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
William is basically who we thought he was
We spent a sizable chunk of this week’s episode — the last before the season two finale — diving back into William’s past. We also met his wife, Sela Ward (whose character probably has a name that I never registered because I was like “Hey, that’s Sela Ward”), and learned the circumstances of her repeatedly referenced death. The short version: She was a troubled alcoholic in a loveless marriage with a monster for a husband and she took her own life after looking at Ford’s profile of William that showed his psychological traits — delusions, paranoia, etc. — and what he did at Westworld. And we learned that his daughter, Emily, saw the profile and was in Westworld to try to pull him out and save him and their relationship, both of which had fallen to pieces since Sela Ward’s death.
Also, he thought his daughter was a robot so he killed her. Maybe we should have led with that. It’s probably the more important thing, long-term, since we very much knew his wife was dead. It’s not exactly breaking news that William is kind of a violent comic villain, so you could argue that all that extended flashback did was 1) give the producers an excuse to put Sela Ward on camera, and 2) show the part of his profile that specifically identified him as delusional and paranoid to explain the delusions and paranoia that caused him to kill Emily. I’ll forgive the redundancy of number two because it gave us number one.
(There’s also the possibility that the whole profile was a ruse by Ford as part of the “one final game” he is playing with William, or something. All I know is that if I am at a bar and Anthony Hopkins is sitting at the other end by himself, I am out of there. Nothing good can come of it.)
Anyway, for those of you keeping score, William has now: pushed his father-in-law out of a billion-dollar company, left his brother-in-law nude and for dead in a theme park populated by robot cowboys, driven his wife to suicide, and shot his daughter. He is almost definitely not invited to the next Delos family reunion.
Evil Teddy just knew too much
Poor Teddy, man. Poor, sweet, handsome Teddy. All he ever wanted to do was mosey about town, tip his cowboy hat at the ladyfolk, and chat-up the rancher’s pretty daughter. He wasn’t prepared for all of this. He quite literally was not built for it. And Dolores/Wyatt’s attempt at retrofitting never really took, what with all the evil and menace in the world suddenly hardwired into the brain that was just a barren mishmash of cowboy cliches floating in a pool of sarsaparilla soda, like trying to turn Woody from Toy Story into Johnny Ringo from Tombstone. He couldn’t handle it. It was too much for him to process. Dolores basically tried to load a brand new operating system onto an iPhone 4 and watched as it whirred and buzzed and then shut itself down.
Rest in peace, Teddy. We knew this wasn’t going to end well for you way back in the premiere when we saw you floating in the pond with the other dead hosts, but this was somehow extra sad. Hopefully, you’re happy now, riding a horse in robot heaven and helping old ladies with their groceries.
Elsie deserves a vacation
Elsie has:
- Been kidnapped by her boss
- Been chained to a rock in a cave
- Been saved by the boss who kidnapped her
- Discovered this boss is a robot
- Stumbled across the bodies of dozens of coworkers who were killed in a robot revolution
- Somehow powered through this and developed a plan to save the day
- Been left for dead by her boss, again, as he sped off in a cool little Batmobile go-kart thingy
And after that last thing happened, she finally broke and cussed at him, which probably felt great until she realized she was yelling at a fancy Roomba. Someone send her to Santorini if she ever gets out of there.
What We Kind Of Know
Zombie Clem has been weaponized
Charlotte — with the help of the creepy Delos technician whose name I don’t remember but will assume is, like, Rupert — has downloaded the Keanu powers from Maeve and uploaded them into Zombie Clementine. The goal of this, one imagines, is to turn the hosts against each other in the various parks until they have torn each other limb from limb. Which, fine. I would watch that for a good 10-15 minutes or so. But here’s my question: Why go to the trouble of having the hosts mangle each other in violent bursts of rage when you could use the mind control to have them all commit suicide quickly and without the potential of collateral damage?
I will accept “because this way looks cooler” as an answer here, for the record.
What We Don’t Know
What’s going on with Maeve?
Maeve has spent the better part of two episodes lying on an exam table with a gaping neck wound flayed open and mostly untreated as Delos employees stand around and talk about her in front of her. This is not a good use of Maeve. Maeve should be running around orchestrating revenge-based massacres and/or staring down powerful samurai warriors. This is why I was very excited to see Ford wiggle his way into her code and deliver a long speech about how she was his favorite and how she should not let them end her story like this. I do not know exactly how — or if — Maeve will recover and get out of there, but as we’ve discussed, I am now rooting for the robots on this show and Maeve is a big reason for that, especially with my sweet boy Teddy gone. Let Maeve live, dammit.
Is William a robot?
I suppose this is an important issue I should care about, seeing as William is the boss and a character the show has spent a lot of time developing, and how the immortality thing and downloading human experiences into robot bodies has been a major theme of this season, but as William was carving into his own arm to look for the port after shooting his daughter and flashing back to his wife’s suicide, I just… didn’t? William’s history and Ford’s game have never been the most interesting part of the show for me, so maybe that’s part of it, but it’s probably not ideal that one of the show’s main characters was self-mutilating in the middle of an existential crisis and I was like “GO BACK TO ELSIE, DAMMIT.”
Who’s even gonna be on this show anymore?
The thing about Westworld is that, between timeline-wiggling and various techno-chicanery, characters that die rarely stay dead. Hell, Dolores shot Ford in the back of the head in front of God and the Delos board and Anthony Hopkins has still been skipping through 3-4 scenes every week. But this week alone the show “killed off” Teddy, Emily, almost all of Dolores’ army, half of the Ghost Nation, Sela Ward, and it has Maeve on the robot equivalent of life support. And William’s body is riddled with bullets and knife wounds and bad memories. That’s a lot of carnage and it doesn’t leave us with many unscathed characters going forward. It’s like Bernard, Dolores, Charlotte, and… that’s about it. I’m sure the show has a plan to deal with this problem but I still want to get my point on the record.
How do we get from here to where we know we’re headed?
We know at some point there will be dozens of bodies in a lake and that Bernard will take credit for their destruction, but right now we have about four potential massacres developing:
- Dolores, the Deathbringer, is heading to the Valley Beyond and she is now riding alone with the memory of her dead soulmate, as if she needed any more supervillain fuel
- Bernard is headed for the Forge, which is where all of the guests’ information is stored and the existence of which was revealed in hilarious fashion, with Bernard just kind of blurting it out after almost a full season of people speculating about what was happening there
- Maeve is taking over her code again, and we have plenty of history with that, most of which ends with dead bodies as far as the eye can see
- Zombie Clementine is ready to be deployed to have the hosts commit mass murder-suicide with whatever sharp or blunt objects are handy
What I’m saying is that the finale could be pretty fun.
