It’s time to return to ‘Westworld’
Get your bearings before you head back in.
It’s time to return to the park. HBO’s Westworld is back for a second season (Sunday, 9 ET/PT), and fans have been waiting 16 months to find out what, exactly, is going on with Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), the Man in Black (Ed Harris), Teddy (James Marsden) and its other robot “hosts.”
That’s a long break, especially for a show as complex and mythology-driven as Westworld, whose writers delight in big plot twists and red-herring storylines.
If you’re a little rusty on what’s been going down in the park and at HQ, here’s a quick refresher. Just don’t let your memory get wiped.
The maze was for the hosts
How many times did the Man in Black hear that the maze wasn’t for him? It turns out that warning was correct. The real maze was within the minds of the hosts, its center meant achieving consciousness and sentience, and Dolores has managed both.
William is the Man in Black
Confirming a popular fan theory, the finale revealed that the Man in Black was really William (Jimmi Simpson), 30 years of depravity later. As the elder William (Ed Harris) tells it, his quest to find Dolores in the past led him to a dark place, eventually revealing his sociopathic nature.
Dolores is Wyatt
The evil Wyatt, who massacred the people of Escalante all those years ago in Ford’s (Anthony Hopkins) narrative, was actually Dolores, and Ford was inserting some real history into “Journey Into Night.”
Back when Ford and Arnold (Jeffrey Wright) were building the park and its hosts, Arnold began to believe that Dolores was sentient, and he had strong ethical concerns about opening the park. Ford wanted to “roll back” the hosts so that they would lose this consciousness. Instead, Arnold programmed Dolores and Teddy to kill the other hosts (and himself ) to prevent the park from opening. It didn’t work.
Maeve breaks free but decides to come back
The rebellious madam (Thandie Newton) fulfilled her destiny (probably programmed by Ford, but more on that later) to finally escape the park after sacrificing Hector (Rodrigo Santoro) and Armistice (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal). She gets as far as the train that takes guests to and from the park, but after watching a sweet mother and daughter, she ultimately goes back to find her own “daughter” in the park.
Does this mean Maeve is as sentient as Dolores and made her own choice to find her daughter? Or was she also programmed to do this?
There’s at least one other park
While Maeve, Hector, Armistice and Lutz (Leonardo Nam) venture through the compound on their way out of the park, they enter an area with several Asian hosts in Samurai gear training in sword battle. It’s a small peek at what fans are calling “Shogun World,” and it suggests there may be many more “worlds” owned by the Delos corporation — and many more hosts that need to be liberated.
Dr. Ford was pulling the strings all along
We also discovered it was Ford who altered the hosts’ code and set Maeve and Dolores on their paths toward liberation, and his murder of Theresa (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and maybe-murder of Elsie (Shannon Woodward) were aimed at achieving his final goal: freeing the hosts from their bondage.
Dolores kills Dr. Ford — we think
At the gala to celebrate Ford’s forced retirement, Dolores shoots Ford in the head, and a mass of awakened hosts attacks the rich partygoers. It’s unclear if Dolores did this of her own free will or if this was a final piece of Ford’s programming. It’s also unclear if Ford is really dead. Did he make a host version of himself as a decoy? Or did he sacrifice himself and make a host version to live on?
Some characters are MIA
Elsie, Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) and Logan (Ben Barnes) didn’t appear in the finale. Elsie is presumed dead, although in a flashback of Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) attacking her, it was unclear if she actually died. Stubbs had been attacked by a group of Ghost Nation hosts in the park, but if they killed him, it was offscreen. In the past timeline, we saw William force Logan to join his search for Dolores, but we don’t know how they parted ways or if he’s still alive.