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Westworld Spoilers Club season 2, episode 10: The Passenger

Westworld Spoilers Club season 2, episode 10: The Passenger

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Timelines come together, but questions remain unanswered

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Photo by John P. Johnson / HBO

Heading into the second season finale of Westworld, audiences had already been treated to subreddits of twists, reveals, and switcheroos. Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), it turned out, was still alive(ish), and his consciousness was uploaded to a vast computer simulation called The Cradle. Delos, Inc. didn’t just buy Westworld because it wanted to get into the theme park business; it wanted to use host technology to create replicants of actual human beings, allowing the company to sell immortality to the highest bidder. And the Man in Black (Ed Harris), the show’s sturdy antihero, had gone increasingly mad on his search for “The Door,” until he actually killed his own daughter and began to question whether he was a host himself.

There’s been a lot to unpack, even for a show that embraces puzzle box sensibilities as much as Westworld. But all that pales in comparison to the amount of narrative sleight of hand and fragmented storytelling that the second season finale squeezes into its 90-minute runtime. “The Passenger” is part philosophy course and part magic trick, with a healthy dose of The Matrix Reloaded thrown in for good measure. It ties up a lot of loose story threads while leaving some major questions unanswered, and does its best to set the stage for the show’s already announced third season. To top it all off, it ends with the most mind-bending — or is that obnoxious? — post-credits scene in quite some time.

Photo by John P. Johnson / HBO

The big reveal?

The Westworld Spoilers Club was built around the idea of digging into one specific reveal from each episode this season, but given how much ground “The Passenger” covers, it’s best to take a big-picture view. Unwind all the story threads, reshuffle them into some semblance of linear order, and the water cooler summary goes like this: Bernard makes it to The Valley Beyond, which is home to The Forge, a secret facility where all of the digital copies of the park’s guests have been stored. There he’s met by Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and the Man in Black — though the latter is quickly incapacitated. Dolores and Bernard head down to The Forge’s control center, which Bernard discovers also houses a virtual “new world” that the hosts can upload themselves into. Opening the fabled “Door” that has been discussed all season actually amounts to activating a massive virtual portal in the Westworld park, one that only hosts can see. When they walk through it, the hosts’ minds are uploaded into their new virtual home, where they can be safe from humanity’s meddling.

Bernard kills Dolores to save the other hosts

After The Door is opened, members of the Ghost Nation tribe and other hosts begin uploading themselves in earnest. Dolores would rather burn everything down, however, and in order to stop her from deleting everything and everyone, Bernard shoots and kills her on the spot. He escapes The Forge, but Dolores already activated the failsafe mechanism that floods the entire Valley Beyond, leading to the aftermath seen in the season premiere.

Back at the Mesa, Elsie (Shannon Woodward) tries to cut a deal with Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), but Hale simply kills Elsie instead. (Unfortunately, Westworld fans, Elsie definitely seems dead this time.) Bernard witnesses the murder and calls on Ford for help. While he deleted Ford’s code from his own mind in the previous episode, “Vanishing Point,” Ford nevertheless appears and helps Bernard craft a new host body. It’s later revealed that the host body Bernard builds is none other than a copy of Charlotte Hale herself. Bernard places Dolores’ consciousness into the Charlotte body, and it kills the real Charlotte and replaces her.

It’s a mind flip. Given the timeline, it forces the audience to realize that half of the time they’ve been watching Charlotte Hale this season, they’ve actually been watching Dolores pretend to be Charlotte Hale. But the episode is packed with so much business that it doesn’t even bother to revel in the implications of the reveal.

Photo: HBO

Knowing his memories could give the game away, Bernard decides to scramble his own brain to hide what he’s done. But first, he has one final conversation with Ford on a beach — during which he realizes that his latest conversations with his mentor have been nothing more than his own imagination. It’s a callback to Dolores recognizing her own internal voice in the season 1 finale, and it serves as evidence that Bernard has finally achieved his own independent consciousness. But he still moves forward with mucking around with his memories, and he lies down on the sand… which is exactly where Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård) found him in the season premiere, some 14 days after the robot uprising began.

The episode rejoins that 14-days-later timeline as Strand, Hale, and Confused Bernard also head to the Valley Beyond. They enter The Forge control facility, where they hope to transmit the digital copies of the park’s guests back to the mainland. But Dolores-as-Hale — “Halores,” as one of the show’s in-world websites is calling her — reveals who she really is, kills Strand and the other Delos operatives, and tells Bernard she’s changed her mind about burning everything to the ground. Instead, she uploads Teddy’s consciousness to the virtual world (she grabbed his control unit after he killed himself) and transmits the whole thing to a safe location where Delos, Inc. can never find it.

Then she shoots Bernard in the head.

Using the fact that she looks like a senior Delos board member, Halores then heads out of the park, with five host control units tucked safely in her purse. She has a brief exchange with Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), who clearly knows she is a host. He even implies he may be one himself. But he lets her through with the understanding that he will not pursue her in the outside world — and then, finally, Dolores is able to escape Westworld.

Photo: HBO

What does it mean?

The main story arcs leave the story primed for the third season. Dolores has escaped, a majority of the hosts are alive in a virtual world somewhere, and even the human characters that died likely exist as digital copies somewhere in The Forge. Maeve, Hector, and Armistice are all gunned down, but there’s a door left open even for them, with Delos lab techs Felix and Sylvester (Leonardo Nam and Ptolemy Slocum, respectively) tasked in the final moments to decide which hosts should be salvaged for the company.

Three hosts make it out into the real world

But “The Passenger” isn’t happy with that straightforward ending. After Halores leaves the island, the show cuts back to Bernard waking up across from Dolores, who’s wearing her season 1 blue dress. She’s built a new version of him from memory, she says, much as she did the original Bernard, and she believes they will both need to exist in the real world in order for hosts to survive as a species. Her motivations don’t entirely make sense. Dolores goes from wanting to destroy the virtual world to saving it, and from killing Bernard to bringing him back, all without anything substantive happening to change her worldview. She talks about needing him in the way the showrunners might talk about needing a protagonist and an antagonist for a story to function, which seems like a far cry from her desire to make her own decisions in the real world, away from controlling narratives.

There’s also one small wrinkle: when Bernard asks Dolores if she escaped, the camera dollies behind his head. And when it comes out the other side, Dolores is suddenly wearing the black cocktail dress she wore the night Arnold talked to her in the real world, back in episode 2, “Reunion.” (Arnold is also suddenly nude, the way a freshly printed host would be.) This could be written off as a bit of visual metaphor or as Arnold conflating multiple timelines before finally understanding exactly when and where he is. But during the show’s first season, Westworld pulled this same transitional trick numerous times, usually when it was cutting between different Dolores storylines, sometimes 30 years apart. It doesn’t appear there’s any massive time-shift happening in the scene, but it is something worth considering. Either way, the episode wraps with three hosts in the real world: Dolores, Bernard, and the Charlotte Hale host. Whose mind is currently inside the Charlotte Hale body? That’s left conveniently unaddressed.

Photo: HBO

Changing the game

If the Dolores / Hale switcheroo wasn’t enough, “The Passenger” also includes a post-credits scene. Earlier in the episode, The Man in Black took the elevator down to The Forge but never actually appeared in The Forge. The scene picks that moment up, as he walks out of the elevator… to find the place deserted. It looks like years, even decades, have passed since Dolores and Bernard were in the facility.

The Man in Black is approached by someone who looks exactly like his daughter, Emily (Katja Herbers). At first, he thinks he’s in another computer simulation. The woman tells him that’s not the case, but that this is what is left of his world. “Tell me, what were you hoping to find?” she asks. “To prove?”

“That no system can tell me who I am,” he says. “That I have a fucking choice.”

“And yet here we are. Again.” The Man in Black quickly realizes the truth: he is a host clone, just another iteration in a long line of them. And she is there to conduct a baseline interview to verify fidelity just as he had done to hundreds of James Delos copies.

It raises questions about William without enough information to draw a satisfying conclusion

The scene is thrilling because it comes out of left field with a major twist. It’s simultaneously frustrating because it raises a bunch of questions about the Man in Black’s status throughout the season without providing enough information to actually draw a satisfying conclusion. Series co-creator Lisa Joy clarified to The Hollywood Reporter that the post-credits scene takes place “in the far, far future,” and that while the incidents portrayed in the season did happen to the human Man in Black, this future host clone has been repeating them on his own loop. It lends credence to the idea that the Man in Black presented in season 2 has actually been this future host version all along. But there are plenty of important questions left unanswered, including what Ford’s intention with The Door game was in the first place. Given that this was sold as the major hook of the season, it’s a little confounding.

The scene does tie into what is perhaps the most interesting idea in “The Passenger”: that human beings don’t actually have free will at all and are destined to follow certain patterns based on their makeup. The notion is explained earlier in the episode when Dolores and Bernard visit the simulated world of The Forge. There, they talk with the computer system that creates the guest copies, who happens to appear as Logan Delos (Ben Barnes). There’s a lot of exposition — the sequence feels a lot like Neo’s chat with The Architect in The Matrix Reloaded — but the salient point is that The System created millions of virtual copies of James Delos. But every single simulation built to the exact same moment: Delos turning his back on his son when he needed him most.

Just like Delos, no matter what the Man in Black has done in his many host incarnations, he always ends up back at The Forge, having killed his own daughter.

Photo: HBO

Humans are smart enough to conceive of free will, the show argues, but that’s really just a façade used to interpret the much more basic, fundamental truth. It’s why Dolores is so eager to get to The Valley Beyond in the first place. When she enters The Forge, she looks through the digital copies of all the guests so she can better understand humanity and defeat it. It’s a “competitive advantage,” as Bernard puts it.

The same idea is also what makes Bernard’s decision to fight back with the Hale host such a big moment for his own evolutionary development. Over the past few episodes, Ford has pushed Bernard to demonstrate agency and act counter to his more mellow, subservient instincts. Seeing Elsie murdered was enough to push him over the edge, and he took drastic measures he would normally never take. And in the process, he obtained his cognitive freedom.

The notion also creates a compelling battlefield for the upcoming third season. Hosts have recognized humans don’t actually have free will and can be understood like algorithms. However, the hosts have learned how to change their own primary drives and achieve self-awareness. It could be argued that this is the season where hosts truly evolved past humans.

But none of that matters to this mysterious Man in Black host, running on his loop in the future. In the real world, he couldn’t cope with his failures as a husband and father, and he tried to use the park to find a deeper understanding that would bring meaning to his life. He failed with The Maze. Now, it appears the company’s technology is being used in an attempt for him to posthumously prove that he’s not an unredeemable monster — and he’s failing, loop after loop after loop. That’s a tragic, harrowing idea. Granted, it’s not actually in the Westworld season finale itself. But in the long wait for season 3, all theories are up for grabs.