Decoding the 50 Biggest Moments of Westworld Season 1
By Amy Woolsey
Anthony Hopkins in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
Season one of HBO’s Westworld was full of memorable scenes, striking images, and, of course, dramatic twists. Here are 50 moments that had us talking.
The season finale aired more than two weeks ago, but we’re still thinking about Westworld. HBO’s latest prestige drama had everything you could want from a TV show in its first year: a sprawling world worth exploring; a dynamic cast of characters and actors; a propulsive plot that keeps you on the edge of your seat; a sense of confidence in its tone and direction. Even in an era with more quality TV than most people can keep up with, it’s unusual to encounter a series with this level of ambition and artistry.
Unfortunately, we have to wait until 2018 to find out where the story goes next. That leaves us plenty of time to look back on, evaluate, and savor what has already happened.
Perhaps more than any other current series, Westworld rewards repeat viewings and in-depth analysis. You can not only gain a better understanding of how the writers constructed the various mysteries and character arcs, but also develop a deeper appreciation for the labyrinthine intricacy of the show’s themes. Who would’ve thought that something based on a 1970s Michael Crichton B-movie about murderous robots would tap into so many big moral and philosophical questions?
But if you don’t have time to watch all ten episodes again, have no fear. We’ve got you covered. We compiled a list of the 50 most significant moments in season one of Westworld – complete with commentary. From game-changing twists to thought-provoking lines, these moments made the show a rich, compelling viewing experience.
Let’s get underway.
Westworld season 1 credits sequence, screenshot courtesy of HBO
50. The opening credits
Okay, so the credits aren’t technically part of the show. But the instant those first piano chords sounded, Westworld hooked my attention.
Opening credits on TV have come a long way in the past half-century. They originally doubled as a brief introduction to the program and an advertisement for sponsors (check out this spot for I Love Lucy) before becoming more sophisticated, with full cast lists and theme songs. Now, they are practically works of art by themselves, reflecting the show’s mood and themes; it isn’t rare to find one that’s the best part of the show (see: Hannibal, Jessica Jones).
Even by modern standards, the title sequence for Westworld is elaborate. Designed by a team led by Patrick Clair (also responsible for the True Detective and The Man in the High Castle credits), it blends composer Ramin Djawadi’s dirgelike orchestral score with elegant, monochromatic visuals, immersing viewers in a surreal world. Machines draw a three-dimensional horse skeleton to life; an iris reflects desert cliffs; a woman, her face eroded to expose the skull beneath, fires a six-shooter; a piano plays on its own. These eerie images perfectly encapsulate the show’s hybrid nature, blurring the past and the future, technology and biology, life and death.
Evan Rachel Wood in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
49. We meet Dolores
Westworld’s premiere, titled “The Original”, begins with a black screen. A male voice that we recognize belongs to Jeffrey Wright intones, “Bring her back online,” and then, fluorescent lights flicker on. The dim, sickly glow reveals a large room with mirrored walls and a concrete floor, its sole visible occupant a naked woman sitting on a stool, her legs bent inward at an awkward angle.
She and the man start talking in emotionless voices. “Where are you?” he asks. “I’m in a dream,” she replies. When the camera cuts to a close-up of the woman’s face, though, we see that her lips aren’t moving. Blood stains her cheek, and her eyes are glassy, staring. Also, there’s a fly. As the camera creeps in, the fly darts onto her eye, momentarily camouflaged. The woman still doesn’t budge.
Right away, Westworld lets us know something is wrong. The room, simultaneously sterile and grungy, seems at odds with the woman’s nakedness, which the surrounding shadows emphasize rather than conceal. She sits directly in front of us, center-screen, placing us in the position of the unseen interrogator – presumably, Bernard, the programmer played by Wright. It functions as a kind of Ex Machina-style Turing test, informing us that Dolores is artificial before the rest of the show convinces us to see her as human.
In retrospect, the scene takes on greater significance. Maybe we hear the voices as disembodied because, well, they are. The conversation could be happening entirely inside Dolores’s head, an internal monologue that she imagines as a dialogue. Is this the first time she hears “Arnold”?
James Marsden and Evan Rachel Wood in Westworld season 1, image courtesy of HBO
48. Teddy is a host
The first twist in Westworld occurs without fanfare; it might not even register to you as a twist.
We first see Teddy Flood, the gunslinger played with earnest charm by James Marsden, riding on an old-fashioned steam locomotive that travels across the rugged landscape of Westworld. Because Dolores is talking about “the newcomers” in the overlapping voiceover, we immediately assume that he and all of the other train passengers are guests visiting the park. When he arrives at Sweetwater, hosts invite him to join a bounty hunt and offer him a discount at the local brothel (he politely declines both), which reinforces our hunch.
But then he runs into Dolores. Teddy picks up a can that she drops while untying her horse from a hitching post (which we later discover is part of her everyday routine), saying, “Don’t mind me. Just trying to look chivalrous.” A smile lights up Dolores’s face. “You came back,” she says.
Hold on a second – “back”? That suggests these two have met before. The more they interact, the more it seems Teddy and Dolores are familiar with each other, and the more stilted their dialogue sounds, as though scripted. It occurs to us that Teddy must be a host as well, which is confirmed when the Man in Black fatally shoots him. In this moment, the show warns us that not everything is as it appears.
Timothy Lee DePriest in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
47. Milk and blood
Not surprisingly for a show on HBO, Westworld is visually stunning, boasting sweeping desert vistas and authentic-looking period attire. Among the many memorable images in the premiere is the above shot from Teddy’s confrontation with the bandits ransacking Abernathy Ranch. One of the bandits is swigging from a bottle of milk when Teddy shoots him. He falls backward through the doorway of the house, spilling the milk. The camera observes from above as the host’s blood seeps onto the floor and mingles with the pool of white liquid.
At first, the milk seems totally random. Is it an oblique reference to the Biblical land of milk and honey? Westworld is, after all, modeled on the mythic American frontier, a place associated with promise and prosperity. The milk later acquires a vaguely lewd connotation, when Walter (now resurrected) turns against his fellow bandit and pours milk on the other man’s corpse – a form of macho posturing, perhaps.
Most likely, though, it’s supposed to evoke the substance from which hosts are made. After the scene where Walter malfunctions, we get a peek at the host manufacturing process: a life-sized figure resembling Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man rises out of a vat filled with milky white goo, a reversal of the last image of the show’s opening credits. Milk, then, represents the essence of the hosts, their lifeblood so to speak. The mixed fluids surrounding Walter’s dead body are a neat illustration of the hosts’ precarious condition; they’re both organic and artificial, human and machine.
Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
46. Dolores’s rape
After killing Teddy at Abernathy Ranch, the Man in Black drags Dolores into a barn, presumably to rape her. We don’t actually see it happen; the camera fixes on an extreme close-up of Teddy’s eye, in which the barn is reflected, and the Man in Black closes the door behind him anyway. But the scene is disturbing enough that it stirred minor controversy during the TCA press tour this summer.
HBO’s new President of Programming Casey Bloys responded to questions about the network’s history of portraying sexual violence with galling thoughtlessness, insisting that it’s not “specific to women” and joking that “we’re going to kill everybody.” Given that television’s treatment of women has been a prominent topic of discussion for the last several years, it’s bizarre that Bloys failed to prepare better answers.
Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy did offer a more considered response at another panel. In addition to noting that it would be disingenuous for a show about people who freely play out their wildest, most illicit fantasies to not address sexual violence, she emphasized that the showrunners take the issue seriously. “It’s extraordinarily disturbing and horrifying,” she said. “In its portrayal, we really endeavored for it to not be about the fetishization of those acts.”
Overall, they’ve succeeded on that front. Indeed, Dolores’s assault is probably the show’s most graphic instance of sexual violence so far, and it’s merely implied. Yet, neither does Westworld downplay sexual violence. The whole first season was essentially an exploration of trauma and its effects, encouraging us to identify with the hosts and view their pain as real. By the end, they aren’t things to be exploited or victims to be pitied, but people.
Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
45. Behind the scenes
The next day, everything in Westworld resets. Dolores wakes up in her bed. Teddy is alive again, back riding the train to Sweetwater. Suddenly, the camera zooms out, and the desert bluffs shrink until, almost imperceptibly, they fade into the landscape. A cut shows that we’re looking at part of a giant map of Westworld in the middle of a circular room with glowing red walls. Around the map stand five shadowy figures, each holding a tablet. This, we later learn, is the Control Room, the hub of the Westworld headquarters.
Besides just being cool, the transition illustrates the relationship between the park and the people running it. Despite being far away, secluded in aseptic, dimly lit offices and labs, the employees have a virtual god’s-eye view of Westworld and absolute control over what happens inside. The hosts – and even, to a lesser extent, the guests – are abstract to them, pieces on a game board. It’s a bit like a maze: when you’re walking through it, it seems complicated and claustrophobic, but when viewed from above, it looks simple, two-dimensional.
It becomes increasingly apparent, however, that the Westworld employees are also pieces in a larger game, their actions dictated by corporate and societal rules. Even a high-ranking executive like Theresa has to answer to the Board of Directors. Throughout the season, the show questions the concept of freedom. What is it? Can anyone truly attain it? How would you know if you did?
Anthony Hopkins in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
44. Evolution monologue
When Bernard tells Ford about his concern that the updated gestures, or reveries, are causing the hosts to malfunction, this exchange ensues:
"Ford: Mistake? It’s a word you’re embarrassed to use, yet you’re the product of a trillion of them. Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool: mistake.Bernard: I flatter myself by taking a more disciplined approach here. But I suppose self-delusion is a gift of natural selection as well.Ford: It is. Of course, we’ve managed to slip evolution’s leash now, haven’t we? We can cure any disease, keep even the weakest of us alive, and one fine day, perhaps we can even resurrect the dead, call forth Lazarus from his cave. Do you know what that means? That means that we’re done, that this is as good as we’re going to get."
This proves to be perhaps the season’s most crucial passage of dialogue. To start with, Bernard’s line about self-delusion is a nice bit of irony, subtly teasing a major upcoming twist. As a host, he’s programmed to ignore any evidence of his true nature, so his life is essentially an act of self-delusion.
Also, it turns out that the key to Ford was in plain sight from the beginning. As the show kept piling on conspiracies and monologues, Ford only seemed to grow more enigmatic, his intentions shrouded by contradictions. In fact, he laid everything out for us right here.
Humanity, Ford believes, has reached its evolutionary peak. We have no room left to progress, nothing meaningful left to achieve; he has even managed to resurrect the dead in a way, by creating a robot version of his dead partner in Bernard. It is time, then, for someone else to take over. So, building on Arnold’s failure, he orchestrates an A.I. revolution – waiting, of course, until it’s most convenient for him to set his plans in motion.
Rodrigo Santoro in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
43. “Paint It Black”
Westworld’s first major action scene is also one of its best. In order to remove hosts en masse for inspection without arousing guests’ suspicions, Sizemore arranges for Hector and his merry band of fugitives to visit Sweetwater a week earlier than scheduled.
The ensuing mayhem is a thing of beauty. The outlaws arrive as hooded figures on horseback, menacing even before they reveal their impressive array of weaponry. At one point, as Armistice slaughters townspeople with pinpoint efficiency, the camera swivels in sync with her shotgun, mimicking the style of first-person shooter video games, which Nolan and Joy acknowledged as influences. Hector and Maeve exchange flirtatious banter, while his associates raid the Mariposa Saloon. It all ends abruptly: just as Hector prepares to make a dramatic speech, an eager guest blows his head off.
What really catches your attention, of course, is the music. Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” can be heard earlier in the episode on the Mariposa player piano, but this orchestral version of “Paint It Black” is more prominent – and more jarring. If you think inserting the Rolling Stones into the Old West is weird, well, it’s supposed to be. As Djawadi told Vulture, the anachronistic songs help prevent viewers from getting seduced by Westworld, reminding us that it’s a fantasy. “Paint It Black” in particular is a perfect accompaniment to Hector’s massacre, reflecting his nihilistic worldview.
Evan Rachel Wood in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
42. End of the premiere
“The Original” ends by going full circle. Now being questioned by Ashley Stubbs, she repeats her monologue from the episode opening: “Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray. I choose to see the beauty, to believe there is an order to our days, a purpose.” A montage shows her once again waking up in bed, walking downstairs, and greeting her father on the porch with a cheery “Morning, daddy.”
But there are a few conspicuous changes. First, her father looks different. After Peter Abernathy started glitching and quoting Shakespeare, he was decommissioned, exiled to the basement with several other defunct hosts. Dolores doesn’t appear to notice the difference. Second, while riding the train, Teddy touches his chest, where he got shot during Hector’s massacre, which means he remembers, even subconsciously. And lastly, while gazing out at the rising sun, Dolores casually slaps a fly that’s crawling on her neck.
The fly is particularly important, since the hosts are programmed to not hurt other beings; as we saw earlier in the episode, they won’t even flinch at bugs. Dolores also violates the directive that forbids hosts from lying, when she tells Ashley that “of course” she would never harm a living thing. This is our first clue that something is seriously afoot with Dolores, the moment where the real story begins.
Jimmi Simpson in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
41. William chooses a hat
In episode two, Westworld introduces a couple of new characters. Logan is a frequent visitor to the park eager to share its pleasures with his future brother-in-law, William, a newcomer. We get a sense of their dynamic right away: Logan is the rebel, whereas William is an “uptight” straight-arrow. They don’t exactly get along.
When they arrive at the monorail terminal, a host named Angela guides William through the orientation process, which involves a brief health questionnaire (sample question: “Do you often experience sexual anxiety?”) and a wardrobe change. The final touch is the hat, which comes in two colors: white and black. William, predictably, opts for a white one, while Logan goes black.
This is an obvious nod to the show’s genre roots. Westerns traditionally inhabited a binary moral universe, pitting righteous lawmen and vigilantes against sinful criminals and troublemakers. On the surface, Westworld seems to be following tradition, casting William as the “good” guy, or the embodiment of order, and Logan as the “bad” guy, or the embodiment of chaos. But even before we see the entirety of William’s arc, there are hints that he isn’t as noble as he pretends to be. He clearly hesitates before deciding which hat to wear. And we first see him as a reflection in the darkened monorail window.
Thandie Newton in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
40. Maeve’s backstory
Like the other hosts of Westworld, Maeve has a routine. As the madam of the Mariposa, her job is to entice visitors to partake in the brothel’s services. To those who are reluctant, she gives the following speech:
"You can hear it, can’t you? That little voice? The one that’s telling you, “Don’t stare too long. Don’t touch. Don’t do anything you might regret.” I used to be the same. Whenever I wanted something, I could hear that voice telling me to stop, to be careful, to leave most of my life unlived. You know the only place that voice left me alone? In my dreams. I was free. I could be as good, or as bad, as I felt like being. And if I wanted something, I could just reach out and take it. But then, I would wake up, and the voice would start all over again. So I ran away, crossed the shining sea, and when I finally set foot back on solid ground, the first thing I heard was that goddamn voice. Do you know what it said? It said, “This is the new world, and in this world, you can be whoever the f*** you want.”"
You can see how the speech would work. By relating to the guest’s vulnerability, Maeve creates the illusion of an emotional connection with him, distracting him from the fact that the brothel – and Westworld in general – is selling a fantasy. Her description of the U.S. as a place of limitless freedom taps into the allure of the park, which, in turn, taps into the mythos surrounding the Old West.
Maeve later confides to Teddy that the story isn’t true; in reality (or at least the version of it that the hosts inhabit), the first voice she heard when she came to America was a man offering to turn her into a prostitute. Still, it provides insight into Maeve’s personality. She’s programmed to be a survivor, constantly searching for a way out and assuming different identities to suit her current situation. Then, her decision in the finale to find her daughter instead of escaping to the mainland makes sense; for her, not running away is a bigger act of rebellion.
Oliver Bell and Anthony Hopkins in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
39. Ford meets his younger self
Seemingly on a whim, Ford takes an elevator that transports him from the basement underneath Westworld to the desert on the fringes of the park. There, he comes across a young boy, and they start talking.
From the get-go, something seems… off about the conversation. To start with, Ford and the boy are wearing nearly identical clothes: a starched white shirt under a vest (Ford’s is gray, the boy’s is black) and black pants. Then, when Ford mentions an aphorism that his father apparently used to cite (“Only boring people get bored”), the boy states that his father says that too.
It doesn’t take long to figure out what’s happening. Just as he controls the movements of a robot rattlesnake with his hand, Ford instructs the boy to “run along now.” And he does, dropping his walking stick and marching away with a blank look on his face. We realize that the boy is a host, one that Ford modeled on his younger self.
This is the first time we witness the power that Ford wields over the hosts. He doesn’t even have to speak to command them. It also reveals that, contrary to what Ford says, not everything in this world is magic, a feat of pure imagination. Some things are memories.
Ed Harris and Clifton Collins Jr. in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
38. The Man in Black’s philosophy
After rescuing Lawrence from the gallows, the Man in Black drags the outlaw to his hometown, a sparsely inhabited village with Spanish colonial architecture. He proceeds to hold Lawrence’s wife and daughter hostage, eventually killing the former, in the hope that Lawrence will disclose information about the maze.
The standoff culminates in a shootout, but first, the Man in Black waxes philosophical. Despite having 30 years of experience under his belt, he apparently only just learned that Lawrence has a family. That, he declares, is the appeal of Westworld: there are always new things to discover, new secrets to unearth. In the next breath, however, he seems to contradict himself. “You know why this beats the real world, Lawrence?” he asks. “The real world is chaos, an accident. But in here, every detail adds up to something.” Is it possible to embrace both mystery and order?
For all his intimidating veneer, the Man in Black is ultimately little more than a bored, entitled fan. He relishes mysteries, but only so he can solve them. He craves realism, but only because it makes winning that much more satisfying. To him, stories are things to be beaten, outsmarted, the journey merely a means to an end. He’s the type of person that would spend hours analyzing a TV show and then resent it for not give him exactly what he wants.
Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
37. Layers of escalators
As Bernard returns to his apartment one night, we are treated to a dizzying overhead shot of the Mesa Hub’s interior – a network of intersecting escalators and banisters. It’s not all that original of an image, but it perfectly encapsulates the show, with its seemingly infinite layers spiraling into the unknown.
Westworld contains unmistakable echoes of another pop culture work created by someone with the last name Nolan: Inception. Like the 2010 Christopher Nolan blockbuster, it deconstructs the nature of reality and consciousness by building an insulated world where people’s dreams come to life. The resemblance is especially conspicuous in “Chestnut”. The episode starts in media res, disorienting the audience and inviting us to piece the plot together like a puzzle. As Angela tells William, figuring it out how it works is half the fun.
Both stories manifest the psyche as a physical space comprised of various “levels”, which can be navigated like an open-world video game. The farther down you venture, the more deeply you become absorbed in the fantasy – and, paradoxically, the closer you get to discovering a person’s true self, their innermost secrets, desires, and fears. Inception finds a fairly direct link between the subconscious and conscious mind, as the protagonists exploit their target’s yearning to please his father, but Westworld is more ambiguous. Are people, at heart, defined by primal urges? Or is there something more? What really lies at the center of the maze?
Thandie Newton in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
36. Maeve wakes up
Throughout “Chestnut”, Maeve experiences fragmented visions, which at last coalesce into a coherent dream. In the dream, she’s a pioneer living in a rustic, secluded cabin with her daughter. Their carefree existences are disrupted by the Man in Black, who violently breaks into the cabin and prepares to murder them. As he closes in, Maeve realizes that she is dreaming and, following the advice she gave Clementine earlier, counts down from three.
When she opens her eyes, however, she finds herself in another unfamiliar place: a lab, where a couple of technicians are operating on her. Maeve panics and, armed with a scalpel, escapes from the room, blood still gushing from the incision in her abdomen. She ends up in another building, where she sees the naked bodies of “dead” hosts being cleaned with a hose. Shock paralyzes her long enough that the techs manage to sedate her again.
As viewers, we understand what is going on, and we know the hosts aren’t technically dead. But the sequence unfolds with such nightmarish urgency that we can’t help but share Maeve’s horror. It is perhaps the show’s most powerful use of nudity, emphasizing rather than stripping away the characters’ humanity.
Anthony Hopkins and Simon Quarterman in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
35. Ford lectures Sizemore
Sizemore’s presentation of his new storyline, called “Odyssey on Red River” and riddled with violent titillation, is, unsurprisingly, met with disapproval by Ford. The creative director explains what’s wrong with Sizemore’s approach to Westworld:
"The guests don’t return for the obvious things we think they do, the garish things. They come back because of the subtleties, the details. They come back because they discover something they imagine no one has noticed before. Something they fall in love with. They’re not looking for a story that tells them who they are. They already know who they are. They’re here because they want a glimpse of who they could be. The only thing your story tells me, Mr. Sizemore, is who you are."
Among its many other dimensions, Westworld is a meta narrative about storytelling. You could use the park as a stand-in for practically any kind of modern entertainment, from video games, to cable television, to blockbuster movies. It offers the same visceral pleasures to participants: a space in which you can safely and vicariously live out repressed desires; the illusion of agency; the opportunity to be someone else. Westworld itself is full of what Ford calls “garish things”, yet by exposing its own artifice, the show compels us to question the fantasy. What do we really want from entertainment? Is it all about escapism? Or is there a deeper purpose?
James Marsden and Anthony Hopkins in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
34. Teddy gets a backstory
During his conversations with Dolores, Teddy occasionally hints at a dark past for which he must atone. He fantasizes about going to a place “where the mountains meet the sea” and “the water’s so pure it could wash the past clean off you.” We find out that the Westworld programmers never bothered to give Teddy an actual backstory, just “a formless guilt” that he is mindlessly driven to absolve.
Ford decides to finally rectify this. He brings the host into the labs and scripts for him an origin story involving a man named Wyatt, whom Teddy knew from his military days, and a massacre at the town Escalante. One day, according to the narrative, Wyatt returned from an expedition “putting down the natives” and claimed he could hear the voice of God. It sounds like something out of Heart of Darkness. By now, of course, we know that the story of Wyatt was just a thinly fictionalized version of Arnold’s downfall; all great stories, Ford insists, are rooted in truth.
Besides being vital to the plot, this scene contains one of the most striking images in Westworld so far: a shot of Teddy and Ford from outside the glass lab. It situates the audience as voyeurs, drawing attention to Teddy’s nakedness. Teddy is addressing Ford, but his gaze appears to point past the theme park founder, toward the model of an android sitting in the room next door. In a sense, he’s looking in a mirror, yet he can’t recognize himself. Superimposed on the model is the reflection of another model, reclining. That’s the hosts in a nutshell: they look conscious, but in reality, they’re asleep, dreaming. Ford sits in the center of the frame – in control. He faces away from the models, seeing only the lifelike Teddy. But knowledge of the hosts’ true nature always lingers at the back of his mind.
Anthony Hopkins in Westworld season 1, image courtesy of HBO
33. Arnold’s introduction
In addition to straying from their scripts, the malfunctioning hosts have been talking out loud to an invisible person named Arnold. When Bernard mentions this to his boss, Ford explains that he founded Westworld with a partner – a man named Arnold.
For Arnold, it wasn’t enough that the hosts believably simulate consciousness; he wanted to make them actually conscious. He envisioned the path to consciousness as a pyramid with four steps: memory, improvisation, self-interest, and, last, the bicameral mind – a phenomenon in which an individual hears his or her own thoughts as someone else’s voice, in effect carrying on a mental conversation. In the hosts’ case, they would hear their programming as an inner monologue, which would evolve into autonomous thoughts. The experiment failed, driving the hosts mad, but Arnold became obsessed.
“He barely spoke to anyone, except to the hosts,” Ford says. “In his alienation, he saw something in them. He saw something that wasn’t there.”
Eventually, Arnold killed himself in the park, though we only learn later the whole truth about his death and his relationship with Ford. It’s fitting that the memory of a dead person would play such a pivotal role in Westworld, a show whose very premise – a hybrid of the science-fiction and Western genres – merges the past and the future.
Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
32. Bernard’s backstory
After leaving Ford’s office, Bernard has a video chat with his wife (or ex-wife), Lauren. They haven’t spoken to each other in a long time, it appears, since Westworld employees are obligated to live at the park in rotations, and Bernard is too busy working to call often. “I suppose I’m glad for you,” Lauren says. “At least you have a way of forgetting.” Flashes of memory show Bernard with his son, who died from an unidentified illness. Even though the memory of Charlie causes obvious pain, he insists he doesn’t want to forget. “This pain,” he says, “it’s all that I have left of him.”
Dolores echoes that line in the next episode, when she talks to Bernard about seeing her parents get killed. It points to one of the most important and intriguing themes in Westworld: the notion that negative feelings have value. They are, after all, things that all people experience at one point or another, and they inform who we are, helping us learn and change. To deny them would be to deny one’s full humanity. Plus, as Dolores implies with her “beautiful” script about grief adapted from a script about love, negative feelings are inextricably mingled with positive ones.
Evan Rachel Wood and Jeffrey Wright in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
31. Two versions of you
Later in the episode, Bernard meets Dolores for one of their secret conversations. He expresses doubt about what they’ve been doing, admitting that his desire to help her remember is selfish; he hadn’t thought about the severe trauma it would inevitably cause her. Maybe Ford is right that it would be best to leave the hosts in their blissful ignorance. He urges Dolores to “imagine that there are two versions of yourself – one that feels these things and asks these questions, and one that’s safe. Which would you rather be?”
It seems at first like Bernard is being hypocritical. He just told his wife that he wants to remember his pain. Why would he assume Dolores wants to forget hers? But we now know that the person talking to Dolores isn’t Bernard at all; it’s Arnold, in a flashback to when he was still alive and experimenting with the hosts. Upon rewatch, the scene plays differently.
Dolores counters Arnold. “There aren’t two versions of me,” she says. “There’s only one, and I think when I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” This gets Arnold’s attention. She’s describing what present-day Dolores spends the whole season trying to achieve: the bicameral mind. Realizing that she might be on the cusp of consciousness, Arnold decides not to roll Dolores back. It’s time to see what she can do on her own.
Evan Rachel Wood in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
30. Dolores shoots
As usual, Dolores returns home at night to find chaos. The cattle are loose, and she hears gunfire at the ranch house. By the time she arrives, however, her father is lying on the ground, dead. With Teddy out looking for Wyatt and the guests unwilling to help, one of the bandit hosts seizes Dolores and drags her into the barn. She is about to get raped when she draws a pistol out of the hay, the one that she found the dirt at the beginning of the episode. At first, nothing happens (her programming prevents her from pulling the trigger). Then, her vision flickers, briefly changing the host into the Man in Black. A voice instructs, “Kill him.” Dolores manages to pull the trigger and kills the host.
The moment isn’t staged as triumphant; Dolores’s tear-stained face conveys only shock and fear. After all, she almost got raped, and she has no idea what’s happening. She can’t tell that the Man in Black is a memory. The déjà vu happens again as she tries to leave the ranch: a man yells at her to “get back here” and shoots her, but the next moment, he repeats himself, and the wound in her stomach is gone. It allows her to dodge the bullet and escape. This is our first hint that time for Dolores doesn’t operate linearly, and that we shouldn’t necessarily trust her perspective to be objective reality.
Tait Fletcher and Shannon Woodward in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
29. The found stray
The title of episode three, “The Stray”, most explicitly refers to a host that Elsie and Ashley are charged with tracking down. Normally a woodcutter, he has wandered off his programmed route. At the campsite where their quarry is supposed to be, Elsie and Ashley find strange carvings in the various rocks and wooden figures the host assembled. It looks like he was drawing Orion, the constellation, even though, as Elsie puts it, he “wasn’t programmed to give a s*** about stars.”
Finally, they find the stray stuck in a chasm at Python Pass, a remote area on the northern side of the park. Guided by the light of a flare, Ashley climbs down and starts to saw off the host’s head, presumably to prepare him for inspection. But suddenly, the host wakes up, attacks Ashley, and tries to escape. He raises an enormous rock, seemingly about to clobber Elsie, whose control pad has failed, but instead, he smashes his own head, splattering blood everywhere.
Before, the Westworld employees had mostly been treating the hosts’ issues as a harmless glitch, something that needed to be fixed but shouldn’t arouse concern. This incident, though not fatal, convinces Elsie that the problem is more serious.
Thandie Newton in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
28. Maeve’s drawings
Maeve is casually talking to Clementine over drinks at the Mariposa when the surrounding noise deadens, voices distorted so they sound slightly robotic. All of a sudden, she’s lying on the floor in the middle of a shootout. A man in a bowler hat aims a pistol at her, smirking, and fires. But Maeve isn’t dead. Instead, she wakes up in an operating room, men dressed in full-body suits and masks looming over her. Several hazy images later, she’s back at the Mariposa, like nothing happened.
The sequence is beautifully executed, from the blood tracing the contours of Clementine’s eye to the dissolves during the surgery, but the most memorable moment comes afterward. Bewildered, Maeve hurries to her apartment and inspects her stomach in the mirror. There’s no bullet wound, though she sees a blood stain on her undergarment. She sketches one of the masked men and lifts a loose floorboard to hide the paper – only to see that a pile of identical drawings is already lying there.
Particularly chilling is the image of Maeve looking down, her face claustrophobically framed by the underside of the floor; it’s almost an inverse of a certain famous shot from Breaking Bad. She is gazing into the abyss, the truth of her existence.
Ingrid Bolsø Berdal and Ed Harris in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
27. Camping with the Man in Black
For its first three episodes, Westworld portrayed the Man in Black as a larger-than-life figure, a ruthless, invincible killing machine who’s almost deeply rooted in the park as the hosts (he did claim that he was, in a sense, born there). In other words, we see him the way the hosts see him.
“Dissonance Theory” is the first time he seems like an actual person. To start with, it gives us the vaguest clue as to his life outside of Westworld. One night, while camped out with Armistice and her crew, a guest nervously approaches the Man in Black and professes his admiration. “Your foundation literally saved my sister’s life,” he gushes. In response, the Man in Black threatens to cut the guy’s throat, snapping that this is his “f***ing vacation.” Still, the exchange tells us that the Man in Black’s real-life persona is very different from what we’ve seen of him. He’s rich and well-respected.
More enlightening is his conversation with Armistice, in which he reveals his mission. When she asks why the Man in Black is curious about her tattoos, he mentions Arnold. “You could say he’s the original settler of these parts,” he explains. “He created a world where you could do anything you want, except one thing: you can’t die. Which means no matter how real this world seems, it’s still just a game.” He believes the maze represents Arnold’s last story – one with “real stakes, real violence.”
So, while many guests take comfort in the fantasy element of Westworld, for the Man in Black, it cheapens the experience. If your actions have no permanent consequences, what’s the point?
Sidse Babett Knudsen and Anthony Hopkins in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
26. Power lunch
Following a pep talk from Bernard, Theresa meets Ford to discuss the logistics of his top-secret storyline. They sit at a restaurant overlooking an area of the park currently under construction and trade power moves. First, Theresa plays the role of “jaded yet benevolent supervisor”, saying that she can convince the Delos board to give Ford more time to work and they “want to protect your legacy.” Translation: you’re getting old and won’t be around much longer.
Ford is less subtle, and perhaps that’s why he prevails. He turns Theresa’s dig at his age against her, emphasizing his role in designing the park and demonstrating his authority over it. With one gesture, he can cause all the hosts working in the restaurant and on the construction site to freeze in place. He and Arnold, he declares, are the gods of Westworld, and everyone else is merely a guest. And as a god, he controls everything that goes on in his domain, including the activities of his staff. For his trump card, he reveals that he knows about Theresa’s relationship with Bernard.
Despite consisting of nothing more than two people sitting and talking, this scene accomplishes a lot. It establishes the hostility between Ford and the board of directors. It brings out the anxiety under Theresa’s matter-of-fact façade. And it boils Ford down to his essence: a control freak who resents other people infringing on and ruining his creation.
Rodrigo Santoro and Thandie Newton in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
25. The shade
Hector celebrates his escape from prison by immediately attacking Sweetwater. Disregarding the Man in Black’s warning that “you’re never going to find [that thing you’re looking for] in that safe”, he returns to the Mariposa, where he runs into Maeve. They retreat into a private room and strike a bargain: she’ll give him the combination to the safe in exchange for answers. She shows him her latest drawing of the masked man.
After some thought, Hector reverts to his programming, which includes an extensive knowledge of native lore. He identifies the figure as a legendary shade that “walks between worlds and was sent from Hell to oversee our world.” It’s supposed to be a blessing to see one, he says, to behold “the masters that pull your strings.” Yet, Maeve rejects that idea; something can’t be a blessing if it causes the trauma that she feels. With a swig of alcohol and a cigar clenched between her teeth, she convinces Hector to cut her stomach where she got shot. He reaches in and extracts a crushed bullet.
Hector asks what this means. “That I’m not crazy after all,” Maeve replies. “And none of this matters.” And, in a hail of gunfire, she sets forth on the trajectory that takes her through the rest of the season.
Anthony Hopkins and Michael Wincott in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
24. The greyhound
Another Westworld episode, another monologue by Ford. “Contrapasso” opens with the creative director sharing a drink with the decommissioned host he sometimes revives to play the piano in his office. This time, he shares an anecdote about a greyhound he owned as a child:
"The greyhound is a racing dog. It spends its life running in circles, chasing a bit of felt… One day, we took it to the park. My dad had warned us how fast the dog was, but we couldn’t resist. So my brother took off the leash, and in that instant, the dog spotted a cat. I imagine it must have looked just like that piece of felt. He ran. I never saw a thing as beautiful as that old dog running. Until at last, he finally caught and, to the horror of everyone, killed that little cat. Tore it to pieces. Then, it just sat there, confused. That dog had spent its whole life trying to catch that thing. Now, it had no idea what to do."
Our immediate assumption is that the greyhound is a metaphor for the hosts. They, too, spend their lives chasing one thing, following a predetermined path to a predetermined destination, and it’s possible that once they break out of their loops, they’ll simply be lost.
Yet, Ford could also be talking about himself. Contrary to his insistence that he isn’t sentimental, he seems just as fond of Westworld as he accuses Arnold of being. He has dedicated much of his life to creating, refining, and supervising it, after all. No wonder the prospect of being forced into retirement aggravates him. Deprived of his creation, he wouldn’t know what to do. He’d rather die than face a life without purpose. He and the Man in Black, who is willing to sacrifice himself to find the maze, have that much in common.
Evan Rachel Wood and Jimmi Simpson in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
23. Why people come to Westworld
When William arrived at Westworld, he assumed that it only appealed to people like Logan, who want an opportunity to indulge their worst impulses. As he experiences more of the park, though, he starts to understand. People come to Westworld for the same reason Dolores (he thinks) wants to leave: because they want a different life.
“Whoever you were before doesn’t matter here,” he muses. “There are no rules or restrictions. You can change the story of your life. You can become someone else. No one will judge you; no one in the real world will even know. The only thing holding you back is yourself.”
It’s more or less the opposite of what Logan believes, which is that Westworld reveals who you really are; in that case, the real world is the fiction, where people assume false identities. It also, again, mirrors perceptions of the frontier as a place for redemption and fresh starts, separate from civilized society, with its traditions and expectations. Like the Old West, Westworld taps into the American Dream, the belief in the individual’s ability to determine his own fate. No doubt, that’s why this narrative appeals to William, a man who has spent his life working to climb the social ladder.
Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
22. The orgy
The Pariah orgy scene in “Contrapasso” is arguably the most glaring slip-up of Westworld’s first season. On the whole, the show has handled nudity with surprising tact, but it feels clumsy here, serving neither to deepen our understanding of the characters nor to further the ongoing critique of spectacle. Indeed, in an interview with EW.com, Jonathan Nolan notes that this is the one time when “we were going for it – to show the pure pleasure of [Westworld].” Yet, the scene doesn’t succeed as titillation either. For an audience used to graphic entertainment like Game of Thrones, it’s frankly rather tame, especially considering Pariah is supposed to exemplify the park at its most decadent.
It isn’t a total waste, though. The score, an instrumental cover of “Something I Can Never Have” by Nine Inch Nails, perfectly captures the anesthetic emptiness of Westworld’s thrills. And the characters’ reactions to the lurid display around them are amusing (morality, Logan proclaims, is “just a giant circle-jerk”) as well as revealing. Here, the simmering tension between William and Logan finally erupts, leading the former to take his first major step toward the dark side.
Jimmi Simpson and Evan Rachel Wood in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
21. No damsel
“Contrapasso” shows several characters wrestling with their identities, from William rejecting his propensity for obedience to Logan reasserting his anarchic outlook. None of them undergoes a more radical change than Dolores.
About halfway through the episode, Ford questions Dolores about Arnold, ostensibly trying to find out if she’s a threat to the park stability. “Have you been dreaming again, Dolores?” he asks. “Imagining yourself breaking out of your modest little loop, taking on a bigger role?” She denies experiencing anything out of the ordinary, saying that she hasn’t been hearing voices, and Ford seems to believe her (though now we know that he knew precisely what was going on because he orchestrated it). The conversation concludes with Ford asking, “If you did take on that bigger role for yourself, would you have been the hero or the villain?” Dolores doesn’t answer, perhaps because she doesn’t know what to choose yet.
By the end of “Contrapasso”, she figures it out. When the Confederate mercenaries discover that their nitroglycerin has been replaced with tequila, they turn on Logan, William, and Dolores, thwarting the guests’ attempts to leave Pariah. A gang of them corner William, and he seems like a goner (or as defeated as any human can be in Westworld). Then, something clicks in Dolores, and she shoots all of their attackers in rapid succession, much to William’s disbelief. “I imagined the story where I didn’t have to be the damsel,” she tells him.
In addition to marking Dolores’s official departure from her loop, the scene includes a nifty bit of foreshadowing. After Dolores kills the men, we get a fleeting shot from above. The characters are positioned so that it looks as though Dolores is aiming her pistol at William, hinting at their eventual antagonism.
Leonardo Nam in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
20. Free bird
Since right now, we don’t know how much agency Dolores has, perhaps the most successful act of rebellion in “Contrapasso” actually belongs to a relatively minor character: Felix Lutz. One of the technicians assigned to work on Maeve, he isn’t fond of his job, thanks in no small part to his partner Sylvester, who seems to berate him on a near-constant basis. Whenever he has spare time and Sylvester is out of the room, Felix uses a “borrowed” control pad to experiment with a bird host that he keeps in the lab cupboard. He hopes that if he practices enough, he can get promoted to the behavior department.
After multiple futile attempts, he manages to not only revive the bird but also make it fly. As he watches the bird circle the room, emitting high-pitched chirps, Felix raises his arms and beams in triumph. It’s a rare, refreshing moment of pure ecstasy and wonder on a show that leans toward grim detachment.
It also provides insight into Felix, explaining his future behavior. When Maeve enlists him and Sylvester to alter her programming, it’s easy to think that they are both either dense or easily manipulated. That might be true for Sylvester, but Felix listens to Maeve because he genuinely wants to help her (though admittedly, his enthusiasm wanes when she almost kills Sylvester). As his bird experiments demonstrate, he’s curious about the hosts, and, feeling trapped in his own life, he relates to them. In the finale, Maeve calls him “a terrible human being”, which means he actually has a sense of empathy.
Thandie Newton and Leonardo Nam in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
19. Maeve gets a tour
It doesn’t take much for Maeve to gain Felix’s support. She challenges his fumbling attempts to explain the difference between hosts and humans, taking his hand in hers and observing that “we feel the same.” Before long, she persuades him to take her “upstairs”, where her script was written, perhaps as a last-ditch effort to prove she’s in control.
In an almost wordless sequence, we watch Felix escort Maeve through the various levels of the Mesa Hub. They pass livestock management, where “dead” hosts are being cleaned and repaired, the walls splattered with their blood. In manufacturing, workers pump liquid into a Vitruvian Man model, causing its chest to glow red and its heart to beat. In the behavior labs, a bison walks around on a leash, and human hosts practice kissing or drawing guns while people with tablets observe impassively. Lastly, on the 8th floor is the design department, where people sculpt faces onto busts.
Felix prepares to take the elevator back downstairs, but a voice catches Maeve’s attention. It’s Angela, narrating a promo for Westworld displayed on a wall-sized screen. A montage of images – the train pulling into Sweetwater, Dolores and Teddy horseback-riding across the desert – flash by, interspersed with slogans like, “A World of Adventure”. What really alarms Maeve are the images from her days as a pioneer. “How did you have my dreams?” she asks Felix whey they’re back in the repair lab.
The sequence recalls Maeve’s escape attempt in episode two, but it’s more subdued, the horror replaced by melancholy. Radiohead’s “Motion Picture Soundtrack” plays in the background, and Thandie Newton’s eyes convey every nuance of Maeve’s devastation.
Alastair Duncan and Jeffrey Wright in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
18. Ford’s secret house
While investigating the data theft, Bernard discovers that there are five hosts inside the park who haven’t been entered into the updated programming system. He sneaks into sector 17, where they are located. It’s supposed to be deserted, designated “off-limits for future narratives.” But he sees a cottage there, hidden in the forest.
He enters and finds what looks like an ordinary household, consisting of a man, a woman, their two young sons, and a dog. One of the sons is familiar – the boy that Ford talked to in the desert in “Chestnut”. The man seems hostile, moving to attack Bernard when Ford shows himself and intervenes. Ford explains that these are first-generation hosts designed by Arnold as a gift to his partner, the sole vestiges of his original creations. Over the years, Ford modified them so they more accurately resembled the real-life people they were modeled on – his family, including his hated alcoholic father.
The scene is a recreation of what Ford calls his only happy childhood memory, a family trip to the English countryside. Golden light filters through the windows, bathing the house in nostalgia. For Bernard, though, the sight of an intact family only evokes bad memories, reminding him of his irrevocable loss. He doesn’t belong here.
Shannon Woodward in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
17. Elsie goes missing
As Bernard looks into the host anomalies, Elsie tries to locate the satellite to which the stray had been transmitting. Her search leads to a couple of unsettling findings: first, the satellite belongs to Delos, which means the data theft is an inside job; and second, someone has been broadcasting to first-generation hosts using the old “bicameral” control system. She tracks down a relay in an abandoned theater in sector three that is switched on and treks over there to see who has accessed it.
The theater is dark, stuffed with dusty relics, including a computer. Elsie combs the archives and discovers that Theresa is the person responsible for smuggling data. But there’s a more serious problem: whoever is broadcasting to the hosts has been changing their programming – even their prime directives, which prevent them from lying or harming people. She guesses that it’s Arnold, somehow. All of this information she shares with Bernard over the phone.
Later, while transferring the data to her tablet, Elsie hears a creak. When she goes to investigate, somebody grabs her from behind, and she disappears for the rest of the season. Brief flashbacks show that Bernard was her assailant, but we still don’t know if he actually killed her. (Hopefully, this Easter egg means something.)
Rodrigo Santoro, Sidse Babett Knudsen, and Tessa Thompson in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
16. Theresa and Charlotte conspire
Delos has sent Charlotte Hale, executive director of the board, to oversee administrative changes at Westworld. Specifically, she’s supposed to prepare the park for Ford’s imminent departure. She invites Theresa to her suite for a private meeting. Well, it’s private except for Hector, who is tied to the bed, naked.
The meeting proceeds similarly to Theresa’s lunch with Ford, less a conversation than a power struggle. On the surface, Theresa seems to have all the authority. She’s older and has most likely worked at Westworld for a longer time than Charlotte has been on the board. She comes to the meeting wearing a formal dress, making sure to sit straight. Meanwhile, Charlotte lounges on the couch in a bathrobe, sipping wine and smoking.
In actuality, Charlotte is in control. First, she tacitly expresses disapproval of the park’s current state and assigns blame to Theresa: “You have always been good at your job, and the board has been impressed with your performance so far, which is why we were so surprised by this woodcutter mess.” She then makes it clear that Delos has higher ambitions than Westworld; what matters isn’t the park, its employees, or the hosts, but the code contained here, which the board wants to use for a mysterious research project. Lastly, she proposes a plan to get rid of Ford, who is too influential to be fired. They have to demonstrate that Ford’s creations are dangerous, and that requires a “blood sacrifice.”
Kudos must be given to Tessa Thompson, who makes an indelible impression as Charlotte, despite not being introduced until the sixth episode. She exudes a bizarrely magnetic mixture of charisma and condescension, a worthy adversary for Ford even though it’s never really in doubt who will win the battle for Westworld.
Jimmi Simpson and Evan Rachel Wood in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
15. William’s backstory
On Lawrence’s train, Dolores and William have plenty of downtime, so they talk, trying to get to know each other better.
“This place you’re looking for, what makes you so sure it exists?” William asks Dolores, though, ironically, he never thinks to ask himself that question. She essentially replies that she doesn’t know; the point for her is finding out, and besides, she can’t simply return to her normal life. She then asks why he’s still with. He explains:
"The only things I had when I was a kid were books. I used to live in them, used to go to sleep dreaming I’d wake up inside of one of them because they had meaning. This place, this was like I woke up inside one of those stories. I guess I just want to find out what it means."
So, just like the Man in Black, William is obsessed with finding a deeper meaning in Westworld, which would, by extension, give deeper meaning to his life. Hmm…
Also enlightening, however, is Dolores’s response: “I don’t want to be in a story. All I want is to not look forward or back. I just want to be in the moment I’m in.” Neither really seems to notice it, perhaps because they’re so desperate for connection, but there’s already a rift between Dolores and William. They have fundamentally different worldviews and desires. Whereas William sees Dolores as integral – key, if you will – to achieving his objective, for Dolores, William is merely incidental; her quest for meaning ultimately has nothing to do with him.
Thandie Newton in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
14. “How many times have you died?”
During one of her walks around the Mesa Hub with Felix, Maeve sees Clementine, the host chosen as Charlotte’s “blood sacrifice”, getting what looks like a lobotomy. The horrifying sight makes her realize something: it’s not enough to just survive, which is what she’s done her whole life. In Westworld, survival is “just another loop.” So, Maeve decides to escape – with Felix and Sylvester’s assistance, of course.
Sylvester protests, pointing out that everything in the building is designed specifically to prevent the hosts from leaving. “It’d be a suicide mission,” he insists. As usual, however, Maeve is a few steps ahead of him. “You think I’m scared of death?” she asks, raising a disdainful eyebrow. “I’ve done it a million times. I’m f***ing great at it. How many times have you died? Because if you don’t help me, I’ll kill you.”
Maeve has identified the principal – and maybe only – difference between hosts and humans: for the latter, death is permanent. Although the hosts can break or wear down, or get disabled, they can always be repaired, returned to pristine condition. They are essentially immortal. Maeve and, eventually, Dolores use this to their advantage, exploiting a fear that underlies so much of human behavior.
Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
13. Bernard is a host
The first significant reveal of Westworld had plenty of build-up. Earlier in the episode, Theresa and Charlotte stage a demonstration that they hope will get Ford ousted. Instead, Bernard ends up taking the fall. But noticeably, he doesn’t protest. He glances at Ford, then at Theresa (who pointedly avoids eye contact), and then at Ford again, before walking out of the room in silence. Then, the camera cuts back to Ford, whose mouth is curled in a devious smirk.
Later, Bernard brings Theresa to Ford’s secret cabin in sector 17. It’s dark, and the unregistered hosts are gone. “What’s behind this door?” Theresa asks. Bernard swivels around, lantern in hand, and we see that a door has appeared where one definitely didn’t exist before. Bernard looks straight at it and says, “What door?”
That’s when it clicks: Bernard is an android. Like the rest of the hosts, he is programmed to not notice things that would conflict with his reality. Unfortunately, Theresa ignores this warning sign, opens the door, and walks downstairs into a lab full of equipment. Ford, it seems, has been making his own hosts. Theresa rifles through a stack of papers showing anatomical diagrams of various hosts, including Dolores and a young Robert, and shows one to Bernard, asking what he makes of it. We see that it’s a drawing of Bernard.
“It doesn’t look like anything to me,” Bernard says. The bewilderment that flickers in Theresa’s eyes when she looks at her colleague and lover then is chilling.
Evan Rachel Wood and Jimmi Simpson in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
12. Dolores returns home
A voiceover overlaps the transition between this scene and the preceding one, in which Ford and Bernard debate the difference between humans and hosts. Ford assures his partner that erasing his memories of the incident with Theresa is for the best because otherwise, he might “get drawn back into them – lose yourself in them like some of your fellow hosts have now and again.”
The voiceover gives us an idea of what happens to Dolores when she arrives at her hometown. It first appears as an unpopulated cluster of buildings, but as she walks through the streets, hosts appear. Some of them are dancing, monitored by people in lab coats. Lawrence’s daughter shows up and asks, “Did you find what you were looking for, Dolores?”
Suddenly, a shootout erupts. Hosts fall to the ground in slow motion, shot, and screams fill the air. Dolores then sees herself pointing a pistol at her head. The camera cuts to a brief close-up of the other Dolores’s eyes, before showing that our Dolores is also pointing a gun at her head. Before she pulls the trigger, William snatches the gun. She looks around and sees that the town has vanished. Only a church steeple remains; the rest of the building is buried in sand.
Dolores is bewildered. “When are we?” she asks William, her voice quivering with desperation. “Is this now? I’m going mad! Are you real?”
Until now, Dolores seemed to be coping with her resurfacing memories. But those weren’t as vivid, flashes rather than entire scenes. As Felix told Maeve, the hosts’ minds operate differently from people’s minds. Their memories don’t fade over time; they remain so perfectly intact that they are basically indistinguishable from present reality. So, when hosts remember their traumas, it’s like they’re reliving them. The effects are finally getting to Dolores.
However, that doesn’t stop her from trying to figure out what Arnold wants her to remember.
Thandie Newton in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
11. The Man in Black’s backstory
After seven episodes of secrecy, Westworld finally supplies something resembling a backstory for the Man in Black. Teddy has tied him to a rock and, having remembered him from a previous life, is questioning him about Dolores’s whereabouts. The Man in Black takes a couple punches before agreeing to tell Teddy who he “really” is.
“I’m a god,” he says, “a titan of industry, a philanthropist, a family man, married to a beautiful woman and father to a beautiful daughter.” Last year, however, his wife “took the wrong pills” and fell asleep, dying in what he thought was an accident but his daughter insisted was a suicide. Apparently, his family was terrified of him, because even though they didn’t see what he did in Westworld, they knew anyway. His wife believed that his good deeds were a ruse, an “inelegant wall I built to hide what’s inside from everyone and from myself.”
Trying to prove her wrong, the Man in Black came to the park and sought to do something truly evil. That’s when he attacked Maeve and her daughter. At first, he felt nothing, but then Maeve, her daughter in her arms, stumbled outside the cabin and fell to the ground. “She was alive, truly alive, if only for a moment,” the Man in Black reminisces. Then, carved in the dirt beneath Maeve, the maze appeared.
A couple of things stand out about the Man in Black’s story. First, it refutes William’s insistence to Dolores in “Contrapasso” that you can do whatever you want in Westworld and “no one in the real world will… know.” That feeling of total secrecy, the belief that Westworld and “real life” are fundamentally separate from each other, was crucial to William’s – and the Man in Black’s – enjoyment of the park.
Also, the image of Maeve lying at the center of the maze hints at the maze’s real purpose: it’s a manifestation of the hosts’ minds, a path toward consciousness. But, of course, the Man in Black sees only the maze, the puzzle to be solved, and not the person at its core.
Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
10. Dolores exposed
Logan is back. Now leading a company of soldiers, he captures Dolores and William and holds them at a camp. For a while, things stay civil, as William attempts to convince Logan to help him help Dolores escape. “She isn’t like the others,” he insists. “She remembers things. She has her own thoughts and desires, and to keep her in a place like this, it isn’t right.” But Logan dismisses him as delusional, deciding that he has fallen under the park’s spell. Doesn’t William remember that he’s engaged to be married?
“It’s time for a wake-up call,” Logan says. He plunges a knife into Dolores’s stomach – the most vulnerable part of a person, according to Bernard – and reveals the wires and machinery inside her. It plays almost like a rape scene, with Logan violently asserting his dominance over Dolores. “Your world,” he boasts, “is built for me and people like me, not for you.” He’s not exactly right; Ford repeatedly implies that he and Arnold didn’t create the hosts with the intention of building a theme park. Nonetheless, it’s true that the park thrives on exploitation, reinforcing the guests’ sense of privilege.
To Logan’s surprise, Dolores fights back. Seizing the knife, she cuts him on the cheek and shoots several nearby hosts with her pistol before fleeing. While she’s running, she hears Arnold’s voice again: “Remember.” The shouting ceases, replaced by an eerie silence. Dolores looks down to see that her stomach is no longer bleeding.
This confirms that the show has been scrambling time. Dolores herself exists in the present, but William and Logan are memories, like the massacre of Dolores’s hometown. We can reasonably assume now that the “William is the Man in Black” theory is correct.
Thandie Newton and Rodrigo Santoro in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
9. Maeve burns it down
Relationships in Westworld tend to resist intimacy. Dolores and Teddy’s old-fashioned romance is sweet but chaste, and Bernard and Theresa’s liaison was fairly casual. That’s why Maeve and Hector are such a blast to watch together.
In preparation for her rebellion, Maeve approaches Hector with an unusual proposition: “I want you to break into Hell with me and rob the gods blind.”
Hell yes, we say. But Hector is skeptical. Maeve starts to cajole him by revealing that she knows about the nihilistic bandit’s mysterious past and can predict his future. He and his fellow thieves, she says, will turn on each other and all end up dead. And that’s what happens, until Maeve goes off-script and shoots Armistice.
She then switches gears. “I could simply change you, make you follow me,” she observes. “But that’s not my way.” Her desire to win allies using empathy rather than force refutes Ford’s belief that all conscious beings seek to dominate others. Like with Felix, Maeve wants Hector to join her willingly, freely. She recreates their meeting at the Mariposa, sitting on top of the safe that he stole and pressing a knife to her stomach, in hopes that it will jog Hector’s memory.
It works. The next thing we know, they’re vigorously making out in a tent. Once again, sex for them is mingled with death, as Maeve kicks over a lantern and sends the whole place up in literal flames. On paper, the scene seems somewhat ridiculous, but actors Thandie Newton and Rodrigo Santro sell it, embracing the melodrama and raw passion.
Plus, the cinematography is spectacular. As the fire gradually consumes Maeve and Hector, they morph from individuals into faceless silhouettes, merging with one another. They also shift to the center of the frame, in control.
James Marsden in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
8. Teddy remembers
While Dolores and Maeve strive to escape from their current situations, Teddy remains stuck in his loop, forced to accompany the Man in Black on his search for the maze. Although in episode eight, he had flashes of memory, recognizing that he met the Man in Black before, they didn’t prompt him to start questioning his reality.
Angela, who has been recast as a member of Wyatt’s gang since William met her, wants Teddy to remember something. When she initially prompts him to talk about his past, he repeats the backstory that Ford gave him. But Angela presses him to think harder, and he realizes the victims of the massacre at Escalante weren’t soldiers, but civilians. His new flashback bears a striking resemblance to the vision Dolores had when she visited her hometown, containing images of the same people getting shot.
Could they be remembering the same massacre? Ford mentioned that his new storyline is based in truth. Plus, during the past few episodes, Teddy and Dolores both shed their virtuous personas, displaying a heretofore unseen capacity for violence, so it isn’t implausible that they could be the perpetrators of a massacre. This makes Dolores Wyatt, Teddy’s nemesis. Cue ominous music.
Paul-Mikél Williams and Jeffrey Wright in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
7. Bernard lets go
Prompted by Maeve, Bernard demands that Ford grant him access to his archived memories. We revisit several earlier scenes, from Bernard’s video conversation with his wife to Theresa’s death. The sequence has a dreamlike quality, each memory flowing into another in no discernible order or pattern.
It inevitably leads to the memory of Charlie’s death, the cornerstone around which Bernard’s entire identity is built. This time, however, Bernard decides to change it, like a lucid dreamer. He orders the nurses and doctors to leave the room and approaches the hospital bed where Charlie lies, ostensibly dead. Then, Bernard instructs, “Come back.” The boy’s eyes open, and he sits up.
“I always thought you had my eyes,” Bernard says. “But that’s not true. You have no one’s eyes. It’s a lie. You’re a lie, Charlie.” He sits on the bed, the tenderness of his gaze and voice clashing with the harshness of his words, and embraces his son. “The pain of your loss,” he continues, “I long for it – revisit it, open it, again and again. But it’s the only thing holding me back. I have to let you go.”
We’re aware that, as Bernard says, this is all a lie, the kind of neat resolution that only fiction can provide (in fact, it’s basically a copy of a scene from Inception). Yet, the moment is still achingly poignant. Bernard’s pain may be programmed, but that doesn’t make it feel less real to him. As he points out to Ford, pain for humans is psychological too – imagined. So, in the end, what’s the difference?
Evan Rachel Wood in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
6. Dolores meets Arnold
Rid of William and Logan, Dolores returns to the church in her hometown, which is now above ground again. She enters. The room is full of hosts mumbling incoherently – the mad subjects of Arnold’s original consciousness experiments. Dolores walks past them and into a confession booth, which is actually an elevator. It takes her down to a hallway lit by flickering fluorescence, bodies strewn across the floor. As she passes through the hall, it comes to life, and her cowboy attire is replaced by her old blue dress. She sees a young Ford storm into a room, demanding that Arnold talk to him, and follows him. She finds herself in the basement where she and Bernard have their talks.
This is cross-cut with Bernard’s earliest memory. He opens his eyes to see Ford standing over him. “Hello, my old friend,” Ford says. After getting dressed and carefully putting on his glasses, Bernard asks, “Who am I?” Ford admits that he hadn’t decided on a name yet, but he suggests Bernard. “But who am I?” Bernard asks again. Ford then shows Bernard the photo of Arnold that he keeps on his office desk, and we see that it now has three people: Ford, Ford’s father, and a man that looks like Bernard.
It’s official, then: Bernard is Arnold, as a host. Arnold joins Dolores in the basement, sitting in a chair across from her. She laments that her search for the maze has only brought her pain and terror. But he can’t help her. “Remember,” he urges. Then, she realizes that Arnold is dead – and she killed him. The camera draws back to show an empty chair. Dolores is alone, except for the faint reflection of her in the glass wall.
Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
5. Dolores finds the maze
While leaving the church, Dolores runs into the Man in Black. In the cemetery outside, they find a wooden cross with the name “Dolores Abernathy” etched across it. The Man in Black watches, befuddled, as Dolores digs up the grave and unearths a small, circular maze, its walls designed so that it looks like a outstretched person is lying at the center. When she stands up, Arnold is there.
“What does it mean?” she asks him. Arnold explains that when he was constructing her mind, he initially imagined the development of consciousness as a pyramid with different steps, but later, it dawned on him that it is more complex – a maze. “Consciousness isn’t a journey upward, but a journey inward,” he says. “Every choice can bring you closer to the center or send you spiraling into madness.”
Dolores struggles to process this information. The last time she was this close to figuring out the maze, she and Arnold had to stop the experiment due to Ford’s disapproval. Instead of rolling her back, though, Arnold combined her programming with that of a host named Wyatt and instructed her to kill all the hosts, hoping it would prevent the park from opening. Still, the solution eludes her.
The Man in Black is even more frustrated. He dismisses the toy maze as “another f***ing riddle” and demands that Dolores give him answers. What’s at the center? Who’s Wyatt? He sounds like a host, denying reality, or a TV viewer unsatisfied with how his favorite show ends. Even though other hosts warned him, he can’t fathom the fact that the maze isn’t about or meant for him.
Ben Barnes and Jimmi Simpson in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
4. William is the Man in Black
At long last, in its season finale, Westworld confirms the theory: William turned into the Man in Black. His transformation was completed after Dolores ran away from Logan. Failing to find her, he ventured to the outskirts of the park, where he discovered that he had a taste for violence. No matter how far he got or what nihilistic fantasies he enacted, though, he couldn’t get Dolores out of his mind.
The last straw came when he returned to Sweetwater and spotted her at the hitching post. He was about to approach, but another guest swooped in first, picking up the dropped can of food that she dropped. Dolores interacted with the guest in the exact same way she interacted with William when they met. Everything they went through together, William realized, was for nothing. Their relationship wasn’t real or special; she didn’t even remember him. So, he dedicated the rest of his life to an obsessive search for answers, proof that Westworld means something.
Needless to say, many viewers predicted this twist. But it doesn’t exist to shock us; what matters is Dolores’s reaction. And naturally, as anyone who found out that the man they thought to be their true love was the same man who brutally assaulted them would be, she’s devastated. This is really the final step on her path toward disillusionment: the realization that there’s no one to save her, not really.
Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
3. Where the mountains meet the sea
Ever gallant, Teddy manages to whisk Dolores, bleeding from a stab wound, away from the Man in Black. They ride to the place he promised he would take her, where the mountains meet the sea. Moonlight bathes the beach, and the sound of waves crashing onto the shore fills the air. It’s the perfect setting for romance.
“You came back,” Dolores says, lying in Teddy’s arms. Teddy responds, “Someone once told me that there’s a path for everyone, and my path leads me back to you.” He suggests that they run away together, but Dolores understands it would be futile. She does a riff on her monologue from the premiere:
"Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world. I choose to see the beauty. But beauty is a loop. We’re trapped, Teddy. We’ve lived our whole lives inside this garden, marveling at its beauty, not realizing there’s an order to it, a purpose. And the purpose is to keep us in. The beautiful trap is inside of us, because it is us."
Then, she dies. The music swells tragically, and after some mourning, Teddy starts talking to no one in particular: “But we can find a way, Dolores, someday, a path to a new world. And maybe it’s just the beginning after all…”
We cut to a wide shot, and the camera pulls back, revealing that an audience has been watching on the beach the whole time. As it turns out, this intimate, if cheesy, moment was all scripted, the introduction to Ford’s new narrative. Even the hosts’ deaths don’t really belong to them.
Evan Rachel Wood in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
2. Dolores finds herself
After he revives Dolores again, Ford fills in the remaining gaps of her history. Arnold convinced her to kill not only the other hosts but also him; in order for the massacre to have an impact, it had to be irreversible. As we know, his plan failed, because Ford managed to create Bernard, and thanks to William, Westworld found sufficient funding. But Arnold’s sacrifice wasn’t entirely in vain. Ford eventually changed his mind about the merits of host consciousness. He used the park to prepare the hosts for their awakening, believing that the trauma they suffer is necessary, a way to learn about the enemy.
He ends his speech by showing Dolores a painting hanging on the wall: The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo. It’s ostensibly religious art, but if you look closely, you can see the contours of a brain in the painting. The message, Ford says, is that “the divine gift does not come from a higher power, but from our own minds.”
Perhaps this is what pushes Dolores to finally figure out that the voice she’s been hearing isn’t Arnold’s, but her own. Sitting in the basement, she sees a version of herself, this one wearing the blue dress, in the chair where Arnold used to be. “I finally understand what you were trying to tell me,” she says out loud. “To confront, after this long and vivid nightmare, myself.” The key to consciousness, then, is the ability to reconcile the different, even contradictory aspects of your identity – in other words, self-acceptance. It’s fitting that a show so interested in the machinery of the mind would climax with a conversation between an individual and herself.
Anthony Hopkins in Westworld season 1, screenshot courtesy of HBO
1. The end
Outside, Ford addresses the board of directors, who have come to celebrate the debut of his new narrative and, tacitly, the announcement of his retirement. The speech he gives is reminiscent of his evolution monologue in the premiere:
"Since I was a child, I’ve always loved a good story. I believe that stories help us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken, and to become the people we dreamed of being. Lies that told a deeper truth. I always thought I could play some small part in that grand tradition, and for my pains, I got this: a prison of our own sins. You don’t want to change, or cannot, because you’re only human after all. But then I realized someone was paying attention, someone who could change. So I began to compose a new story for them. It begins with the birth of a new people, and the choices they would have to make, and the people they would decide to become."
With that, the new narrative begins. Decommissioned hosts, including Clementine, emerge from the woods, now programmed to kill. On stage, Dolores shoots Ford in the head with the gun that she used to kill Arnold – a simultaneous suicide and “screw you” to Delos – before firing into the panicking crowd, seemingly at random. Teddy and Bernard watch in confusion and awe.
At first, this ending was infuriating. Ford is the villain; he’s not supposed to win (if you can call killing yourself winning). Yet, it ultimately makes sense with the show’s critique of violence. By undermining the catharsis of seeing the hosts rebel, Westworld forces us to interrogate the purpose of revenge narratives and blurs binary views of morality. Do the humans deserve what’s coming to them? Are people capable of change? Will this violent end really lead to a new, more hopeful beginning?
Season two will hopefully answer at least the last question. But in the meantime, this is a maze we don’t mind being lost in.
NEXT: Breaking Down The Westworld Terms And Conditions
What do you think, what were your favorite moments from Westworld season 1? Let us know on Facebook or in the comments below.