The Westworld Confusion Index is your guide to what we know, what we kind of know, and what we don’t know about Westworld, one of television’s more confusing shows. We will make mistakes, surely, because we rarely know what is happening or why (and whenever we think we’ve figured it out, they go and change it on us), but we will try to have at least as many jokes as mistakes. This is the best we can offer. Here we go.
What We Know
Ford has been pulling strings from beyond the grave
To be fair, we already knew this, for the most part. There was the thing with Gus Fring and his gang of bandits committing mass suicide rather than answer a single question from William, and there’s also the thing where every host under the age of 16 will eventually look at William with dead black eyes and say something cryptic about “the game,” whatever exactly that is or was or will be. Ford is arguably more present in the park now than he ever was when he was alive. All we learned this week was the how, which involves complicated science balls crammed full of information and deposited into the park’s Cradle, where all the code that controls all the action is stored, and where Ford’s ghost has been dancing around thwarting overrides and updating things on the fly and so on. And then we saw him at the piano after Bernard had Elsie wire him in and send him on a dream journey back to a pre-revolution Sweetwater. So there was that, too.
Do you ever stop and think about how much time all of this must have taken to set up? Like, Ford was already running all the parks, which seems like a lot of work, but then, apparently, toward the end of his life, he gave himself a second full-time job that he carried out in secret. There’s an alternate universe somewhere where Ford got way into golf and none of this ever happened.
Teddy is evil now
Fine. I’ll say it. If no one else will say, I will say it. I miss sweet Teddy.
I thought it was getting old, the whole naive, dumb, wide-eyed Teddy thing, where he would stumble through the world like the Pinky to Dolores’ Brain, getting his tiny robot mind blown every three or four hours. I felt bad for James Marsden that he was stuck playing this blank slate, this nothing in a cowboy hat. I was ready for Evil Teddy.
And now he’s here, all reprogrammed and nasty and cold, shooting first and not asking questions because there’s probably more shooting to do, and I do not like it. No sir, I do not like it at all. Bring back my sweet boy. Let him play with some horsies and shoot some bottles off a fence to impress the townsfolk. He wasn’t meant for this life.
Nobody left in the park has a damn wet wipe
Maeve is currently running through a field with her long-lost daughter, who is kind of not her daughter now, and the both of them are fleeing the warriors of the Ghost Nation. One assumes there will be answers to the questions raised by this, like why Maeve didn’t just Keanu them and make them all kill each like she did to half the population of Shogun World, but it was hard for me to concentrate on any of that because I was thinking about the blood on her face.
You guys noticed that too, right? How Maeve still had blood on her face the morning after the Wu-Tang massacre from last week, and how it was still there when she got back to town, and how it was still there when they were marching around with Akane? My first thought was, like, maybe they didn’t have napkins, but then Maeve ripped her damn sleeve off so Akane could wrap the heart in it. I’m clearly overthinking this. I know that. But if I have robot samurai blood splattered all over my face, I hope one of you will tell me instead of letting me run around all day like that.
William and his daughter have a pretty messed up relationship
So, let’s recap:
- William’s first thought upon seeing his daughter was “she’s a robot sent by my enemy”
- She once accused him of being the cause of her mother’s death
- She begged him to leave the park with her and stop playing silly robot games
- He agreed
- He then bailed and left his daughter alone in the middle of a hellscape filled with murderous droids
Not ideal.
What We Kind Of Know
There’s some fishy stuff going on with Dolores and Bernard
Right. The episode started with a scene we’ve seen a few times now, where Dolores listens and runs through her lines with Bernard. But this time, their conversation took a hard left. Dolores took over and shut him down and said there was an issue with “fidelity,” which is notable for two reasons:
- It seems to imply that Dolores, at some point, was either involved in the training and programming of Bernard or evolved so quickly that she flipped the power balance of the relationship
- “Fidelity” is the same word William used during the aborted immortality project with Papa Delos
What does all of this mean? Buddy, your guess is as good as mine. I’ve enjoyed this show more this season when it focuses on Maeve and Full Wyatt Dolores, following them from park to park as they massacre anyone in their way. I know at some point it’ll all get tied together but I do worry that all the Bernard flashbacks and chronological flashes forward are going to twist this whole thing into a pretzel. We’ll see.
Dolores and her army of soulless killer robots are screaming toward the Mesa in a train packed with explosives on a mission to free her daddy, who is currently — I think, depending on the aforementioned timeline chicanery — bolted to a chair in an examination room guarded by what remains of the human staff
Abernathy heist?
What We Don’t Know
Is this the last we’ll see of Shogun World?
I’m torn here. On one hand, it does feel like we’ve reached a logical end to this story. As much as we like Akane and her crew of Westworld doppelgängers (very much), once we get to “burning a deceased loved one’s heart in a bowl as part of a ceremony that takes place just after her freedom was secured in a sword fight that ended with her tormentor’s hand and entire head chopped off,” I think that might be all we need out of Shogun World.
On the other hand, I kind of want to head back at some point just because I like to imagine there was some guy who was out of town for a few days and missed all of this, and I want to see someone try to explain it all to him.
“Holy crap. What happened here? There are bodies everywhere.”
“Well there was this lady…”
Zero chance he believes it.
What’s up with the bodies in the lake?
Our big question for the season makes another appearance, as we still don’t know exactly who or what caused those hundreds of hosts to become lifeless floaties in the lake. All we have to go on right now is Bernard saying “I killed them all,” but Bernard is being jerked around by everyone so who knows if that’s true or how it came to be. It could also be a trap. All those hosts could open their eyes and march out of the lake and wreak soggy havoc on everyone on the beach. You don’t know. Neither do I.
Who is Sizemore calling?
He’s calling for “help,” but I’m not sure if that means he’s calling the Delos headquarters or someone on the mainland or what. Knowing him, he might just be calling his literary agent to pitch a book deal about everything he’s seen over the last few days. He’s such a weasel. I really do love him. I hope he’s the only one who survives.
