Westworld’s second season finale, “The Passenger,” is still fresh on everyone’s mind, and we’re trying to make sense of everything that happened during its 90-minute runtime. It’s a difficult one to get your head around, but one things for sure: creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have packed it full of Easter eggs and callbacks to earlier episodes, and attentive fans have picked up on them. Did you catch these details?
Let’s start our review of the second season finale where the first one ended: with Dr. Ford’s final speech and death. “An old friend once told me something that gave me great comfort, something he had read,” he said. “He said that Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin never died. They simply became music.”
Fast forward to the scene in “The Passanger” where Logan Delos (or a digital librarian who looks like Logan Delos) is showing Bernard and Dolores around the Forge. They come upon a robotic arm writing everything that makes James Delos who he is in a book. Like all humans, James Delos’ identity can be summed up in 10,000 lines of code.
What’s interesting is the form the code takes: it looks like the sheets read by the player piano in the Mariposa saloon. People becoming music indeed:
"They simply became music"
Moving on, remember when Bernard and Elsie found an insane host modeled after James Delos in a top-secret bunker below the park? “I’m all the way down now,” the host said as it cut its face. Redditor theBesh was quick to point out that this is what Logan said to his father months before he died of a drug overdose.
"View post on imgur.com"
That was the final time Logan reached out to his father before his death. As Forge Logan told us, that moment was the defining event in James Delos’ life. Every time the host version got to that memory, it began to go insane, which is why it never passed the fidelity test William administered for 30 years.
Sticking with the scene in the Forge, Redditor meleiys noticed that as Logan leads Dolores and Bernard through the complex, they pass some familiar faces doing the exact same things we saw them doing in season 1:
This could mean everything that happened in the Mesa was recorded and is being replayed as Bernard looks into each room. Alternatively, maybe all of that was bound to happen, since human beings and hosts alike can only live according to their code.
The Forge held some wackier Easter eggs, too. Redditor bigmattyh spotted a book bearing a symbol from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.
So either Adams visited at some point, or a set decorator was having some fun.
Books on characters Charlotte Hale and Karl Strand were also among the stacks. Delos has profiles of everyone.
Finally, Redditor Prefered4 caught a glimpse of something in the Forge library that resembled the astrolabe from the Game of Thrones opening theme (and the one in the Citadel library):
Others commenters noted that the lighted globe in the Forge is called an Armillary sphere and may not be related to Game of Thrones, but we’ll let you judge for yourself.
Okay, let’s move on from the Forge and connect a few of the plot dots, just in case anyone missed them. In “Akane no Mai,” aka “The One in Shogun World,” Delos tech expert Antoine Costa noted that the dead hosts recovered from the flooded valley in the season premiere had “virgin” control units; it was as if they had never held any data before. In the season 2 finale, we learned why: when the hosts went through the Door in the finale, their code was uploaded into the Valley Beyond while their now-useless bodies fell off a cliff. When Dolores flooded the Valley, those bodies floated to the top where they were found by Costa and his team.
Still not sure how Teddy got there, though. That must be one big valley.
Another connection you may have missed: In season 1, Hector (Rodrigo Santoro) was going to give an epic speech when he and his gang robbed the Mariposa Saloon, but he killed before he could get going. In the season 2 finale, he attempts to give it again, but Delos lead narrator Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) steps in and makes it instead, giving Maeve and crew time to get away from the QA team. Sizemore did write the speech, after all.
"You wanted me? Well, let this be a lesson. And the lesson is: if you’re looking for a reckoning, a reckoning is what you’ll find. If you’re looking for a villain, then I’m your man. But look at yourselves. This world you’ve built is bound by villainy. You sleep on the broken bodies of the people who were here before you. Warm yourselves with their embers. Plow their bones into your fields. You paid them for this land with lead, and they’ll pay you back in full. You wanted me? Well, all I could say to that is here I fucking am!"
Are there any Easter eggs from the Westworld season 2 finale that we’ve left out? Let us know in the comments.
Next: The cast and crew of Westworld explain the Valley Beyond
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 Channel