Westworld season 2, episode 2 recap: “Reunion”
Westworld Episode 202, “Reunion,” taught viewers a valuable lesson: Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) has been listening and remembering everything that’s happened to her since she was first brought online by her maker, Arnold. The episode begins with a cold open: Arnold is talking to Dolores in a hotel room overlooking a modern city at night. “It looks like the stars have been scattered across the ground,” Dolores says. “Have you ever seen anything so full of splendor?”
We’re 30 years in the past, in yet another timeline. A young Dr. Ford (voice of Anthony Hopkins) walks into the room and asks Arnold if Dolores is ready. Apparently, the two are trying to lure investors to the park, but Dolores won’t be a part of it. Instead, Ford sends Angela (Talulah Riley) and Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) to a bar to meet up with Logan Delos (Ben Barnes), who’s having drinks and flirting with some dude.
Not knowing the pair are hosts, Logan accompanies them to a private party where they challenge him to spot the host among the humans. When Angela reveals that every person in attendance is a host, Logan is blown away and immediately begins an orgy. Classic Logan.
We hop timelines to right after Dolores began her uprising. She and Teddy (James Marsden), along with Angela, walk into the Delos Mesa HQ, where lab techs are blissfully and ignorantly going about the task of repairing dead hosts, resetting them, and sending them back into the park. Before they arrive, however, a Delos board member frantically runs into the room and tries to warn the techs about the robot revolution, but he’s too late.
This is what Angela told Dolores she found in the premiere episode, and it’s also what Dolores said she wanted Teddy to see for himself. Until this moment, Teddy had been blindly following her, but at Delos HQ, his eyes are finally opened. Teddy is starting to wake up and see the world around him for what it really is: fake. Predictably, he’s upset and roughs up the board member against a wall, but he still doesn’t seem to be completely buying into Dolores’ sinister endgame, whatever it is.
Dolores interrogates the board member, who tells her that the company will send between 600 and 800 men to quell the uprising. Teddy is worried about that show of force and tells Dolores they need an army to combat that many men. Dolores is way ahead of him, and has a lab tech revive a Confederate soldier, knowing he will lead her to a larger group of soldiers who she can use to swell her ranks.
Dolores, Teddy, and Angela follow the soldier as he returns to his unit, led by Major Craddock (Jonathan Tucker). Along the way, they have a brief run-in with Maeve (Thandie Newton), Hector (Rodrigo Santoro) and Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) who is comically dressed as the stable boy from the premiere episode.
This felt like it should have been a much bigger deal. Dolores and Meave have a quick back and forth, then Maeve asks Dolores to step aside and let them pass, and she does. That’s it. Hopefully, this isn’t the last time the two come together.
Dolores tells the Major they need to join forces, but he initially refuses, so she has Angela and Teddy gun the soldiers down. Once they’re dead, Dolores has them brought back online, convincing them to follow her.
In the same timeline, the Man in Black (Ed Harris) finds his old pal Lawrence (Clifton Collins Jr.), rescues him from a narrative that would have seen him killed, and the two head into a town where MIB tries to explain that none of Lawrence’s world is real.
We jump back to 30 years in the past, where William (Jimmi Simpson) is hosting a retirement party for his father in law, James Delos (Peter Mullan). Previously, William brought James to Westworld to show him the park in its infancy, hoping to get him to invest. It worked, and now William is being prepared by his father in law to take over the company.
Dolores is there, playing the piano. when it gets dark, she walks out onto the lawn to gaze at the city lights. Logan, who is pointedly NOT being prepared by his father to take over the company, is slouching in a chair, injecting some sort of drug into his arm. After Logan and William’s trip to the park in season 1, Logan has become a shell of his former self. He recognizes Dolores, of course, and tries to carry on a conversation with her. It doesn’t work. No more orgies for poor Logan.
Later, we see Dolores back at Delos HQ, being reset and prepped to send back into the park. William walks in and tells her to bring herself back online. It’s clear William is bitter about Dolores not remembering who he was and even admits to falling in love with her. He then tells her to follow him, and the two walk out to the top of the Mesa, where a huge machine hangs over a pit — it’s the same machine Dr. Ford used to shape his final narrative in season 1. “Have you ever seen anything so full of splendor?” he asks, repeating Dolores’ line from earlier. We have a motif.
Back in the present, the MIB and Lawrence enter the lawless town of Pariah, where everyone seems to be dead. As they reach the town’s center, a man asks them what they’re doing there, as his gang surrounds them. The man removes his hat revealing his identity to be El Lazo (Giancarlo Esposito — Gus Fring from Breaking Bad), the same character Lawrence himself played in season 1 — or, the host who is now Lawrence. This show is confusing. Anyway, MIB tries to recruit El Lazo and his men to help him find the Door (the game Dr. Ford started him on in the season 2 premiere), but El Lazo, channeling Dr. Ford tells him he can’t because this game was meant for him alone.
El Lazo and his men then point guns at their own heads and pull the triggers. And just like that, MIB and Lawrence are alone again.
Finally, we see Dolores and Teddy riding at the head of her new army. They arrive at the edge of a bluff and stop. Dolores is looking at something she calls beautiful. Teddy asks her what it is. She replies that an old friend showed it to her one time, and that it was a mistake on his part. Dolores calls whatever they’re looking for a weapon, which is when we see the giant earth-moving machine from earlier in the episode.
I think Dolores will use this machine to create the body of water from the premiere episode, the same body of water we saw all those dead hosts floating in. She’s going to combat the Delos security team by shaping the landscape to her liking.
“Reunion” jumped around the timelines quite a bit, but got one major point across: Dolores is using her memories to fight back against her former masters.
Teddy’s eyes were opened, but it’s clear he isn’t fully on board with killing everyone and everything in their path, and that he, like the audience, still doesn’t understand what that path is. But hey, at least he didn’t die again…or yet.
The Man in Black is playing the game he always wanted, but whether he likes it or not, Dr. Ford is somehow making up the rules as he progresses. Bernard, Charlotte and the rest of the Delos team were nowhere to be found in “Reunion,” but hopefully we’ll see them next Sunday in Episode 203, “Virtù e Fortuna.”
Next: Watch the trailer for “Virtù e Fortuna,” the third episode of Westworld season 2
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