Spoiler alert: this blog is published after Westworld airs on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK on Sunday night/Monday morning. Do not read unless you have watched season two, episode nine.
Another week, another emotional wallop. This penultimate episode to Westworld’s second season carried a real punch, hitting the Man In Black straight in the gut (twice) and leaving Teddy on the floor. The fight to reach the Valley Beyond is on, but who will be left standing at the final count?
First to the Man In Black. That’s the name by which we know him inside the park but, outside, this character has always been William. Thanks to the way the first season was mapped out, we watched William’s youth in parallel with the adventures of the more grizzled Man In Black. We got to know these conflicting aspects of his personality, but never quite saw how they came together. This week, the tension between William’s two lives is finally brought into focus, and with doubly tragic consequences.
The first catastrophe we are already aware of; the suicide of William’s wife, Juliet, a year before current events. We meet Juliet properly for the first time this week. She is drunk at a glamorous event celebrating William’s philanthropy and we are led to understand this is a common occurrence. Juliet’s alcoholism is so severe that she refuses rehabilitation. We watch her switch from rowing with William to pleading with him when she senses that her evening’s entertainment might come to an end. Emily, the couple’s daughter, watches all of this. She is fed up with her mother and wants her committed to an institution, even if it is against her will.
Over the course of this episode the events of the night are told and retold. We see William encounter Ford at the party, with the dodgy old codger passing William his personal Westworld file. We see Juliet lash out at William, calling him an accomplished liar and a virus that has eaten up her family. William then takes his sozzled spouse to bed, tucks her in, hides his file between the pages of a book and confesses. As he stands over Juliet in their bedroom, fulfilling the duties of a good husband, he admits that, yes, there is something he is hiding and that it is not good. William belongs to another world, he tells Juliet, and that world is Westworld.
He thinks Juliet is asleep while he talks. But she isn’t. When William heads downstairs, Juliet gets up, retrieves the file from its hiding place and loads it on to her computer. Contained within are edited highlights of the Man in Black’s very worst deeds. The next time William and Emily see Juliet, she is sitting in an overflowing bath, dead from an overdose.
The second tragedy follows on from the first. A year after her mother’s death, Emily has been hunting down her father in the park and, most recently, saving his life. She knows about his obsession and she wants to find out more. She also, ultimately, wants to know why her mother did what she did.
Unfortunately for Emily, her father doesn’t believe any of it. He is convinced she is a host, created by Ford to mess with his mind. We have heard the line before and perhaps had thought he had got over it. But he had not. When Delos types arrive to take the Man in Black off the park and give him medical treatment, he shoots them dead. They were proof that Emily was going to turn him in, he says. Emily insists no; she is real and she can prove it. She goes for her pocket to pull out her father’s file (saved for her by her mother in her final act). Her father – addled by his paranoia and his many years in the park – knows only one response to such a movement. He beats his daughter to the draw and shoots her dead.
‘This thing inside me’
As the truth of what he has done dawns on the Man in Black, he contemplates suicide. He decides against it, choosing instead to fight against himself, “this thing inside me”. He cuts at his forearm, like Bernard does when he wants to access his system.
At the same time, elsewhere in the park, Teddy puts a pistol against his temples and blows his control unit right out. He does so in front of his lover Dolores, the woman he swore to protect till the day he died. But that day has come; he is not fit for the Valley Beyond, as Dolores always said, and now he must leave.
Teddy’s death is the mirror image of the scene a few episodes ago when Dolores told Teddy how much she meant to him, and then forcibly rewired his settings. That left Teddy as the meanest marksman in Westworld, but the change came at a cost. Deep down Teddy knew this was not who he truly was. Despite it all, he still had a conscience. He could never fully subscribe to Dolores’s plan to burn everything to the ground. In his final speech he spins that sentiment into one last statement of fidelity towards Dolores; he had to die before he let her down.
So Teddy pulls the trigger and falls to the ground. But then so does Dolores. This ruthless killer, the one known as Wyatt or “Deathbringer” loved Teddy too. Her feelings for him endured, again despite her programming. When she fails, a soundtrack of white noise blares around her. Her face contorts, her mind unable to process what is happening to her. She is malfunctioning, on the verge of a breakdown.
These two plotlines alone make for the most suspenseful episode of the entire run, in my book (and, following on from Akecheta’s story last week, quite the late season improvement). But there’s more. Bernard faces down Ford, not only the man who created him but someone currently camping out in his brain. He does so to save himself from killing Elsie. With Ford whispering to Bernard that Elsie will betray him at any moment, Bernard is supposed to do what he has done before, and become Ford’s silent killer. Instead Bernard manages to jack an iPad into his veins and, with just enough time, he deletes Ford’s malignant, codified self from his operating software. (Write it that way and it kind of takes the drama out, but it worked on screen).
Finally, among our protagonists, there’s Maeve. She’s shot up in the medical bays of La Mesa and the Delos surgeons are losing interest in keeping her alive. This is mainly because they have worked out how she was controlling fellow hosts and have been able to copy the method. Clementine has now been programmed to do something very similar; she can now make hosts attack each other to the point of destruction. Now that such a weapon is available to Delos, Charlotte Hale says, Maeve can be left to die. What Delos don’t know, however, is that disembodied Ford left Bernard’s head for a minute and paid Maeve a visit. As well as revealing that she was always his favourite host, he also uses the occasion to unlock Maeve’s core permissions, which may yet give her one last shot at saving herself.
Notes from the prairie
- Charlotte Hale really is ending up the big baddie of this second season. I’m sure I remember her as being corporate but likeable early on. Not any more, that’s for sure.
- A lot of talk of “is this real?” and “is this a dream?” this week. A bit hammy perhaps, but the lines between the experience of humans and hosts; what makes one and what the other; indeed, if there’s really much difference at all, have been bleeding together quite well of late. The MiB’s arm gouging is the latest example – is he self-harming or attacking the hardware? Or is that the same thing?
- So the Valley Beyond is also the Forge, and it is also the MiB’s secret hidden project. In a twist that many viewers had been expecting, the project is all about digitising human minds so they can live on forever in the form of hosts. Emily is a bit boggled by the process; how did they manage to scan every working of an individual brain? “It was built in,” says the MiB. Emily looks, puzzled, at her hat.
Questions
What do we want from the finale? Who will make it to the Valley Beyond? Will someone explain to us where Hector went to?
One final thing: I will be speaking with Westworld creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan for an interview to coincide with next week’s final episode. So do share your questions and I will attempt to ask as many as I can.