Westworld season two keeps collecting more plot threads in its third episode, which WIRED's Matt Reynolds and Andy Vandervell are back to discuss and dissect.
You can read their thoughts on episode one and episode two to get you up to speed, but be warned that this article contains significant spoilers for all episodes of Westworld.
Andy Vandervell: Colonial India, Matt. Clearly the perfect place to reminisce about the world before the EU ruined everything, right? How did you enjoy episode three of season two?
Matt Reynolds: As far as pre-title sequences go, that was a big one. We already knew that there were other parks beyond Westworld – the trailer for season two hinted that at least part of the season would feature a 'Shogun' park – but this new setting was a big surprise.
This brief sojourn to India didn't really teach us anything new, but it did confirm a couple of things. First, we can be sure that the boundary between parks has broken down altogether. That tiger we see at the end of this sequence seems to be the same one that the Delos operatives find at the beginning of episode one.
Second, we know that the chaos in Westworld is also happening in other parks, and hosts are running off-script and killing humans at will. Whether this is also the case for the other four worlds, however, remains to be seen.
Speaking of other worlds – what other settings do you reckon Delos has gone for?
AV: Well, if I were a businessman, I'd definitely have a Jane Austen-era England one. Let's face it, our American cousins would lap that up. "Look, it's a real castle," and all that. That or a Downton Abbey kind of vibe. How about you?
MR: I'd love to hang out in an Aztec world, or maybe an Ancient Egyptian one. Although I reckon those two are a little less likely as the three worlds we know about (Westworld, Shogun, colonial India) all seem to be set around the same time period.
But let's get back to Westworld. Did we learn anything new this episode?
AV: Well we now know why Bernard was on the verge of 'death' in episode one. He downloaded the encrypted file from Peter Abernathy into himself and it's corrupting him. It doesn't seem Delos has caught on yet, though I feel like Charlotte Hale knows Bernard is a host. At the very least she suspects something is up with him.
MR: And crucially, we still don't know what's on that encrypted file!
I'd fallen out of love with Bernard a little bit, but this episode I think he got really interesting again. Whereas the other hosts have quite clear motivations, it's really hard to work out what is making Bernard tick. I suspect that he's not quite sure why he wanted to hide the file from Delos, but he had the gut feeling that something wasn't quite right there.
It seems a little obvious, since he's based on Arnold to begin with, but Bernard really is the most human-like host, even if Dolores is trying to convince him that's not the case.
AV: Dolores is an interesting case here, because this episode was the clearest evidence yet of the conflict inside her.
For those who don't remember, Arnold merged the 'Wyatt' personality with Dolores so she could protect herself. Wyatt was like a dormant passenger who only appeared when she was in danger. Now, however, the two sides of her are out in the open. She openly refers to herself as Wyatt at one point, but then reverts to the 'Dolores' personality when she sees her father.
How much of her genocidal rampage is Wyatt's personality and how much is it Dolores' own desire for revenge? It's definitely up for grabs.
MR: And Wyatt also played an important role in Teddy's backstory too. Wyatt convinced Teddy to take part in the massacre of a Union outpost at Escalante and then later betrayed him. This must make the Dolores-Wyatt combo particularly confusing for poor old Teddy.
But perhaps he's not as much of a damp squib as I thought he was. When Dolores asks Teddy to kill the remaining Confederado soldier, he actually lets him go free, much to Dolores' disappointment. Clearly he has more independence of thought than it seems at first.
Meanwhile, Maeve is still doing her own thing elsewhere in the park...
AV: Indeed she is, though once again this conversation proves how many moving parts this how has. I'd forgotten about more or less all this backstory when we were watching the show earlier. No wonder the world need people like us to chat randomly about the show.
Anyhoo, Maeve and her growing crew of misfits seem to have stumbled into the fabled 'Shogun World'. She continues to be #fansfavouritecharacter in my book. I especially enjoyed how she unpicked the origins of Isabella, Lee Sizemore's one who got away. She even manages to make Lee seem likeable, which is some kind of miracle.
MR: What I like about Maeve is that she's driven by one thing: finding her child. And I think it'd be a mistake to think this signifies that Maeve is somehow more simplistic than Dolores or even Bernard. In a way, she's very human in her single-minded determination to live her life according to her own personal narrative. This seems to be reflected in the way she's dressed – she could very easily pass for a human in the real world, whereas Dolores is very much in full Westworld mode.
But I reckon a clash between Maeve and Dolores could be on the cards. Towards the end of this episode, Maeve met up with Armistice, the tattooed loose cannon from season one. Now Armistice has major beef with Wyatt, because he once led a massacre in her hometown. That tattooed snake on her back? It's coloured with the blood of the men who destroyed her hometown, but the head is yet to be coloured in, because she's waiting for Wyatt.
And where is she going to find him? Inside Dolores.
AV: See my previous comment. I'd totally forgotten about this character, so having to mug up on her all over again is a tad annoying. I still really enjoyed the episode, though. Despite the fact it didn't deal with any of the questions from the last episode, such as the mysterious 'weapon'.
MR: Are you still convinced it's something to do with DNA?
AV: Less so, I think. It could be much more mundane, but there isn't a huge amount to go on right now.
For me, it all comes down to one thing. Does Dolores want to rule the park(s), or escape? Does she even know? Her plan, such as it exists, is a mystery to me.
MR: That is the question. What we do know from episode one is that loads of those hosts somehow end up drowned sooner or later. And one of them is Teddy.
This might be a bit of a leap, but what if it was Dolores that drowned the other hosts, and not Bernard? We know that she has a low opinion of almost all the other hosts, seeing them as pawns in her game, and this episode we saw a tiny crack start to open up in her relationship with Teddy.
Could it be that when Bernard says "I killed them" what he really means is that he and Arnold – if we assume they’re one and the same these days – are responsible for all of this, since they built and nurtured Dolores in the first place?
AV: I think that's as good a theory as any, Matt. Have a gold star. Right now, I'm off to watch that episode again to see if missed anything. See you next week.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
