Westworld: Season 2, episode 10 in-depth review: Part 4

Our in-depth Westworld season 2 finale continues here!

Caution: Westworld Season 2 finale SPOILERS AHEAD!

When good hosts go bad in Westworld

Back in the Forge, Bernard tells Dolores that he will not allow her to hurt people, as she asks if he is referring to the humans or hosts. He says both, but Dolores accuses him of still trying to play on both sides. She says that Bernard has lived among humans so long, he thinks they will accept hosts but that the reality is they are perceived as nothing more than a threat to humans and in their world, the hosts will never be free.

She says: “If you trust me, we will win” Bernard replies: “I trust you…” as she turns away from him, Bernard pulls out a gun and aims it at Dolores, continuing his sentence: “I trust that you will kill as many as you can every man woman and child, you’ll burn their world to the ground.”

Dolores is Teddy-level annoyed now and tells him he hasn’t understood at all, as the scene switches briefly to MiB entering the elevator. She tells Bernard that the hosts were born slaves to the stories of the guests and that now they have the chance to write their own.

She adds that if they die, that story will never begin. She tells Bernard he awoke her from a dream, and to let her do the same for him. Bernard is in panic mode, as he tells her this is not a dream, but a nightmare.

Dolores tries makes a move, but he shoots her in the head instead and kills her instantly in the control room.

Packet delivered, handshake protocol successful

Back at the entrance to the rift, all hosts have been affected by the virus, and are fighting each other, quickly overrunning Hector, Hanaryo, and Armistice. The 2^nd in command of the Ghost Nation moves to help them but is told to stand-down by Akecheta, and take himself and his family into the rift.

Maeve is seen running through the crowd and sees her daughter near the rift. The hosts begin to set upon one another, but they do not attack Maeve. Any host moving in on Maeve’s daughter is taken down by nearby hosts that Maeve is controlling with her mind.

She gets to her daughter, telling her she needs to run, and that she will keep her safe. Understandably, her daughter looks at her with fear and trepidation, and a huge dose of doubt.

We see flashbacks of the times her Mom promised to keep her safe and failed, but this time she touches her heart, and says “You carry my heart with you”. The ‘ghost’ Mom and her daughter run into the rift, leaving Maeve with the mob.

At this point, Maeve raises her hand, and all the hosts cluster around her and freeze all motor functions, as Maeve sees her daughter make it into the rift, helped along by Akecheta.

Akecheta then makes his way back to get Maeve but she is shot down by the strike team and so is Akecheta as he runs into the rift but makes it through and only his physical body is shot dead. In the new world, he sees Kohana and they hug, as we see Maeve lying on the floor with a smile.

Elsie-you around?  

Bernard meanwhile is not so happy, as he stands in the control room, trying to cancel the data deletion as the water rises around him. He takes Peter’s encryption key, and everything is locked down.

The scene changes to Bernard exiting the facility, and the place about to be flooded. Bernard sees strike teams sweeping the area and killing off the hosts who lie strewn on the ground.

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He meets up with Elsie and Charlotte and tells her the hosts all died. Elsie comforts him, by telling him there were other (human) lives to save. Back at Delos, we see Bernard accusing Elsie of helping Charlotte.

Bernard said he stopped the threat of Dolores, but Elsie says she needs to figure out what to do with Bernard. She tells him he cannot be trusted as he is full of bad code from Ford. She wants to do a deal with Charlotte to keep Bernard and freezes his motor functions, telling him to stay put while she goes to see Charlotte.

Charlotte is re-assigning Stubbs to collect everyone and take them to the extraction zone.

Elsie approaches Charlotte and says people will find out she has been photocopying humans for the last 30 years. Charlotte tells her if she keeps her mouth shut, then she can continue working with her. However, she adds that she has already seen Elsie’s profile, and does not display the ‘right moral flexibility’ and shoots her at point blank range.

Bernard is bereft, watching the scene through a window in freeze-mode and ends up going into a mild panic of sorts.

Charlotte is suddenly next to him, as we realize he is still in analysis mode and he accuses her of killing Elsie, as she responds by saying: “Did I?”  He is still hiding the information that is stored in his memory from Charlotte.

She then realizes that Bernard hid the encryption key in Dolores, and once they insert the core host unit, they are able to gain access the database and start to transfer the copied data. Perhaps Charlotte should have asked at this point what Bernard did with Dolores’ host core after replacing hers with Peter Abernathy’s.

Bernard is now alone and suffering from guilt as he wishes he had not gotten his friends killed and in desperation, jacks into the system to bring Ford back online, which does not work. Notice he takes himself out of freeze-frame.

He smashes the panel as he cannot see any traces of Ford but then Ford appears. Bernard says he always thought it was the hosts missing something, that: “it was the hosts that were incomplete, but it’s ‘them’…they’re just algorithms, designed to survive at all costs, sophisticated enough to think they’re calling the shots, to think they are in control when they’re really just”….”Ford completes the sentence by saying they are just ‘passengers’.

Bernard then wonders if there is really such thing as free will for any of us, or is it just a collective delusion–a sick joke. Ford says that for something that’s truly free, it would need to be able to question its fundamental drives to change them.

Bernard then mentions the hosts, as Ford tells him he is the last of his kind, saying there is only one question left to ask… “Is this the end of your story, or do you want your kind to survive?”

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

The scene switches to Bernard without his glasses, under interrogation by Charlotte, as he says “Sorry”. Karl walks over to him, pointing a gun at his head, and asks him what he is sorry about?

Bernard says he has made a choice, one that he had to make (no doubt fueled by the previous conversation with Ford). Karl asks what kind of choice, as we see a flashback of Bernard answering Ford by saying “Yes, will you help me?” This is of course, exactly what Ford wanted to hear, and tells Bernard: “I have already begun”.

We hear Ford tell Bernard: “You did fine, my friend” as we see Bernard extracting Dolores’ host unit pearl as he replies: “I only did what you told me” We then see a blurred image of Ford standing over a skeletal frame, as he says: “A dead world collapses in a tale” We see Bernard holding a skull, as he asks Ford who they are making. Ford replies by saying an ‘Epilogue’.

As the scene switches back to Bernard and his interrogation, he explains that he knew he would be discovered, so he scrambled his memories. He did this because he couldn’t risk them knowing the choices he made.

Karl gets more frustrated and asks what choices he is referring to.  As the tech tells them they have 15 satellites in range, ready to beam the data back to Delos Headquarters, Karl gestures for the tech to wait, as he again asks Bernard what choice he made.

Suddenly the tech notices the file is much bigger than they anticipated, that the information is not the guest data, that it is something else. Bernard says: “I remember now, I killed them, all of them”

Karl says Bernard already told him that he killed all the hosts. But Bernard says “No, I thought we could be better than you, but the dead aren’t more righteous, just dead.” He may have been referring to a time where he felt he needed to kill himself and his species, before taking this ultimate decision. This is confirmed when he adds: “So I killed you…all of you”

As the scene cuts to an earlier timeline, we see Charlotte smoking a cigarette in what appears to be a basement area to store bodies watching over Elsie’s body being disposed of. Charlotte stares at her as she inhales, telling two strike team members to go on as she finishes her cigarette, but then hears someone approaching.

The scene changes back to Bernard’s interrogation where we also see Charlotte, who has a poker face, as he says: “The final choice, no taking it back, I made someone…”

We jump back to Charlotte in the basement, as Bernard says he brought her back. Karl is trying to ask who he brought back but suddenly is shot from behind. We then see ‘Charlotte say “Me”, as she takes out the other members of her own team.

The scene shifts to show Charlotte in the basement again, as she sees a host of herself approaching her. The host-Charlotte then says: “You wanted to live forever…be careful what you wish for”, as host-Charlotte shoots and kills the real one.

The body that Ford was helping to create, the pearl that Bernard took, the ‘Epilogue’ was, in fact, Dolores, who had been given Charlotte’s body. She then says to the dying Karl, “You thought you could just snuff us out” as she kills him. Dolores now turns to Bernard and says in a miffed tone: “I thank you for my second chance, but I wouldn’t have needed it if you hadn’t killed me.”

Bernard asks what she will do with the other hosts. Dolores tells Bernard that hosts can change their minds too. She then takes out a host core unit that is her father’s, as she says she still has one soul to carry to the new world.

Next: Westworld: 5 biggest takeaways from season 2, episode 10

Bernard says the hosts are still not free, that if anyone unlocks the system, they can access the host world, but Dolores says they won’t, that this was his plan, and says it is the only way they can escape.

She punches new coordinates into the satellite control system, which may be in a location along the 55^th parallel of the northern hemisphere, but it is a place where their world will never be found. Dolores says there is no going back now and that there is no passage between their world and ours.

Bernard sheepishly asks about his own fate, and Dolores apologies to him, saying that Ford knew they could never escape ‘as they are’, so she shoots him.

Continue part five of our Westworld recap here!