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
Westworld is SimCity, basically
It didn’t dawn on me until this week. I apologize. I should have picked up on it much earlier. But regardless, it’s there now, plain as day: Westworld is just a billion-dollar, real-life game of SimCity. For Ford, at least. He had me fooled for a little while with all of his talk about consciousness and immortality and such, but he tipped his hand this week when he said “It can be quite a thing, Bernard, to build a world and watch it end.”
That’s SimCity. Ford is a brat kid who builds an entire working city and then sends in the disasters to wreck it all. He’s me, basically. Get past all the humans in the park and the discussions of corporate data collection and that’s what happening here. Ford is me, age 14, watching his Sims tear each other apart in a whirlwind of apocalyptic anarchy, after pressing the button that says “robot revolution.”
The male libido is a heckuva thing
We lost two Delos employees this week. Actually, wait. No. We lost many more than two, as Dolores and her dead-eyed gang of robots stormed the Mesa on a hunt for Abernathy’s brain. But we lost two of note.
First, we lost my beloved mustachioed Delos employee, the guy who showed up last week and talked in sound bites from action movies and died because he couldn’t stop doing it. You may quibble with this assessment and point out that he died because Teddy punched him so hard that his mustache ended up inside his brain, but I would argue that the proximate cause of death was him pausing in that brief moment where he had the upper hand to shout “Happy trails, motherfucker,” which gave Teddy just enough time to turn the tables on him. If you gotta go, I guess…
And speaking of Delos employees who died entirely preventable deaths, condolences to the family and friends of the guy who died because he kind of wanted to hump a robot one last time. Let’s be clear here: That’s what happened. He walked into the room with the Cradle, warnings lights flashing red all around him, the hallways littered with his dead colleagues, prepared to kill who/whatever was in that room causing all the trouble, but then he got in there and Angela started talking sweet to him and you could see him start to do the math in his head. “Do… do I have time to hump a robot one last time?” Incredible. He died via grenade explosion once he got close enough for Angela to pull the pin and take them both out, but really, the cause of death was reckless horniness.
The Ford/Dolores/Arnold/Bernard story is an onion of infinite layers
Let’s see if I have this right:
- Arnold made Dolores
- Arnold got in too deep and died
- Ford made Bernard
- Ford made many Bernards
- Ford used Dolores to train the Bernards because Dolores knew him so well
- Ford got in too deep and died
- Dolores is on the warpath and Ford has taken over Bernards’ brain from inside the system
Does anyone else miss Maeve killing samurais while Wu-Tang played?
What We Kind Of Know
If Elsie survives this and goes back to dental school, as she indicated by saying “If we survive this I’m going back to dental school,” her patients are in for some wild visits, man
Two things. Number one, I am fascinated by her decision to drop out of dental school to go work on robots at a murdersex amusement park for billionaires. If they’re gonna keep screwing around with the timelines on this show and we can’t talk them out of it, they might as well zip back and show us the Thanksgiving dinner where she explained this decision to her parents. I think we’ve earned it at this point.
But more importantly, please do take a moment to picture Elsie as a dentist, but the kind of dentist who tries to have a conversation with you while they’re rooting around in your mouth.
“So what do you do?”
“Aarm a accountah.”
“Ah, tax time. My last job messed up my withholdings pretty bad. But a lot went wrong there. You know about Westworld, right?”
“Weffwah?”
“Yeah. Hoo boy, that was a mess. One time my boss tried to kill me and then chained me to a rock in a cave. Lotta plaque on your rear molars.”
“Effcuse mah?”
“Plaque. Got some buildup back there. We’ll get you a new toothbrush.”
“How dih you geh ou-h da caife?”
“What’s that?”
“Da caife? How dih you effcape?”
“Oh, the cave. He came and released me. Turned out he was a robot under the control of a madman. It was a whole thing. Anyway, you’re good for six months. Cheryl up front will get you scheduled.”
What We Don’t Know
What’s Dolores going to do with Abernathy’s brain egg?
Do we know? I don’t think we do. We know what Charlotte and Delos want it for, probably, mostly, but not Dolores. All we know for sure is that she’s headed to the Valley Beyond with her daddy’s robot brain and that she’s killed dozens of people to get it. One imagines her reasoning for it all will come up at some point.
What’s up with Maeve?
Maeve watched her daughter get taken away, again, and then she used her Keanu powers to get hosts to shoot William in every extremity and zero vital organs (presumably because Ed Harris’s contract runs through the season), and then got shot through the chest by Sizemore’s reinforcements, proving once again that Sizemore is just the most useless weasel you’ve ever seen. Now she’s bleeding on a table in the Mesa. Could be working out better for Maeve.
Also, Dolores marched off and let Maeve live again. I feel like this might end up costing her someday. Like Dolores will try to destroy the park and Maeve’s daughter will be there and then chaos will descend down from the skies as Maeve makes Evil Teddy pop his own head off like a champagne cork.
What’s up with the Valley Beyond?
Should I… no. No, I won’t do a theory. There are enough Westworld theories. I’m not even good at them. I am spectacularly bad at them, actually. I should not do a theory.
But…
We’ve heard references to the Valley Beyond and Glory, the latter of which is somehow either a place or a weapon or both, and we know that at some point hundreds of hosts under up dead in a lake in a mass murder that Bernard takes credit for.
Do we think Bernard uses the Glory weapon to kill them all, either for Ford or as a revolt against him?
Oh, God. I feel bad. I should not have done a theory. Please disregard.
What will Sizemore call the book based on these events, provided he lives to write it?
Sizemore is 100 percent going to write a book about all of this that paints himself as the hero. He’s probably spending the book advance in his head right now. I bet he calls it, like, Chaos on Robot Island: The True Story of the Delos Tragedy.
