Westworld returned for its season 2 premiere on Sunday night, and it was up to its old timeline-hopping tricks. “Journey Into Night” opens in the past, with Arnold (Jeffrey Wright) having a chat with Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) in one of the pair’s candid “therapy sessions.” Arnold describes a dream he had where Dolores and the “others” stood on a distant shore, while he stood alone, left behind. The opening dialogue sets the tone for the episode, which is book-ended by Bernard. In short order, we take a rapid-fire journey back through his memory, seeing glimpses of his role in the aftermath of the season 1 finale where Dolores led her fellow hosts in a murderous uprising against the Delos board of directors.
In the present, Bernard wakes up on a beach lying face down in the sand and surf. As he shakily tries to get his bearings, newcomer Maling (Betty Gabriel) approaches him, her gun drawn; she suspects he’s a host, which he is, but she doesn’t know that, and it’s complicated. Thankfully, Westworld security chief Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) is there. He recognizes Bernard and tells Maling not to kill the boss. Later, she consults a deck of red cards with the faces of Westworld staff members on them; Bernard is listed as high priority.
It’s odd that Stubbs referred to Bernard as the boss. It’s also odd that, the last time we saw of the head of security, he was being attacked by a band of Ghost Nation warriors. But just two weeks after the host uprising he’s looking fit as a fiddle. Food for thought.
Anyway, Stubbs and Maling bring Bernard through a Delos forward camp and present him to new head of security Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård), the man tasked with bringing Dolores and her murderous robotic kin to justice. In the process, he orders someone “off his island,” confirming that Westworld is, in fact, located on an island somewhere. Congratulations, Reddit: you figured it out.
As Strand is introducing himself to Bernard, they walk past security personnel who are killing hosts. This seems to shake Bernard a bit, but he hides it well. Strand orders another newcomer, Antoine Costa (Fares Fares), to remove one of the newly deceased host’s brains (or CPU, I suppose) to see its final moments. In order to get to the host brain, Costa must remove its scalp, revealing the same maze map on the inside the Man in Black discovered in season 1, from another host’s scalp. It seems this is Dr. Ford’s super fucked-up business card.
The host’s final moments are played out for those in attendance, and Bernard is shocked to see Dolores is responsible for killing it, meaning she is willing to kill her own kind. “Not all of us deserve to make it to the valley beyond,” she tells the Ghost Nation host before she kills him. That’s not how to make friends in your new world, Dolores, but I digress.
Shifting in time to immediately after the host uprising, we see Dolores as Wyatt, chasing down a bunch of Delos board members. She and Teddy (James Marsden), along with several of those creepily masked outlaws from season 1, are hunting humans and murdering them in increasingly twisted ways, including making them stand on top of grave markers with ropes around their necks while Dolores taunts them. The humans beg for mercy, and in a truly meta moment, Dolores turns back as if she might deliver that it, but then pulls up short. “Doesn’t look like anything to me,” she says. Goddamn, I love this new savage Dolores.
But Teddy isn’t taking as much pleasure in all the murder and mayhem, and Dolores knows it. He asks her if this is what she really wants, and she explains that humans are walking among them, but aren’t like them. She also says that it won’t be enough to take Westworld, and that they’ll have to take the outside world from the humans, too. Is she planning a worldwide robot apocalypse? Dolores is queen of Earth by the series finale?
She also tells him she has something to show him. What could it be? It probably has something to do with whatever Angela (Talulah Riley) reports to Dolores that she’s found.
Oh, and did I mention that Angela and some of Wyatt’s men set a trap to ambush and slaughter some escaping Delos board members? The scene was straight out of The Hills Have Eyes, and I totally dug it.
Next, we return to Westeros headquarters — Mesa HQ — to see what’s happening above the park. Delos lead narrator Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) is being attacked by a ghoulish cannibal host, but just before he kills poor Lee, Maeve (Thandie Newton) steps in and commands the host to stop. It seems that Maeve is more lenient that Dolores, although they have points of view in common. She walks away from Lee, but he begs her to stop, and in return, he promises to show her where her daughter is.
The two share some hilarious banter as Maeve tracks down and finds her man, Hector (Rodrigo Santoro). She needs his help maneuvering the navigating the pitfalls one encounters when exploring a theme park at war, and he’s more than willing to provide it.
We now come to what Bernard did during the uprising, something we haven’t seen yet as the episode, in classic Westworld fashion, has been hopping around in time. We see him and the aforementioned ambushed Delos board members, including Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), hiding out in a barn as hosts make sport of killing humans outside. It seems as if Bernard doesn’t really understand what’s going on, and I think I know why:
Remember in season 1 when Dr. Ford commands Bernard to shoot himself in the head, but then Maeve and company come across him and she decides to bring him back online? Apparently, that head wound caused him to lose precious…brain juice, for lack of a better term, and he’s starting to malfunction. Bernard can’t tell what end is up right now — or where he is in the timeline. “Is this now?” he says in a callback to what Dolores asked William (Jimmi Simpson) in season 1.
So, after Angela ambushes the other board members in their group, Bernard and Charlotte make their way to a top-secret bunker hatch. Apparently, being the HBMIC (Head Board Member in Charge) has its perks, one of them being access to a super-cool lair where “drone hosts” walk around looking nefarious and carrying out varying tasks. And those drones are unregistered, meaning Dr. Ford didn’t create them or have an opportunity to upload his reverie update in them, so they did not take part in the uprising.
However, in order to get to this secret lair, Bernard had to pass a “DNA sniffer,” meaning Ford had knowledge of it and bypassed the system so that one day Bernard could enter without setting off alarms. While down in the bunker, Bernard finds a recently deceased host and steals its brain fluid, buying himself and his malfunctioning robot brain some time. Phew, that was close. Still, though, those drones are extremely creepy, and I’ve got a feeling we’ve not seen the last of them.
Moving on, we finally catch up to the Man in Black (Ed Harris), and what happened to him during the uprising. He survived, obviously, and he’s very happy the hosts are fighting back. MIB has his own cabin in the park, and his horse is named Ned. When he arrives at his cabin, a Delos board member finds him and pleads for help gets really angry about his situation in a perfect storm of mismatched priorities, but before that can go anywhere, two renegade hosts emerge and kill the board member.
MIB then kills the two hosts, goes inside the cabin and opens a chest containing his signature black hat, along with his clothes and weapons.
Soon after, he comes upon a campsite where everyone is lying dead. He dismounts and rummages for water and food when he hears the voice of a little boy. It’s Dr. Ford’s robotic younger self (Oliver Bell), and he’s talking to the Man in Black as if Ford himself is still alive and remotely operating the host. He tells MIB a new game has started, and that he must find a door. MIB’s in Dr. Ford’s game now, but at least it’s “for you.” MIB is weirdly excited by this (“The stakes are real now”) and shoots the kid in the face. Classic Man in Black.
Back in the present, Bernard and Delos security drive dune buggies across the park. Costa has his Delo control pad tracking a large concentration of hosts in one area of the park, but when they arrive, all they see is water. They’re confused because the maps don’t show a large body of water there, meaning it has been recently added. On their way to the shoreline, the group comes across the carcass of a tiger. They are all perplexed, as tigers aren’t part of Westworld and hosts aren’t supposed to migrate across park borders. It looks like we’ll be getting some fun crossovers this year, although the cat is clearly not from Shogun World.
Costa announces that he’s found all the hosts. The group gathers round, and sees the newly formed body of water is packed with host corpses, including Teddy. They’re all dead. As Bernard and Strand approach the shoreline, Strand tells Bernard he needs his help and asks him what happened. Bernard hangs his head, visibly shaken, and replies. “I killed them. All of them.” Roll credits.
This 70-minute episode was a superb way to kick off the new season of Westworld. Writers Lisa Joy and Roberto Patino and director Richard J. Lewis delivered hit after hit. The story never lagged, and it effectively set up the rest of the season.
Next: Watch the trailer for the next nine episodes of Westworld season 2
To stay up to date on everything Game of Thrones, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.
Watch Game of Thrones for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels