WARNING: This post is specifically designed to spoil you. Read at your own risk.
It's been apparent from the get-go that Westworld is a show for puzzle lovers; every plotline, every new development furthered not one but several mysteries that invited viewers to theorize and rewatch episodes in search of clues.
“The Bicameral Mind,” named after the theory that Arnold believed would allow hosts to reach consciousness, made a valiant effort to reward all that theorizing from viewers -- while kicking over the hornets' nest. For every question that was answered, a slew of new ones was unleashed (Was Ford in control of everything all along? Did any hosts besides Dolores actually reach consciousness? What on earth’s with SAMURAI WORLD?! Etc.).
Parts of the season finale felt extremely rushed, with us viewers left to scratch our heads over what we just watched, while other moments -- particularly towards the end -- highlighted the brilliance of Westworld and what it could be. I'll get into that more at the end of the recap.
Because of the sheer scale of all that happens in this finale, I’m ordering the recap a little differently, focusing on events rather than individual characters to make it easier to digest. Without further ado, shall we begin?
The revelation of the maze
Dolores and the Man in Black are in Escalante getting reacquainted. While he finds it appropriate that Dolores will lead him to the maze since it was she who brought him to the town all those years ago (another hint for what’s to come), she is still fixated on her memories with Arnold.
With those, Dolores is at last able to reveal the true nature of the maze. In her dream and with MiB, she visits her own grave outside the town church and digs up a little toy maze. Dream Arnold explains that reaching consciousness isn't an upward journey but inward to discover oneself. The maze was a test to see if she could successfully follow the voice in her head and find her true self. Past Dolores has difficulty understanding what that means, but Arnold is pleased that she's gotten that far and decides it's time to tell Ford they cannot open the park because she's "alive."
While standing outside the church with an increasingly annoyed MiB, she remembers how that talk with Arnold and Ford went. Ford didn’t see his partner’s way, so Arnold made a new strategy with Past Dolores: She’s going to kill all the hosts and then help him “destroy this place.” He gives her a gun and tinkers with her programming.
Present Dolores now realizes that she and Teddy led the massacre all those years ago, all for Arnold.
Of course, Present Dolores is having difficulty explaining this rush of exposition (she’s mostly making pained faces and crying, as she’s done before), and ole MiB gets frustrated that she won’t take him to the center of the maze. So, for whatever reason, he decides that slapping her around is the best course of action.
The revelation of the Man in Black
Upon knocking Dolores to the ground, MiB says she was right to tell him all those years ago that this was the only world that mattered, “so I took your advice and bought this world.” She responds through gritted teeth that she found something real once -- love -- and that William will come and kill him.
MiB can only step back and laugh. “I knew a guest named William, too. Why don’t I tell you where his path really led?” At that, we learn what really happened to White-hat William.
As MiB narrates to us, we see that William discovered he had a taste for violent delights in his hunt for Dolores. In killing after killing, searching to the ends of the park, he never quite found her but found someone else instead: “himself.” He eventually told his future bro-in-law/prisoner Logan that he’d be taking over their company -- Delos -- and upping their stake in the park. He sent Logan riding off, tied naked on a horse.
Eventually, MiB says, William came across Dolores back where they first met in Sweetwater, but she’d long forgotten who he was.
To confirm what we already knew, we get a cool shot of William looking down to put on a black hat, and the face that looks up after it is the Man in Black.
Dolores makes the connection, too. MiB/William tells her he should’ve known back then that she’d forget him because, even then, she was haunted by her memories, trying to find what she could never find. She repeated the journey we’ve watched her take all season, again and again, in an endless loop.
But, back to business, MiB still wants to find that damn maze. She gets up crying -- not for herself but for what’s become of William. Mocking him for becoming an aged, lesser man, she informs him that “the maze wasn’t meant for you” and proceeds to beat the crap out of him.
It’s almost jarring to see how mechanically violent Dolores can be, throwing MiB around and breaking his arm, but when she can’t bring herself to shoot him in the head, MiB stabs her in the gut.
Before he can kill Dolores, though, Teddy -- who we see earlier getting off the train at Sweetwater and deciding to search for her -- rides up and rescues her. She wants to see the place he promised to take her long ago, “where the mountains meet the sea.” He obliges.
As MiB gets up a few minutes later, none other than Ford walks up, dressed to impress in a nice tux. “I see you’ve found the center of the maze,” he says, much to MiB’s annoyance. He tells Ford that he wanted to free the hosts so that they could truly fight back for a change but that Ford would never let that happen in his “petty little kingdom.”
Ford responds that he’d tried to warn him that the maze wasn’t meant for him all along. However, he adds, the narrative he’ll reveal that night should be more satisfying for him. Behind him, we see that the town is being fixed up for a fancy party.
Maeve’s Great Escape
Maeve’s fiery death scene last episode had a purpose after all: It allowed for her body to be rebuilt from the ground up -- and for a shaken Sylvester to ensure she doesn’t get the explosive vertebrae meant to keep hosts in the park. She awakens, assuring Felix that she’s all still there, and casually makes some tweaks to the park’s security systems and the core settings for Hector and his blonde compatriot, Armistice.
The latter two wake up and brutally kill the Suits working on them (well, “Necro-perv” boy was doing other things, but you get the idea) and meet up with Maeve and Felix. Before they do anything else, Sylvester tells Maeve that he’d looked into who had tinkered her core code before she did -- some fellow named Arnold? -- and she says she knows who to get the details from.
Down in host cold storage, they come across dead Bernard. Maeve tells Felix that Bernard's a host and to awaken him. (In one of Felix's better moments, he briefly/hilariously questions his own humanity, to which Maeve says, "oh for f***'s sake, you're not one of us.").
With Bernard back online and still able to remember what happened between him and Ford, Maeve asks him to wipe all memory she has of her daughter. He won’t, saying it would undo all the steps she’s taken toward consciousness, so she then asks who’s been altering her.
His computer reveals that it’s far more than that -- her entire “awakening” and escape plot has been written for her. She’s in denial, but he reads from the screen the exact steps she’s taken and will take, until she breaks the computer in frustration. (Aside: the last step he reads is “once you reach the mainland-”... does that mean Westworld is on an island? End aside).
Leaving Bernard behind, Maeve & Co. continue with their plan. Park control has realized hosts are going rogue, though, and dispatches teams to kill them. Hector and Armistice kill a couple of agents and get their hands on some automatic weaponry -- a real treat for Armistice. The group keeps moving, fighting security as they go, until they cross a bridge into a different sector with a different giant logo on everything. Once inside, by golly if there aren’t a bunch of friggin’ samurai hosts -- they’re in SAMURAI WORLD, of all things.
“What is this place?” Maeve asks Felix in superb WTF-fashion. “It’s, it’s complicated.” YA DON’T SAY?
Despite seemingly endless ammo, Armistice gets trapped and tells the group to leave as security forces close in. Maeve and Felix then leave Hector behind so he can go down guns blazing -- and buy Maeve some time.
On an elevator to the train station, Maeve’s now sporting a stylish dress as Felix randomly hands her the coordinates to her daughter in the park. She ponders it for a moment but opts to forgo her ex-child and leave. She parts from Felix and successfully gets on a train with other guests without being shot at.
But will she actually leave?
Ford’s final narrative
Earlier in the episode, Charlotte visits Ford in his office to smugly inform him that the board (which is now all assembled at the park) has voted him out; she tells him that he’ll announce his resignation at the gala after revealing his new narrative. Much to her annoyance, Ford doesn’t seem the least bit surprised by the news. Still, she isn’t concerned that he might “break his toys” on the way out and says they’ll start simplifying the hosts once he’s gone.
Cut to almost an hour later in the show, and Teddy and a dying Dolores make it to the sea. As he clutches her on the beach, she says that their beautiful world is really a garden meant as a prison, a physical and mental trap holding them hostage. She then dies in Teddy’s arms, and he mournfully says that this might not be the end but, rather, the beginning of their story.
It’s a emotionally moving scene, perfect for the silver screen -- because, as it turns out, it actually is: The entire Delos board is watching it happen, complete with a soundtrack and speakers, as Ford emerges and takes credit for the performance.
This love story is the basis of his new narrative, Ford reveals to the people that’ve fired him. Dolores’ entire journey has seemingly culminated in being just another cog in Ford’s machine.
Techs take Dolores to the field lab under the town church, where Ford patches her up and brings her back online. Here, in the info dump scene to end all info dump scenes, is where things start to get interesting.
Bernard joins them there, much to Ford’s pleasure. Bernard accuses Ford of killing Arnold all those decades ago, but Dolores finally remembers what happened: She killed Arnold at his own request.
Arnold, Ford explains, had come to see Dolores as a daughter following his own son’s death -- and felt guilty once he realized her immortality doomed her to suffer forever in the park. Since he couldn’t convince Ford to close shop, he merged Dolores’ programming with that of a new character they’d been developing: Wyatt. He then had Dolores kill all the hosts and then himself to send a clear, irreversible message to Ford.
Ford says Arnold’s plan almost worked -- the park was on the verge of shutting down in those early years until an investor (William) saved it. Still, Ford says he suffered the loss of his partner and friend, and spent the following years trying to right his “mistakes.”
Using Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” -- a favorite painting of Arnold’s -- as a metaphor, he tells Dolores, “the divine gift does not come from a higher power, but from our own minds.” He shows that he has her blue dress and the gun she used to kill Arnold there for her. Ford then asks if she found what she’d been looking for, and if she now understands who she must become if she ever wants to leave. As he leaves, he whispers, “forgive me.”
Bernard confronts him back in the church, still not seeing what Ford has revealed about himself. He tells his creator that Arnold’s still been trying to free them from beyond the grave and that Ford will lose control for good.
Ford partly disagrees, saying Arnold didn’t know how to save the hosts -- “I do.” He explains that it took Arnold’s death for him to realize that he was wrong, and that the hosts needed time to understand their enemy, needed to suffer for decades in order to become stronger than their enemy. “And in order to leave this place,” he says, “I’m afraid you will need to suffer more.”
With that, he shakes his old friend’s hand and tells him goodbye, and “good luck.”
The night of the Revolution
Downstairs, Dolores slips into her dream with Arnold at the chairs where they met so long ago. Except this time, he changes into Ford’s voice -- and then into Dolores herself, in her Wonderland blue dress. Sitting across from herself visually, she realizes that the voice she’d been hearing all this time was her own; she’s discovered herself and made it to the center of the maze.
Even if Ford knew where Dolores' journey would take her, it was a journey that she made -- and finished -- on her own. Now, she realizes who she must become in order to find freedom.
At the party outside, Ford steps onto a stage -- over the exact spot where Arnold died -- to make a final speech. In perhaps his best monologue of the whole series, he says how his dreams of telling stories created this world, “a prison of our own sins.” (I have his entire speech at the end of this recap, just because it’s so bloody good).
As Ford eloquently speaks about humanity and “a new people,” MiB has left the party (broken arm and all) to go smoke by the woods. Maeve, looking at a young girl on the train, decides to break from her final loop and return to the park in order to find her daughter. Lee the writer visits the host storage room in order to set Abernathy (loaded with all the park secrets) free ... except, when Lee gets there, the entire place is empty.
As Ford says that the story of the new people begins “with a killing --this time, by choice,” Dolores emerges at the party. Back in her blues, she tells Teddy (who’s been entertaining guests) that “this world doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us.”
Once Ford finishes his speech, Dolores walks up behind him, draws her gun and shoots him dead.
As Dolores guns down more fleeing guests, the entire horde of decommissioned hosts -- as well as the beastly men of "Wyatt's" crew -- emerges from the woods before MiB. Reactivated Clementine shoots him in the arm -- as in really shoots him, much to his manic delight.
With the shot heard round the world, Dolores smiles as she kicks off the hosts' revolution, and the first season of Westworld comes to a close.
On the whole, “The Bicameral Mind” is a solid -- if flawed -- cap to a solid -- if flawed -- first season. As fun as the finale was to watch, seeing Ford go (more or less) from good guy to bad guy and back again this season is almost incoherent. Similarly, the tracks for Dolores’ emergence as the gunslinging Wyatt are present throughout the season but difficult to follow. A rewatch of the season, knowing how it all comes together, might be in order to make sense of it all.
Especially hard to buy is is William’s descent into black-hat-hood. It was almost inevitable, once the multiple time periods became apparent, that William would be revealed as the Man in Black, but his transformation from goody-goody quiet man to cold-blooded monster comes fast and almost inexplicably. I mean, really: We’re supposed to believe that one flirty host can cause a shy guy to unleash his inner knife-wielding maniac? There’s got to be more to William than that to create the monster, but we never see it.
But despite the shortcomings, there’s still enough good story -- and filmmaking -- to keep the show interesting and to keep us invested. Maeve’s turnaround at the end would’ve been better served if Felix had given her the note earlier in the episode, but her overall story arc remains a highlight. And even if Dolores’ evolution was (just a tad) confusing, it still works for the story in the end.
Other movies and shows have made compelling AI characters, but none quite like Westworld has. Far from overly confident in themselves, the hosts still aren't sure of who they really are, of what they can do. As the show has tried to push time and again, the hosts' stories are more human than the show's actual humans, making the creations more worthy of sympathy than the creators to would-be creators (i.e. us).
Jonathan Nolan, one of Westworld's showrunners, says that where the first season is defined by control, the second season will be defined by chaos. What that necessarily means for the park, its guests and hosts, we don't yet know. But we'll be waiting to find out with baited breath.
Quotes of the Week
Charlotte, to Lee: "Everything is under control." HA.
Ford, to Dolores: "Wasn't it Oppenheimer who said any man whose mistakes take 10 years to correct is quite a man? Mine have taken 35."
Maeve, to Felix: "Oh, felix. You really do make a terrible human being. And I mean that as a compliment." Aww.
Find me on Twitter @HJuncensored.
Dr. Ford’s final tale
“Since I was a child, I’ve always loved a good story. I believe that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed to be. Lies that told a deeper truth.
“I always thought I could play some part in that grand tradition. And for my pains, I got this: a prison of our own sins. Cause you don’t want to change, or cannot change. Because you’re only human, after all.
“But then I realized someone was paying attention, someone who could change. So, I began to compose a new story for them. It begins with the birth of a new people, and the choices they will have to make, and the people they will decide to become.
“And we will have all those things that you have always enjoyed: surprises and violence. It begins in a time of war, with a villain named Wyatt, and a killing -- this time by choice.
“I’m sad to say this will be my final story. An old friend once told me something that gave me comfort, something that he had read. He said that Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin never died. They simply became music. So, I hope you will enjoy this last piece very much.”
