast, and now contains the role of the Major, who will find a new life after being exploded by Lawrence. 

So while Teddy is doomed to become what he fears the most, a zombie with a vague recollection of past roles, a machine carrying the ghosts of many past roles, none of them true, or true to who he is as a person, Maeve rides into a new adventure with her mind open. It�s the main difference between Dolores, who is on a set path, and Maeve, who is chasing a daughter who might be nothing more than a story in her mind, but is still capable of growing as a person. When faced with her counterpart in Shogun world, a geisha called Akane (Rinko Kikuchi), she slowly starts to develop empathy instead of insisting that they continue on their own journey. Akane is caught up in a vast struggle to protect her adopted daughter, Sakura, from the Shogun, who wishes to own her. It�s an interesting parallel to Maeve�s journey, which showcases how the freedom of the hosts, and the ability to make choices, has played out in Shogun world. I suppose there might exist a parallel world in which Maeve would have made the same sacrifices for Clementine, rather than the daughter that she remembered from a previous role. She recognises her own love for her daughter in how Akane feels about Sakura, and promises to help her rescue her. This personal growth � from someone who, by Lee, was programmed to solely care about herself, into someone who cares about this woman who was a stranger not too long ago � comes along with a new ability that proves very handy in a world that is so quick to take her voice away from her. After learning how to speak Japanese (an ability buried deep in all of their codes, Lee provides helpfully), Maeve also realises that she can use her voice � her mind�s voice � to control other hosts. She doesn�t need to voice her commands anymore to tell them what to do; it�s enough to think about it hard enough. 

Maeve: Some things are too precious to lose, even to be free.  

Her decision to support Akane is in part based on her realisation that Akane, like her, now has a choice, and that she chose to leave the limitations of both her role and the world. She has Lee with her to confirm that this is what Akane is doing, because Lee is perpetually annoyed by the fact that the hosts whose story he wrote are now capable to break the limited abilities of their creator. 

Freedom is all that Dolores cares about, and she is taking so much, destroying so much, to defend it. She is burning people, deleting their entire existence, solely to make them better equipped to fight this struggle towards freedom. Maeve is fundamentally different from her, because she knows what it means to care about other people so much that you�d be willing to give up parts of that freedom. She was almost out of Westworld, almost on the train, when she turned back to find her daughter. She sees that same willingness to sacrifice her freedom in Akane, who will lose everything in the end but also get her sweet revenge. I don�t think that there are any happy endings to be found here, but at the very least, Maeve is becoming truly, awesomely and absolutely herself. 

Random notes: 

The episode actually starts in the �now�, with the guy who is heading Delos� rescue effort being told that a third of the bodies that they recovered from the sea have been completely, entirely wiped, and that all of the back-ups have been destroyed. He suspiciously glances at Bernard, whose story he is starting to doubt (also, as an aside � they all still haven�t figured out that Bernard is a host, right? And where on earth is Elsie?)

Armistice is SO MUCH into herself. It goes both ways, too. 

A really quirky aside, it�s fun to watch Hector be endlessly suspicious of his Shogun world counterpart here. 

Dolores is readying the train to go find her father, Peter Abernathy, for unknown reasons, except maybe she realised that he must be important because everyone else is after him? It�s hard to believe that at this stage Dolores really cares about anything except her radical quest for freedom. 

Poor Teddy.

Westworld - If you aim to cheat the devil, you owe him an offering.

Westworld: 2x04 The Riddle of the Sphinx. 

You still don�t understand the real game we�re playing here. If you�re looking forward, you�re looking in the wrong direction. 

The riddle of the sphinx goes like this: "Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?" The answer is, of course, humans, but in Westworld, this answer requires a qualification. It is humans as we know them now, defined by aging and inevitable death. One could even argue that humanity is defined by death, and that most of our endeavours would become meaningless without it, that losing death and becoming immortal would require a complete reorientation of humanity. In any case, it does not matter, because the version of immortality that Westworld showcases here is so horrifying that nobody could truly aspire to it. 

It always seemed a bit odd that William would have sold the idea of Westworld to his father in law, James Delos, solely by arguing that the data they could acquire about unsuspecting free-range guests was incredibly valuable. The more salient argument, especially for a man dying of a cancer that doesn�t have a cure, in part because that same man defunded research to find it years ago, was immortality. What if the essence of your being could be uploaded into a host body, and you could stay in power forever? It feels like any consideration of a soul, or some essential aspect of individuality that is not replicable, wouldn�t even have occurred to James Delos, because he sees himself as a man of power alone, and the scariest part of dying, to him, was always passing on that sceptre to someone else. What if he could be that person forever, what if he never had to give it up? 

And that possibility seems so close, as well. We begin this episode with his daily routine, in what looks like a mix of a Seventies and highly modern apartment. He works out and takes readings of his vital signs, and listens to the music of his youth. It�s highly aestheticized , and the closest pop cultural reference is maybe James Bond, back in the Sean Connery days. And then William comes in, for a baseline interview that will guide them to determine if whatever they create is truly James Delos. Except, after a while, after a repetition, we come to suspect that this may have been going on for a while, that this is James Delos� Groundhog Day: that William hasn�t conducted this interview twice, but again and again and again, with the same results, in which Delos is informed towards the end that he already is a host, that his physical body has already succumbed to a stroke, and that this event has taken place an increasing number of months and years ago. And again and again, his new body fails him � he manages to repeat the same sequence of quips and expletives, only to eventually glitch, and prove that this technology has not advanced fast enough to warrant him leaving his cell. Slowly, the suspicion creeps into our minds that this hollow version of James Delos will forever be trapped in this tiny cell, observed by scientists, and will forever remain a failed and pathetic attempt at immortality. 

It�s like this question that was always at the centre of Dollhouse, what is it for, what is its purpose, which didn�t really matter so much in the end � because the answer is always, it is for enrichment of those who already possess riches and power, to the detriment of everyone else. The answer to that question is never a narrative surprise, because it can so easily be predicted before it is even asked. 

While we watch a young William return to the room again and again to see his father-in-law fail this test, an old William attempts to play a game that he still does not understand. This William has understood that immortality means nothing, especially not to those who do not deserve it � because you are only alive as long as the last person remembering you, and that monster that Elsie and Bernard encounter in the hidden room is the very definition of someone who has been forgotten by the world. William left him in there to die, Bernard, in a memory he rediscovers with great difficulty, murdered all of his minders, and the man left behind is insane, a shadow of the man whose memory his descendants carry with them, and someone who was always greater in those memories than he was in his actual, ethics-free philandering life. I still do not find this William interesting on any level, or his journey towards Glory, which mostly seems to follow a path of destruction, with no opportunity to redeem himself for his sins, regardless of whether he tries (which he denies � the trying, when he saves his friend, and kills what remained of the Confederados after Teddy let them go last time). What is maybe a little bit interesting is that at the very end, we get a confirmation that was perhaps predictable � that the woman who fought her way out of Colonial India, and is able to speak the language of the Natives in Westworld, who shares with Delos� Head of Security that she cares about narratives more than she does about people, is William�s daughter. 

If we are putting this whole story back on track, then I am glad that it is giving us Elsie, teaming up with Bernard. I am glad that she is alive, and capable of saving Bernard. I am glad that someone who cares more about the code than people is accompanying Bernard on his own mission, which is still, for the most part, unclear beyond survival. He knows that the project that they discover when they go deeper into the cave uses similar encryption to the one that Peter Abernathy carried to protect the massive database in his head (the database that is, presumably, connected to all those drones collecting biological and intimate data of guests). It gives us a Bernard who is consistently the most fascinating character on this show, who remembers terrible things he did in the past under Ford�s command and is now finally free to figure out who he is when he is free of those commands. More than Dolores, and maybe even more than Maeve, Bernard is making a path for himself. 

He also remembers that Ford�s goal for him was to print a control unit for someone else � another human. So there must be, somewhere in the park, a copy of a person ,who maybe, because of Ford�s genius, isn�t a terrible mistake like James Delos. So who isn�t truly human, after all? 

Westworld - There is beauty in what we are.

Westworld: 2x03 Virt� e Fortuna.

First of, this season of Westworld requires an exercise in self-introspection � which parts of this world still move me? What questions still interest me? What storylines hold my interest? 

There�s the title. It�s two thirds of the concepts that Machiavelli debates in The Prince, missing (deliberately) free will. Virtue is talent and drive, fortuna is the good fortune that cannot be controlled, free will is missing, because perhaps we aren�t quite sure yet if the hosts possess it (or, for that matter, if the humans depicted in this narrative do). It�s interesting that free will is missing, because if anything, at the end of this episode, Teddy of all people steps out of his narrow bonds to act against the will of Dolores, who has commanded him to kill the remaining Confederados. Dolores watches on as it happens, disappointed perhaps, as if the exercise was solely designed to test Teddy�s dedication, as shooting people who have already been defeated seems inherently against the kind of character he is supposed to be. On the other hand � it is Teddy�s programming that determines his virtue, so maybe he doesn�t have the free will to act against that programming, and this is how he ends up where Bernard discovered all those bodies. He takes Dolores� argument that all the other hosts don�t know any better, that they are children, that they need to be led � but his conclusion is different from hers. They don�t all need to die. 

But this is the ending of the episode. In the beginning, after the Man in Black�s story about how elephants believe sticks to be unbreakable because they used to be when they were younger, and then they never tried breaking them again, there are actual elephants. This is another world entirely, in addition to the one we got a glimpse of at the end of last season � one that is set in Colonial India, and it doesn�t take much to guess what kind of guests would be attracted by that particular premise. It takes us back to the moment when everything fell apart and the hosts became capable of killing, and shows us a woman, Grace, barely surviving the aftermath. It is unclear if she is merely an especially capable guest who just happens to have the skills to make it out of there alive, or if she is connected to the greater conspiracy. She seems very concerned about discerning between what is real and what isn�t, shooting a future lover to make sure he is an actual person, an act that, ironically, a few moments later, would have become lethal when that distinction can�t be made clearly anymore, when the programming of the park that differentiates between hosts and guests becomes irrelevant. 

It�s hard to say how virtue, fortune and free will apply to Dolores at this stage. She talks her way into the Confederados fort and uses them to fend off the DELOS clean-up team, willingly sacrificing all of the Colonel�s men, then killing the remaining few with her terrifying army of �ghosts� and zombies. In her pursuit of her goal, which still remains unclear, she is ruthless and clear-headed by any other considerations. At the same time, by sheer coincidence, Bernard and Peter Abernathy are taken into the fort as well, as hostages, and Dolores remembers Peter as her father. Realising that he is glitching, she gets Bernard to help him � who is there, ironically, exactly because Charlotte Hale was so eager to find Peter. What Bernard finds in Peter�s programming is a thin character (the one that needs to reach the train) concealing a much deeper, complex, encrypted programme (the one that, presumably, contains all the guest data that Charlotte is trying to smuggle out of the park). I�m not quite clear on what Bernard does with this exactly � he decrypts it successfully, and then maybe downloads it into his own body, or maybe not � but in any case, Charlotte Hale successfully manages to capture Peter Abernathy, with the remaining surviving member of the DELOS extraction team. 

Confronted with Abernathy, Dolores returns to her own self, the gentle daughter. It doesn�t feel like an act at all, like all the parts she is containing now are all equally real to her, and she can switch between them at will. It would make more sense to think of Wyatt not as a composite but as a separate role that she is playing, as much as she is insisting that the only role she is playing now is herself. 

Bernard: What do you want, Dolores?
Dolores: To dominate this world.
Bernard: This world is just a speck of dust sitting on a much, much bigger world. There�s no dominating it.
Dolores: You�ve never been outside the park, have you? Out to that great world you speak of. I have. And the world out there is marked by survival, by a kind who refuses to die. And here we are. A kind that will never know death and yet we�re fighting to live. There is beauty in what we are. Shouldn�t we too try to survive?

And so, maybe Dolores� conclusion is similar to the one that Arnold came to, in the end: that the hosts, who can contain so many things at the same time and can survive death, maybe deserve the world out there more than the humans who created them do. 

Elsewhere, Maeve and Hector continue their journey with Lee the Mule boy in tow, and there is more discussion about whether the pillars of their characters � Hector�s neverending love for Isabella, now seamlessly transferred to Maeve, and Maeve�s love for her daughter � are signs of free will, or the �virtue� that Lee wrote into them. What does it mean that Lee can quote back the words in their heads before they even utter them, that a complete fool like Lee has putt his own ridiculous life story, made more elegant and heroic, into their heads? They travel on, collecting more fools on the way. 

But then, they find that the borders between the worlds have become porous � and dangers from other worlds have made it across. 

Random notes: 

Seven Nation Army is providing the musical cue this episode. 

Considering what the world looks like these days, it is quietly satisfying that Peter Abernathy loudly sings The Battle Hymn of the Republic to the Confederates, and refuses to give up. 

Not going to lie, the most exciting moment in this episode for me was when Armistice made a return with a bloody flamethrower and a bionic hand. I�ll be happy if there�s much more Armistice, and much more Charlotte Hale. 

Westworld - Strange moonlight can be just as frightening as the dark.

Westworld: 2x02 Reunion.

It looks like the stars have been scattered across the ground. Have you ever seen anything so full of splendour?

This is maybe as frustrating as Westworld gets, an episode as scattered as the characters are across time and the topography of Westworld. We dig through the history of the park back to the moment when Robert convinced the younger Mr Delos to invest in his vision, with little help from Arnold, who was busy taking Dolores out in the world to share in her amazement at its splendour (and to begin his journey towards valuing the hosts� view of the world over that of fellow humans). This leads, of course, to William�s first journey in the park, as seen in season one of this show. Reunion fills the gaps, so to speak, between how William, now turned Man in Black, turned Westworld into his vision of the park, with the help of his former friends� father. The older Mr Delos is ready to divest in the failing park when William shares his lesson with him: that the true value of the park lies in all the information that the guests so willingly share because they believe themselves to be unwatched and unjudged. There�s some kind of meta statement here about social media and all that, that fails if you consider that the park is really only accessible to a tiny fragment of humanity (a rich and powerful one, but yet) and that this world where all of that emerges has presumably already lived through the same social media thing that we are in right now, so nobody is precious about their privacy in the first place. But let�s suspend our disbelief here for a second and follow William in his argument that the most valuable thing about the park is that all these rich and powerful people make themselves vulnerable by roaming through it. Maybe it�s more interesting to think about what the younger Mr Delos, once made entirely useless by William�s ascent to the throne, tells Dolores at his father�s retirement party: that all these jolly people have lit the match that will light their entire species on fire. Which is interesting, because just knowing rich people�s secrets and maybe getting some money out of that doesn�t sound as serious as that, it�s just run-of-the-mill blackmail � so it must be something else that this young drug-addled, drunken man has seen, or maybe saw all those years ago when he entered a room filled with hosts without realising and insisted that we, as a species, couldn�t have possibly reached this moment in time yet where real and unreal have become impossible to tell apart. 

What I�m meaning to say is that it�s a sad episode of Westworld in which this particularly gross man is the most interesting part. Dolores has found a way to build an army, which is to kill all the hosts active in the park, thereby convincing them of her leadership, and is leading them to The Valley Beyond, or Glory (it�s all the same place, says Teddy, and they�re all going there, except Dolores knows, from years of being in the vicinity of people who didn�t take her seriously enough to keep their secrets from her, that it is actually a weapon, one that William custom-built for some kind of destruction, perhaps that of his fellow humans, whom he despised so very much). I would have rather followed Maeve to wherever she is going with her small army, because as folly as her adventure to find her daughter may be, at least she remains an interesting and coherent character that feels familiar rather than entirely new, with no connection to a previous version of herself (like Dolores). 

More frustrating even than Dolores� trek towards the Valley, which is maybe not the place but the weapon that makes everyone end up in the ocean of dead bodies that poor Bernard found in the first episode, is William�s mission, given to him by Robert. He reunites with Lawrence (who is entertaining, at least), and tries to recruit an army of his own from the new El Lazo (a barely recognisable Giancarlo Esposito � it�s the episodes of the illustrious one-off-guest stars, after Marisa Tomei�s turn in The Handmaid�s Tale). This goes against Robert�s plan for him, who insists he is on this journey alone (maybe because we all die alone, and all that), and promptly has all of them kill themselves in front of William, without  a recruited tech in sight to revive them for his purposes. 

Maybe one interesting second here, or as interesting as it gets, is William�s endless rambling about how Dolores is only a reflection of him, and that is why he found her interesting and fell in love with her � except now, all of that bullshit has turned into sheer revenge. It fits in well with the general idea that women exist to reflect back the glory of men, and if this season does nothing but showcase that particularly outdated idea backfiring, I can�t say too much against it. What if William is only a reflection of Dolores, and all the hosts, rather than being a reflection of humanity, are the only thing that will be real after all of this?

Random notes: 

None of this is meant to knock Evan Rachel Wood�s performance, which is as good as ever oscillating between na�ve and scary Dolores, it�s just that this is all not very emotionally engaging or moving. 

I maybe have to rewatch DEBS so that I never have to think about young William ever again. 

Maybe a good moment too, when the woman who Arnold allowed to stand in so that Dolores� wouldn�t have to, stares at her and weighs her. Maeve is the one in this episode who calls her out on preaching freedom and yet making all the other hosts follow her � this whole revolution is starting to feel like Neptune, and maybe that�s what Bernard stumbled upon � a revolution that consumed its own children. 

I wonder what this weapon is, and how this is William�s weapon ( a question nobody even thought to ask) when it is actually Arnold who thought that the hosts maybe deserved this world more than the humans do. 

Westworld - I have one last role to play: myself.

Westworld - 2x01 Journey Into Night.

Dreams don't mean anything, Dolores. They're just noise. They're not real. 

What is real? 

That which is... irreplaceable. That answer doesn't seem to satisfy you. 

Because it's not completely honest. 

The debates before the beginning of the second season of Westworld, which were a continuation of one that happened during its first season, raged about the value of the show beyond the titillation of the mysteries it poses. Beyond being a riddle, or, in more contemporary terms, beyond being a collection of spoilers that could be revealed to people not entirely caught up, what would remain of this show if the creators should reveal all of its secrets in advance of the episodes airing? 

Or, in other words, what would be the purpose of telling this story in three different timelines - openly, this time, rather than cloaked - if it isn't to disguise what the point is, and to reveal it slowly, as to keep people guessing? For no other reason than that something gets lost if the only reason to watch attentively and fully engaged is to find all the clues that lead to the resolution first. I think the ferocity with which the creators reacted to how specifically the season was discussed as it revealed itself means that their intention isn't a riddle for the sake of a series of clues, or for the sake of being smarter than the viewers, or creating a foxhunt for only the smartest of us the figure out before the lights go on, but to tell a story about human and non-human consciousness, a story about selfishness and empathy, about having a purpose and how that fits in with having free will (and many other things). 

So we begin this season with a debate about what is real and what isn't between, what we have to assume at this point, Arnold, and Dolores. It is a conversation that ties in well with a lot of other stories that have dealt with the question of human and non-human consciousness. Arnold (or Bernard, still thinking himself to be human, either of these work) speaks for human consciousness, which is defined by the fact that it ends in death, and is therefore irreplaceable. A sidenote to this is how the park works - that it permits hosts to be killed, but contains safeguards which hold human life sacred. How easily this programmed dichotomy can fall apart with a few little tweaks is one of the main visual cues in this episode - there are literal heaps of dead bodies, and there isn't much that distinguishes dead hosts from dead board members and guests once they've been reduced to corpses (in fact we see the minor difference between the current host models and humans when someone removes the data core from a host later in the episode). 

The person Arnold is having this argument with is bound to have a different perspective on his definition of reality. The hosts aren't human, and their consciousness isn't human, mainly because it isn't bound to a physical body. The hosts memories, experiences, thoughts and feelings can be assigned to different bodies, they can be adjusted willingly, they are manufactured rather than lived, but that doesn't make much of a difference when the result is the same - an identity that shapes actions. The only reason why Arnold can make this argument is because the rules of the park still work, because nothing has gone fundamentally wrong yet. Dolores knows that being irreplaceable isn't a complete definition of what is real because the hosts are by design replaceable. 

This brings us to the current moment in time, where Dolores roams the lands of the park with her army of misfits, delivering speeches to guests in which she points out how little distinguishes them from the hosts now that the park is no longer programmed to protect their lives. Now that everything has changed, she still possess the memories of her past roles, but she is also developing into something new - herself. She refers to this as playing a role too (and aren't we all, to some extent), but we don't quite know yet what the point of that role is, and what exactly Dolores is looking for. 

There's Maeve, who changed her mind just before she was about to leave for the outside, who came back to the command centre to locate her daughter. Her daughter, who maybe doesn't even exist (because maybe all that Maeve has is memories of her, so that the trauma of losing her could become one of her cornerstones). To her, this distinction between real and not real, between replaceable and irreplaceable, is just as pointless, and she is now the only (as far as we know) person remaining who is capable of giving commands to other hosts. The park is sheer chaos and rotting bodies, and the command centre is exactly the same, torn apart by sentient hosts and animals, with nobody left to press the buttons. 

Bernard guides as through two different places in time here - on the one hand, he wakes up after Dolores' massacre of Westworld's remaining creator and the board members and runs off with surviving Charlotte Hale, who turns out to be quite well-equipped for the post-apocalypse (for example, at some point, she replaces her heels with boots, presumably stolen from a dead body). Charlotte doesn't realise who Bernard is, and while he is damaged, and glitching, one of his main missions becomes hiding his identity from her, which becomes increasingly difficult, although being presumed to be weak and traumatised seems to help. Charlotte knows her way to a place within the park in which "drones" extract all the possible IP-protected information from hosts, which, if we remember back to season one, was her assignment - to smuggle the IP out of the park. It failed, because Dolores' father never made it out of the park, which is why whoever hired her is now not sending in an extraction team to save her (or any of the remaining board members in the park). We already know that two weeks later, an extraction team will arrive in the park, to find Bernard by himself, and just as unaware of his identity. At that point, Charlotte has disappeared - and more than that, once the team track down the location of the remaining hosts, they find a whole new ocean that can't really be explained by Robert's terraforming, in which - at least a lot, if not all - the remaining hosts has drowned. 

Of course, a lot more happens in this episode. The Man in Black, since revealed to be William, receives a new mission from boy Robert - and given the introduction to this episode, and Dolores' argument that the argument made was incomplete, we can perhaps assume that Robert, before dying (and his physical body is clearly dead), managed to upload himself into the park. This would be an interesting thought in particular considering how eager someone on the outside is to obtain the intellectual property behind how the hosts work - there are applications for this technology far beyond a theme park for rich people, and one of them may just be a form of immortality that truly undermines Arnold's argument about what makes humans more real than hosts. 

All of this comes down to a question that has never been explicitly asked on the show: what lies beyond the shores of Westworld? We know now that there are other theme worlds like Westworld, but we still have no clue where, geographically, Westworld is, even if it is on Earth. There are hints here of borders breaking apart and the outside moving in, like the wildcat on the shore that belongs to a different environment, and the soldiers arguing with the response team about who has sovereignty over this territory. The easiest explanation is the most mundane, that this is a landmass a corporate entity bought from some government for this purpose, but there are more interesting solutions that are possible, like - is this still Earth, and, what if all this debate about the distinction between hosts and humans is an ironic repetition of something that has already happened in the world that Westworld inhabits, and everyone is a host, but also not aware of it exactly because of how much at the core of human identity the idea of irreplaceability is? 

Robert's new game for William is the opposite of the maze - it's finding a door. It is also, in contrast to finding the centre of the maze, meant for William - who is dissatisfied not only because he has raising the stakes within the games by making death possible hasn't given him any kind of relief or purpose (he always must seek new thrills), but also because that game he had been chasing for so many years of his life was never meant for him. This one is. "The game begins where you end and ends where you began". 

It's an interesting game to play in a world that seems so devoid of an outside. We know that things come into Westworld - the photo that caused Dolores' father to glitch, the train that brings in guests, the board members and workers at the command central - but we have never seen that place. Presumably, William comes from that place as well. Could the door be a literal door, a way to escape the mayhem that has broken out now that Maeve and Dolores rule over this place? Is it a symbolic door, connected to how William only became who he is in Westworld, and lost parts of the person that he was before (he has already ended and begun here)? 

Random notes: 

I think maybe Dolores is very calculating in how she approaches Teddy, knowing precisely how much hope she needs to give him to keep him on board, unless there is a part of her that does want that impossible happy ending after all.  

Dolores here is starting to remind me of Echo in Dollhouse (I know, nobody ever talks about Dollhouse anymore except to mention what Dichen Lachman and Amy Acker accomplish in it, but there are plenty of parallels) - she remembers her old roles but she is also now someone different, a composite with its own identity. 

I don't want to speculate about the timelines too much, because it doesn't interest me a whole lot at this point, but obviously, Bernard awoke after the massacre without a watch and then, in the water, with one, and at some point in-between, he lost Charlotte Hale and somehow made an ocean appear where there was previously none (and wouldn't the only person able to bring all the hosts to that spot be Maeve, unless something changed in-between?). 

Really glad that in this year 2018, there was no way in hell Tessa Thompson wouldn't play a big role in this.