Reddit may have cracked the biggest twist from Westworld season 2

Westworld is known for its mind-melting plot twists spanning multiple timelines, and for the jaw-dropping reveals that spawn Game of Thrones-level theorycrafting among fans. Creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have publicly acknowledged that fans on the Westworld subreddit figured out most of the major plot twists in season 1 before they happened. Will history repeat itself?

If Redditor subvrsteve has anything to say about it, yes. Subvrsteve has crafted a theory that seems to predict, with specificity, a major twist coming down the pipeline. Does it hold up? Let’s take a look, but beware major SPOILERS…potentially.

Some setup: Westworld is a futuristic theme park populated by robotic hosts designed to entertain the high-paying human guests. In the season 2 premiere, “Journey Into Night,” we spent a lot of time with Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), the head of programming at Westworld and, as he discovered in season 1, a host himself. But throughout the episode, he — and we — switch between different timelines.

In one set of scenes, Bernard is scrambling for his life in the immediate aftermath of the host uprising that ended season 1 — call that Timeline A. Another set of scenes is set some weeks later, after Delos, the company that owns Westworld, has sent in rescue teams to help the humans still stranded there — call that Timeline B. Bernard begins Timeline B by by waking up on a beach, dazed. We don’t know what happened between these two spaces in time, and by the way Bernard behaves in Timeline B, he’s having trouble, too. We end the episode in Timeline B, as Bernard and Delos security chief Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård) look out over a sea full of host corpses. Bernard, confused and hushed, confesses that he killed “them all.”

Subvrsteve’s theory is going to help make sense of all this. Basically, it posits that the Bernard in Timeline B isn’t Bernard at all.

Let me explain. During two points within the episode, we see the removing of robotic brains from inside the hosts. This is something we never saw in season 1; the show is drawing our attention to it.

Subvrsteve’s theory posits that, by the time Bernard wakes up on that beach in Timeline B, his CPU has brain has been switched with that of another host: Teddy Flood (James Marsden).

Game of Thrones fans had R+L=J. Now Westworld fans have B=T.

So where’s the evidence for this? Besides Bernard’s furtive behavior in Timeline B, subversteve points to how much Bernard’s clothing looks like what Teddy usually wears after Bernard wakes up on the beach, as seen above. The plain color scheme is similar, and both outfits feature a jacket over a vest. If Teddy’s brain is in Bernard’s body, then he might want to dress in something familiar.

Then there’s Bernard’s confession at the end of the episode that he killed “all” the hosts floating in the sea. (Incidentally, one of the dead hosts in the water was Teddy himself, as the camera took care to show us.) Teddy was known for killing large numbers of hosts in season 1; he was a bounty hunter by trade, and we saw him kill a whole battalion of Union soldiers alongside the Man in Black. He also helped Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) kill all the hosts in the park’s first-ever town in her Wyatt narrative.

At one point in the episode, Bernard has a jumbled flashback, and we see a quick shot of him mowing down Delos workers with a machine gun. The similarities are starting to pile up.

Then, in the season 2 trailer, there’s a quick shot of the Delos board member Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) looking at three copies of Bernard, somewhere in a dark room. Teddy could have had his CPU brain put in one of these copies, leaving Bernard alive and well, to help Dolores and the other hosts from behind the scenes.

The next clue comes in the form of the infamous primer video, better known to non-die-hard Westworld fans as the time Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy Rick Rolled the internet.

Yes, this video was a joke from the showrunners, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any genuine Westworld footage in it before things get funny. At around the 1:00 mark, we see Bernard wake up on the same train that delivers Teddy to the town of Sweetwater after every time Teddy is killed and reset. In that video, Bernard looks down at his hands, and they’re white, and look like Teddy’s. Here’s a comparison:

We also saw Bernard looking at his hands a lot in the season 2 premiere, almost as if he didn’t recognize who they belonged to.

Now, all of these things could be clues pointing us toward the conclusion that Bernard and Teddy switch brains at some point in between Timeline A and Timeline B, or that Teddy’s brain is implanted in a copy of Bernard while the “real” one runs around trying to help the hosts achieve self-awareness. B=T confirmed.

OR, this could be Nolan and Joy, showrunners known to enjoy trolling their audience, leading us down the wrong rabbit hole. We’ll find out more when Westworld season 2 marches on this Sunday at 9:00 p.m. EST with “Reunion.”

Next: Korean trailer for Westworld season 2 reveals new footage

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