Important Questions Heading Into The 'Westworld' Season One Finale

There are, if we estimate it conservatively, somewhere in the neighborhood of 79446808357 open questions as we head into the Westworld season one finale. The producers claim that all of them — or at least almost all of them — will be answered in the 90-minute episode, but they’re kind of cheating because they’re the ones who get to make up the answers. Me? I don’t have the answers, which would make attempting to answer all 79446808357 of them both something that would take very long and something that would be impossible. I am not going to even try. Sisyphus, I am not.

So, instead of doing that, let’s just look at 10 of the biggies. Some of which will not really be biggies, but things are decidedly smaller but have just been bugging me. Westworld is a weird show, man. Let’s dig in.

1. Is William the Man in Black or nah?

He is. He totally is. Unless he isn’t. But he is.

The evidence is all right there: They have the same knife; William is turning into a murderous psychopath; and William is about to marry into a family whose company is a major investor in the park, which is notable because we just learned that the Man in Black is on the board of the company that owns it. And then there was the whole thing at the church with Dolores calling out for William and the Man in Black walking through the door. It all adds up.

Which is why I’m starting to question it. Like, he still is, obviously, definitely, but now it almost seems… too easy. Right? It’s a show that has gone out of its way to okie-doke us with theories for over two months now. Would you be that surprised if you found out in the finale that, oh, let’s say William dies and his billionaire twin buys his way onto the board and becomes the Man in Black to investigate it all? I mean, honestly? You’d be surprised, sure. And probably bummed out. But that surprised? On this show?

But yeah, he totally is.

2. What’s going on with all the timelines?

The best theory I’ve read about all of this is that there are three timelines: the Arnold one 35 years in the past; the William one 30 years in the past; and the one taking place in the present, at whatever point in time the show’s “present” takes place. (Thanks, Dustin.) This is all very confusing and, as far as I can tell, requires many screencaps to understand.

The bigger question I have about all of this is whether the show will spell it out explicitly in the finale or leave it hanging out there for internet sleuths to decipher. That’s my question about everything, really. We’ve gotten a couple pretty big confirmed reveals in the last couple episodes. (Bernard is a robot! Bernard is Robot Arnold!). Is the finale just gonna be 90 minutes of rapid fire reveals to all the remaining mysteries, or will the “answers” be a little hazier than that? And if they do settle all of that, where do they go from there? Will they introduce a new timeline that takes place in 1986 and features Motley Crue showing up at the park? I hope so.

3. Why/How has no one noticed that Ford’s new number two looks exactly like the co-creator he started the park with 30 years ago, who he keeps a picture of in his office?

And how did Bernard get hired and get paid every two weeks with no Social Security number or tax information? Why isn’t this the only thing any of us are talking about right now? This is driving me crazy.

4. Who is Wyatt?

Follow-up question: Is there even a Wyatt? Because it seems like “Wyatt” was just something that Ford added to the story retroactively, possibly to explain the very real massacre at Escalante, which might have been where Arnold died, possibly at the hands of Dolores, who might be as close to a Wyatt as we’re gonna get, and Ford put all this in motion as part of his complicated multistep plan to install his new narrative.

It must be exhausting to be Ford, always plotting out years-long schemes that involve dozens of twists and slights of hand and homicide coverups. I bet he always wins at Clue, though.

5. How pissed would you be if you booked a $500,000 vacation like this because you wanted to hang out with Dolores or Teddy and then you got there and found out some rich schmuck with a stake in the company had commandeered them to meander around the fringes of the park?

Pretty pissed, I bet.

6. How will the Charlotte Hale vs. Robert Ford power struggle play out?

Despite all the attention being paid to various Wyatts and Arnolds and Dolori, this is probably the biggest issue in the show going forward. Everything Ford has done to date — which touches on almost everything else that has happened — has been a micro-step in his plan to put his new mysterious new narrative in place. One imagines he will go to great lengths to prevent his removal by the board. But Charlotte doesn’t appear to be a pushover, either. The only real knock against her is that she chose freakin’ Lee to be her co-conspirator.

Which, now that I think about it, is a pretty big knock. What kind of alleged corporate mastermind sees a drunken cannibalism-obsessed writer piss off a balcony onto an expensive piece of company property and then thinks “This is the man I will enlist to help me overthrow a Machiavellian genius with an army of potentially murderous robots”? Jesus Christ, Charlotte. That’s your plan?

She’s a goner.

7. It’s weird that Theresa’s death was basically investigated in-house, right?

This is one of those small things that has been bugging me, but I think it opens up a door to potentially larger issues. Walk with me here: A high-ranking executive at the park died under mysterious circumstances that may or may not have involved corporate espionage. And yet, the investigation into her death appears to have been done by Westworld employees, exclusively, to the degree that the cause of death was revealed to her fellow executives in a morgue located inside the facility.

This is weird, yes? You’d think there would have been a coroner involved, or some sort of nosy detective, possibly one who wears a trench coat and plays dumb to lull his brilliant suspects into a false sense of security and hooooooo boy I’m just now realizing how much fun it would be to watch Columbo investigate Ford. After all, he has a history with robots.

But look at me, getting off-track again. The point I was getting at is this: In the universe of the show, is it normal for private companies to handle these things internally? And if so, isn’t that a big deal going forward, given Ford’s influence over every little detail?

8. Maeve’s rampage… legit, or another plot by Ford?

So here’s something: Ford has almost complete control of Westworld. It seems like nothing happens without his knowledge or direct involvement, both in the park (The Man in Black running amok) and in the headquarters (Bernard, the Clementine ruse, etc.). Are we to believe that one of his main characters can boost all her stats like a video game cheat code, kill fellow hosts in a nighttime rampage, then get herself plopped right back in so she can break her narrative and go screw a safecracker inside a tent she set ablaze on purpose, and do it all under his radar? This seems… improbable.

And if Ford did set all of this in motion, that brings up three subquestions:

What’s his angle here?
Does this mean my dream scenario where Maeve kills everyone and becomes Queen of Westworld is off the table?
Do you think Felix and Sylvester, the butchers, are roommates in the headquarters barracks, like some sort of Big Bang Theory/Odd Couple pairing, but with more underground robot sex rings?

Okay, technically this last one is unrelated to the Ford thing, but I wanted to bring it up anyway both because I think it’s true and would give a reason for their constant bickering, and because I enjoy picturing them fighting over, like, the shower curtain getting moldy because one of them keeps forgetting to open it to let it dry.

9. What’s the status of Bernard and/or Elsie and/or Stubbs?

Back when Justified was on, the producers would say that you shouldn’t assume a character was dead until you watched them get zipped up in a body bag. Now, Justified and Westworld are very different shows (Boyd would like Westworld, for the record, and would probably try to take over the company through a plan that involves many explosives), but I think it’s important to note here that we never actually saw Elsie die. We just saw her get abducted and dragged off. Same with Stubbs as he went off to investigate. (About that.) And we never really saw Bernard “die,” either. We just saw a gun go off and him hit the deck, and we only saw that in the fuzzy distance as Ford walked away from the action. And, also, can Bernard die? Hosts get shot in the head constantly on this show and it never prevents them from coming back. I refuse to believe he’s gone, for that reason and because Jeffrey Wright is far too good an actor to write off in an offscreen death in episode nine of the first season.

Something is afoot here, I’m sure of it. I just don’t know what.