Westworld season 2, episode 7 recap: “Les Écorchés”

Tonight on Westworld, Dolores and her army assault the Mesa while Charlotte Hale and her team tried to defend it, Maeve confronts the Man in Black, and Bernard picks up a passenger on his way to enlightenment. Episode 207, “Les Écorchés,” was exciting from beginning to end, so let’s get to it.

We open on Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) being awoken by Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) in the present, weeks after the robot uprising started. Stubbs doesn’t trust Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) or Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård) to protect the lives of its employees or guests, but before he and Bernard can discuss it more fully, Strand proves Stubbs right by apprehending him and Bernard and taking them to the secret Delos bunker located in the basement replica of Dr. Ford’s (Anthony Hopkins) childhood home, the same place where Ford had Bernard kill Teresa in season 1.

That’s the subject of this excursion, actually; Teresa’s blood is still on the wall. Strand thinks either Bernard or Stubbs killed her, but right before Strand is about to settle on blaming Stubbs, Bernard speaks up and leads the crew down a secret passage where they uncover a bunch of spare Bernard bodies. I don’t know if that goes toward the murder, but it sure is a good change of subject.

As the revelation that Bernard is a host sinks in, Hale delivers a line fit for a Disney villain: “I figured you’d have some skeletons in your closet, Bernard. I didn’t think they’d be your own.” Ugh. Anyway, the next time we see Bernard, Hale is torturing him in an attempt to discover the location of Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum), so we know immediately that Peter — and probably whatever valuable data Delos wants to suck out of his head — must get taken in Dolores’ attack.

But how? At Charlotte’s urging, Bernard flashes back to the past, where we see Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Teddy (James Marsden) lead their forces in an assault on the Mesa. Coughlin (Timothy V. Murphy) sends his Delos strike team to intercept, but get ambushed by Angela (Talulah Riley) and her team instead. Dolores and Teddy, meanwhile make their way to the the room where Charlotte has Dolores’ father bolted to a table, which is a less than auspicious way to meet someone.

Hale tries to defuse the tense situation by patronizing Dolores into submission, using the Cradle as leverage. It goes to waste. Dolores isn’t phased by the thought of what might happen to all the host backups there; in fact, she’s here specifically to destroy them, reasoning that that’s the only way she and her kind will truly be “free.” Charlotte has nothing here, and is poised to have less still, after Dolores revs up a nasty-looking whirling saw and waves it menacingly in Charlotte’s face. But distant gunfire and Peter Abernathy stirring provide a timely distraction, and Hale and Stubbs escape.

Left alone, Peter tells Dolores it’s okay, and she removes his control unit. It’s an emotional scene, and sort of a heartless thing for Dolores to do, but as we see later in her conversation with Maeve, Dolores thinks that “the kin they gave us” are just another way for the humans to tie them down. Away with them.

Meanwhile, Angela’s team makes it to the Cradle. Angela seduces an idiot Delos QA guy into letting her get close, and then uses his grenades to blow the whole thing to smithereens, killing herself for good in the process. Mission accomplished.

Here’s the important part to remember: That security guy is terrible at his job. Okay, here’s the actual important part to remember: With the Cradle destroyed, the stakes are finally real for the hosts, as they can no longer be recreated and brought back online. Without their backup code stored safely in the Cradle, they can now be killed for good. RIP Angela.

Before the Cradle is destroyed, however, Bernard and Dr. Ford continue the conversation they started at the end of last week’s episode. Ford explains that Westworld was never about providing a vacation spot for the rich, but rather about gathering data on its human visitors so Delos could successfully mimic human behavior. As we saw with JamesDelosBot, the prospect of giving someone immortal life by putting their consciousness in a host’s body is a very seductive one; you can make more money off that than by letting them stay in Violent Disney World.

For his part, Ford had himself uploaded to the Cradle before Dolores killed him in the season 1 finale, but explains that he could only ever exist digitally. If he tried to upload his data into the body of a host, he would degrade rapidly like James Delos did. Much as they’ve tried, Delos’ grand experiment still hasn’t been successful.

But if Delos can’t make functioning human-bots, how do you explain Bernard, who is ostensibly a copy of Arnold, Ford’s old business partner? Ford explains that, too. Ford built Bernard long ago, in the house that Arnold built for his family, the same one we saw in Episode 2. With help from Dolores, who knew Arnold better than anyone, they tested Bernard for similarities to Arnold over the course of many years. But it ends up that Bernard was never supposed to be an exact replica of Bernard. Indeed, Ford seems to find the notion of making exact replicas of actual people distasteful; he’d rather design something new. Bernard embodies much of who Arnold was, but was made to be “nobler” and better than base humans, which may explain for Ford seems so eager for the hosts to conquer their makers.

But he doesn’t trust them completely, apparently. Ford jumps into Bernard’s mind as a passenger, a secret friend only Bernard can see, and guides him through the Mesa. I wonder if co-piloting a host is easier for one mind, or if Ford will still degrade inside Bernard.

Later in the episode, Bernard is confronted with a few Delos security officers. They get confrontational, and while Bernard doesn’t want to commit any more violence, Ford takes over his body, picks up a machine gun, and shoots all the humans in the Mesa map room. He also works the keys at a Delos terminal and opens the “door” (whatever that is) so the hosts can have a chance at surviving the uprising.

While all this is happening, Maeve (Thandie Newton) and her daughter are fleeing from members of the Ghost Nation tribe. They run into an abandoned town and hide inside a house. The Man in Black (Ed Harris) and his men ride into the same town. He enters that same house, which is understandably terrifying for Maeve on account of the Man in Black killing her in front of her daughter in one of her previous narratives, but a lot has changed since then.

Maeve pulls a gun and shoots MIB, who’s under the impression that Maeve is just another marker Ford has left for him, and uses her Jedi mind powers to make his own men turn on him. Lawrence (Clifton Collins Jr.) draws his gun on Maeve just as she’s about to deliver the coup de grâce to MIB, and tells her to drop the gun. Maeve tries her voodoo on Lawrence, but it doesn’t work, and she congratulates him on being “free.”

Apparently, her mind bullets only work on hosts who aren’t free from their narratives, and she implores Lawrence to remember all the horrible things MIB has done to him in the past. Lawrence remembers, and shoots MIB directly in the center of his chest. Just then, Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) shows up with the cavalry: the Delos security forces he called in last week’s episode.

Maeve tries to run for it but is shot several times by the Delos QA team, and falls down watching helplessly as Ghost Nation tribesmen swoop in and grab her daughter. It’s a rough day for her. In the confusion, MIB crawls away and hides behind some barrels. He was shot four times — one of which was center mass — yet somehow he still lives. This may be getting a little ridiculous.

Lee and his Delos teams return to the Mesa, only to find it under attacked by Dolores and Teddy. On her way out, Dolores sees Maeve and offers to end her suffering, but Maeve says she made a promise to her daughter to find her. Maeve also points out some of Dolores’ questionable methods, like turning Teddy into a MurderBot against his will, and says she’s “lost in the dark.” Dolores, ever clear-eyed about her future, maintains that she’s doing what she has to do to free her people from bondage. They kind of have a Professor X/Magneto thing going on; they want the same thing but have different ideas of how to achieve it. I’m curious to see if they come into greater conflict down the line.

Anyway, Dolores honors Maeve’s request and leaves her there, while Lee hides in the corner.

The final scene of the episode is Charlotte Hale interrogating Bernard. She wants to know where Peter Abernathy is. Bernard, after being placed into analysis mode, obliges.

This was an action-packed episode of Westworld. The dialogue was a bit clunky at times, but the fact that the hosts can now be permanently killed is a huge deal.

Next week is the third to last episode of the season, and looks to be a departure. Will it be a worthwhile one?

Next: Watch the trailer for Westworld Episode 208, “Kiksuya”

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