‘Westworld’s’ ‘Passenger’ most confusing episode

Barr talks ABC firing

Trying to figure out what the hell is going on in “Westworld” has always been the sport of the show. Are there multiple timelines? Where is Elsie? Is Sylvester’s beard real or is it an illusion created by the robot horse in whose mind the entire series takes place? These are the kinds of questions that “Westworld” inspires actual human beings to ask, then answer for one another. The show sometimes feels like a few hundred million dollars spent just to spawn fan theories and Reddit arguments.

But as Season 2 pulled into its final stretch, the plot of “Westworld” leveled-up from difficult to impossible. It became hostile to understanding. But then came episode eight, “Kiksuya,” a straightforward (by “Westworld” standards) story about a tertiary character, the Ghost Nation leader Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon). It was a hard break from the show’s puzzlebox norm, and it led to its own question — what if understanding what is going on in “Westworld” isn’t the point of “Westworld”? What if that doesn’t matter at all?

Season 2 finale “The Passenger” ranks with the show’s most confusing episodes. Much is revealed and many more mysteries are generated. But what impresses most about “The Passenger” is how well particular scenes and fragments of scenes work as character drama. It’s almost as if the Mobius-strip narrative is there not to be understood, but to provide a backdrop against which scenes about what it means to be human (or what it means to be a human-looking robot) pop.

The episode opens with Bernard and Dolores again chatting — and yep, that’s Bernard, not Arnold. Among the many minor truths learned in “The Passenger” is that Dolores created Bernard at Ford’s instruction. No one was better equipped for the task than Dolores, who had spent countless hours with Arnold in conversation and thus knew him better than anyone.

Then a bunch of other stuff happens. To faithfully recount it all feels like a disservice to “The Passenger” and to “Westworld” as a whole. It also feels like a bad use of time.

There is plenty to nitpick in this finale, which is too long (90 minutes) and very ambitious. But there is also so much that works and is worth celebrating. Wright, as always, was fantastic. So too was Evan Rachel Wood, whose Dolores remains the series’ most important character but too often this season was written as a one-note brooding psychopath. Teddy’s death, however, appears to have had a positive affect on Dolores. “The Passenger” appears to be largely about placing Bernard and Dolores where they are at the end of the season — in affectionate opposition to each other, representing two different points of view, kicking off a relationship that promises to be based largely on conflict (the kind that makes for good TV shows).

It was nice to see Wood get to do something other than brood and kill. For the first time this season, we get complexity from Dolores, and Wood successfully reminds us not only why Dolores is so angry, but why that anger is a legitimate, maybe the most legitimate response. “If I were human I would have let you die,” Dolores tells Bernard after he wakes in his new home-printed body. She made him and appears to loves him. That conflicted love feels more real than the love we were told over and over again Dolores had for Teddy and Abernathy — maybe because those relationships were functions of her programming, even long after Dolores had grown beyond her programming. That moment between Dolores and Bernard at the end felt earned.

Less earned was Lee’s (Simon Quarterman’s) blaze-of-glory moment facilitating Maeve and Hector’s escape. But it was still an entertaining send-off for Lee, who was arguably this season’s most complex character. I don’t know that I buy the full hero turn from him, but I almost do. Close enough, anyway, to appreciate what Quarterman and the writers did there and all season long.

The culmination of Maeve’s daughterquest was where the plot delivered best in the finale. Forget all that stuff about satellite uploads. The portal to Host Eden was clever (even if Host Eden just looks kind of like the part in an open-world fantasy video game where you try to get from one town to the next by leaving the road and cutting across a big field of nothing). Seeing Maeve do her wizard thing one more time was satisfying, and unlike Lee’s death, Maeve’s felt entirely appropriate to the arc that she has been on since the beginning of the series. The moment when Maeve saw the wave of Clementine-induced madness coming and then, instead of warning everyone, cut to the front of the line while scanning the crowd for her daughter was the most Maeve thing ever. Clearly Maeve will be back next season courtesy of Sylvester, Felix, and a bodybag. A “Westworld” without Thandie Newton would not be a “Westworld” worth watching. But for now, anyway, Maeve’s was a good death.

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Rabbi Shmuley Boteach has released an edited transcript and audio recording of the interview he conducted with former ABC star Roseanne Barr shortly after the cancellation of her series “Roseanne.”

In the interview, Barr claims that she “never would have wittingly called any black person...a monkey.”

“It’s really hard to say this but, I didn’t mean what they think I meant,” Barr said of her tweet. “And that’s what’s so painful. But I have to face that it hurt people. When you hurt people even unwillingly there’s no excuse. I don’t want to run off and blather on with excuses. But I apologize to anyone who thought, or felt offended and who thought that I meant something that I, in fact, did not mean. It was my own ignorance, and there’s no excuse for that ignorance.”

Barr spoke through tears for much of the interview. “You have to feel remorse, not just repentance. That’s just a step towards feeling remorse. And when you feel remorse you have to follow it with recompense,” Barr said tearfully. “You have to take an action in the world — whether it’s through money or other things — to correct your sin. After your heart is unfrozen and after it stops being broken from the pain you caused others, you stop being a robot and you gotta’ come back to God. So it’s remorse, and I definitely feel remorse.”

Barr explained that she didn’t mean what “they think I meant.”

“I have black children in my family,” she said. “I can’t, I can’t let ‘em say these things about that, after 30 years of my putting my family and my health and my livelihood at risk to stand up for people. I’m a lot of things, a loud mouth and all that stuff. But I’m not stupid. I never would have wittingly called any black person, (I would never had said) they are a monkey. I just wouldn’t do that. I didn’t do that. And people think that I did that and it just kills me,” she said while sobbing. (RTRS)