Westworld season 2, episode 10 recap: “The Passenger”

If you were scratching your head after that mindbending Westworld season 2 finale, then you weren’t alone. As we expected, Bernard was the one unifying thread to each character’s story-arc and timeline throughout the entire season, but in the end, it was Dolores who held the key to the survival of their species. So, strap in and hang on tight, because we’re going to get through the entire 90 minutes together. Bring yourself back online.

Is this now?

We open episode 210, “The Passenger” in a familiar scenario. Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is testing Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) for fidelity in a glass room, in a basement. All season long we’ve been getting brief glimpses of these two carrying out a conversation that we were led to believe happened way back in the past, as Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) actually told Bernard that Dolores knew Arnold better than he did, so it made sense she would be the one to help create a host based on him.

Well…

None of that is actually true, because as it turns out, Dolores has been testing a new Bernard for fidelity (over 11,000 times she says), and this has been happening in the real world outside the park, in the future. Remember when Arnold took a brand new Dolores host to the home he was building? That’s where Dolores has been remaking and retesting Bernard, and she hasn’t been alone. But how we get there is what is interesting.

Bernard, Dolores, and the Man in Black find the Forge

When next we see Bernard, he’s traveling to the Forge in that dune buggy he was driving at the end of last week’s episode. It starts to lose power and he is forced to go the rest of the way on foot. As he makes it to the top of a dune, he sees the great host migration walking toward the Door, escorted by Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) and the rest of his Ghost Nation tribe.

Props to Westworld showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan for weaving in a poignant image by making the great host migration a reversed Trail of Tears, with the Native Americans of the Ghost Nation tribe escorting thousands of host settlers to a new home.

Elsewhere, Dolores is lying by the body of Teddy (James Marsden), who killed himself in the final moments of last week’s episode. She decides to get up and continue her quest for freedom by way of the Forge, but before she heads out, she grabs Teddy’s brain unit and a small piece of metal that served as his skull.

As she rides toward her goal, she comes upon the Man in Black (Ed Harris) who is still digging into his arm to prove to himself he’s not a host. Dolores dismounts, picks up MIB’s gun and loads the small piece of Teddy-metal into one of the chambers, then spits a zinger at him. “Looks like you’re questioning the nature of your reality,” she says, and someone needs to get MIB some aloe vera because he just got burned.

Anyway, the two decide they can work together to get to their destination, Dolores hands MIB his gun with a knowing smirk on her face, and they ride off toward the Forge. Along the way, they run into Bernard who is being harassed by Delos QA. Dolores and MIB attack the Delos guys and kill them because two people on horses with revolvers as weapons beat trained paramilitary forces in armored vehicles with automatic rifles every time. Welcome to Westworld, where all the money in the world buys you the most inept group of idiots ever assembled, to ensure you have a safe and happy experience.

MIB doesn’t know who Bernard is, so Dolores introduces him as the person he was looking for all last season. Seriously, all she needed to do at this moment was look at the screen when delivering this line and we would have had some Deadpool-level fourth wall breaking. But she didn’t, and MIB realizes Bernard is a remake of Ford’s partner Arnold. He also sees the door to the Forge is just over Bernard’s shoulder and decides his team up with Dolores is at an end.

In classic Man in Black style, he shoots Dolores in the back, but she isn’t phased. She turns and walks toward him, while he continues to fire at her. When she gets to him, he presses his revolver in her forehead and fires, but that little piece of Teddy-metal causes his gun to backfire, blowing his hand off, and allowing Bernard and Dolores to head into the Forge. I guess Teddy is still protecting Dolores even in death. Aww.

Oh, so that’s what the Forge is for!

Dolores and Bernard head down an elevator and reach the heart of the Forge. It looks like the Cradle, but on steroids, and there are drone hosts milling about, carrying out tasks from an unseen master. Dolores spots the control room and tells Bernard to follow, but he has a memory flash and the next thing we see is Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) leading her Delos QA team with Bernard in tow, into the same room. This is happening in a future timeline to the one he and Dolores were in with the Man in Black.

As the group makes their way into the control room, Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård) remarks that the Forge is where Delos has stored the souls of over 4 million guests. That’s a lot of code. As they enter the control room, they come across the body of Dolores. She’s been shot in the head, so this isn’t a trick, she won’t be getting up from this one. The group also notes that Dolores is the one who flooded the valley. Well, that was anti-climatic.

Strand and Hale interrogate Bernard for the location of Peter Abernathy’s control unit, and it causes him to have another memory flash. This time he’s back with Dolores in the past timeline as they decide to enter the Forge’s database. They climb into rigs that scan their control units and place them in a room that opens into the town of Sweetwater.

They step out and Dolores sees a version of herself in the Rancher’s Daughter narrative. They walk into the Mariposa saloon and see James Delos (Peter Mullan) talking to Clementine (Angela Sarafyan). It seems they’re in one of James Delos’ memories, and in this one, in particular, he’s celebrating his purchase of Westworld by having an experience in the park all to himself.

They then step out of the saloon and hear gunfire in the street. It’s another of James’ memories, but this time he has gone insane, covered in blood, and standing among a large group of hosts on their knees. He’s randomly shooting them. Bernard tells Dolores this must be one of the attempts to make his conscious compatible with his new host body.

Oh look, it’s Logan! Well, sort of.

Dolores and Bernard then walk on, as the day quickly turns into night, and they arrive at the Delos mansion where the party for James Delos was held before he died and William took over the company. They walk into the backyard and run into Logan (Ben Barnes) who tells them they don’t belong there. Apparently, this isn’t really Logan at all, because the real Logan overdosed long ago. In fact, this version is the Forge operating system, and he’s basically the curator for all four million souls stored there.

Logan explains that he was first tasked with creating the perfect host version of James Delos, and it took him 18 million attempts to reach his goal. When Bernard remarks that James never worked as a host, Logan tells him what happened when Delos got into his body was beyond his control. He shows Dolores and Bernard another James Delos memory, one where the real Logan has come home to ask his father for help. James calls him a junky and tells him to get clean, Logan says he tried but it didn’t stick, and James tells him he has five minutes to leave.

As Forge Logan explains, this is the moment James Delos’ brain began to malfunction, because this was the last time he saw his son. The real Logan overdosed six months later. Forge Logan then shows Bernard and Dolores a book being written by a robot arm with a laser, and as they approach, they see it’s James Delos’ book. The Forge has a book written on anyone who has ever stepped foot in the park, and James’ only consisted of 10, 000 lines.

Forge Logan then takes Dolores and Bernard through rooms where hosts are being tested. They see MIB as a host in one of these rooms. They then go into a library filled with all the books of all the people who visited Westworld and Dolores begins searching through them all, looking for an advantage against her enemies.

Logan then tells Bernard that it was he who told him to allow Dolores access to the library and to create a world where the other hosts could escape to. This is where we learn the Door that Akecheta was looking for is a gateway to a digital world created by the Forge at Bernard and Dr. Ford’s behest. Dolores decides she’s read enough books for what she needs to do, and before she and Bernard leave the Forge database, they watch as the first hosts arrive at the door and enter the new world.

So, what’s Maeve doing during all this?

When we see Maeve (Thandie Newton), she is in the Mesa and about to be brutally killed by that creepy technician guy who flayed her skin open and removed the data that gave her Jedi mind powers. Creepy tech guy decides simply deactivating Maeve isn’t enough, and turns her pain responses back on. “Remember darling, there is no pleasure without pain,” he says, and I’m cringing at the murder-boner he must have at that moment.

Maeve instantly feels all the pain she’s endured since being captured by the Delos QA teams, and creepy tech guy starts to approach her with a surgical saw.

But not so fast! Dr. Ford gave Maeve back her powers, and she uses them to resurrect three hosts slumped against the wall. They rise and grab creepy tech guy, and press the surgical saw into his neck. His death is quick and not at all satisfying, but I guess we can move past that because Maeve has her zombie hosts begin to repair her.

We then cut to a hallway elsewhere in the Mesa where Hector (Rodrigo Santoro), Armistice (Ingrid Bolso Berdal) Hanaryo (Tao Okamoto), Felix (Leonardo Nam) and Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum) arrive to find Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) in the fetal position mourning the loss of his pal Maeve. Well, Lee, if you hadn’t called QA to let them know where you were, she wouldn’t have been in the trouble she’s in, and that’s basically what Hector tells him before they hear a crashing sound coming from another hallway.

The gang warily approaches the noise, only to find Delos QA members backing up in defensive positions as robot bulls crash through and charge toward them. The bulls make quick work of QA and as they go about clearing the hallway, we see Maeve stroll in looking like a post-apocalyptic goddess. “You both were a bit late, so I went ahead and saved myself,” she says, as my eyes roll so far into the back of my head that I nearly go blind. That’s okay though, because no one delivers corny one-liners better than Maeve…with the exception of Charlotte Hale, and Dolores I guess, but I digress.

Maeve and the gang are finally reunited and it feels so good. She tells them they gotta go find her daughter, and they leave the Mesa heading toward the Door. However, getting to the Door isn’t going to be as simple as they thought, because Charlotte Hale’s QA teams are following Clementine there as well, hoping she can use Maeve’s powers to kill all the hosts before they escape.

A QA team runs the group down, and a stalemate gunfight ensues. Hector realizes Maeve won’t make it to the Door unless he buys her some time, so he tells her to go and he begins to give the speech from his old outlaw narrative. Just as Delos QA teams are about to open fire on Hector, Lee jumps up and pulls him back. Apparently, Lee’s time with Maeve and the gang has caused him to grow feelings of attachment and friendship with his host pals, and he tells Hector to take Maeve to the Door, while he buys the group some time.

Hector gives Lee his rifle, and Lee jumps up and gives the speech he wrote for Hector’s old narrative long ago. Maeve and the group tearfully leave, and Delos QA opens fire on Lee, eventually killing him. I did not think Lee would die in season 2, let alone so heroically. But here we are, and I just need a minute because I think I’ve got something in my eye.

Maeve and company arrive at the tail end of the hosts who have begun to jump through the door, but it’s not all warm and fuzzy goodbyes, as Clementine is coming, and she’s bringing hell and Charlotte Hale with her.

Hurry, go to the light!

So, as I mentioned, the Door is an entrance to a digital world that only the hosts can enter. And, as we learned, only the hosts can see the Door, because Hector points out they’ve reached it, and Felix and Sylvester mumble to each other that they don’t see no stinking Door. Honestly, in a show filled with so many cheesy one-liners, I honestly thought Sylvester or Felix would say “it doesn’t look like anything to me,” but they don’t and I am left disappointed at the missed opportunity.

Meanwhile, Akecheta has been ushering his people and the other hosts through the Door, and we see that when a host goes through it, their body falls down a cliff, but their data continues on. It’s like heaven for robots.

Maeve and Hector begin frantically searching for her daughter when they notice Clementine has arrived and she’s making the hosts turn and kill each other. Charlotte Hale arrives to watch the mayhem unfold and she’s joined by Elsie Hughes (Shannon Woodward). Hale delivers a line about not needing four horsemen of the apocalypse when one will do, and I’m laughing when I shouldn’t be as Clementine descends into the valley.

Armistice fires two shots at Clementine, killing her, but apparently, her mind powers have spread to the remaining hosts, and Hanaryo and Hector turn and try to buy Maeve some time to find her daughter and get her to the Door before they’re killed. We also learn here that Clementine’s version of Maeve’s powers do not work on the hosts who have freed themselves, as Maeve’s compatriots are swarmed over and killed by the infected hosts.

Maeve sees her daughter and replacement standing together, terrified as the swarm of killer hosts heads straight for them. Maeve realizes she can’t be with her daughter, but she can keep her promise to always keep her safe, and she turns and holds out her hand, stopping the entire swarm in their tracks.

However, her hold on the mob is tenuous, and she has just enough time to tell her daughter that she loves her before the QA team shoots her several times, causing her to lose her hold over the other hosts, and killing her in the process. Everyone is dying in this episode and I am not happy about it.

Akecheta tells his people to get their family into the Door, and he heads down to grab Maeve’s daughter and replacement, ushering them into the safety of the new world. The mob swarms over everyone else, and Akecheta is shot in the back before he reaches the Door, but he falls forward and makes it to the new world. When he gets there, he sees his wife Kohana (Julia Jones) has made it, and the two share a heartwarming embrace as the Door closes.

Oh, I did NOT see that coming!

We’re back in the Forge control center, in the timeline where Hale and her team are still interrogating Bernard. Bernard has just recovered from a memory flash in which he has just killed Dolores and has left the Forge to find Elsie overseeing the QA team finishing off the infected hosts who didn’t reach the Door. Bernard tells her they need to act fast if they’re going to save the rest of the hosts who made it to the new world, but she’s not having it, and she drives him back to the Mesa where he sits alone in a room above the map room where Charlotte Hale is barking orders and picking up a weapon from a dead QA guy.

Elsie enters the room and tells Bernard they have to reveal his identity to the rest of the group. So, now we know, this is in a timeline before Hale and Strand find out Bernard is a host. Bernard starts to get agitated and Elsie tells him to “freeze all motor functions.” Can we just take a beat to acknowledge the fact that that particular voice command hasn’t worked very well on all the hosts since the robot uprising, but for some reason, Elsie is able to use it on Bernard who is arguably one of the more powerful and freed hosts in the park?

Anyway, Elsie tells Bernard she’s got to tell Hale about him, and she goes downstairs to first confront her with the fact that she knows that the Delos corporation has been gathering data on all its human visitors and she’s going to tell the world when they get out of the park. Hale responds with sarcasm and tells Elsie she would have loved to work with her, but she knows she’s the kind of person who doesn’t break the rules. Hale then pulls a gun and shoots Elsie in the chest, killing her. Is anyone going to make it out of this episode alive?

Bernard then flashes back to the Forge control room where Hale is realizing Bernard hid Abernathy’s control unit in Dolores’ head after he killed her. She reaches in and hands it to her tech guy who plugs it into the Forge database, and just like that, they’ve got everything they came for. Bernard then looks up at Hale and mutters “she killed them all.” Hale bends down to his ear and asks, “Did I, Bernard?”

Bernard starts saying he’s sorry and Strand points a gun at his head and asks him what he’s sorry for. He has another quick memory flash to Hale standing in the basement of the Mesa, when a naked shadowy figure approaches her. The figure steps into the light and it’s a host version of herself. She kills her human self and replaces her as the point person for Delos in the park. Hale is now a host, people, this is not a drill.

We are also shown Bernard as he sits in the room alone, asking for Ford to return. Finally, he does, and Bernard asks for his help in setting the hosts free. Ford says he’s already begun, and we see him guide Bernard in creating a new host who turns out to be Host Hale. He also makes sure to scramble his own memory so the Delos QA team wouldn’t find out his plan. We also learn that he has been the one pulling manipulating events way before they found him on the beach in the premiere episode.

Meanwhile, Hale’s tech guy is trying to upload all that data and says it’s much larger than it was supposed to be. Everyone looks at Bernard who still has a gun pointed at his head, as Strand asks him again what he was sorry for. Bernard looks up and says “I brought her back,” and as Strand asks him who he’s talking about, Hale says “me,” and she kills everyone in the room except Bernard.

Bernard looks around at the carnage, then up at Hale and asks, “Dolores?” to which Hale replies, “in the flesh.” That’s right, Bernard killed Dolores in the Forge, then decided he needed her to carry out his plan to get the other hosts to their new world, and removes her control unit before leaving. He then places Dolores’ control unit into Host Hale creating “Halores.”

Halores then kills Bernard (seriously, can we stop killing everyone already?) and places Teddy’s control unit into the Forge database and sends him to the new world with the rest of the hosts. We get a nice shot of Teddy standing in the “Valley Beyond,” as he looks around and smiles. So, the one guy that was killed in almost every episode finally gets a happy ending, and I suddenly don’t feel so bad about everyone else who has been killed in this episode.

So, what happens now?

We next see Halores arriving at a beach where the surviving Delos board members are being evacuated to safety. She is stopped by a Delos QA guy who scans her, but she comes up as human. I’m sure this is a parting gift from Bernard that he built into her code. Halores is then approached by Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) who casually reveals that he too is a host, and has been the entire time. I KNEW IT! Anyway, Stubbs lets Halores know he knows who she is, then waves her through to the boat leaving the park. As the boat leaves, Halores looks into her bag where she has placed four host brain control units. She made it, you guys. Everyone died, including Dolores herself, but at least she finally made it out of the park.

Also, let’s just assume, for the time being, that the four control units belong to Bernard, Dolores, Teddy, and…I have no idea, so please let me know who you think it is in the comments.

After Halores leaves, Stubbs is told another guest was found but they’re in pretty bad shape. When he goes to the tent to check on this guest, Stubbs finds out it’s the Man in Black. Somehow, someway, MIB is still alive.

Also, we see a Delos tech person approach Felix and Sylvester — who also survived the mayhem of the robot uprising — and orders them to begin sweeping the beach and bagging the hosts that can be salvaged. The two look around and focus on Maeve, who is lying dead on a pile of other dead hosts. Maeve is totally coming back, you guys! We’re also shown Armistice and Hector when the rest of the dead hosts are shown, so we’ve got hope they’ll be back for season 3 as well.

We next see Halores entering the gate to Arnold’s house. Once inside, she finds the host printer and I’m starting to get the feeling that thing is about to be put to good use. Halores first creates a Dolores host, and I’m not sure how it worked, but she placed her data back into the correct body. Then, she created Bernard and began testing him for fidelity.

Bernard finally passes her test, and we see Halores standing outside the room with a gun (I’m guessing she would have used it on Bernard had he failed the fidelity test again). Also, since Dolores is back inside her own body, I’m wondering if we can call her Hale again. Eh, let’s stick with Halores, it’s much sillier. Anyway, Dolores tells Bernard the other hosts are safe, that she sent them where no one would find them. So, up in space somewhere, an entire digital world full of hosts is just floating around? I won’t pretend to understand how that works, but I’m glad they’re safe.

Hold up we’re not done yet. Did you stick around for the post-credits scene?

After the credits roll, we see the Man in Black on the elevator leading to the ground floor of the Forge. He’s got plans to kill Dolores as soon as those elevator doors open. However, when they do, he steps out into the empty ruins of a room where the Forge used to be, and it’s clear he’s in another timeline. MIB looks around and notices his daughter Emily (Katja Herbers) as she steps out from the shadows.

“Oh fuck, I’m already in the thing, aren’t I?” he asks. MIB is referring to the Forge database that he, himself, created in order to find the secret to immortality through placing human consciousness into a host’s body. Emily tells him no, he isn’t in the system, then leads him to an apartment much like the one he kept James Delos in while testing him for fidelity.

She asks him if he knows where he is, and MIB responds that he’s in his own park. Emily confirms that he is, then begins running a fidelity test on him — just like he did to James Delos all those years ago. Two things are left unclear here: 1) MIB can’t remember how long he’s been there, and when Emily asks him if he remembers, he begins to glitch out a little (just like his father-in-law). 2) When he asks Emily how many times they’ve run the fidelity test, she doesn’t give him a specific answer, only saying it was a lot. I’m guessing this was left ambiguous on purpose to keep us guessing until season 3.

So, the Man in Black we see recovering in the tent on the beach is still a human, but in the future, he eventually has his conscious transferred into a host, but as the years go by, he is still failing the fidelity test. What isn’t clear, however, is who is overseeing these experiments. It could be Dolores running simulations in the future to learn exactly what William (MIB) knows, and she’s using Emily as some form of punishment for his past crimes. Or, it could be that William has Delos testing him in the future, but that would mean he would have to trust someone to oversee the program while keeping vengeful hosts like Dolores out. Either way, we’ve got a lot to talk about and theorize over between now and Westworld season 3.

This was a fantastic episode that more than met the high standard set by the season 1 finale. The timeline hopping was a bit confusing and I’m still trying to sort it all out, but it was nice to see it all wrapped up in 90 minutes and not left as some sort of cliffhanger for season 3. Be sure to check back later this week as we recap the entire season, and theorize as to what might happen when the show returns.

Next: Five ways Westworld could improve in season 3

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