'Westworld' recap: 'Trace Decay' makes us question EVERYTHING

WARNING

: This post is specifically designed to spoil you. Read at your own risk.

There's dense television, then there's Westworld and its (at least) five complex plotlines dense.

"Trace Decay" throws a lot of information at us -- why Ford made Bernard (supposedly), why the Man in Black is in the park, glimpses of Dolores' past -- while also flooring the pedal on new developments and making us seriously question not where everything's happening, but when. Oh, and Maeve has been captured after almost killing Sylvester and upgrading herself to have direct voice control over other hosts.

Is anything what it seems? Can we trust anybody? Do we even have good and bad guys in Westworld anymore?

It’s almost too much to take in for a single episode, but thankfully it still manages to be exciting enough for us viewers to not fall out completely. Let’s take a deep breath and plunge into the madness of “Trace Decay.”

Bernard

The recently revealed host is trying to cope with the reality of his existence and with the fact he just murdered his lover. Hannibal Lecter Ford is just fascinated with Bernard’s emotional response, telling him he should be proud of it because Bernard helped create it. Yup: Ford says he built Bernard to help fill in the emotional gaps of the hosts that the human workers weren’t smart enough to do.

He tells Bernard that Theresa had to go, but Bernard flips out. Unfazed, Ford effortlessly reins him back down and commands him to erase any trace of their involvement with her death and Bernard’s affair. This Bernard does with surgical precision.

The term "disgusting" comes to mind when watching Ford exert total control over Bernard.

Ford won’t even let him mourn his loss except when Ford finds it amusing. Beyond that, Bernard’s merely a tool in his box and treated as such.

When Bernard’s done, Ford moves to give him “what you want most right now:” the erasure of all of the affair with Theresa and her murder from Bernard’s memory. Bernard takes this moment to ask some pointed questions, such as is the pain he feels any different from a human’s. Ford responds that, in reality, there’s not much difference. “You’re not missing anything at all,” he says.

Before Ford wipes his mind, Bernard asks if he’s had to hurt anyone like that before. “No, of course not.” For such a brilliant liar/manipulator, this is such a lie that the word “LIE” practically blinks on the TV. Sure enough, Bernard has a quick vision of him choking someone before Ford does the deed. That someone is Elsie, who has been missing for a while.

So, does that mean the witty techie is dead?

Charlotte

What do you do when your underling is found dead? You tango with your nemesis.

Well not literally, but Charlotte and Ford engage in some layered sparring over Theresa's body that would go unnoticed to anyone who didn’t know what either of them had been up to.

Stubbs explains to the pair that Theresa was found in Head Smasher host’s ravine with a transmitter -- the same found in Head Smasher’s arm -- and data, and that she had likely stumbled and fell. Charlotte tries to cover her concern at potentially being outed, but Stubbs says that this wouldn’t be the first time a third party has tried to steal information

Ford laments the disappointing end for Theresa’s “story” and flashes Charlotte the quickest of smirks. Worried that he’s on to her, she tries to turn the tables, saying that Theresa was uncomfortable with Ford’s new narrative and alluding to foul play in her death.

Turning it right back around, Ford announces that it’s been discovered that host Clementine’s malfunction (last episode) was a hoax; her coding had been tampered with. But rather than go in for the kill, Ford gives Charlotte an out and says it was clearly Theresa’s doing. Charlotte takes the offer and agrees with the assessment, allowing Ford to rehire Bernard.

Later, Charlotte goes to writer Lee Sizemore’s office. He’s working on who he thinks is the secret villain for Ford’s narrative, but she scoffs and says it’s only Ford trying to keep Lee out of his way with some busy work. She’s got real work for him, if he’s interested.

She takes Lee to where the decommissioned hosts are kept. Uploading all the data Theresa was trying to smuggle out into one host’s brain, she tells Lee to create a convincing personality for it so that the host can sneak out of the park on a train. Which host, you ask? It's Abernathy, the first glitching host we ever saw, because of course.

Dolores

Our Alice is still on her journey of self-discovery in Wonderland. She and Will ride up to a creek bank strewn with Confederados killed by the Ghost Nation (remember all that?). One of them is still alive, and Dolores wants to save him.

She goes to get him some water but, to her dismay, sees her own body in the water, then sees all the bodies around her have disappeared. But when she turns again, all is back to normal. Her frightful confusion is all for waste, though, as the survivor dies anyway.

Eventually the pair find Dolores’ “home:” the small town with a white church we’ve seen in flashbacks. She walks to the empty town before seeing it full of life again. As Dolores passes through it, back in her blue dress, we realize the scene is one we’ve seen in another flashback, with hosts being trained to dance in the street.

The tranquility is broken when the townsfolk are suddenly being massacred. Dolores sees herself with a gun, putting it to her head. White-hat Will steps in before the real Dolores can do the same, and to her dismay she realizes the town isn’t even there anymore: They’re standing on top of it, as only the burned-out church steeple and a couple of roofs stick out from the ground.

Dolores flips out, asking if Will is real (“of course I’m real”). She feels trapped in some dream and can’t discern what the real world is anymore. She says Arnold wants her to remember the past, but Will thinks this is bad for her health and gets her out of there.

Unfortunately for them, “out of there” means running into a scout group of Confederados that night -- with Logan, who seems simply delighted to have found them. Uh oh.

Maeve

At her saloon, Maeve’s acquainting herself with the new Clementine host when she has another vivid flashback of her old life with a daughter -- and the Man in Black killing her. She later asks the boys in the Underbelly how the dreams can be so real, and Felix explains that host brains are so advanced from humans that memories appear perfectly; the hosts basically relive their memories.

Never one to dwell too much on the past, Maeve turns her focus back to her escape plan. She’ll need some more updates to pull it off -- not to mention handling the explosives in her spine, like in all hosts, set to go off should she leave the park -- so she needs to boys to take her up to behavior. They agree to do it, but Sylvester secretly plots with Felix to wipe her memory once they start the update.

The two eventually take her upstairs to do the deed, but back in their neck of the woods the supposedly dead Maeve springs up from the table; Felix, ever putty in Maeve’s hands, told her of Sylvester’s plan. “He couldn’t snuff out a life just like that,” she tells the stunned Sylvester.

You know who can snuff out a life like that now? Maeve, who’s had her core code tweaked enough for her to grab a scalpel and slice a nick in Sylvester’s throat. It looks like she’s just going to stare smugly as he bleeds out, but she changes her mind and gets Felix to cauterize his wound; they might still need him after all.

Back in the saloon, with “Back in Black” coming from the piano, Maeve decides to test her latest trick: direct vocal control over the other hosts. When Hector and his band of bandits ride in, she’s able to steer all the lawman away so Hector can succeed.

That certainly gives her a confidence boost, and that night she decides to leave her loop at the saloon. Clementine tries to stop her outside, but a gunshot triggers yet another flashback to the MiB’s attack, and Maeve inadvertently slices Clem’s throat. She’s then surrounded by lawmen ready to gun her down in the street, but Maeve whispers to another host who opens fire on the men, covering her escape.

Her activity has caught the attention of the controllers in headquarters, who dispatch a team to retrieve her. Back home and shaken up, Maeve remembers when she was taken into the Underbelly after her daughter’s death, inconsolable. She recalls that Ford and Bernard themselves have to calm her, using a musical reverie “from an old friend” of Ford’s.

She asks him not to wipe her memory, as the pain is all she has left of her daughter, but Ford does it anyway to “give her a fresh start.”

At this revelation, the Suits find her in her room. Will she soon be reaquainted with Ford?

Man in Black

Although the Man in Black doesn’t do much this episode, he ends up sharing a bunch of backstory that paints him in an entirely new light.

Before that, though, he and Teddy come across a girl who’s survived a brush with Wyatt’s men. To MiB’s surprise, it’s an old host he’s met in the past -- the same host we saw welcoming White-hat William to the park in Episode 2. Coincidence?

MiB hears rustling, and a fellow wearing a mask with massive horns jumps out swinging an ax at him. He and Teddy try to take him down, but as MiB drags the attacker by the neck, Teddy has a flashback of MiB doing that to Dolores at the farm. Once the pair kill the attacker, Teddy knocks MiB out with his pistol.

That evening, Teddy has MiB all tied up. After some back-and-forth, Teddy says he’s going to kill him, but MiB says the “rules” hold him back -- but what if he were to change them? “You speak like you own this world,” Teddy says.

“Not just this one,” MiB replies. “Want to know who I am? Who I really am? I’m a god. A titan of industry. Philanthropist. Family man.”

Thus we finally get some real backstory from the Man in Black. He reveals that he had a wife and daughter on the outside, but his wife committed suicide and his daughter blames him for it. They never saw the side of him he unleashes in the park, he says, but that didn’t stop them from figuring out it was inside him.

To prove to himself he what he really was, he says he decided to return to the park to do “something truly evil.” He found a homesteader and her daughter and murdered them both -- the two, of course, turn out to be Maeve and her daughter. He says he did it just to see if he feels anything. “I felt nothing. But then something miraculous happened”

Maeve, as he recalls, just wouldn’t die. Crying out in pain, she carries her dead daughter outside the house, into the sunlight, before collapsing and dying. “She was alive, truly alive, if just for a moment,” MiB says. “And that was when the maze revealed itself to me.”

Maeve, as we see it, collapsed in the center of a giant maze symbol. MiB says this mission of his -- finding the maze and, maybe, bringing a real life to the hosts -- is all he has left, the chance to give his life some meaning.

So, does that mean the Man in Black is something of a hero?

The lady host, it seems, has had enough of the story; she tries to get Teddy to kill MiB. When he can’t do it, she stabs Teddy with an arrow.

“You’ve been gone a long time, Theodore,” she says, as masked men pop up from all around. “It’s time you came back to the fold. Wyatt will need you soon.”

If you're into Westworld theories, this is the episode for you. MiB's encounter with the host that welcomed William to the park, a host that the MiB remembers from a long time ago, hints strongly at what might be his true identity.

Dolores' confusing flashbacks also give some serious weight to the theory that we're watching events in different time periods. Case in point: Charlotte tells Lee in his office that Ford's already "dug up some old town on the fringes of the park." That's presumably the same town we saw modeled in Ford's office, which is the same town of Dolores' flashbacks. But when we later see Dolores there with William, the town is still buried.

There’s even more hints dropped throughout the episode, but those are the biggies. At this rate, we might start getting some real answers next week.

Quotes of the week

Maeve, to Felix and Sylvester: "Time to write my own f***ing story."

Logan, to Dolores and William: "Man, you two are f***ed."

Charlotte, to Lee, who's not very comfortable walking around the decaying hosts in storage: "This shouldn't make you uncomfortable. It's the circle of life, or the approximation of it. Even the dead fulfill a purpose."

Still trying to wrap your head around this one? Find me on Twitter @HJuncensored.