Our in-depth Westworld season 2 finale continues here!
Caution: Westworld Season 2 finale SPOILERS AHEAD!
Deja Valley Loop: Bern here before
We then switch to the scene in an earlier timeline closer to the start of this season, where Delos Inc had drained a part of the Valley to which Bernard was escorted to by Karl and Charlotte. Karl is discussing his status and says he needs to be kept together until they find Peter Abernathy’s control unit. Note that Bernard is not wearing glasses.
Stubbs is also with them, and he is arguing with Karl, as they are informed that human signs have been detected in a nearby location. Stubbs wants to rescue the guests with the boats they came in on, but Karl says they are not there for the guests. Stubbs informs him that this is a direct violation of park protocol, so Karl sarcastically invites him to file a complaint.
Stubbs has had enough and gets mad, but Charlotte intervenes and tells him to locate the guests on foot, while they continue their operation. Stubbs heads off, while Charlotte takes Bernard in boats to the area that has been drained.
As they make their way to their location on foot, Karl wants to know from Bernard why the hosts are all heading there.
Charlotte intervenes, by saying he doesn’t know, and to stop wasting time but it is not known at this point, why she is defending Bernard and is not interested in the mass movement by the hosts. She points at the Forge saying it is the location where they need to go, as to what they need– namely Peter’s control unit, is located there.
As they walk along a ridge, Bernard surveys the surrounding area in the valley below and sees an abandoned buggy, which is the exact same one he used to get the Valley Beyond earlier, after having abandoned Elsie in the previous episode.
Dolores and Bernard; a Forge to be reckoned with
We then switch to Bernard but this time with his glasses, being led by Dolores into the heart of the Forge. It looks like a huge version of the CR4-DL, with its lovely ambient red lighting, servers and mainframes to house the data surrounded by areas of water used to cool the system.
The scene shifts back to Bernard entering the facility with Charlotte and Karl, as he says the Forge holds over four million ‘souls’. Their technician informs them that the security encryption protocols have locked the system, and all data is inaccessible, though intact.
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Charlotte asks Bernard if this is the place where all the host stories came to an end. They stumble upon the body of Dolores, and Karl surmises that she flooded the valley. He then asks why Bernard accompanied her there and what she was looking for. As they still have not located Abernathy’s key from Bernard, they begin torturing him again to extract the information.
However, the tech argues that he has over 20 years of data stored in his head, and it could take just as long to isolate the piece of information they are looking for. Bernard pleads for them to stop, saying he can’t help them. As he sits cowering on the ground, he hears Charlotte say: “It’s perverse, their ambition.”
The scene changes back to Dolores and Bernard in the Forge, who asks her if it is the Promised Land that Ford had in mind for the hosts. Dolores informs him that it does contain another land, but not the one she is trying to access.
She invites Bernard to join her in the immersive world of the Forge, so he can see the Promised Land for himself, and uses Peter’s control host unit or pearl to unlock the system and gain access into the Forge.
Bernard now enters the world, which is ‘just like the one outside’ and follows Dolores through a door into Sweetwater as she sees herself playing out a narrative in that timeline. They enter the Mariposa Bar and Bernard identifies James Delos who is talking to the Madame.
It seems the operating system is running the immersive world and the host narratives, and it can also create new narratives. It recreated the Mariposa Bar scene from James Delos’ memories but the narratives it has created are corrupted. The operating system has stitched different memories from various timelines together to form a warped loop sequence.
In this version of events, Clementine is the Madame, and she is repeating the words Maeve was reprogrammed to say. As the scene progresses and we follow Dolores and Bernard through another door of the Mariposa Bar, where we see two different memories of James Delos merged together, with his face full of cuts.
These cuts were the result of his time in the goldfish bowl from the fourth episode with William, when he was under analysis and cuts his face in front of the mirror as he questions his reality–but it has been combined with the memory from his first week at the park.
Dolores sees that he is randomly shooting the hosts that are trying to escape him and calls him insane. However, Bernard says this glitch happened to hosts as well, where small changes in their programming led to large corruptions in the software code and erratic changes in behavior–stating that humans have a narrow range to describe what is ‘insane’ adding that most states of consciousness are insane.
Login to Logan OS
Bernard then just flat-out asks Dolores what they are looking for, and she says it is something below this world, namely the ‘operating system’ itself. Bernard says the system was not designed for a conscious mind to enter, and that they may not be able to see the system.
Dolores and Bernard arrive at the Delos Mansion at night time which is another recreation from the memory of James Delos. Dolores comments that perhaps the system has revealed itself to them, as they enter the area.
They discuss the place as they make their way to the rear of the mansion and Dolores takes in the view of the skyline of a distant city. They hear a voice telling them that they are not supposed to be here, and we see Logan sitting nearby. Dolores says he should not be there either, as he only visited the park once and did not return after William took control.
She says the system would not have a copy of him. He disagrees, saying he only has the memories of his father and that they are imperfect. He then says in addition to building all these walls, I play all the roles too. This implies that Dolores is in a dialogue directly with the operating system controlling the place who is portrayed as an avatar of Logan. He gestures for them to follow him.
Logan explains that he was originally tasked with maintaining perfect copies of the guests, starting with James Delos, whom he made 18 million versions of until they finally created one version with the exact same choices of James before releasing this faithful reproduction into the park.
However, he acknowledges that the faithful copies would not be able to function in the real world and that they failed. Logan says he needed to acquire more information. He didn’t just want loyalty in the park, but also the decisions they made in their lives, and that is when the operating system started realizing a truth about humans.
Logan talks about being fascinated by the stories of the humans, as he learned why they do the things they do. He wanted to know why they make the decisions they do, but he realized that humans don’t actually know why they make decisions.
We see many versions of James in the labs. He leads them into a new memory by accessing the kitchen and dining area of James’s home, and they arrive at what Logan calls James’ ‘defining moment’.
Touching rock bottom
They are at the pool where we see James’ last memory of Logan. He is not welcome in his father’s home. Logan recalls a traumatic childhood moment where his father forced him to learn to breathe underwater and would not let him get out until he could touch the floor of the pool, just like James’ father did to him.
However, James is not interested in Logan’s small-talk and accuses him of being there for the money, which he refuses to give him until he gets clean of his ‘addiction’. Logan tells him he did get clean and asked him for help, but he did not accept.
Next: Westworld: Season 2, episode 10 in-depth review: Part 1
His father argues that he just went back to his vices and asks him to leave with a 5-minute warning before he alerts the security staff of his presence, despite Logan saying he has reached his lowest point. He tells his father that he has reached rock bottom, that he can touch it and asks if he wants to see it.
This final chat must have really affected Logan badly because the Logan operating system tells them he overdosed 6 months later. He goes on to say that created a million pathways for James, but they always led back to the poolside chat.
Always judge a book by its cover
Bernard asks Logan if humans lack the ability to change their natures, and he replies by saying that the best they can do is live according to their code. Logan takes them back into another location, which is a room with a book in the center, that is being written by a robotic arm and laser pen, this appears to be the area of the operating system that creates the narratives from the harvested memories of all the guests.
Logan says the problem with recreating faithful copies of humans is a tricky business, and that the copied hosts in the real world failed not because they were too simple, but because they were too complicated, that humans are just ‘brief algorithms’, consisting of 10,247 lines of code–which the machine creates into a book for each human.
Bernard holds James Delos’ book in his hands as Logan says humans are deceptively simple to encode. “Once you know them their behavior is quite predictable.”
Continue part three of our Westworld recap here!