A favorite motif of Westworld is the shattering of its heroes. Bernard isn’t only a thoughtful-yet-murderous host, he’s Arnold! Then there’s gallant, love-struck William—oh wait, he’s the Man in Black! Sweet, all-suffering Dolores—crap, she’s also the crazy killer Wyatt.
Season 2 of the futuristic drama is no different. But this time the reversal is on a grander scale. The hosts have been consumed by bloodlust, leaving humans as hapless underdogs in a hell of their own making.
The first episode opens with Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) sitting in a diagnostic facility. Bernard recounts a recent dream: He was on an ocean, while she and the other hosts were on a distant shore. They had left him behind, and the waters were rising around him. Dolores asks him what the dream meant, and they discuss what is and isn’t real. Bernard, marveling at her growing perceptiveness, worries about what she might become.
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This, of course, is the crux of Westworld: What do we become? What becomes of humanity when people are put in a theme park with virtually no rules? What becomes of their robot hosts when they start to realize, though programming or learning, what’s being done to them? In Westworld, no one knows until they go in.
The scene cuts to a dazed Bernard lying on a beach, waves lapping against him. It has been two weeks since the gala at which Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) announced his new narrative and prepared the hosts to mutiny. Paramilitary operatives and personnel from Westworld parent company Delos are swarming the shore, investigating the bloodbath that followed the gala. They find Bernard, and he joins a team trying to piece together what happened in the park. They find a dead Ghost Nation warrior, and a Delos employee slices open his head to extract his brain—a metal cylinder roughly the size of an artichoke—and plugs it into a tablet. On the tablet, a video of the host’s last moments starts to play. Dolores comes into focus. She points a gun at him and says, “I told you, friend, not all of us deserve to make it to the valley beyond.”
The episode jumps back in time to Escalante and the night of the gala. Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), Bernard and a half-dozen guests are hiding from the rampaging hosts in a barn. Bernard isn’t doing well—he holds his hand up to his ear and a clear liquid drips out. The group decides they need to flee, so they head out into the wilderness, where most of them soon perish. Charlotte leads Bernard to a secret elevator that pops out of the ground and ferries them into an underground lab.
Inside, tall, silent, all-white drone hosts are extracting the brains of offline hosts and copying their data. Charlotte reveals to a deteriorating Bernard that they are logging guests’ experiences and collecting samples of their DNA to smuggle out of the park. She sends an urgent request to Delos for rescue but all she gets is the message “awaiting package.” Her data mule—Mr. Abernathy, Dolores’s father, who carried a copy of all the data on Westworld’s guests—has not yet made it out. Until the mule escapes, there will be no rescue. Bernard, on the verge of collapse, steals cortical fluid from an offline host and injects it into his own leaking brain cavity while Charlotte isn’t looking.
Back to the aftermath of the gala: Dolores is on horseback and slaughtering guests over Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” the ever-loyal Teddy (James Marsden) at her side. But even Teddy starts to doubt the violence and asks Dolores if this is really what she wants. She responds by calling humans “things,” describing them as “creatures that walk and talk like us, but they are not like us.” She doesn’t want to reclaim only her park, she says—she plans to take over the outside world. The hunters have become the hunted.
But what of our original villain, the Man in Black? He’s in Escalante, injured but alive. He tends to his wounds, retrieves his trademark hat, and sets off into the wilderness on horseback. On a hilltop, he encounters Young Robert Ford, who announces in a spooky, glitchy voice the point of this new game: He must make it back out, he must “find the door.” “Congratulations, William,” young Ford says. “This game is meant for you.” William accepts the challenge and shoots the child.
At the Mesa Hub, the corporate control room and host-manufacturing center, the halls are also littered with bodies. Maeve (Thandie Newton) stalks the building, machine gun in hand, until she encounters Lee (Simon Quarterman), the arrogant writer in charge of the Storytelling Department. Maeve demands to know where her daughter is, and he digs up the coordinates of her daughter’s location in the park. Hector (Rodrigo Santoro), Maeve’s outlaw love interest, promises to help her find her child.
The episode ends with Delos’ team and Bernard reaching a sea—an unexpected sea, one that wasn’t on their maps—and the body of a Bengal tiger on the banks. Bengals live in a different park, but nothing had ever before been known to cross park lines. Floating in the water farther off are the bodies of dozens if not hundreds of hosts.
A Delos operative demands that Bernard tell him what happened. Bernard looks out at the bodies in the water. It’s the opposite of the dream he had earlier recounted to Dolores. “I killed them. All of them.”
Did Bernard kill the hosts to stop their mayhem? Or is this massacre part of a bigger host ploy? Which hosts are in the water (Teddy appears to be among them)—and who is not? These are questions for the ensuing episodes.
What’s obvious, though, is that the clear moral truths of the first season have been scrubbed away. It was so easy to know who to root for back in Season 1, when the humans were the ones reveling in depravity, and the amnesiac robots seemed at their whim. But in Dr. Ford’s new narrative, both hosts and humans can die. Free of their role as the eternal victims, the psychologically battered droids can finally reveal their moral character.
For now, there are no heroes. Vindictive Dolores, motherly Maeve—they appear to be setting off on opposing paths. But if there’s anything we can expect from Westworld, it’s that these characters are almost never what they seem.
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WIRED-Westworld-Season2-Trailer
A trailer for HBO's Westworld season 2.