Spoiler alert: this blog is published after Westworld airs on HBO in the US on Sunday night. Do not read unless you have watched episode 10, which airs in the UK on Sky Atlantic on Tuesday at 9pm.
Thank you for the loops. For the rolling cans of milk. For the muttonchops and breeches, the coffins packed with nitroglycerine and the fields littered with corpses. Thank you for the 3D tablets, the cottages in the woods, the high-speed elevators and the drill-bits up the nose. Thank you for the narratives and the reveries, the updates and the flashbacks. Thank you, finally, for Westworld. It was a great little park, but now it’s undergoing some repairs.
The series that has had them all talking ends with everyone doing a runner. The Delos board and assorted VIPs had gathered in the park’s original homestead expecting to hear about Ford’s final narrative. Instead, they are fleeing a homicidal Dolores. A Dolores who has finally attained consciousness, a Dolores who’s realised that she’s Wyatt. She is the embodiment of “those who are to come” – not hosts and not guests, but sentient robots ready to assume their dominion. And if that requires murdering every human within eyeshot, then so be it.
Around Dolores are assembled the central characters in the drama. The Man in Black is watching as a robot army advances from the brush. They are the reanimated hosts and the park’s Natives. Combined, they form a true Ghost Nation. The Man in Black watches them creep forward with a smile. At last, he has an opponent who can hit back. Teddy is watching the violence aghast. He thought he’d saved the woman he loved, but it turned out he was just a plot device. Bernard is there too, conscious of what is happening (perhaps even fully conscious) but unable to affect what is going on. Finally, lying on the floor with a hole in his head, is the man responsible for it all: Ford.
Ford is not dead. Like all of us will some day (if you listen to certain technological adventurists), he lives on in the cloud. Dolores may have been Arnold’s invention, programmed to kill her fellow hosts to stop what he thought would be the barbarity of the park. But once she had killed Arnold at his own instruction, Dolores came under the influence of Ford. Ford adapted this Alice to his own Wonderland and used her to act out his nefarious plans. It was Ford who planted the pistols to trigger Dolores’ insurrection, it was his voice in her head. Finally it was he who programmed Dolores to kill him like she had Arnold. And live on like Arnold too. As Beethoven found eternity through his music, so Ford will find it in a robot whose consciousness is tempered by his own.
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That’s my reading of the final scenes, at least. What it means for the park I don’t know. What will the fully conscious robots with an urge for killing humans do next? Will they enter the real world and claim that as their own? Or will they be content with turning Westworld into their own Bot-topia?
Either way it seems likely the robot uprising will face opposition. Not just from poor benighted Teddy, or a Bernard still loyal to the man he was built to resemble, but from Maeve, the hooker with a heart. Her own rebellion against the humans came to an end in the Delos train station. Prompted by memories of a daughter she knows was not her own, she chooses to stay in the park rather than leave. She may be foul-mouthed and hard-nosed but Maeve is motivated by love, not hate. As such she stands against Ford’s scheme. But at the same time her rebellion turns out to have been pre-programmed – perhaps even by Ford. Curious and curiouser.
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Ahead of the Wild West red wedding, other twists were revealed, including the most open secret since Jim and Pam got it together in the US Office. Yes, William became the Man in Black. The story goes that, driven by his passion for a Dolores who goes missing, the young William got a taste for killing. When he eventually finds Dolores, at the start of her loop, William realises he didn’t love her that much after all. Certainly not as much as he does killing. Westworld is a game, just like real life, he decides. He invests in the park, saving it from collapse, and goes on to unravel its puzzles in the hope they might give his life some meaning. Thirty-plus years later and he’s still looking. Which, if nothing else, suggests introspection is a long-winded process.
We will see William again in the second season. As for his brother-in-law Logan, we cannot be sure. The world’s biggest arse is sent to the edge of the park on a horse, buck-naked. William doesn’t care what happens to him, but surely someone from guest welfare would eventually pick Logan up and wrap a towel around his nether regions. These humans do feel shame you know.
*****
A quick roundup of the other survivors finds Charlotte Hale having got her wish – Ford is no longer director of the park. On the other hand she could be gunned down any minute by Dolores. Lee Sizemore is standing in an empty cold store wondering what happened to a platoon of decommissioned hosts. It seems unlikely he’ll get his promotion. Sylvester is not dead, which is in itself a miracle, while Felix has been anointed by Maeve as “a terrible human being” which is a compliment. Hector Escaton is shooting security guards with his future gun. Ashley is still lost on the reservation and is perhaps a rebel himself by now.
And that, I think, is that. Westworld has been a big hit for HBO; it has dominated the conversation the past couple of months in the way few dramas do. With its combination of puzzles, red herrings, and hints at some kind of intellectual underpinning it’s shown itself to be perfectly suited for TV in 2016. That it’s also painted a rather bleak and cynical picture of humans and their ways of behaviour is something for another day. I’d like to thank you for joining me on this path and it’s a path that leads back to you. There’ve been lots of comments under this blog and lots of enthusiastic engagement. Thank you for that. I’ll see you around in the Mariposa some time.
