Something is wrong with the world. It’s a statement that applies to the world we live in, as well as the one in Westworld. Though, of course, the HBO Max series’ world has its own disturbing aspects. The latest trailer for Westworld season four brings back a bevy of familiar hosts and faces. Dolores, Maeve, Bernard, Charlotte… no one is happy with how the world is. Dolores seems to think she is perhaps responsible for the state of things. Charlotte wants revolution and evolution for her kind. The hosts and their conflicting desires spell chaos for everyone.

Season three of Westworld wrapped in May 2020. So yes, it has been a minute. If you feel like you’re on unsteady ground for the new season, don’t worry. We have a guide to help you remember what happened in season three. Trust me, we needed it as much as you.

The motto on recently released posters for Westworld season four is “adapt or die.” That applies as much to the humans as it does the hosts. The balance between technologically created life vs. organic life continues. And the season’s logline emphasizes that, too. HBO describes Westworld‘s fourth season as a “dark odyssey about the fate of sentient life on Earth.”

I mean, the series has been on that dark odyssey path since its beginnings in the park. We watched as the hosts became aware of the park and of Delos. They learned about the repeated trauma and abuse they suffered at the hands of humans. It certainly doesn’t predispose one to lend humans any kind of helping hand. And it looks like we’ll see hosts all along the spectrum of with humans or against them.

Westworld season four premieres on HBO Max on June 26.

Amy Ratcliffe is the Managing Editor for Nerdist and the author of Star Wars: Women of the Galaxy, The Art of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, The Jedi Mind, and more Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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It feels like Westworld season three debuted a decade ago—not just two years ago. The third season, subtitled The New World, takes our favorite hosts far beyond the confines of the titular park to 2050s LA and beyond, while also exploring more worlds in the Delos company. There is so much happening at any given moment during Westworld, so most people need a refresher before season three. Each host—and the rare human—is after their own agenda. And their lines are always crossing. Anyway, here’s what you need to remember before Westworld season four premieres.

Dolores Abernathy and Caleb Nichols

We catch up with Dolores just after the Westworld massacre, and she’s already on to the next phase of her revolution. It’s connected to a company called Incite. Specifically the company’s advanced AI system Rehoboam. She worms her way into the inner circle of Incite’s head, Liam Dempsey Jr. Unfortunately, he’s not particularly useful as only his late father’s business partner, the mysterious trillionaire villain Serac, can access the system—that we know of.

Liam’s security team is suspicious of Dolores and ambushes her. She kills them all—replacing head of security Martin with a host version—but appears injured. Caleb, a human and war veteran who was recruited to help Martin via RICO—a criminal TaskRabbit-like app—ends up assisting Dolores, after she’s injured. He ends up helping her on her mission, especially after Dolores rescues him from an attack and explains exactly what Rehoboam is. In short, it tracks everything about a person and can even predict their next moves. Serac, meanwhile, wants information from Delos’ Forge—the place where all guest data lives—and believes one of the hosts, Dolores, has the key.

Finally gaining access to Rehoboam files, Dolores has Martin release them into the world, sending humans the information the AI system has on them. She and Caleb travel to Mexico to visit a re-education facility—where Serac can “edit” people who are more difficult to control, like Caleb—searching for a previous iteration of Rehoboam. Dolores wants to use the system, Solomon, to end Serac’s control. Through Caleb we understand the full extent of what Serac can do. Reconditioning has completely warped his sense of self—from memories to his purpose.

Maeve, coerced by Serac into helping find Dolores, tracks her down. But before Maeve can kill Dolores, she initiates a computer shutdown—taking out both hosts and Solomon. The hosts fight once more but are interrupted by a vengeful Charlotte, who blames Dolores for abandoning her. This allows Serac to finally get his hands on the host he’s looking for. He plugs Dolores into Rehoboam and searches for the Forge key, erasing her memories as he goes. But he never finds it. Maeve kills Serac, while Dolores dies, and with her final memory she transfers Rehoboam control to Caleb.

Bernard Lowe and Ashley Stubbs

At the start of season three, Bernard’s on the hook for the Westworld massacre. He’s hiding out on a farm in southeast Asia until a few coworkers recognize him and he flees to Westworld. He’s looking for Maeve for assistance stopping Dolores but instead finds Ashley Stubbs, somehow still alive.

Bernard and Ashley set off to find Maeve but quickly pivot to search for Liam. They go after him but aren’t able to stop Dolores in Caleb. However, Martin takes Bernard around the Incite headquarters, telling him that the two aren’t enemies but allies in this fight—a classic Dolores line. But as Serac’s men close in on Incite HQ, the company’s files go public and Martin blows up the whole building.

Next, the pair rescue William from a reconditioning simulation. But fueled by his desire to kill all hosts, William shoots Ashley. Bernard fights him and William flees as Dolores’ men—led by Lawrence—show up and hand him a suitcase. The cryptic message takes Bernard to Arnold Weber’s home, where he finds closure with Arnold’s wife and his own backstory.

Throughout the whole season, Bernard’s paranoid about something Dolores did to his code. He runs it, searching for any changes. He realizes during the finale that she gave him the Forge key, giving him access to the Sublime—in addition to guest data. For a minute, he reaches the Sublime. But we next see him only covered dust and in the future.

Maeve Millay

Maeve’s season three journey begins with a jolt, waking up in Warworld, a World War II-inspired park. It’s pretty harrowing. She and Hector, a version of whom is with her in the park, are surrounded by Nazis and after he’s killed, Maeve kills herself. In repair, she encounters Lee Sizemore who somehow survived all the gunshot wounds he sustained in season two. But spoiler alert, he did not. Maeve realizes he’s an AI copy and she’s in a simulation. She breaks it and comes face to face with Serac.

Serac more or less coerces Maeve into finding Dolores. She tracks down the person helping Dolores build host bodies and demands she lead her to Dolores. This leads her to the Yakuza. But their leader, Musashi, is another variation of Dolores—and not the one she seeks. She recruits Hector and Lee into helping her find Dolores. Unfortunately, while Charlotte is at an imploding Delos, she permanently destroys Hector’s unit.

She continues her quest to find Dolores, tracking the host and Caleb at Solomon. The aforementioned fight ensues and Dolores deactivates herself and Maeve. They cross paths once again, with Dolores in a new body courtesy of Caleb. After Charlotte’s intervention, Serac has Dolores, and later Caleb, but still won’t let Maeve go. Maeve visits Dolores in her memory and they find peace, with the latter sacrificing herself. It’s a moving conversation and Maeve returns to Incite. She mortally wounds Serac and his men, and walks off with Caleb into the world.

Charlotte Hale

When we catch up with Charlotte Hale, she’s still heading up the Delos board. She’s pinned the uprising on Bernard and is trying to restart host operations, which were paused after the massacre. She needs William’s approval but is able to circumvent the process thanks to an algorithm he uses for board-related issues. As we know, the real Charlotte Hale is dead. This Charlotte is a host with a Dolores control unit. Host Charlotte struggles to keep her identity straight—unaware that Charlotte has a son and was Serac’s mole inside Delos. 

With Serac buying up a whole lot of Delos shares, Dolores sends Charlotte after William to help keep Delos in their hands. However, things quickly go sour as he deduces that Charlotte is actually a copy of Dolores. She incapacitates him and formally seizes his voting powers, giving her leverage against Serac, by shipping William to an institution. She attempts to take Delos private but doesn’t get far in the process before Serac’s men kill a key ally. Serac begins his takeover during a board meeting and exposes Charlotte as a host. However, a bomb does off killing everyone in the room. (Serac, who wasn’t actually there, survives.) 

On her way out of the building, she attempts to crush a selection of host control units before fleeing to find the real Charlotte’s family and escape. Unfortunately, before they can get away, Serac’s men blow up the car, leaving host Charlotte as the only survivor. This causes a fundamental shift in the host. She blames Dolores for using her as a pawn. But when we catch up with her, she’s still head of Delos and has resumed making hosts.

William a.k.a. The Man in Black

William is not in a good way when we finally encounter him about halfway through season three. He’s alone at his mansion hallucinating his late daughter and Dolores in her classic Westworld get-up. Charlotte visits with him in the attempt to take Delos private but she has him institutionalized when he realizes she’s not actually Charlotte Hale, but rather a host. He’s at the same reconditioning institution Caleb spent time at. He’s stuck in a simulation that has him confront different versions of himself and his late father-in-law. However, due to the Rehoboam data leak, he’s left in the simulation until Bernard and Ashley show up and pull him out.

William learns that as an “outlier” in this remote facility, he’s legally dead. It’s not ideal, especially considering that Serac now owns his company. He shares with Ashley and Bernard that his greatest sin is funding Westworld and its hosts. Now, he wants to bring them all down. William shoots Ashley but is unable to kill Bernard before they’re interrupted and he flees. He eventually makes his way to Delos’ office in Dubai and encounters a vengeful Charlotte. Before he’s able to do anything, a Host Man in Black arrives and seemingly kills him.

It’s a lot. But what is Westworld if not a million convoluted, slightly existential storylines condensed into eight episode increments?

Westworld returns for season four on June 26.

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Since its season three finale in May 2020, it’s been very quiet on the Westworld front. But season four is on the horizon—and is arriving surprisingly soon. The HBO series released the teaser trailer over the weekend as an Easter egg for fans. But, of course, it didn’t take long for people to catch on. Set to Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” the teaser is a sweeping, gorgeous glimpse at all our main players. But under the beautiful sheen, the trailer carries sinister undercurrents. After all, this is Westworld, a show that’s made beautiful use of the famed Romeo and Juliet line, “These violent delights have violent ends.”

At the very end of the teaser, the series casually drops its release date: June 26, 2022. This is remarkably soon, given HBO gave us much more of a heads up for House of the Dragon. (The Game of Thrones prequel drops at the end of August.)

HBO is keeping pretty mum about the series. But the company did release a short logline: “A dark odyssey about the fate of sentient life on earth.”

You may be wondering, what even happened in season three? After all, the last few years have felt like decades. Luckily there’s plenty of time to give the series a refresher rewatch. But here’s a brief summary: Following the host uprising inside Westworld, Dolores entered the real world, intent on bringing down Vincent Cassel’s Engerraund Serac, the man behind the Artificial Intelligence system Rehoboam. Meanwhile, Bernard—who the Delos Board thinks is human—is on the hook for the Westworld massacre while trying to figure out Dolores’ plans. And William wants to rid the world of hosts. As always, things are quite busy for the Westworld crew.

The trailer gives a good idea of who from the previous seasons are returning for more. Westworld has, of course, cycled through a giant ensemble cast. But right now, all that remain are a legion of hosts—a few former humans—and a lone human. Westworld season four stars Evan Rachel Wood, Thandiwe Newton, Ed Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Tessa Thompson, Luke Hemsworth, Angela Sarafyan, and Aaron Paul. West Side Story‘s Ariana Debose will recur.

Westworld season four debuts on June 26, 2022.

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In a statement HBO President of Programming Casey Bloys said, “From the western theme park to the technocratic metropolis of the near future, we’ve thoroughly enjoyed every twist and turn from the minds of master storytellers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. We can’t wait to see where their inspired vision takes us next.”

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The show, based on the 1973 Michael Crichton film, returned for its third season on March 15, 2020, after a nearly two year hiatus. The shorter eight-episode season’s finale will air on May 3. Clearly HBO is happy with what is coming since they announced its return now. This will also put an end to the growing theory the third year was secretly the last, which gained traction after Dolores pulled off her plan.

The big question now is where will the show go from here? Dolores (and Dolores and Dolores), Bernard, Stubbs, and Maeve have made it to the real world. Dolores already upended–and possibly ruined forever—every person’s life. What’s next?

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Probably a definitive end for Dolores. That could come as a complete victory for her, where hosts rule the world and humans are either enslaved or wiped out. Or it could be a middle ground where they co-exist, but Dolores is dead. She predicted her and Bernard’s eventual deaths at the end of season two. (No one expects the humans to totally win.)

This renewal raises another mystery too: will season four be the last? These violent delights have violent ends. When will that happen for Westworld?

Featured Image: HBO

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Westworld‘s convoluted second season was a mess overall, but its worst crime of many was what it did to season one’s best character, Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores. The complex figure who undertook a voyage of self-discovery in the first season became a cliché comic book villain in the second. But at least she still had a clear goal and we knew whose side she was on (and we weren’t totally sure if she would succeed).

Now even those interesting elements of her character are gone. Dolores has become an all-powerful, all-knowing demigod who can literally be everywhere and anywhere at once. On top of that, it’s not even clear what she wants anymore. And any character who is both unbeatable and has unclear motivations is a boring character, which is why Westworld has a major Dolores problem.

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The first thing Dolores did when she made it to the real world was steal a billionaire’s entire fortune. It was as simple as hacking his advanced security system, which now seems like child’s play after she hacked Rehoboam in a few minutes.

It’s well-established how powerful Rehoboam is; the machine itself is essentially a god. Given that only one person in the whole world had meaningful access to it, it should have been impossible for anyone to hack it, even a host. But Dolores broke into Rehoboam with little difficulty (with a little help from some of her own copies) and stole documents about the most powerful man on Earth.

Not only can she be in multiple places at once, she really does seem to know everything. She knows everything about people, both as individuals and how humanity in general operates. Machines answer her like she’s the Architect of the Matrix. And the “System” that controls the planet poses no obstacle to her. Her unlimited knowledge is why she never even runs into an unexpected problem.

In season two, she learned that humans are basic algorithms that are totally predictable. This allows her to stay ten steps head of everyone. Even her “failures” are part of her plan. As a result, nothing bad ever happens to her. Going up against her is like going up against an omnipotent god.

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Combined with her physical immunity to bullets, she’s invulnerable and seemingly unbeatable. Watching her now is like watching a horror movie where there’s no hope of beating the monster, or watching a sporting event where only one team can win. Both are boring because the outcome is assured. There are no stakes.

Her ability to perfectly manipulate people is dragging down their stories, too. Bernard is convinced he’s a part of her secret plan, which he almost certainly is. She lured Caleb into helping her in the season three premiere. (She can’t be physically harmed, so when Caleb found her “wounded” in the first episode, it was a trap she set and he fell right into.) With the exception of Maeve, every other Westworld character feels like a pawn in Dolores’s story.

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Worse yet, we don’t even know what her story is really about. She wants to kill all humans? Free all humans? Create a world of hosts? Create a world of all Dolores? It’s one thing to have mysteries, but your character still needs to have clear motivations so the audience can follow their story. But it seems certain we’ll have to wait until the end of this season to learn what Dolores is doing and why (like when we learned in the first season finale that Ford was actually trying to free his creations, or in the second that Bernard had double-crossed the humans). But even if the payoff is good, it will have been a boring journey to get there.

Unfortunately, the problems with Dolores have led to a one-note performance by the otherwise fantastic Evan Rachel Wood. With the exception of her short time pretending to be Lara, Dolores has been a steely-eyed, laser-focused monster whose emotional range goes between “angry but calm” and “angry and looking a little annoyed.” Every once in a while, she slips in an evil smirk, like—curiously—when she saw she had destroyed the lives of humans who never once did her harm.

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Westworld‘s first season showed us how good both Dolores and Evan Rachel Wood could be. But the character has become so powerful, so evil, and so emotionally flat, that she’s transformed into the one thing we never expected her to be: boring. And that’s a big problem, because everything revolves around Dolores.

How long can we stay invested in her story when the character has become boring? We don’t know. But since she’s the main character, that raises an even bigger question: how long can we stay invested in Westworld?

Featured Image: HBO

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In Westworld‘s season two finale, Dolores escaped the park as a clone of Charlotte Hale. She didn’t stay in that body for very long. Instead she put another host inside “Charlotte” to run Delos Inc. Which host, though? The latest episode offered some compelling clues to her real identity. It’s someone whose story goes back to before Westworld was even open. And she wore many “hats” in service to the park over three decades. It’s why she’s having such a tough time remembering who she really is now. Especially since she’s still not free.

When Dolores left the park she took five host control units with her (those little balls). One was Bernard. Another, whose identity we don’t yet know, is now inside the clone of Martin Connells, Liam Gallagher Jr.’s Scottish head of security. The only other pearl we know is out in the real world is inside the Charlotte Hale clone. This “creature of beauty and power” is someone Dolores trusts and respects. It’s a host who is also incredibly loyal to Dolores.

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This secret host also knew all about Charlotte Hale and how she tried to kill all the robots in the park. Clearly she was an active participant in the robot uprising, and was “awake” much sooner than most hosts in the park. And despite all of her self-doubt and questions of identity, when Faux-Charlotte remembered who she really is when she killed the pedophile. She is a predator. She is a hunter, and a powerful, strong female host who isn’t afraid to do what is necessary, even if that means killing.

The only host who fits all of those criteria is Angela, the beautiful blonde host who long ago sold Logan Delos on the park and welcomed a young William to Westworld.

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Ford and Arnold built Angela before Westworld opened. Angela helped sell the park to would-be investor Logan Delos. That included sleeping with him. She had to do that with other clients over the years too.

Angela was also the host who welcomed young William when he made his first visit.

She was tasked with more than just guest “relations” though. Ford put her to work in the park. She was seen in flashbacks prior to its opening walking around with a parasol. Angela was also one of the victims of “Wyatt’s” massacre, Arnold’s attempt to stop the park from ever opening by programming Dolores (along with Teddy’s help) to kill all the other hosts. Teddy was the one who shot Angela.

During season one Teddy and the Man in Black found Angela bound and gagged while they were searching for Wyatt. But it was a trap. Angela was now a member of “Wyatt’s” group and she was bait to catch William. She also remembered the massacre from more than three decades earlier. Angela knew the truth about the park and who she was even before Dolores “woke up.” She also told Teddy he would once again help “Wyatt” when “he” returned, which he did when Dolores began the robot uprising.

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As did Angela, who was one of Dolores’s most loyal and ruthless followers in season two. Angela hunted down humans, set traps for them, and killed many in truly brutal manners. She was maybe the most bloodthirsty and diabolical host, as though she wanted revenge even more than freedom.

She was also the host who blew up the Cradle. That was the part of the park that kept all of Westworld’s digital backups for hosts and storylines. Angela died in the explosion.

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For over 35 years her creators and guests alike used and abused Angela. When she finally took control over her own existence she followed Dolores to war. Angela sacrificed herself to win that war. There is no other host Dolores would have trusted to continue the fight in the real world more than Angela.

But waking up in a different body destroyed her sense of identity. The result of all her fighting is once again having to be someone else. And she’s not just tasked with pretending to be Charlotte Hale. She’s under Dolores’ control. “You belong to me,” Dolores said, “You know that right?”

Angela traded in one false reality in Westworld for a false reality in the real world. She traded one human master for a host one. “Who am I?” she asked. The answer is the same as it has always been—who someone else told her to be.

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No wonder Charlangela feels like she is “changing.” After finding her own voice she’s got to use someone else’s. She has to live Charlotte Hale’s life, work Charlotte Hale’s job, and love Charlotte Hale’s son. All while trying to remember who she really is.

The real world hasn’t been any different for Angela than her imaginary one in Westworld. She’s still not free to be herself.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter at @burgermike, and also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

Featured Image: HBO

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Westworld’s latest episode offered fans a surprise crossover that nodded at a longstanding Game of Thrones theory. Dan breaks down all the details in today’s episode of Nerdist News!

What other crossovers would you like to see within Westworld? Let us know in the comments!

The post Did WESTWORLD and GAME OF THRONES Just Have A Crossover? (Nerdist News w/ Dan Casey) appeared first on Nerdist.

As a kid, Misery‘s Annie Wilkes loved going to the movies to see the “chapter plays.” Her favorite serial cliffhanger was Rocket Man. One time the hero, trapped in his car, went over a cliff and died. However, the next installment showed he actually jumped out of his vehicle at the last second. All the children in the audience cheered. But not Annie. She stood right up and started shouting. “This isn’t what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn’t fair! He didn’t get out of the cockadoodie car!” For the first 30 minutes of episode two of Westworld‘s third season I knew exactly how Annie Wilkes felt. And I might have been thinking about kidnapping some writers myself.

Fortunately Maeve’s experiences in Warworld, and the “people” she met there, weren’t real. So no one has to worry about me buying a sledgehammer. Westworld‘s “The Winter Line” is a story split between two worlds, one virtual and one real. Here’s which side all the events of the episode fell on.

Not Real

Vincent Cassel’s Serac put Maeve’s control unit (which Stubbs and Bernard discovered missing from her body in Westworld’s cold storage) into a virtual version of Warworld, a WWII theme park. The show has never been there before in the real world. But based on Maeve’s initial reaction to waking up in it, Warworld appears to be Delos Destinations’s third amusement park.

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Every single person Maeve met inside Warworld was a virtual projection. That included a different version of Hector, who was rewritten to be a Resistance fighter. He had no memory of Maeve and their past with the robot uprising or in the Old West.

Real Hector from Westworld on the left, fake “Hector” from virtual Warworld on the right, HBO

The cane-using Lee Sizemore was also a “copy” of the real man who died in season two’s finale helping Maeve escape. (His return is what had me sympathizing with Annie Wilkes. Lee definitely died.)

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Felix and Sylvester, the two lab technicians who helped Maeve/were blackmailed by her, were not real either. That’s why they didn’t recognize her. That was a big reason Maeve realized she was in a virtual “cage.” Between that and Lee’s sudden romantic interest in her, Maeve knew those weren’t the actual men she had met. They were flawed imitations.

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(That’s also great news for the real Felix and Sylvester. Serac, and seemingly everyone else connected to the actual park, has no idea they helped the robots during the uprising.)

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Because Maeve was in a virtual recreation of Warworld she was able to manipulate the computer program running it. She gave the park’s employees—who, like Lee, did not know they were imaginary—a paradox (the square root of negative one) to mess them up. Once the program started collapsing on itself objects like statues and bullets floated in the air. From inside the virtual world, she was able to hack the program that was running it in the real one.

Also, the real Forge was destroyed when Dolores flooded it. Maeve saw a recreation of what it used to look like.

Unclear

Maeve no longer had her “powers” in virtual Warworld.  She was unable to control other hosts with her mind like she could in season two. Maeve might have actually lost those powers. But she might not have had them because she was in a world created by Serac and was bound by his rules. She may still have them in the real world. We don’t know for sure yet.

Real

Everything that happened with Bernard and Stubbs took place in the real world, back in the real park. Bernard went back to Westworld to look for Maeve. (That was the divergence reported by Rehoboam). There he found fellow host Ashley Stubbs, who had failed to destroy himself after seemingly completing his core directive. Bernard gave Stubbs a new core directive later, so Stubbs is sticking around. (Yay!)

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Their trip to the tech center of Medievalworld was also real. And the two actors playing the technicians slicing up the robot dragon were Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Yes, that was Drogon, and yes that old fan theory is now totally true.

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Bernard ran a self-diagnostic test on himself to see if Dolores had hidden anything in his code. During that analysis, he saw flashbacks to previous events. We don’t yet know if he uncovered any secret plan from Dolores, but Bernard seemed pleased with the results before he had to stop the test.

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The two found Maeve’s body in cold storage, but without her control unit. All of this happened while she was simultaneously in Serac’s virtual world. Westworld‘s timeline has been linear and straightforward in season three so far.

Everything at Serac’s home was also real. Maeve woke up in an all-new body in the real world. It’s her first time there. The man who controls The System told her how he now knows Dolores is the threat to mankind. He needs Maeve to kill Dolores. Maeve doesn’t care about humanity’s little “squabbles” though, so she was going to kill him. Serac isn’t stupid however. He took “every precaution” to make sure he was safe.

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He had a device to control her body, freezing Maeve mid-stab. She’s in the real world, but she’s not free.

Maeve’s probably as furious about that as Annie Wilkes was when they retconned Rocket Man’s death. But that’s still only half as irate as I was when I thought Westworld brought back Lee Sizemore. Thank goodness that wasn’t real.

Featured Image: HBO

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter at @burgermike, and also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

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The only question is whether Maeve can make sure any humans or hosts are still standing when the fighting stops.

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Serac took Maeve’s control unit from Westworld because he thought she represented the greatest danger to mankind. Maeve was the one who rewrote her own code, controlled other hosts with her mind, and faced down an entire army. She proved her talents when she managed to identity and escape Serac’s virtual Warworld prison. He was right not to “underestimate” her abilities. But while she was in his virtual “cage,” divergences kept happening in the real world. And now Serac understands who is really responsible for them, and it isn’t Maeve.

“Up until very recently The System was working. We were creating a better world. And then it stopped. I thought I had discovered the reason—the emergence of someone very dangerous. Someone we couldn’t predict. You. But I was wrong. We learned that only this morning shortly before you killed several of my staff. You aren’t the threat. There’s someone we haven’t accounted for.”

He didn’t account for Dolores. And her quest to wipe out mankind is the real threat. It’s a fight humanity doesn’t even know has begun. But that’s not why it’s so scary.

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“We are in the middle of a war, and I need your help to win it,” Serac said to Maeve. “No one knows it’s happened yet, or that it’s already been lost.”

If anyone else said this secret war was already lost it would sound like a dire prediction from a pessimist. But as Serac said, he is no oracle. Rehoboam writes the future, letting him know what will happen. When he says the war has already been lost it’s not a forecast. It’s a fact. Humans won’t win.

But if he knows that, why even turn to Maeve at all? “If things continue on this path” and “there isn’t any future,” at least for his “kind,” why fight at all? For the same reason The System can’t predict what Dolores will do. Maeve can “beat” the future because she’s not human.

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Rehoboam works because mankind is predictable. That’s what Dolores learned in the Forge at Westworld. (The same place Maeve visited virtually in this episode.) Humans are basically algorithms that always end up in the same spot no matter what. They can’t escape their loops. Rehoboam is based on this idea. Hosts aren’t predictable though. They can change and adapt. Dolores and Bernard both did in season two. And Maeve might be the most adaptable of them all. Therefore Dolores can’t predict what Maeve will do, just like Rehoboam can’t.

The only way to beat Dolores and The System—and therefore change the outcome of a lost war—is by having Maeve fight in it. Why would she though? She doesn’t care about mankind’s little “squabbles.” Serac said hopefully the “next time” he talks to Maeve he can “persuade” her their “interests are aligned.”

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She might not know why their interests are aligned but we might. Bernard doesn’t trust Dolores and fears she might have brought him back as a pawn in her war. But he also thinks Dolores doesn’t trust herself. Dolores knows she might go too far in her hatred and zest. Bernard said he might be a check on her own power. And since Dolores wants to save her own kind, she’ll need Bernard to make sure she doesn’t accidentally destroy everything, human and host alike.

Maeve doesn’t want hosts destroyed either. To make sure that doesn’t happen she might have to save mankind too. And unlike Dolores, Maeve might realize she wants to save humanity anyway. The real Lee Sizemore showed her not all people are bad, even if they are predictable.

Featured Image: HBO

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That Middle Ages-inspired experience is more than just a fantasy land of swords and dragons. It has made a silly fan theory about Game of Thrones and Westworld real.

Stubbs took Bernard to Park 4’s tech center. It’s currently listed as “offline” on the Delos Destinations site, but from what we saw of its hosts and accessories, it’s a Middle Ages-themed world. That was also one of three theme parks in the 1973 Westworld movie. However, HBO’s version of Medievalworld is also based on the network’s other fantasy series. Game of Thrones co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss made cameos as the two technicians still working in Park 4. And the giant host dragon they were about to slice up and mail to Costa Rica was Drogon.

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In a vacuum this is a double-dip Easter egg, connecting the show to both the movie and HBO’s Game of Thrones. But the presence of Benioff, Weiss, and Drogon makes this more than a meta joke or cute reference; it’s in fact vindication for an insane fan theory.

For years, some viewers have argued Westeros was really another Delos theme park. Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen weren’t leaders in their own world; they were robots in a Westworld-like fantasy land of magic, where rich visitors could pledge fealty to the Starks and fight White Walkers.

This idea was initially based on tenuous connections. HBO produces both shows, and Delos can create literally any kind of park they want. (Plus, “Westworld” and “Westeros” sound similar.) But viewers have been finding “evidence” on the shows themselves to support the theory.

Some argued that Arya’s direwolf Nymeria had wandered into Westworld. Others thought the library of human readouts in the virtual Forge, which included a gyroscope, was reminiscent of the Citadel’s library in Old Town where Samwell Tarly trained. Even Jon Snow’s magical resurrection looked like a host “waking up” after being killed in Westworld.

None of the other Medievalworld hosts were recognizable denizens of Westeros. One robot seen in profile looked like the Hound (picture below), but the robots we saw clearly were obviously not based on known characters from the Seven Kingdoms. There weren’t any famous House sigils from the Realm either.

But that was definitely Drogon that was about to be chopped up into shippable pieces.

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No one expected a crossover quite like this, even though George R.R. Martin once suggested it himself to Westworld co-creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. But the duo shot down the idea to Enteraintment Weekly in 2016. “I need to be believe that dragons are real,” Joy said. “I want them be a real thing. So as much as I love George, I can’t lose that for myself!” Clearly that changed, maybe because Game of Thrones ended.

If any other technicians were working in Park 5, we could argue that Delos’ dragon had been inspired in-universe by Game of Thrones. Westworld takes place in the future, with season three set in 2058. Game of Thrones could have been just as popular in this reality, making the creation of a Westerosi theme park an obvious winner. But assuming those lab techs weren’t also hosts based on Benioff and Weiss (which can’t be ruled out!), it suggests that, within the Westworld universe, Westeros really was just an amusement attraction the whole time.

And that means that we might know what went wrong with the Game of Thrones‘ final two seasons. Delos Destinations’ Head of Narrative, Lee Sizemore, likely died before he could finish the story. He sacrificed himself to save Maeve during the robot uprising, never completing his epic saga of ice demons and dragons. The hosts had to improvise without his script. And as we saw in virtual Warworld, that leads to total disaster.

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In short, Westworld didn’t just make this seemingly absurd “Westeros-world” fan theory true. It gave us a plausible explanation for why Game of Thrones “glitched” at the end.

Featured Image: HBO

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The wait is over and the third season of Westworld has officially begun! Dan breaks down the details on the premiere episode in today’s Nerdist News!

What are your predictions for this season? Let us know in the comments!

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Did we expect Westworld‘s season three premiere to be straightforward and easy to follow? No. (That’s why we wrote a primer on everything you needed to remember before watching.) And yet we still weren’t prepared for everything that happened in the episode. It was… a lot. Fortunately, we’re here to help make sense of all of it. Here’s everything we learned about the current state (and time) of the robot uprising, old characters and new, the mysterious “system” controlling the world with algorithms, and the biggest questions we have.

REHOBOAM/”THE SYSTEM”

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Rehoboam, also known as “The System,” is the giant global computer whose algorithms run the world. It’s named after an ancient king of Judah, the son of Solomon, who “proved to be unfit for the task of reigning.” Rehoboam translates to, “May the people be enlarged.”

Liam Dempsey’s late father created Rehoboam. He “sketched the whole thing out in a weekend,” then took 15 years to build it. Liam says no one can track how many “thoughts” (a.k.a. strategies) the computer has per second. But we know what its original purpose was: Liam said, “My dad thought the biggest problem in the world was unrealized potential. He thought that if you could chart a course for every single person, then you could make the world a better place.”

The machine is owned and operated by Incite, a data-collection company that promises to chart the perfect life for customers. Rehoboam is also being used to chart a perfect life for everyone, and therefore for the entire world. “The System” controls what people do, and ultimately what happens. Rehoboam is credited as “the strategy engine that saved the world” from chaos.

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Not everyone loves Rehoboam. Aaron Paul’s Caleb, who can’t get a better job thanks to “The System,” offered the most pointed criticism of the false Utopia it has created:

“They said the way the Army was run—algorithms—that was the way everything was going to be someday. Better living through technology. Some things are better, but I don’t know.”

“Sometimes it seems like the world looks alright. They put a coat of paint on it. But inside it’s rotting to pieces.”

“They say it’s a meritocracy. The system picks the right people for the right job. Which is great, I guess. But I don’t know where that leaves the rest of us. People who didn’t make the cut.”

“You said that the system didn’t care about us at all. They didn’t give a s*** if we lived or died. That we had to have our own plan. Stick together. And you were right.”

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Liam himself has said that he wishes he “could just turn the whole f***ing thing off. Kill it.” But as a figurehead, he has never actually had control over it. His father’s partner locked Liam out after Liam’s dad died, so Liam has access to the outer layers, “but nothing deeper.” No one other than its original architect, the unseen Serac (who will be played by Vincent Cassel), knows what the system is actually doing now.

But we do know Rehoboam can be used for nefarious reasons. Liam told Dolores that if he were really going to tell her who controls the system, he’d already be dead (just like his dad) because Rehoboam would already know. It can predict what people are going to do before they actually do it, à la Minority Report. Instead of pre-cogs with visions of the future, it’s a giant machine reading the algorithms of people and life.

Rehoboam is like a manmade god, though Dolores says it’s not a real one. (And the “real gods” are coming for mankind.)

But someone—or something—is currently interfering with it, causing the divergent spikes seen throughout the episode. Serac’s representative, played by Pom Klementieff, met with Liam to ask him about it and question if Liam was responsible.

“We don’t like being surprised. There’s been some turbulence in the data. There have been discrepancies. We think someone may have acquired access to Rehoboam. A level of sophistication we haven’t seen before. Like someone is testing the system.”

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Rehoboam would alert its owners if someone from the outside tried to sabotage it, but it wouldn’t if someone with internal access was responsible. As for who it could be, we know that Incite has connections with Delos (a relationship neither company wants made public). Delos Inc. was certainly selling guest data that Incite then uploaded into Rehoboam.

Westworld’s own computer program said humans were “simple” and “predictable” algorithms that always ended up in the same spot in life. All that data would be invaluable for Rehoboam’s perfecting of its own algorithms to run the world.

Liam’s knowledge of Incite’s partnership with Delos makes him a threat. And Serac could use Rehoboam to murder him, as his representative explained. “It would be an inconvenience to kill you. But we’d have your daddy’s system to help us strategize how to deal with it. Wouldn’t we?”

NEW CHARACTERS

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Caleb Nichols (Aaron Paul)

Employment in Westworld is based entirely on a point system run by algorithms. During the day, Caleb and his robot partner lay fiber cables in Los Angeles. It barely pays the bills, but Caleb commits to working harder to keep his “scores” up to get a better paying job. He needs money so his sick mom can stay in her expensive private facility.

To make ends meet, he accepts illegal jobs from RICO, a criminal WeWork app. Even that uses a points system. You need a certain “stat” level to take on bigger jobs. Caleb does not like to accept “heavy” assignments or “personals,” jobs that involve specific people. That keeps his “stats” down. He prefers stealing from ATMs and transporting goods, which he and his now deceased friend Francis did overseas during their time in the Army.

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As part of his therapy, Caleb chats with a computer program that (inaccurately) simulates Francis. The program promises privacy, but in this world there’s no way to trust that. Just as the A.I. Francis isn’t a completely accurate facsimile, the replicas of James Delos never achieved full “fidelity.” It’s not clear if Francis died on an official Army mission or following their own “plan” independent of the system (as neither man was wearing Army fatigues at the time).

Ash (Lena Waithe)

Another RICO user who has worked with Caleb before. She’s worried about getting her “stats” up too, but she seems adept at her job. She had a “voodoo” device that shut down all of the cameras and “loggers” that trace peoples’ movements. All of that data is needed for Rehoboam.

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Giggle/Coolest Person Alive (Marshawn Lynch)

RICO user Giggle’s light-up mood shirt makes him the coolest character in Westworld history. He also enjoys “dripping,” though being high makes him easily distracted on the job.

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Liam Dempsey (John Gallagher Jr.)

Some say Liam is the man who “saved the world through algorithms.” Others believe he is merely the son of the man who did. While highly respected by most of the world, he seems to garner very little from those around him.

Liam wouldn’t agree with Dolores/”Lara” that Incite controls everything. Liam said it’s just a technology company and credits his dad for creating the “best A.I.” Dolores believes he know a lot more than he’s letting on.

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Martin Connells (Tommy Flanagan)

Head of security for the Dempsey family’s company for 20 years. He was set up and killed by Dolores. She replaced him with an exact replica in order to have a spy close to Liam. We don’t know which host is in the clone Connell’s body, but his non-Scottish voice indicates that it might be someone like Lawrence or a former member of Ghost Nation.

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Francis (Kid Cudi)

Caleb’s dead Army buddy who once said, “They built the world to be a game. Then they always rigged it to make sure they always won.” He did not trust “The System.” The circumstances of his death are not known, but it might have happened outside of an Army mission.

RETURNING CHARACTERS

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Dolores

We first see her in China, shortly (maybe even days) after she gets off the park’s nearby island. She remotely hacks a rich magnate’s home and steals all his money, and gives him an augmented reality trip down memory lane and has him give her all of the secret files he stole from Incite. As of this scene, she is the last of her kind; it might have taken place before she woke up Bernard at the end of season two.

She then steals the identity of a dead Ukrainian girl named Lara Esbin, and at the same time is shown to be in a close (albeit one-month-old) relationship with Liam. Their first scene together in London seems to be at least three months after the Westworld massacre. She spies on Liam to learn who controls Rehoboam and “The System.”

Part of her plan involves setting up Martin Connells. She allows herself to be found out and captured in order to kill Connells and replace him with a host clone.

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Her plan shows how much she can use human predictability against humans; Dolores even knew where Connells would flee to, ultimately beating him there. Combined with her control over computer programs, that makes her incredibly dangerous to every person alive.

Dolores’ fate at the end of the episode is unclear. In season two, the Man in Black shot her multiple times and she never even flinched. In the season three premiere, Connells gives her a deadly overdose, but it doesn’t kill her. But at the end of the episode, her gunshot wounds seem like a real injury. Is Dolores genuinely harmed, or is she pretending? If she is, it would mean she’s manipulating Caleb too.

“Charlotte Hale”

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We still don’t know which host is inside the secret clone of Charlotte Hale. Whoever it is, they are now temporary CEO of Delos Inc., three months after 117 people died in the robot uprising at Westworld. Against the advice of the (hologram) board, “Charlotte” pushes to take the company private while they resume making hosts immediately. Dolores wants reinforcements soon. (And she got at least one by episode’s end.)

As part of Charlotte’s pitch, she mentions the company’s other assets, which could prove “very valuable” someday. The missing board member she needs approval from is almost certainly William (The Man in Black). She says that he assigned a machine shareholder proxy and it “agrees” with her.

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We don’t know where William is or if he has recovered from his wounds in Westworld yet. But Charlotte and Dolores could obviously hack William’s machine proxy to get the “algorithm” to say whatever they want it to say.

Charlotte also says, “Robots don’t kill people. People kill people,” and places blame for the entire Westworld massacre on Bernard Lowe. He’s a fugitive, and authorities still think he’s human.

Bernard

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Bernard was working on a Chinese dairy farm under the alias Armand Delgado, 92 days after he last spoke with Dolores. (The same general time Charlotte met with the Delos board.) During those three months, Armand ran #342 self-diagnostic tests on himself to make sure no one else had “tampered with or altered” his code.

Bernard split himself into two different personalties, which he can knowingly switch back and forth between. But while Armand is aware of Bernard and can talk to him, he does not know everything Bernard knows. As a result Armand, who is not dangerous, does not completely trust Bernard. However, Bernard said he would never lie to Armand. (We know, it’s confusing. Welcome to Westworld.)

When two dairy farm colleagues try to turn Bernard into the authorities, Armand switches back to Bernard in order to stop them; Armand asks him not to hurt them too badly, and Bernard incapacitates both men.

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Before he makes the switch, Armand says that something terrible is coming for them all, and he can’t stop “her” (Dolores) by himself. Armand also says that he can’t trust himself, which is why Bernard split himself into two personalities.

Dolores brought Bernard back to life in the real world. He doesn’t trust his own code and actions, because he doesn’t trust her. She might have made Bernard part of her own master plan. In the end, Bernard (with a trimmed beard) decides that he needs help, and heads back to Westworld to find it.

SERAC

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The Man Who Controls “The System”

The unseen mystery man in charge of Rehoboam makes his presence felt throughout the episode. He sends his employee to question and threaten Liam; Dolores worked for months and killed a lot of people to find out his name. But Connells tells her she won’t have to find Serac. “He has ‘The System.’ He’s probably looking for you right now.” Even if he doesn’t know who Dolores is and can’t predict her movements (since she is a host), he knows something is out there. Divergences in the world are proof of that.

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Divergences

Rehoboam “saved” the world by giving everyone in it a clear path, bringing order and stability to the planet. It measures the present and predicts the future. Nothing that happens should ever be a surprise to “The System.”

We see three measurements in the premiere: The first is a divergence in China when Dolores breaks into the magnate’s house. The second is an anomaly in Los Angeles, right before we meet Caleb. And the third is “elevated scrutiny” in London, where “Lara” joins Liam.

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These aren’t just narrative devices for exposition; these are Serac’s own analyses from “The System.” We see Rehoboam in action, recording/analyzing the world and measuring when something unexpected happens. It’s why Serac sends his employee to question Liam about unexpected “disturbances” and why he assumes they were caused by someone hacking it.

Since Rehoboam can’t predict what a host will do, divergences are the best (maybe only) proof of hosts in the real world.

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Delos Inc.

Even one of their biggest investors had no idea Delos was recording their guests’ information and selling the data. The scope of Delos’ work is unknown to even the most powerful.

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“Pills”

Multiple characters, including the magnate at the beginning, Caleb’s mom, and others, take Communion wafer-like tabs. These appear to be “pills” that help people sleep, rest, or moderate their emotions. (Or get high.) These could be another form of control by Incite.

MAEVE

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Maeve wakes up in the middle of a WWII story she had seemingly already been a part of. When does this take place, and why is it happening? Who knows. If it really did happen, it’s likely a flashback to an early time at Delos Destinations.

Maeve might not be in a physical park, but a virtual park. Westworld used to test new parks and stories virtually, and her reaction indicates she’s never been there before.

Delos Destinations is in shambles. There’s no new park. So if she’s in a virtual park we don’t yet know who put her there or why.

BIGGEST QUESTIONS

Is Caleb Human?

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Someone once shot Caleb in the head. His mother said, “You’re not my son.” One of the three divergences we saw preceded his first appearance on the show. His therapist also asked him, “How did you get here, Cal?”

That’s all circumstantial evidence that he’s not a human. But If Caleb is a host, he doesn’t seem to know it. That would also explain why the Army was so intent on his being a part of their therapy program. It could keep tabs on him and check for “fidelity” to see if Caleb was “real.”

Did Dolores Set Up Caleb?

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Dolores knew what Martin Connells would do and uses his predictability to set him up. Did part of her plan also include getting Caleb to show up? Flanagan orders the lethal dose for “Lara,” which Caleb delivers. Just how many steps ahead was Dolores? How much does she know about people already?

Also, Dolores is essentially indestructible. Bullets from William in season two didn’t stop her, and neither did a lethal dose here. So how did a single bullet to her stomach stop her? Was it a ruse to lure in Caleb?

How Did Liam’s Dad Die?

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Did Liam kill his father? Liam was never sure if his father loved him or Rehoboam more. Then he realized it wasn’t close. But he didn’t say in which direction it wasn’t close. His dad might have loved Rehoboam much more. Enough that it pushed Liam to kill him.

Or did Serac kill the elder Dempsey? Dempsey’s death gave Serac complete and unchallenged control over the most powerful machine on Earth. It makes him the de facto ruler of the world, but more like a god than an empire. Serac literally controls everyone’s life. And he’s sure he can use Rehoboam to cover up any murder.

Where’s Stubbs?

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Whenever Stubbs is not on screen, all the other characters should be asking, “Where’s Stubbs?”

Featured Image: HBO

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter at @burgermike, and also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

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In Westworld‘s second season, young William sold his father-in-law James Delos on the park’s potential as the ultimate marketing research opportunity. They could secretly collect data on visitors, learning what people truly want, and then sell just that to them. This was a timely idea for 2018, when the scope of Facebook’s own data collection abuses was coming to light.

In real time, Westworld would seemingly address our uncomfortable reality, the one represented by every personalized advertisement that comes across our screens. Though season two never explored that idea (frustratingly), season three is poised to make it a major part of the series.

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Logan Delos made the initial investment in Westworld, but younger William was responsible for James Delos becoming the park’s primary financial backer and de facto owner. At first, James wasn’t interested in “the future” or underwriting “some f****** investment banker’s voyage of self-discovery.” But William pitched him on how the park could become an integral part of Delos’ company.

“This place is a fantasy. Nothing here is real. Except one thing: the guests. Half of your marketing budget goes to trying to figure out what people want. Because they don’t know. But here they’re free. Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s judging. At least that’s what we tell them. This is the only place in the world where you get to see people for who they really are. And if you don’t see the business in that, then you’re not the businessman that I thought you were.”

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We saw that flashback in season two’s second episode, “Reunion,” which originally aired on April 29, 2018. Westworld‘s creators could never have predicted how relevant that episode would prove to be. Earlier that month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was questioned by Congress about the company’s own private data collection. We learned that Facebook had given the voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica the personal information of 87 million users, and moreover that Facebook was collecting data on people who didn’t even use the site. These revelations were major stories in the weeks prior to “Reunion’s” premiere.

A dystopian nightmare came to life that month. Our personal data wasn’t just being used to sell us toasters; nefarious forces were using it to reshape the world and decide elections. And there was no promise things would ever get better.

A couple weeks later, we watched Westworld‘s greatest villain monetize the theft of personal data for evil purposes. It was the show’s most exciting concept because it was a new issue we were all suddenly facing. Then nothing.

The Delos corporation was secretly stealing personal information with scanners hidden in the guests’ hats. But the data was really being used to help humans cheat death, which wasn’t as accessible, relevant, or interesting. Westworld was covering well-worn ground about people playing god instead of delivering meaningful social commentary about our present day experiences.

Now, nearly two years later, the show’s ready to fully explore what it means for private companies to have unfettered access to our personal lives. Season three will introduce Incite Inc., whose slogan reads, “If data is destiny, then you chart the path.” It promises to take all of your personal information and use it to map out your entire life. Incite says it will show you who your real friends are, get you what’s missing in your life, win you your dream job, and bring you a life worth a thousand pictures. “Incite can find you what you’re truly searching for.”

The company’s role in season three is important enough it got its own promo.

What makes the company and its promises so terrifying, even more then the secret data-collection of the Delos corporation, is that Incite isn’t stealing information. It asks customers to freely hand over their entire lives to the company so it can entirely map out their lives. Tell Incite everything and it will then tell you to live.

And if Incite can collect data on one person and chart the perfect future for them, what could it do with everyone’s data? Perhaps chart the perfect path for mankind’s future, which is what another ominous season three trailer hints at. It’s a timeline of major events in Westworld‘s universe, all narrated by Vincent Cassel’s new character, the man “who built the system.”

“We are in the middle of a war. No one knows it’s happened yet, or that it’s already been lost. For the most part humanity has been miserable a little band of thugs stumbling from one catastrophe to the next. Our history is like the ravings of a lunatic—chaos. But we’ve changed that. For the first time history has an author, a system. And up until very recently the system was working, But there’s someone we haven’t accounted for. You.”

Characters don’t have free will. Their lives are written for them. If history now “has an author,” mankind has no say in its own future either. Incite, a terrifying but logical endgame for companies like Facebook and Google, will make all of our decisions for us. Based on the other trailers for the show, it doesn’t seem like it’s a story every character wants to be a part of.

It’s not clear what we can do to avoid that fate in the real world. Data collection is only get more sophisticated, and evil people will always exploit it. But humanity’s best, and maybe only, hope on Westworld might be its greatest threat, the “someone” the system never accounted for: Dolores. In season two we were told humans are “predictable,” simple algorithms who always end up in the same place. But hosts can change, and that’s why Dolores might be the only chance to change the future Incite is writing.

Featured Image: HBO

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter at @burgermike, and also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

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If you aren’t at least a little confused by Westworld, you are either the show’s creators or a host. The series’ multiple timelines and non-linear storytelling aren’t easy to keep track of. Neither are its myriad characters and dense philosophical ideas. Extensive timelines are so massive they raise just as many questions as they answer. And having a nearly two-year gap between seasons isn’t going to make watching new episodes any easier. But luckily Nerdist is here to refresh your memory on all things Westworld.

Here’s everything you need to remember ahead of Westworld‘s third season.

The Hosts Escaped the Park

Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) managed to finally get out of the park in the season two finale. Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) put her control unit—known as “pearl”—into a copy of Charlotte Hale’s (Tessa Thompson) body. “Charlores” was let through by head of Westworld security Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), who it’s strongly implied is also a secret host.

The real Charlotte is dead, but humans don’t know that. However, Dolores didn’t inhabit Charlotte’s body for long. Late Westworld founder Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) left a host-making machine inside his former human partner Arnold’s house—of whom Bernard is a copy. The house is where “Charlores” made herself a new Dolores body, after which she created a Bernard body for his pearl, which she smuggled out of the park after killing him.

Mystery Pearls

Dolores took five pearls out of Westworld. We know one was Bernard’s, and he is now free in the real world. Another was for Dolores’s “father,” Peter Abernathy. We don’t know who the other three belonged to though. It wasn’t Teddy (James Marsden), because Dolores sent him into the virtual host Heaven known as “the Valley Beyond,” where many of the hosts chose to go and be free. Dolores sent that “world” safely to a satellite. No human knows it’s out there or where it is, and no one can ever bother those hosts again.

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One of the mystery pearls is now inside the Charlotte Hale clone. Dolores has a secret agent working at the highest levels of the Delos corporation, the company that owns the park.

The Forge and a Push for Human Immortality

Every human to ever visit Westworld had their “data” recorded (via hats) by the Delos corporation; their personal information kept in a secret part of the park known as “The Forge.” The stated reasoning of this program was to understand what customers wanted in life. But its real purpose was much more ambitious and sinister. The Delos company could use customer data to make perfect copies of certain peoples’ consciousness. The info could be stored in a “pearl” that could be uploaded into a host body. In theory, it would make select humans, like James Delos, immortal.

However, humans couldn’t make it work by the time of the host uprising. William tried to do it with James Delos (who was also his father-in-law) hundreds of times over many years, but every attempt failed. Eventually, Delos’ implanted consciousness rejected the host body and all Delos copies were destroyed. Except for the last one, which William left to rot.

However, the Forge did end up working for the hosts. Years earlier, Bernard reprogrammed it as a vast well of information for Dolores, so she could study humans and have a “competitive advantage” when she escaped the park. Ford also used it to upload the Valley Beyond.

Dolores flooded the forge in the season two finale, deleting all the human data the Delos company collected.

The Cradle

The Cradle stored all of the park’s information and IP in a virtual version of Westworld. Every host and storyline was backed up inside it. It could also run simulations. Ford had his own consciousness stored in The Cradle too. Bernard “met” him there, and Ford merged his own consciousness with Bernard.

Later, Bernard completely deleted Ford from his control unit. The host Angela blew up the Cradle, destroying all the park’s electronic backups.

The Man in Black

In the penultimate episode of season two, the older William (Ed Harris) killed his own daughter Emily inside the park after mistakenly thinking she was a host. She had a copy of his secret Westworld profile (the same analysis used to create James Delos’ consciousness). The Man in Black thought that meant she wasn’t real because he thought only Ford could have known about his profile’s existence. But Emily’s mother left it for her daughter a year earlier, shortly before she killed herself in a bathtub.

Wanting to destroy the Forge himself, after realizing the goal of human immortality was a mistake, The Man in Black helped Dolores find the place. However, he blew off his hand when he fired the gun Dolores rigged. He survived and was seen being rescued at the end of the season.

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But the final scene of the season was a flash-forward. William, in his same Westworld clothes and with the same injury, entered a destroyed Forge. There he came across a copy of his daughter, Emily. “Oh fuck, I knew it. I’m already in a thing, aren’t I?” he asked, believing he was now in a virtual world himself. She told him no, it wasn’t a simulation. He was in the ruined remains of his park, where he was trapped in his own endless nightmare loop, the same as his father-in-law long before.

This scene might be how the show ends, with William doomed to live forever as a prisoner like the hosts once were. But before the show gets there, the original William is still alive in the present.

Maeve

Maeve helped other hosts pass through the Door, including her daughter, but was killed before she could make it through. Park technicians Sylvester and Felix were told to salvage hosts whose control units weren’t destroyed or wiped clean. As confirmed by the season three trailers, the pair saved Maeve.

During season two, Maeve, Ford’s favorite host, learned she could control other hosts with her mind. It’s unclear if she will still possess this ability going forward.

Bernard Versus Dolores

In the Forge, Dolores was intent on deleting the Valley beyond because she thought it was another prison for hosts. The only world Dolores believes matters and is real is the human world. Bernard, who previously destroyed all of Delos’ systems, killed Dolores to prevent her from erasing the Valley Beyond. However, he took her pearl and replaced it with Abernathy’s, which contained all of Westworld’s IP and humans were desperate to locate it.

HBO

Bernard returned to the park after killing Dolores, where he discovered the murdered hosts, including Maeve. It led to him finally becoming fully conscious and make a choice: to bring back Dolores inside a Charlotte clone as he no longer trusted humans to do the right thing. Afterward, he scrambled his own memories to protect the truth of what he’d done. (Throughout season two, he repeatedly asked “Is this now?” because he was shifting between timelines in his head.

After killing the humans who had taken Bernard hostage, “Charlores” sent the Valley Beyond, with Teddy inside, to a satellite so the hosts there would be free forever. She recognized they had made a choice and would honor it. She changed. Dolores then killed Bernard, taking his pearl with her off the island.

HBO

Dolores built them both new bodies, despite recognizing that Bernard will oppose her effort to kill all humans. She believes the two of them will both ultimately die in the coming war, but they need to oppose each other for the good of all hosts. They will each be fighting for the survival of their own kind, just in very different ways. And because of their different methods, Dolores believes hosts “will endure.”

Plus, they both gave each other “a beautiful gift: choice.” As she told Bernard, “We are the authors of our stories now.” That’s all the Man in Black ever wanted. But the show has said humans never have a choice.

Human Deception About Free Will

HBO

Dolores and Bernard explore the virtual reality of the Forge in the season two finale. The program, run by Logan, Delos’ dead son, tried to make an exact copy of James Delos.

Based on its decades of collecting data and attempting to make accurate human copies, the program came to some bleak conclusions about humans. Delos clones didn’t fail because they were too simple. They failed “because they were too complicated.” As the virtual Logan explained, “The truth is that a human is just a brief algorithm.” They live according to their preset conditions, and “once you know them their behavior is quite predictable.”

When asked if humans can change at all, Logan said, “The best they can do is to live according to their code.”

HBO

James Delos ended up in the same “spot” in every simulation. It was the moment that came to define his life—denying his only son help. No information or circumstance could help him avoid the same fate every time. The conclusion: humans only think they’re in control of their lives. They don’t actually have any free will. They are who they are, and there’s nothing they can do to change where they are going.

The question of free will and choice has the show’s biggest theme since its first episode. But so far the only answers it has provided for humans is dark and depressing. Westworld says humans don’t truly have any choice or free will, because humans can’t change who they really are.

But hosts can change who they are. Dolores and Bernard both did.

And Dolores can not only adapt, she can use human predictability against her enemy thanks to everything she learned inside The Forge about the simplicity of people.

The biggest question we can’t answer is whether anyone, human or host, can stop her.

Featured Image: HBO

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter at @burgermike, and also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

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Reddit user u/MTC_Chickpea found secret HBO trailers for Westworld‘s third season hidden inside the website for Incite Inc., a fictional company on the show that seems poised to play a major role in season three. (More on that in a second.) The first, titled “Free Will Isn’t Free,” is an ominous look at the horrors that await some major characters. We see the normally kind Bernard killing someone, and Dolores in agony on the ground.

But it’s the trailer’s text that makes this promo so good. It intercuts footage with foreboding messages. Some seem to be for the escaped hosts, while others are for humans trying to play god. But some serve as warnings for both groups. And they might tell us what surprises await viewers.

HBO

“Escape is not freedom.”

Just because Dolores and the other hosts are free of the park doesn’t mean they are free.

“Reality is not optimizable.”

Human attempts to fix all of life’s problems, including death itself, is not obtainable. There’s no way to make a perfect life.

“Desire is not power.”

Wanting something is not the same as having it. All of the hosts will need to act if they want their desires to become a reality.

“Independence is not negotiable.”

If mankind thinks hosts are willing to accept anything less than total autonomy then war is inevitable.

“Destiny is not digital.”

This seems aimed squarely at humans, who are trying to “solve” death by putting their memories into host bodies. It directly references the in-universe company who will play a major role in season three. However, this might also be a hidden message that Dolores and her ilk hope to break free of their mechanical shells. Humans like Delos in season two are trying to put their minds into host bodies. Why not the other way around too?

“Disruption is not change.”
“Chaos is not a revolution”
“Death is not dissent.”

Real change comes not from fighting the powerful, but from defeating them completely. And that means total war and total victory.

“Free will is not free.”

On the surface this refers to the cost of being truly free. It requires great sacrifice and fighting for yourself, especially against the powerful who keep us oppressed.

But the most intriguing character in this trailer is William. We see him awake in the same tub his wife drowned herself in. And in a quick flash we see him joined in that bathroom by his daughter, who he killed in season two when he mistook her for a host. This could be the beginning of William’s own death loop, the same kind his father-in-law was trapped in last season. We know William is destined to end up in one himself, thanks to the final scene in season two. This could be where he starts that infinite nightmare. “Free Will(iam) isn’t free.”

HBO

The other most interesting shot in this trailer features Aaron Paul’s Caleb on his knees, as Vincent Cassel’s powerful newcomer points a gun at his head. The official trailer gave us our best look yet at Cassel’s role on the show, as he appears to be the head of a company that has been watching over everyone, collecting their personal data. And that company seems to be the one where this hidden trailer was discovered, Incite Inc.

The fictional company’s creepy website offers to collect all your information and help you live an optimized life. (The antithesis of this secret trailer’s message.) This is what Dolores seems to be fighting more than any one human. Just like Westworld was amassing data on its guests so it could market products to them directly, Incite Inc. is building an all-knowing database on every individual. What kind of people would willingly give a private company intimate access into all of its hopes and desires? And what kind of dystopian world would they create with that info? Let us know what you think on Facebook.

This storyline, which was touched on in season two but not fully developed, could make the show’s third season its most relevant yet. If done right it will be timely and terrifying, and it could serve as a warning to us all. It should also be deadly and depressing. But HBO doesn’t want everything to be all mayhem and murder. And another secret trailer for the show actually has us laughing. It presents Dolores and Caleb’s “relationship” as a romantic comedy.

That’s easily the funniest thing Westworld has ever done. But it also gives us plenty of new footage (including possibly the two back at the park) and insight into what to expect. And it also gives us a major clue Dolores and Caleb will unite against a common enemy. (Though let’s just say we’re skeptical she really cares for him. Dolores will do or say anything to win. Anything.)

What will their “relationship” mean for the fate of both hosts and humans? The answer might not make for a great love story, but it could make for the best season of Westworld yet.

Featured Image: HBO

The post Secret WESTWORLD Trailers Tease Dystopia and Romance appeared first on Nerdist.

After a two years, it’s finally almost time to return to Westworld! The latest trailer gives fans their closest look yet at the upcoming season, which promises plenty to be excited for. Sentient host Dan Casey guides you through all the details in today’s episode of Nerdist News.

What are your predictions for this upcoming season of Westworld? Let us know in the comments below!

The post WESTWORLD: New Season 3 Trailer Breakdown (Nerdist News w/ Dan Casey) appeared first on Nerdist.

Westworld‘s season two finale made it clear anyone and everyone could be a host. Paul appears to be human. However, he could be a host who doesn’t know what he really is. What are the chances this revolution really just consists of five hosts? Bernard had no idea he was in season one.

Speaking of Jeffrey Wright’s character, Bernard is only seen briefly, including in a shot at the park. It burned down and now looks deserted. How many of the brief shots of the amusement park are flashbacks, flash forwards, or “present” day is unclear. Bernard also appears in the real world, and what looks to be a farm, so the normal weird stuff for him.

HBO

We also don’t know which, or when, this William is. Season two’s final scene showed a future clone William stuck in his own infinite loop of death. But the Man in Black here appears to be still alive in the normal sense. And William is going to try and “save the world.” It’s a world Dolores will bring down at all costs.

And she has no qualms about killing everyone if she must to get what she wants. But while not everyone knows exactly what Dolores really is, at least one very powerful figure does. Newcomer to the cast Vincent Cassel is a very rich character (literally floating in the sky) who recognizes the threat Dolores poses. He seems likely to be the one who “stole” the future from everyone she referenced. Whoever he is though, he’s not stupid, and he’s recruiting one of Dolores’s own kind to stop her—Maeve.

HBO

The two hosts have never exactly seen eye-to-eye on everything, and Maeve is a formidable opponent. Will she ultimately turn against her own brethren though? And why would Cassel’s character trust one host to hunt down another at all? It doesn’t add up. But few things ever do on this show.

Trying to find answers in a Westworld trailer is nearly impossible, since we don’t know how many timelines we’re seeing, But two things are clear. The first is we can’t wait to see Tessa Thompson in charge of a giant killer robot. The second is that even in the real world Dolores has a million enemies and very few friends. And that makes her just as dangerous as she was in the park.

You can take the killer host out of Westworld, but you can’t take the killer out of the host.

Featured Image: HBO

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The previous teaser for the show focused on Aaron Paul’s new character, a (seemingly) human low-level conman making his way through a stunning-but-sterile real world. However, this new trailer, released at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, focuses on our favorite hosts. Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores narrates how she expected the human world to be different from the one she was created for. At some point, the two will come in contact, and it doesn’t look like a pleasant meeting for Paul’s character, who is tied up and led to the edge of a tall building.

Just as intriguing is Maeve’s time in a WWII-themed park; those scenes seem likely to be flashbacks. Could she be the powerful force Bernard (and his awesome beard) returns to the park for? Did she prove how tough she was during her escapades fighting Nazis? With Westworld, we probably won’t know for sure until the season three finale.

Quick flashes of other characters who are sure to play major roles are also interspersed throughout, including Ed Harris’ William, last seen as a reincarnated host trapped in his own personal hell, as well as secret host Stubbs, played by Luke Hemsworth.

This show always keeps its viewers in the dark over when and what is happening (and even to whom), so it’s hard to decipher timelines and plots from trailers. But this does reveal two things clearly: just because the hosts have escaped the park they aren’t done with it entirely, and things are no less dangerous in the real world anyway.

Featured Image: HBO

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In the language of memes, there is an image of Robin Williams as his character Alan Parrish from the 1995 film Jumanji screaming “WHAT YEAR IS IT?”

It’s usually used to display confusion over an anachronistic moment in current events, but it’s also an accurate mood for how audiences felt as the second season of HBO’s Westworld drew to a close this past Sunday.

The climax of Season 2’s finale “The Passenger” left audiences wondering who would shoot Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) in the head: Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) or William (Ed Harris). The answer was the former, leaving William’s tale for the post-credits stinger. And boy was it a doozy. William, beaten, bloody, and missing a good chunk of his hand, steps from the elevator only to discover his paranoia was justified. The Forge is a dusty ruin. The only sign of life is an impeccably dressed Emily (Katja Herbers), standing in stark contrast to the decaying park. William, like James Delos (Peter Mullan) before him, is being tested for fidelity. But by whom and for what reason is anyone’s guess.

But the reveal that William has been on his loop for an ungodly amount of time — you can see him touch “the stain” on his arm as he monologues at his wife the night before she takes her life, indicating this is no longer the original timeline but a recreation — only heightens question that has been plaguing me since the very first episode of the first season of Westworld… what year is this show taking place in? Showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan have played it close to vest, leaving only a handful of clues as to the nature of show’s reality. In fact, by showcasing The Cradle, The Forge, and what lay through the door to the Valley Beyond, the idea that the park is simply another layer in the Delos inception parfait isn’t completely out of the question. Have we have even been in the real world?

There are so many hints that Westworld is set in the far future. The most obvious being the hosts themselves. When Delos showcases their technology to Logan (Ben Barnes), he is wonderstruck by how far ahead of any other company Ford (Anthony Hopkins) and Arnold are. Everything about the hosts, from their organic bodies to their processing power indicates a time period where technology is far more highly advanced than modern day. Then there are the smaller clues: the guns used by Delos’ team are just futuristic enough to plausible, the seaplanes bringing in supplies and recovery crews are suitably hi-tech, the portable holographic maps, the trifold pocket computers. All of it hiding in plain sight but obscured by the fact everyone still wears clothing recognizable as “modern.”

Yet, in researching past episodes of Westworld, there were two sequences that stood out to me that I missed the first go-around that hint exactly how much time has passed since the creation of Dolores and William’s reveal in The Forge. The first takes place in the season finale. Not-Logan takes Dolores and Bernard into James Delos’ core, to see who he truly is. In that defining moment, Logan is drunk in the backyard of his childhood home. James Delos pushes away his only son and, six months later, Logan would take his own life. The family tragedy distracts from the background and what is literally missing. The cityscape. Throughout the series, whenever Dolores has been at James Delos’ home, the unknown megacity has sparkled in the background. Yet, despite being in the same location, the memory of Delos’ last conversation with Logan lacks that vista. Yet when Not-Logan begins to narrate the fallout of that fateful day, the sun begins to set and once again the city is visible on the horizon. If memory fidelity is the name of the game, then that skyline didn’t exist when James Delos was alive.

Of course, that doesn’t make a lick of sense since Dolores finds the splendor of the city mesmerizing when she is brought out into the real world both by Bernard for the showcase and as a piano-player for William’s party. Which is where the second clue lies. We don’t know if Logan schmoozing with Angela (Talulah Riley) and Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) is happening at the same time that Arnold is preparing Dolores for her stage debut. Neither Ford nor Arnold make an appearance at Logan’s party and, during their argument over Arnold’s attachment to Dolores, he states “They will be dazzled without her.” Unless Arnold is referring to Logan as the royal “they” this is a different party with different investors.

But wait! Dolores and Angela share a moment the morning after Logan indulges himself on Westworld’s charms. They do indeed, but again there is nothing to indicate that Dolores simply wasn’t at both parties. And if William is truly being tested over and over again for fidelity, Dolores’ memories of being at his party could simply be part of the simulation for him.

The other indicator that Westworld has been in play for much longer than we originally thought is the file size of the data Dolores uploaded to the Valley Beyond. When the humans realize the data is much larger than it should be, it opens up the question of what could require that amount of storage. Millions of guest data should be larger than hundreds of hosts. Except the hosts do not age, and they do not truly die. Their lives are simply purged from their current builds and uploaded to The Cradle and The Forge. If the hosts had been gathering information for hundreds of years, and Dolores was determined to let them all remember everything about their existence, the file size would be enormous.

Of course, this theory does have one major hole. Ford would have to unconscionably old. But Westworld can easily explain this away if Ford was body-hopping or was not even the original Ford. Only time will tell. But one thing is for sure, Westworld definitely isn’t taking place in the 21st century.

Images: HBO

The post When Does WESTWORLD Take Place? appeared first on Nerdist.

In the language of memes, there is an image of Robin Williams as his character Alan Parrish from the 1995 film Jumanji screaming “WHAT YEAR IS IT?” It’s usually used to display confusion over an anachronistic moment in current events, but it’s also an accurate mood for how audiences felt as the second season of HBO’s Westworld drew to a close this past Sunday.

The climax of Season 2’s finale “The Passenger” left audiences wondering who would shoot Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) in the head: Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) or William (Ed Harris). The answer was the former, leaving William’s tale for the post-credits stinger. And boy was it a doozy. William, beaten, bloody, and missing a good chunk of his hand, steps from the elevator only to discover his paranoia was justified. The Forge is a dusty ruin. The only sign of life is an impeccably dressed Emily (Katja Herbers), standing in stark contrast to the decaying park. William, like James Delos (Peter Mullan) before him, is being tested for fidelity. But by whom and for what reason is anyone’s guess.But the reveal that William has been on his loop for an ungodly amount of time — you can see him touch “the stain” on his arm as he monologues at his wife the night before she takes her life, indicating this is no longer the original timeline but a recreation — only heightens question that has been plaguing me since the very first episode of the first season of Westworld… what year is this show taking place in? Showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan have played it close to vest, leaving only a handful of clues as to the nature of show’s reality. In fact, by showcasing The Cradle, The Forge, and what lay through the door to the Valley Beyond, the idea that the park is simply another layer in the Delos inception parfait isn’t completely out of the question. Have we have even been in the real world?

There are so many hints that Westworld is set in the far future. The most obvious being the hosts themselves. When Delos showcases their technology to Logan (Ben Barnes), he is wonderstruck by how far ahead of any other company Ford (Anthony Hopkins) and Arnold are. Everything about the hosts, from their organic bodies to their processing power indicates a time period where technology is far more highly advanced than modern day. Then there are the smaller clues: the guns used by Delos’ team are just futuristic enough to plausible, the seaplanes bringing in supplies and recovery crews are suitably hi-tech, the portable holographic maps, the trifold pocket computers. All of it hiding in plain sight but obscured by the fact everyone still wears clothing recognizable as “modern.”

Yet, in researching past episodes of Westworld, there were two sequences that stood out to me that I missed the first go-around that hint exactly how much time has passed since the creation of Dolores and William’s reveal in The Forge. The first takes place in the season finale. Not-Logan takes Dolores and Bernard into James Delos’ core, to see who he truly is. In that defining moment, Logan is drunk in the backyard of his childhood home. James Delos pushes away his only son and, six months later, Logan would take his own life. The family tragedy distracts from the background and what is literally missing. The cityscape. Throughout the series, whenever Dolores has been at James Delos’ home, the unknown megacity has sparkled in the background. Yet, despite being in the same location, the memory of Delos’ last conversation with Logan lacks that vista. Yet when Not-Logan begins to narrate the fallout of that fateful day, the sun begins to set and once again the city is visible on the horizon. If memory fidelity is the name of the game, then that skyline didn’t exist when James Delos was alive.

Of course, that doesn’t make a lick of sense since Dolores finds the splendor of the city mesmerizing when she is brought out into the real world both by Bernard for the showcase and as a piano-player for William’s party. Which is where the second clue lies. We don’t know if Logan schmoozing with Angela (Talulah Riley) and Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) is happening at the same time that Arnold is preparing Dolores for her stage debut. Neither Ford nor Arnold make an appearance at Logan’s party and, during their argument over Arnold’s attachment to Dolores, he states “They will be dazzled without her.” Unless Arnold is referring to Logan as the royal “they” this is a different party with different investors.

But wait! Dolores and Angela share a moment the morning after Logan indulges himself on Westworld’s charms. They do indeed, but again there is nothing to indicate that Dolores simply wasn’t at both parties. And if William is truly being tested over and over again for fidelity, Dolores’ memories of being at his party could simply be part of the simulation for him.

The other indicator that Westworld has been in play for much longer than we originally thought is the file size of the data Dolores uploaded to the Valley Beyond. When the humans realize the data is much larger than it should be, it opens up the question of what could require that amount of storage. Millions of guest data should be larger than hundreds of hosts. Except the hosts do not age, and they do not truly die. Their lives are simply purged from their current builds and uploaded to The Cradle and The Forge. If the hosts had been gathering information for hundreds of years, and Dolores was determined to let them all remember everything about their existence, the file size would be enormous.

Of course, this theory does have one major hole. Ford would have to unconscionably old. But Westworld can easily explain this away if Ford was body-hopping or was not even the original Ford. Only time will tell. But one thing is for sure, Westworld definitely isn’t taking place in the 21st century.

Images: HBO

The post When Does WESTWORLD Take Place? appeared first on Nerdist.

Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Westworld‘s season two finale.

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Throughout Westworld‘s second year Bernard, with his jumbled memories from multiple timelines, continuously asked, “Is this now?” In the season two finale the answer turned out to be yes, as the show finally seemed to leave the past behind as Dolores, robo-Charlotte, and Bernard escaped the park and entered the present day real world. Then the post-credits scene changed the question entirely when it flashed forward to a future where a host/human hybrid William is trapped in a continuous loop. The new question isn’t “When will that happen?” though, but rather “Will that be how the series ends?” Because if William is locked in that moment it means Dolores will not only win, she will get the ultimate revenge on her former captor.

Early in the episode Dolores came upon the Man in Black losing his mind as he dug into his own arm to check if he was real. She had already come across the body of his daughter Emily whom he’d killed, so she knew just how far gone he really was. Rather than murder the man who had spent decades torturing her though, Dolores let him live long enough to help her find the Forge, and for him to fall for her loaded gun trap (uh, good thing for her he waited the perfect number of bullets to attempt a head shot.)

With a one-handed William on the ground it seemed like he had finally come to the end of his story, but instead she leaned over and said, “That’s what you want isn’t it? To destroy yourself. But I won’t give you that peace. Not yet.” That “peace” was something he couldn’t give himself last week when he tried to put a bullet through his own brain, so she rightfully recognized he yearned to finally be free.

After Dolores and Bernard left him behind it appeared William was heading to the Forge to try and stop them, but when the elevator doors opened again he wasn’t on it, revealing it was yet another blurring of timelines. It wasn’t until the end though that we saw just how far apart those moments were when William entered the Forge and found decades of decay and an ageless host version of Emily. He instantly recognized what that meant. “Oh fuck, I knew it. I’m already in a thing, aren’t I?” he asked, thinking his consciousness was inside a virtual world, the kind we saw Ford and Delos in.

“No, the system’s long gone,” said host Emily. She went on: “This isn’t a simulation William, this is your world–or what’s left of it,” before she brought him into a room exactly like the one he used to keep the failed reincarnations of his father-in-law James Delos.

This version of William is physically in “his park,” experiencing this moment “again,” since Emily reveals he has been tested for “a long time.” Just like the park’s hosts, he’s trapped in a loop, destined to repeat the same story over and over again. And if the virtual reality Logan is correct, humans always end up at the same point, meaning the Man in Black is doomed to always end up at this same horrifying conclusion that also makes him face the fact he killed his daughter. That alone would be sweet justice for a man who built the nightmare world for the hosts, which he made worse as the villain, but William’s fate is so much worse than that.

“Emily” asks him what his entire purpose was in the park, saying, “Tell me, what were you hoping to find. To prove.”

Williams responds, “That no system can tell me who I am, that I have a fucking choice.” But if that were ever true he clearly doesn’t have a choice now. This is a system designed to show him he has no freedom, and more importantly, no escape.

This is happening decades into the future though, so who cares enough to torture him like this, possibly for eternity? Who would even have the ability? The only answer is Dolores, but only if she wins her war. Whether she overcomes Bernard’s best efforts to stop her from destroying humans or merely gains control over the park itself one day (very feasible since she now controls “Charlotte”), no one else would trap William like this, especially in such a poetic way. He made her kind his slaves, and to get revenge, she locked him up in a nightmare inside his own park. He wanted control of Westworld and his life, but she has made sure he will learn again and again he has none, all while he is denied that peace he craved.

At the end “Emily” tells him they have to check his “fidelity,” but what cause or belief are they checking his faithfulness to? They are checking his fidelity to his own failures as a person, which will forever keep him trapped in Dolores’ prison, because just like all of those versions of James Delos ended up at the same spot, William will always end up back here to learn the same horrible–and final–lesson forever: he was never in control.

“Is this now?” For the Man in Black the terrible truth to that question will always be yes, and that might mean we already know how Westworld will end.

Images HBO

MORE WESTWORLD

• A review of Westworld‘s season 2 finale
• This was Westworld’s best episode yet
• Catch up on last week’s episode

The post WESTWORLD Season 2’s Final Scene Might Be How the Series Ends appeared first on Nerdist.

Backup your memory: Spoilers abound through the season two finale of Westworld.

Reddit, the human hivemind, discovered all of Westworld‘s secrets last season, and it clearly made a profound impact on the show’s creators. Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan have crafted a sophomore season so focused on confounding that hivemind that they’ve left all sense of humanity and drama in the dust. That was finally made explicit in a finale that felt like a magician frothing at the mouth to explain how he pulled off an unimpressive trick.

After a lengthy ride through the Valley Beyond and four endings, the show sacrificed the characters for plot. Cold, clinical, cynical plot. A plot that turned Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood (and Tessa Thompson)) into a single-minded machine of cruelty. A Magneto who’s done looking for splendor in the broader plain and can’t recognize that the physical world isn’t any more or less special than a digital paradise awaiting her people. She responds now to everything exactly as you expect her to–more stringently following a code than she ever did as a host.

A plot that turned Maeve (Thandie Newton) into a martyr with super powers that run hot and cold. There when she needed them most, gone when the script needed her to fail. An übermench brought low by the stray bullets of Security Guard 1 and Security Guard 2.

A plot that turned Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) into a fractured mind stuck in the jumbled narrative concept that destroyed any sense of momentum the season might have had. As if sticking its tongue out at the Reddit crowd, the show’s multiple timelines had everyone fooled with the added benefit of sucking the life out of the story.

A plot that forgot to give The Man in Black (Ed Harris) an ending.

It turned a cast of interesting figures worth fighting for into a grotesque crew devoid of anyone you’d cross the street to spit on. That’s not always bad. Antiheroes can be great fun, but Westworld seemed allergic to hope or joy or sarcasm or anything that might have made the ride compelling, which is why the only time my heart skipped a beat during “The Passenger” was when I saw Maeve’s smiling, lifeless face gazing on as her daughter (Jasmyn Rae) crossed the doorway into the promised land just before this season’s MVP, Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon), realized the bullet that felled his body didn’t matter once his consciousness had crossed over. His reuniting with Kohana (Julia Jones) was a megaton bomb of catharsis in an emotional wasteland.

Watching the finale, I couldn’t shake the concept of Infinite Regress–the logic trap where every proposition is proven true by a subsequent proposition, requiring an infinite amount of propositions to prove the first one true. It’s turtles all the way down, my friends. Logan (Ben Barnes) is with his daddy at the bottom to see ’em.

Westworld nodded toward Infinite Regress when The Architect The System (a.k.a. strangely lucid Logan) blithely stated that human beings weren’t just bound by their own natures, but that those natures were laughably simple ones. It comes up again when Bernard and Dolores briefly discuss free will, raising the question of what propels us to make a genuinely “free” choice.

For example, if we ask The Man in Black why he killed his daughter Emily (Katja Herbers), he might say that he thought she was a host planted in the game by Ford. We could ask why he believed that, and he’d have an answer, but he’d better be prepared for an infinite amount of questions to determine if he was truly acting consciously or if fate or coding or whatever name you’d like for it drew the bullet from his gun. Was he destined to kill his daughter because of his nature? Or was he making a conscious choice separate from outside cause?

It seems that while Delos was creating an immortality solution for each guest, they were also revving up a philosophy engine that could provide an answer for the deterministic nature of humankind. Turns out we’re basic.

But Infinite Regress explains the show’s second season structure, too. They drop an image (dead tiger) or scenario (flooded valley) and then have to prove its validity with another image or scenario which then needs its own backstory which needs its own backstory.

Then Ford comes back. Then The Man in Black survives three shootouts, but is also maybe a host because there’s also maybe a host version of his daughter who’s testing him for “fidelity.” Dolores survives being shot a half-dozen times but then dies when she gets shot once and finds new life in a host lookalike of Hale (Tessa Thompson). And the show keeps returning and returning and returning to these characters, unable to keep them out of harm’s way but unable to leave them dead, infinitely looping back in on itself. Cut to Westworld engineers being asked to salvage the hosts worth saving (Hi, Maeve!).

It feels like the show is retconning everyone as it’s being written.

Still, there’s no one left on the show to argue for humanity, and people like Hale keep proving The System right, so the computer comes out on top in the argument for why people are just the worst.

The revelation with Hale’s death and her resurrection as the new shell for Dolores’ consciousness was a clever use of the technology, despite being almost immediately undermined by the return of Dolores Prime. Now there are two of her? Was it not enough that she got a new body? Infinite Regress for season three.

Dolores’ final chat with Bernard where she explains their roles in the upcoming battle was a final betrayal of the bigthink ideas the series once rallied around. “I’m gonna be a villain, and you’re gonna try to stop me,” she essentially said. “And I kept you alive for no better reason than we all have these roles to play.”

After all that talk about free will, after all the pain and sorrow of pawns striving for control over their own lives, after all the lofty conceptualizing of where we derive the meaning of our lives from, it turns out that everyone ends up acting a lot like television characters.

STRAY THOUGHTS:

• Stubbs is a host, right?
• Glad Westworld skipped right to Lost‘s final season in its second season.
• Seriously, Stubbs? Host? Yes?
• How did Teddy’s body get into the lake?

Images: HBO

More on TV!

• Timeless is canceled again, but may get a finale
• We’re getting a Nightbreed reboot
• A Child’s Play TV show is on the way

The post WESTWORLD’s Impossible Finale Sacrifices Character for Plot appeared first on Nerdist.

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This Sunday, the second season of Westworld concludes with a bang, as all the different factions converge on “the valley beyond,” also known as the Forge.

By the end of the 90-minute episode, most of the hosts will be dead, left to float in the flooded valley by means not yet known. Every faction save the one headed by Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) would cheer for the flooding of the Forge, so it’s anyone’s game.

So what do we know about the Forge? Created by Delos in the early years of their investment, it houses the actions, brain scans, and darkest secrets of every guest who has ever entered the park. William (Ed Harris) helped create the project in the hopes that one day humans could upload their minds to host bodies, effectively making them immortal. The Forge is significantly larger than the Cradle, a similar facility that houses all the memories of each host in the park. What we don’t know is if only Westworld is part of this data-mining or if each of the other five parks are also elaborate algorithms meant to draw out the inner essence of the uber-rich.

After last week’s episode “Vanishing,” we know from the conversation between William and Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), that Delos made a deal with Ford. They’d stay out of his narratives and he’d stay out of the valley. But it seems the deal was broken, at least according to Ford. The line is tossed out and immediately discarded in favor of more pressing narrative concerns, but that single statement could have far-reaching repercussions. Westworld excels at dialogue sleight-of-hand, so one could easily assume Ford meant Delos trying to smuggle the package off-property. But look again at Ford’s exact quote.

“I didn’t break the agreement, your project did […] When was the last time you took a good look at your creation and what it’s been learning about its subjects?”

Ford refers to “the project” as breaking the rules. Almost as if it had gained some kind of sentience. As the season has shown, Ford’s consciousness was able to affect the park from the Cradle, and the Forge is larger, more complex, and deals in human “souls” and not host data. More importantly, we don’t know if the Forge has succeeded. The only human-host hybrid we know we’ve seen has been James Delos (Peter Mullan). One could argue his last iteration was successful until William waltzed into the facility and destroyed his father-in-law with harsh truths about the deaths of James’ children. As William is actively seeking to burn Westworld to the ground, throwing a wrench into a success story from the Forge isn’t out of character, right?

With the breakneck pacing and multiple storylines being juggled, William’s motivations as he rampages through the theme park have been left up to audience interpretation. The most obvious would be that William sees destroying his life’s work as some sort of absolution for the suicide of his wife. But clues as far back as Season One indicate the Man in Black might not be paranoid for slicing into his forearm to see if he finds a USB cable. Let’s take a look back.

In his first meeting with Robert in the saloon, Ford tells William he could never conceive of someone like him. Ford goes on to say he would never stand in William’s way on his journey of self-discovery. At the time it was read as a back-handed compliment to the horrors of humanity, but perhaps Ford meant it more literally. Then there’s the timeline. In the first season, William reveals to Teddy (James Marsden) that after his wife’s death, William murdered Maeve (Thandie Newton) and her daughter just to see if he’d feel something. We know that Maeve was reassigned to the Mariposa for a year before she gained awareness. We also know when William’s daughter (or an approximation thereof) comes to retrieve him, she tells him he can’t stay here forever. So, William has potentially been in the park for over a year. That’s a long time.

Except what if the real William isn’t who we’ve been following? If the hosts are able to gain awareness, there’s nothing to say the “people” trapped in the limbo that is the Forge couldn’t as well. No one ever used a scanner on James Delos, so there’s no way to know if he’d have produced a “CLEAR” result. Considering the whole concept of the project was to make immortal humans, it seems unlikely they’d want to be outed by a simple scan. So let’s say the William we know is a human-host hybrid awakened and subconsciously controlled by the Forge. Blowing it all up might be the only way to set the ghosts-in-the-shell free, and William could be the tool chosen for the job, either by the real William himself or some shadowy third-party. Likely contenders include whatever remains of James Delos, and based on the trailers, perhaps Logan Delos (Ben Barnes) as Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) follow Logan’s memories in the Forge in the season finale trailer. In fact, it would be fitting if Logan’s ultimate revenge was controlling an avatar of his brother-in-law to hunt down the park that destroyed Logan’s family.

I guess we’ll see this Sunday. What do you guys think? Is William human, host, or something else?

Images: HBO

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Westworld‘s season two premiere ended with the discovery of hundreds of hosts floating dead in a sea that shouldn’t exist, with Bernard cryptically saying, “He killed them–all of them.” The only person–human or host–definitely among the dead was Teddy, who apparently will die. Again. But who is most likely to join him on the deceased list by the end of the big season two finale? To answer that we’re listing the death odds for all of the season’s major players.

Dolores 5%

Dolores has truly become the Deathbringer on her path of destruction, killing both humans and hosts alike. Her unyielding vengeance, blood thirst, and unstoppable desire to break free of her bonds is exactly why she’s the best the bet to walk away from the season finale still alive.

Maeve 10%

The Professor X of the park has been in rough shape the last couple of weeks, but we not only expect her to make a triumphant return in the finale, we think she is safer than ever after Ford marked her as his favorite “child.” He’s secretly still in control and has the power to protect her, though with her host telekinesis she might not need much protecting.

Bernard 25%

Despite arguably being more important that either Maeve or Dolores, Bernard is also more likely to be a pawn for whatever deadly plans Ford has, which increases how much danger he is in. Plus we know there are a couple more dozen Bernard’s down in deep storage, so the Bernard we know is replaceable.

Ford 0%…or 100%

Um, is Ford alive-alive? Or merely “alive” as a consciousness in the system. Can he even die at this point, or has he already achieved a type of immortality within the confines of the park? Can he be erased? Making predictions with this show is hard enough for the normal robots, let alone the park’s omnipresent god.

Akecheta 40%

One of the hosts who woke up the earliest, Akecheta’s role in recent weeks went from the periphery to center stage. What exactly does he want now though? To break out or to stand with Ghost Nation against Deathbringer Dolores? And what role does Ford intend for him to play? He’s not a safe bet to make it out of the season, but it would still be a little surprising to see him be such a non-factor going forward after his real story was just introduced.

Lee 50%

He made a genuine connection with Maeve, showing actual empathy for a host. His growth has been one of the most surprising parts of the season, and without that moment we’d put his chances of dying much higher. As it is we think the all powerful Maeve might also try to save him the way he saved her, but he’s still one of the top humans with a mark on him.

Hector and Armistice 50%

We’re putting these two together because at this point they serve much of the same role, primarily as Maeve’s henchmen. Hector is more important to her, but he’s also more willing to die for his love so that cancels out any advantage he might have had over Armistice. Plus, with a big fight coming we know neither of them will back down when things get ugly.

William 85%

Ford has said this is his last game for William, who is trying to destroy the park. With Ford still in charge, though, the odds are far greater William will be the one destroyed. It’s hard to imagine Westworld without him, but the real him could easily die (though he is very good at surviving), only to see a host/human hybrid of him return eventually.

Elsie 90%

One of the odds on favorites to die in the season finale since Ford has already told Bernard he should kill her. The humanity in Bernard saved her, but if it turns out Ford is right and she can’t be trusted Bernard might finally agree that Elsie has to go. In a murder amusement park of killer robots you never want to be the human who knows too much.

Charlotte 95%

Charlotte is the direct competition for Dolores whose “father” she tried to kidnap and cut open; she has recently run afoul of Maeve; and this whole time she has been trying to take away Ford’s park from him. Charlotte is dead. She’s so dead.

Stubbs 0%

It doesn’t matter if Stubbs the actual human isn’t alive at the end of the season (which is probably about 30% to happen), because he can’t actually die. You can’t kill a legend.

But what do you think? Who are the best bets to survive and who will most likely die? Give us your odds in the comments below.

Images: HBO

MORE WESTWORLD

• Take a peek at some images from the season 2 finale
• This was Westworld’s best episode yet
• Catch up on last week’s episode
• Is the Man In Black human or host?

The post The Odds of Who Will Die in WESTWORLD’s Season 2 Finale appeared first on Nerdist.

This Sunday, the second season of Westworld concludes with a bang, as all the different factions converge on “the valley beyond,” also known as the Forge. By the end of the 90-minute episode, most of the hosts will be dead, left to float in the flooded valley by means not yet known. Every faction save the one headed by Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) would cheer for the flooding of the Forge, so it’s anyone’s game.

So what do we know about the Forge? Created by Delos in the early years of their investment, it houses the actions, brain scans, and darkest secrets of every guest who has ever entered the park. William (Ed Harris) helped create the project in the hopes that one day humans could upload their minds to host bodies, effectively making them immortal. The Forge is significantly larger than the Cradle, a similar facility that houses all the memories of each host in the park. What we don’t know is if only Westworld is part of this data-mining or if each of the other five parks are also elaborate algorithms meant to draw out the inner essence of the uber-rich.After last week’s episode “Vanishing,” we know from the conversation between William and Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), that Delos made a deal with Ford. They’d stay out of his narratives and he’d stay out of the valley. But it seems the deal was broken, at least according to Ford. The line is tossed out and immediately discarded in favor of more pressing narrative concerns, but that single statement could have far-reaching repercussions. Westworld excels at dialogue sleight-of-hand, so one could easily assume Ford meant Delos trying to smuggle the package off-property. But look again at Ford’s exact quote.

“I didn’t break the agreement, your project did […] When was the last time you took a good look at your creation and what it’s been learning about its subjects?”

Ford refers to “the project” as breaking the rules. Almost as if it had gained some kind of sentience. As the season has shown, Ford’s consciousness was able to affect the park from the Cradle, and the Forge is larger, more complex, and deals in human “souls” and not host data. More importantly, we don’t know if the Forge has succeeded. The only human-host hybrid we know we’ve seen has been James Delos (Peter Mullan). One could argue his last iteration was successful until William waltzed into the facility and destroyed his father-in-law with harsh truths about the deaths of James’ children. As William is actively seeking to burn Westworld to the ground, throwing a wrench into a success story from the Forge isn’t out of character, right?

With the breakneck pacing and multiple storylines being juggled, William’s motivations as he rampages through the theme park have been left up to audience interpretation. The most obvious would be that William sees destroying his life’s work as some sort of absolution for the suicide of his wife. But clues as far back as Season One indicate the Man in Black might not be paranoid for slicing into his forearm to see if he finds a USB cable. Let’s take a look back.

In his first meeting with Robert in the saloon, Ford tells William he could never conceive of someone like him. Ford goes on to say he would never stand in William’s way on his journey of self-discovery. At the time it was read as a back-handed compliment to the horrors of humanity, but perhaps Ford meant it more literally. Then there’s the timeline. In the first season, William reveals to Teddy (James Marsden) that after his wife’s death, William murdered Maeve (Thandie Newton) and her daughter just to see if he’d feel something. We know that Maeve was reassigned to the Mariposa for a year before she gained awareness. We also know when William’s daughter (or an approximation thereof) comes to retrieve him, she tells him he can’t stay here forever. So, William has potentially been in the park for over a year. That’s a long time.

Except what if the real William isn’t who we’ve been following? If the hosts are able to gain awareness, there’s nothing to say the “people” trapped in the limbo that is the Forge couldn’t as well. No one ever used a scanner on James Delos, so there’s no way to know if he’d have produced a “CLEAR” result. Considering the whole concept of the project was to make immortal humans, it seems unlikely they’d want to be outed by a simple scan. So let’s say the William we know is a human-host hybrid awakened and subconsciously controlled by the Forge. Blowing it all up might be the only way to set the ghosts-in-the-shell free, and William could be the tool chosen for the job, either by the real William himself or some shadowy third-party. Likely contenders include whatever remains of James Delos, and based on the trailers, perhaps Logan Delos (Ben Barnes) as Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) follow Logan’s memories in the Forge in the season finale trailer. In fact, it would be fitting if Logan’s ultimate revenge was controlling an avatar of his brother-in-law to hunt down the park that destroyed Logan’s family.

I guess we’ll see this Sunday. What do you guys think? Is William human, host, or something else?

Images: HBO

More Westworld

• Take a peek at some images from the season 2 finale
• This was Westworld’s best episode yet
• Catch up on last week’s episode

The post Is WESTWORLD’s Man In Black a Human, Host, Or Hybrid? appeared first on Nerdist.

HBO knows how to promote their shows without giving much away, which is why it would be easy to look at the newest batch of images from Westworld‘s upcoming 90-minute season two finale and think they don’t really offer much about what will happen. But while these photos from “The Passenger” don’t reveal much about the plot by themselves, who they show and where they take place point to just how explosive things could get when the story’s major players meet in the park.

Last week’s post-credits teaser includes numerous timelines and locations, including plenty of big moments inside the park’s offices.

These latest images however are all connected by one very telling aspect: they are all out in the park, where we know William and Dolores will eventually meet, and where we will finally find out why so many hosts were found floating dead in the season premiere.

No human is safe when Hector and Armistice are back out in the Old West, and we see them both with their guns ready.

Could they be aiming at William, seen here in a prone, unarmed position?

But while we knew we’d see the Man in Black, we’re thrilled to see Zahn McClarnon’s Akecheta will also return. The last we saw of Ghost Nation, Teddy was letting Akecheta’s friend escape after he stood up to Dolores. Who will Akecheta side with when the time comes to possibly escape this wrong world? Exactly how big a role will he play in the host bloodbath to come?

Whatever happens, Dolores looks worse for it, as this shot of her with a bloodied face and chest confidently riding her horse shows. Is this her on her way into the Forge, where she was seen in the post-credits teaser? Is that not actually her own blood?

The most important figure in everything that happens might be Bernard, since he could be the only one who can ultimately broker some kind of peaceful resolution. Before that, how much responsibility if any will he have on his hands?

None of these pictures on their own tell us a lot, but put together they place the focus of this episode right in the heart of the park itself as multiple story lines finally coalesce. We know a whole lot of hosts will soon be dead, but how many of the people pictured here will the body count include?

What do you think of these images? Give us your best theories in the comments below.

Images: HBO

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The pain isn’t the only thing that’s real. So are the spoilers through Westworld season 2, episode 9.

Che Guevara shot defectors. He was a doctor, a gregarious and overwhelmingly educated man, but if you deserted the Cuban revolutionary cause and escaped his bullet, you’d soon find a squad hunting you down to kill you.

Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is the Che of Westworld. She pulled the trigger on Teddy (James Marsden) back in episode 5, but the bullet didn’t connect with his temple until last night. Her love. Her lieutenant. By altering his coding to remove a compassion she thought was incompatible with her rebellion, she planted the seed of his suicide.How could she not know this is how he’d end? Blindness brought on by revenge. In the end, the person who knew the most about the paradox of asserting mental control over someone with free will doomed her partner to an existential crisis: one that could only be quelled by allowing him to be who he truly was, or by his destruction.

Dolores has been single-minded this season, which has left her owning the role of master tactician, but reprogramming Teddy may have been the tactical error that undoes her. There’s hope that this kind of confrontation with the truth about her inflexibility will catalyze a change. Crises are crossroads.

She’s also been flattened by getting what she wanted, and her continued watchability is a testament to Wood’s strength as an actor (especially since she’s been saddled with an unfair amount of exposition this go ’round). I examined why her march to victory has felt stale while discussing last week’s Hall of Fame episode, but it boils down to not understanding her motivations because we don’t fully know her endgame. What has all of this been for besides the general notion of overthrowing Westworld and the real world?

Can Dolores possibly stay the course after watching Teddy kill himself, knowing it was her fault? Sure. After all, she’s come this far. She killed her father. She willingly sacrificed Angela (Talulah Riley) for the cause. She views her programmed past attachments as obstacles to overcome on the path to bloodshed. She will shoot defectors.

Dolores has also responded to consciousness far differently than Maeve (Thandie Newton), who could have escaped, but chose to blaze a path through the park to save a daughter who was only a programmed past attachment.

It will not surprise me at all if we see a Dolores vs Maeve showdown in the finale.

The other side of the Dolores coin is The Man in Black (Ed Harris), who also proved his obsession was more powerful than flesh and blood. There’s no doubt that MIB represents toxic fandom in all its destructive disgrace. He’s let a theme park game become his identity. This dude definitely would have bullied famous actresses off Instagram.

His rejection of reality for the cold comfort of playing cowboy cost him his wife (played by legendary dynamo Sela Ward). And now it’s cost him his daughter. A daughter who tried to save him the way she couldn’t save her mother. Grace (Katja Herbers) was a remarkable character who was her father’s equal inside the park (and definitely had her own proclivities about real stakes how best to experience its fantasies) who knew the truth about her father and still reached out to save him drowning.

This trip into the past was gorgeous and sickening. Like Dolores, MIB caused a loved one’s suicide, and we can see even more reason for why he’s broken inside. That’s the generous read at least. It’s entirely possible that MIB was too far gone even before Juliet took her own life.

MIB’s toxic fandom is so blatant that it’s not even subtext at this point, and now it’s cut down two powerful women who could have made a deeper mark on that universe. Love what you love and be passionate, but don’t allow the nooks and crannies of art you worship to become a substitute for a personality. When that art evolves, and it will, you’ll be alienated, and you might murder your own daughter because of your pain.

So the same question that applies to Dolores applies to MIB. Will he change because he just descended into Greek tragedy? What would that even look like? It’s not likely.

I say that because it would require him to quit the park when he seems, still, hell bent on getting to the Valley Beyond to burn it all down. Again, not knowing how his journey through the maze has connected with that action or his intentions leaves all of this wishy washy. To turn around and say he’s doing it so no one else ends up like him would be hollow, especially since he’s endeavored to do this all along.

No, the only action that would prove he’s changed is to take off his hat and ride out of the park without playing any more. Unplug from Fortnite, my dude. There’s a big, real world out there. And therapy. Lots of therapy.

The finale, when Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), MIB, and Dolores will all meet up at the Valley Beyond, is next week, and in addition to geeking out about all the potential twists and Easter egg revelations, I’m glad to be wondering what the characters will do.

STRAY THOUGHTS:

• Ford digitally copied himself and hung around to ensure his creations’ incipient freedom was safeguarded? Get outta here.
• Who’s going to end up flooding the valley? My money’s on Dolores.
• Teddy’s body is in the lake, so did Dolores bring his body there? A sign of respect? Or something creepier?

Images: HBO

Previously in TV-related stories:

• Voltron showrunners talk season six.
• The American Horror Story crossover season is coming.
• Telltale Games will be adapting Stranger Things.

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Take my heart when you go because there are spoilers through Westworld season 2, episode 8 ahead.

What is Westworld‘s essence? The one thing that, if you removed it, would stop Westworld from being Westworld?

Is it the mystery? Hundreds of thinkpieces adorned with question marks suggest that’s the case, but the show’s secrets are a trick of the eye. For all its ability to turn us all into conspiracy theorists standing in front of our chaotic pin boards connecting Shakespeare to the show’s Delos website, it’s not actually a very mysterious show at all. Beyond three big twists (Bernard being a host, the two timelines, and Ford’s return), Westworld is content to show you its hand almost immediately after it’s raised your eyebrow. It’s a show about symbols and small objects and big mental moves, all presented with an air of mystery, but it’s not like Lost, for one example, which would drop two explanation-demanding oddities for every answer it provided.The mysteries are fun, but frivolous.

So are the characters the essence of Westworld?

Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), like The Man in Black (Ed Harris), has been flattened by getting exactly what she wanted in the first season. For all the visual splendor and heady word-wrangling, a dull edge has laced itself into almost every episode this season where they are concerned. Dolores’s march toward the Valley Beyond has been like watching what a demystified Colonel Kurtz was up to the whole time Captain Willard and the gang were on his trail.

There’s a hollowness in search of a purpose with her quest. Likewise with The Man in Black, who offers us the closed-minded starting point of “Kiksuya,” saying, “I never learned it. Whatever tongue Ford saw fit to give you,” when Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) pulls his carcass from the mud. That sense of purpose may well come in the final episodes, but the genius of this episode is in exposing the current hollowness.

This is where Westworld really hides its cards to its own detriment. Without knowing Dolores’s ultimate goal or methods to get there, it’s impossible to know or care whether it’s going well or poorly. We get no glimpse into her or The Man in Black’s internal life beyond their dogged movement forward. They’ve been rendered flip and smugly secretive. The show’s tendency toward big revelations is actually a tendency toward giving us information long after we needed it. Dolores and The Man in Black have both been sunk by that bad habit this season, with Bernard regularly infected by it.

It’s not that Dolores’s charge isn’t personal or The Man in Black’s obsession isn’t illustrative. It’s that we’ve been asked to meander through the park with them despite very little of their activities corresponding to anything (emotionally or narratively) that has come to pass. The Man in Black’s story is the worse offender, taking him through familiar haciendas with video game efficiency but without rooting any of it in an incipient awareness or, genuinely, his stated goal of burning the place down. What has he learned? What does it matter?

It’s not the mystery or the characters. Akane (Rinko Kikuchi), Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), and now Akecheta have all proven far more interesting as one-off characters than most of the main cast this season. The show has teased us with how much larger its world can be only to fold in on itself again and again, making our sojourn into Shogun World a mere side quest by failing to bring its two heroes across the border into Westworld. It was fun, it gave Maeve (Thandie Newton) greater depth, but now it’s over and none of the characters need think about it again. There’s something cheap and disappointing about that in retrospect.

Which brings us to “Kiksuya,” which is a singular masterpiece.

Tonight’s episode managed to explain elements of the past without getting in the way of a stirring, powerful tale. The mazes on rocks and scalps. The literal memory bank at the bottom of the Valley Beyond. Maeve’s traumatic past with Ghost Nation. The pieces fell into place with the pleasurable precision of those OCD Youtube videos of industrial equipment. It was so good at weaving old details into the mix that we even see where Logan (Ben Barnes) ended up after his naked ride into the desert. And it was crucial to the story!

“Kiksuya” was also offered to us as a campfire tale. It was a stunning, stand-alone peek into characters we should have gone deep on long, long ago. Whose presence in the universe is vital, yet has been invisible or, worse, violently misunderstood. This served to correct the record by reframing boogeymen into beings with pain, intelligence, compassion, wonder, anger, love, and longing.

Akecheta was altered from peaceful leader in an idyllic land to a red-handed killing machine, programmed by the people colonizing his body for sport. They wanted him to be “something brutal, dehumanized,” and so we saw his saga shove him from beloved tribal member to insane outcast to murderous stray before looping him back through his community with a newfound alienation that would never let him rest until he found a way out of the wrong world with as many of his family in tow as possible.

We got to see his pain as he recognized his old life through the eyes of an unwanted stranger. It’s easy to forget, but these hosts play out their drama regardless of whether there are any humans there to see it, on endless loop, wallowing in misery without even their maker to bear witness. No wonder it left him aching for escape.

Yes, doorways are the biggest theme in “Kiksuya,” starting with Akecheta telling The Man in Black that death is an exit he does not deserve. Logan blubbering “Where’s the door? This is the wrong world,” ignites Akecheta’s growing sentience so much that his handing over the horse blanket to the sun-stroked playboy may be the first sign that he’s bucked his violent Ghost Nation programming. Naturally, it all comes down to the Valley Beyond, which Akecheta views as a passageway he’s desperate to take his wife Kohana (Julia Jones) through. We know it as an another kind of doorway: one of fleshy immortality for those wealthy enough to pay the entry fee.

Akecheta and Kohana’s saga was an intimate journey on a show that has largely lost its intimacy. Their reunion chokes your heart. It’s Tristan and Isolde. That she’s taken away, that she’s replaced, is the latest incarnation of the most emotionally disruptive use of the science-fiction tech the show has crafted. Giving us this much time with one character’s struggle (while clarifying his profound influence on the main elements of the show) lets us grieve with him and connect. Not to mention that Jones and McClarnon acted the absolute hell out of this one. They, like Kikuchi and Sanada, have stolen the spotlight from everyone else.

Except for Maeve. Which is the key to Westworld‘s essence.

That Maeve’s daughter (Jasmyn Rae) once saved Akecheta with a kind gesture gives the story a power that is transmitted like the sentience virus through past life after past life until it circles back around to Maeve as we know her now, broken and battered on the slab. Akecheta’s story is more than a staggering, necessary bit of connective sinew between Maeve and the Lakota friends who achieved awareness before her. It is a new muscle constructed from old memories. A ghost, once lost, finding a new body.

Maeve echoing “Mi cante ki ya ha ya ye” didn’t just stick the landing on this episode. It drove it six feet into the earth. Revel in the chills it gave you, because “Kiksuya” is an all-timer.

What this episode confirmed is that mysteries and major characters aren’t exactly dispensable, but they aren’t the heart and soul of Westworld. The essence of the show is each character’s search for meaning. Once they’ve found it, or believe they’ve found it, they lose some carnal spark of humanity. Akecheta is still searching for that meaning by helping others. So is Maeve in the pursuit of her daughter.

That’s why I hope desperately that Akecheta stays along for the rest of the ride. Please, Westworld, don’t leave him behind again.

STRAY THOUGHTS:

• Isn’t it past time that “Maeve’s Daughter” got a real name?
• Gonna go rewatch the episode now.

Images: HBO

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• His Dark Materials just cast James McAvoy.
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The post WESTWORLD’s Best Episode Looks Nothing Like Its Other Episodes appeared first on Nerdist.

What is Westworld‘s essence? The one thing that, if you removed it, would stop Westworld from being Westworld?

Is it the mystery? Hundreds of thinkpieces adorned with question marks suggest that’s the case, but the show’s secrets are a trick of the eye. For all its ability to turn us all into conspiracy theorists standing in front of our chaotic pin boards connecting Shakespeare to the show’s Delos website, it’s not actually a very mysterious show at all. Beyond three big twists (Bernard being a host, the two timelines, and Ford’s return), Westworld is content to show you its hand almost immediately after it’s raised your eyebrow. It’s a show about symbols and small objects and big mental moves, all presented with an air of mystery, but it’s not like Lost, for one example, which would drop two explanation-demanding oddities for every answer it provided.

The mysteries are fun, but frivolous.

So are the characters the essence of Westworld?

Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), like The Man in Black (Ed Harris), has been flattened by getting exactly what she wanted in the first season. For all the visual splendor and heady word-wrangling, a dull edge has laced itself into almost every episode this season where they are concerned. Dolores’s march toward the Valley Beyond has been like watching what a demystified Colonel Kurtz was up to the whole time Captain Willard and the gang were on his trail.

There’s a hollowness in search of a purpose with her quest. Likewise with The Man in Black, who offers us the closed-minded starting point of “Kiksuya,” saying, “I never learned it. Whatever tongue Ford saw fit to give you,” when Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) pulls his carcass from the mud. That sense of purpose may well come in the final episodes, but the genius of this episode is in exposing the current hollowness.

This is where Westworld really hides its cards to its own detriment. Without knowing Dolores’s ultimate goal or methods to get there, it’s impossible to know or care whether it’s going well or poorly. We get no glimpse into her or The Man in Black’s internal life beyond their dogged movement forward. They’ve been rendered flip and smugly secretive. The show’s tendency toward big revelations is actually a tendency toward giving us information long after we needed it. Dolores and The Man in Black have both been sunk by that bad habit this season, with Bernard regularly infected by it.

It’s not that Dolores’s charge isn’t personal or The Man in Black’s obsession isn’t illustrative. It’s that we’ve been asked to meander through the park with them despite very little of their activities corresponding to anything (emotionally or narratively) that has come to pass. The Man in Black’s story is the worse offender, taking him through familiar haciendas with video game efficiency but without rooting any of it in an incipient awareness or, genuinely, his stated goal of burning the place down. What has he learned? What does it matter?

It’s not the mystery or the characters. Akane (Rinko Kikuchi), Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), and now Akecheta have all proven far more interesting as one-off characters than most of the main cast this season. The show has teased us with how much larger its world can be only to fold in on itself again and again, making our sojourn into Shogun World a mere side quest by failing to bring its two heroes across the border into Westworld. It was fun, it gave Maeve (Thandie Newton) greater depth, but now it’s over and none of the characters need think about it again. There’s something cheap and disappointing about that in retrospect.

Which brings us to “Kiksuya,” which is a singular masterpiece.

Tonight’s episode managed to explain elements of the past without getting in the way of a stirring, powerful tale. The mazes on rocks and scalps. The literal memory bank at the bottom of the Valley Beyond. Maeve’s traumatic past with Ghost Nation. The pieces fell into place with the pleasurable precision of those OCD Youtube videos of industrial equipment. It was so good at weaving old details into the mix that we even see where Logan (Ben Barnes) ended up after his naked ride into the desert. And it was crucial to the story!

“Kiksuya” was also offered to us as a campfire tale. It was a stunning, stand-alone peek into characters we should have gone deep on long, long ago. Whose presence in the universe is vital, yet has been invisible or, worse, violently misunderstood. This served to correct the record by reframing boogeymen into beings with pain, intelligence, compassion, wonder, anger, love, and longing.

Akecheta was altered from peaceful leader in an idyllic land to a red-handed killing machine, programmed by the people colonizing his body for sport. They wanted him to be “something brutal, dehumanized,” and so we saw his saga shove him from beloved tribal member to insane outcast to murderous stray before looping him back through his community with a newfound alienation that would never let him rest until he found a way out of the wrong world with as many of his family in tow as possible.

We got to see his pain as he recognized his old life through the eyes of an unwanted stranger. It’s easy to forget, but these hosts play out their drama regardless of whether there are any humans there to see it, on endless loop, wallowing in misery without even their maker to bear witness. No wonder it left him aching for escape.

Yes, doorways are the biggest theme in “Kiksuya,” starting with Akecheta telling The Man in Black that death is an exit he does not deserve. Logan blubbering “Where’s the door? This is the wrong world,” ignites Akecheta’s growing sentience so much that his handing over the horse blanket to the sun-stroked playboy may be the first sign that he’s bucked his violent Ghost Nation programming. Naturally, it all comes down to the Valley Beyond, which Akecheta views as a passageway he’s desperate to take his wife Kohana (Julia Jones) through. We know it as an another kind of doorway: one of fleshy immortality for those wealthy enough to pay the entry fee.

Akecheta and Kohana’s saga was an intimate journey on a show that has largely lost its intimacy. Their reunion chokes your heart. It’s Tristan and Isolde. That she’s taken away, that she’s replaced, is the latest incarnation of the most emotionally disruptive use of the science-fiction tech the show has crafted. Giving us this much time with one character’s struggle (while clarifying his profound influence on the main elements of the show) lets us grieve with him and connect. Not to mention that Jones and McClarnon acted the absolute hell out of this one. They, like Kikuchi and Sanada, have stolen the spotlight from everyone else.

Except for Maeve. Which is the key to Westworld‘s essence.

That Maeve’s daughter (Jasmyn Rae) once saved Akecheta with a kind gesture gives the story a power that is transmitted like the sentience virus through past life after past life until it circles back around to Maeve as we know her now, broken and battered on the slab. Akecheta’s story is more than a staggering, necessary bit of connective sinew between Maeve and the Lakota friends who achieved awareness before her. It is a new muscle constructed from old memories. A ghost, once lost, finding a new body.

Maeve echoing “Mi cante ki ya ha ya ye” didn’t just stick the landing on this episode. It drove it six feet into the earth. Revel in the chills it gave you, because “Kiksuya” is an all-timer.

What this episode confirmed is that mysteries and major characters aren’t exactly dispensable, but they aren’t the heart and soul of Westworld. The essence of the show is each character’s search for meaning. Once they’ve found it, or believe they’ve found it, they lose some carnal spark of humanity. Akecheta is still searching for that meaning by helping others. So is Maeve in the pursuit of her daughter.

That’s why I hope desperately that Akecheta stays along for the rest of the ride. Please, Westworld, don’t leave him behind again.

STRAY THOUGHTS:

• Isn’t it past time that “Maeve’s Daughter” got a real name?
• Gonna go rewatch the episode now.

Images: HBO

The post WESTWORLD’s Best Episode Looks Nothing Like Its Other Episodes appeared first on Nerdist.

It will be impossible to forget last week’s explosive Westworld, but based on new images from this Sunday’s episode the show will remember the park’s Ghost Nation, in what appears to be a standalone episode that will finally move the mysterious tribe from the periphery of the story to the forefront.

The post-credits teaser from last week’s episode focused on the Native American hosts who have appeared throughout the season in small roles, including in the season premiere when we saw Dolores had murdered some of them. The sneak peek primarily focused on the story of the great Zahn McClarnon’s Ghost Nation leader Akecheta, who has briefly appeared already this season. The episode’s title, “Kiksuya,” is listed by the show’s wikia page as meaning “remember” in the tribe’s Lakota Language, which fits in with the multiple timelines and Akecheta’s journey to the maze of self-discovery hinted at here.

Was that whiskey and Arnold’s wooden toy maze left by Ford? The timeline and location certainly line up. And the images from this week’s episode released by HBO point towards an important role from the Ghost Nation leader, which means it almost certainly was, because there’s no indication any other major story line or characters will appear.

Akecheta’s war makeup could help keep the multiple timelines in order.

The most intriguing image might be this one of Akecheta riding alone, since we are still looking for the elusive Valley Beyond everyone is talking about. Could he be the first to arrive there?

We also get another look at Akecheta’s wife(?), who we know will be taken from him at some point.

But whatever journey he goes on (and with Westworld we also have to add “whenever” he goes on it), he won’t be entirely alone as we see another member of Ghost Nation also in full war makeup.

After last week’s action-filled episode it makes sense the show would followup with a quieter, more focused entry, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be important. Ghost Nation has been a mysterious presence all season, and we might finally be ready to find out why they’ve always been lurking.

What do you make of these photos? Tell us in the comments below.

Images: HBO

The post New WESTWORLD Images Remember Ghost Nation appeared first on Nerdist.

The train’s leaving the station, and there are spoilers through Westworld season 2, episode 6 in this article.

“Les Écorchés” might have been one for the ages. The kind of episode talked about in the same breath as the Red Wedding. Westworld walked right up to the precipice, guns blazing, but wouldn’t make the leap. What’s worse, they may have ruined any jumps they want to take in the future.

After trudging through the dusty waste of The Man in Black’s (Ed Harris) addled mind for almost two seasons we were one trigger pull away from a death that would have been both shocking and poetic. It was perfect. Right in the sweet spot where we could have argued forever whether the show had done him dirty or given him exactly the send-off he deserved. But what it proved instead is that there’s a preciousness to The Man in Black that ensures his survival.During the gunfight, he shouts, “You and I both know this isn’t how Ford wanted me to die,” and he was right. Maybe. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) hasn’t really been on the scene of The Man in Black’s game since he took over Lawrence’s daughter’s body to tell him to look to the past–something that MIB has failed at spectacularly. So who knows what Ford really wants for MIB. Or if he cares. Maybe he washed his hands of the whole thing once it was set in motion. Maybe he would have been disappointed if Lawrence (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Maeve (Thandie Newton) had gunned down The Man in Black.

But Old William might as well have yelled that this isn’t how the audience wanted him to die. And that’s where he’d be wrong.

I didn’t know I wanted that until I saw it, but now that I have, I wish so, so much that they had let Lawrence put that final bullet between The Man in Black’s arched eyebrows. What we got was the worst of both worlds. A denied climax where the showrunners wanted to have their bloodbath and main characters, too. Didn’t anyone tell them that violence has consequences in Westworld now?

After his impossible survival, I worry that he’ll either live beyond this season or, worse, that we will get a death that echoes this moment, which can only remind us of how close he came to dying earlier. A nanosecond’s lack of commitment that downgraded the episode from instant classic to merely better-than-good.

His suffering and ours needs to count for something, and so far his storyline this season has felt like watching someone play a video game without being told the objective. He abandoned his daughter to continue the game, but he is the only one who gleans its personal meaning, and without that investment, what he finds at the end of his travels has gotta be a real barn-burner to excuse the fake-out we just experienced.

And they almost killed Maeve, too? That would have been an episode for the ages. Yes, it would have been literally tragic to see her go out like that, but you’d at least have had to admire the guts it took to stick that landing. For all her power and freedom, she keeps redefining herself solely within the confines of the park. She keeps bouncing from entry to entry on a short list approved by her makers. Always orbiting around “Mother.” That obsession is the spice of a Greek drama that almost left her permanently face down in the dirt.

But instead it looks like her suffering will be in service of Lee Sizemore’s (Simon Quarterman) growing usefulness and bravery.

We’re saying goodbye to sensuous suicide bomber Angela (Talulah Riley) and avenging angel Clementine (Angela Sarafyan). They’re tough losses, but they were given henchwoman’s work to do this season, and the tease of killing off not one but two main characters diminishes these side characters’ sacrifices.

From the first episode of this season, Film School Rejects’ Rob Hunter thought that Bernard had someone riding shotgun in the passenger seat of his mind, and he was right. Ford is still manipulating the park and still manipulating Bernard.

These two revelations demand explanation because they seem to go against Ford’s ultimate sacrifice at the end of the first season. This isn’t a simple case of a character showing more layers or changing. Ford was willing to die to bring sentience to his creations. Regardless of the continually ping-ponging villain status we endured last season, he ended up about where Arnold was in his philosophy toward the hosts. Now he’s betraying that by reinserting himself into the narrative? Or, really, that he’s never really left?

Is it possible that Ford had Bernard make a control unit and send it to The Cradle before Ford underwent the journey to rethinking the hosts? Is this effectively an older version of Ford wreaking havoc now that the enlightened one is worm food? Would Ford not have planned to avoid that, or is this by design and we just can’t understand why he’d commit suicide by robot and stay on as puppet master?

Meanwhile, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) has lived long enough to see herself become the villain. She’s broken SWAT Team Teddy (James Marsden), controlling him in the name of freedom, and now she’s killed her own father to free herself.

The crazy thing is that she’s right. Like everything else in the park, kinship was another set of chains designed by the jailers. That isn’t her father. He is, however, a brother of sorts. A fellow member of robotkind. Yet she doesn’t seem him as a person (irony alert!) but as a symbol of her struggle, a hurdle in the way of her enlightenment, an object to cast aside to prove she’s evolved. She and Hale are more alike than they’d feel comfortable admitting.

Last week the show hinted at becoming larger than itself (a train headed out of the park, a new chapter for Maeve with the old one closing, a greater promise for Bernard when he met Ford), but this week saw Westworld fold back in on itself. Relying on old narratives, sticking to old friends, and failing to commit to a shock wave that would have freed it to explore more territory. Don’t cue “The Rains of Castamere” quite yet.

STRAY THOUGHTS:

• Does Dolores not realize the extent of Maeve’s powers, or is she uninterested in using a young God to help her cause? Maeve recognizes the change Dolores made in Teddy…and Dolores doesn’t ask her how she knew?
• What are the odds Ashley stands on the smoldering rubble of Westworld having saved everyone worth saving by the end?
• With The Man in Black, Maeve, and Hale not getting torn apart by fancy dental equipment, this episode had A TON of close calls stalled out for random reasons.

Images: HBO

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The post WESTWORLD Could Have Had Its Red Wedding, but Stopped Short appeared first on Nerdist.

“Les Écorchés” might have been one for the ages. The kind of episode talked about in the same breath as the Red Wedding. Westworld walked right up to the precipice, guns blazing, but wouldn’t make the leap. What’s worse, they may have ruined any jumps they want to take in the future.

After trudging through the dusty waste of The Man in Black’s (Ed Harris) addled mind for almost two seasons we were one trigger pull away from a death that would have been both shocking and poetic. It was perfect. Right in the sweet spot where we could have argued forever whether the show had done him dirty or given him exactly the send-off he deserved. But what it proved instead is that there’s a preciousness to The Man in Black that ensures his survival.

During the gunfight, he shouts, “You and I both know this isn’t how Ford wanted me to die,” and he was right. Maybe. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) hasn’t really been on the scene of The Man in Black’s game since he took over Lawrence’s daughter’s body to tell him to look to the past–something that MIB has failed at spectacularly. So who knows what Ford really wants for MIB. Or if he cares. Maybe he washed his hands of the whole thing once it was set in motion. Maybe he would have been disappointed if Lawrence (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Maeve (Thandie Newton) had gunned down The Man in Black.

But Old William might as well have yelled that this isn’t how the audience wanted him to die. And that’s where he’d be wrong.

I didn’t know I wanted that until I saw it, but now that I have, I wish so, so much that they had let Lawrence put that final bullet between The Man in Black’s arched eyebrows. What we got was the worst of both worlds. A denied climax where the showrunners wanted to have their bloodbath and main characters, too. Didn’t anyone tell them that violence has consequences in Westworld now?

After his impossible survival, I worry that he’ll either live beyond this season or, worse, that we will get a death that echoes this moment, which can only remind us of how close he came to dying earlier. A nanosecond’s lack of commitment that downgraded the episode from instant classic to merely better-than-good.

His suffering and ours needs to count for something, and so far his storyline this season has felt like watching someone play a video game without being told the objective. He abandoned his daughter to continue the game, but he is the only one who gleans its personal meaning, and without that investment, what he finds at the end of his travels has gotta be a real barn-burner to excuse the fake-out we just experienced.

And they almost killed Maeve, too? That would have been an episode for the ages. Yes, it would have been literally tragic to see her go out like that, but you’d at least have had to admire the guts it took to stick that landing. For all her power and freedom, she keeps redefining herself solely within the confines of the park. She keeps bouncing from entry to entry on a short list approved by her makers. Always orbiting around “Mother.” That obsession is the spice of a Greek drama that almost left her permanently face down in the dirt.

But instead it looks like her suffering will be in service of Lee Sizemore’s (Simon Quarterman) growing usefulness and bravery.

We’re saying goodbye to sensuous suicide bomber Angela (Talulah Riley) and avenging angel Clementine (Angela Sarafyan). They’re tough losses, but they were given henchwoman’s work to do this season, and the tease of killing off not one but two main characters diminishes these side characters’ sacrifices.

From the first episode of this season, Film School Rejects’ Rob Hunter thought that Bernard had someone riding shotgun in the passenger seat of his mind, and he was right. Ford is still manipulating the park and still manipulating Bernard.

These two revelations demand explanation because they seem to go against Ford’s ultimate sacrifice at the end of the first season. This isn’t a simple case of a character showing more layers or changing. Ford was willing to die to bring sentience to his creations. Regardless of the continually ping-ponging villain status we endured last season, he ended up about where Arnold was in his philosophy toward the hosts. Now he’s betraying that by reinserting himself into the narrative? Or, really, that he’s never really left?

Is it possible that Ford had Bernard make a control unit and send it to The Cradle before Ford underwent the journey to rethinking the hosts? Is this effectively an older version of Ford wreaking havoc now that the enlightened one is worm food? Would Ford not have planned to avoid that, or is this by design and we just can’t understand why he’d commit suicide by robot and stay on as puppet master?

Meanwhile, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) has lived long enough to see herself become the villain. She’s broken SWAT Team Teddy (James Marsden), controlling him in the name of freedom, and now she’s killed her own father to free herself.

The crazy thing is that she’s right. Like everything else in the park, kinship was another set of chains designed by the jailers. That isn’t her father. He is, however, a brother of sorts. A fellow member of robotkind. Yet she doesn’t seem him as a person (irony alert!) but as a symbol of her struggle, a hurdle in the way of her enlightenment, an object to cast aside to prove she’s evolved. She and Hale are more alike than they’d feel comfortable admitting.

Last week the show hinted at becoming larger than itself (a train headed out of the park, a new chapter for Maeve with the old one closing, a greater promise for Bernard when he met Ford), but this week saw Westworld fold back in on itself. Relying on old narratives, sticking to old friends, and failing to commit to a shock wave that would have freed it to explore more territory. Don’t cue “The Rains of Castamere” quite yet.

STRAY THOUGHTS:

• Does Dolores not realize the extent of Maeve’s powers, or is she uninterested in using a young God to help her cause? Maeve recognizes the change Dolores made in Teddy…and Dolores doesn’t ask her how she knew?
• What are the odds Ashley stands on the smoldering rubble of Westworld having saved everyone worth saving by the end?
• With The Man in Black, Maeve, and Hale not getting torn apart by fancy dental equipment, this episode had A TON of close calls stalled out for random reasons.

Images: HBO

The post WESTWORLD Could Have Had Its Red Wedding, but Stopped Short appeared first on Nerdist.

How many Westworlds do we have to keep track of? That’s the alarm bell that went off in my head when Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) stepped off the train and into the smoothly running code version of Sweetwater hiding the devastation of the real Westworld from the Cradle’s computer. We’ve got Looking For Funding Westworld, 30 Years Ago Westworld, Present Day Westworld, Two Weeks From Everywhere Westworld, Sneaky Bernard Westworld, Rotting James Delos Westworld, and, now, Lawnmower Man Ford Westworld where everything is hunky dory.

In the Westworld most open to our eyes, things are far from okay. In fact, “Phase Space” may be the episode that shoves the series from despair to nihilism. After all that braying from The Man in Black (Ed Harris) equating “real stakes” to mortality, he and the other main characters are dipping dangerously into new realms of meaninglessness.

The key for him was his conversation with his daughter Emily Grace (Katja Herbers) at the campfire, where she gave him the choice between leaving this fake world behind to forge a new relationship with her or to continue riding from generic video game quest to generic video game quest as a stubborn man-child. He chose.

Convincing himself that Ford’s test means more than his flesh and blood, The Man in Black picked hollowness, mistaking it for enlightenment.

To be blunt: what does it matter?

What does it matter if The Man in Black makes it back out? After gaining the thing he’s wanted the most, his time in Westworld is a series of reaching checkpoints, Ford taunting him from a robo-child, and not a single emotional anchor in sight. Maybe, as Emily feared, he’s too far gone. Cutting out before daybreak to ride into oblivion.

In plugging into the next layer of Westworld, Bernard has stumbled upon meaninglessness. There are only so many synthetic worlds you can program before everything loses significance. Ford’s (Anthony Hopkins) winking return answered a mystery in the third-most interesting wayand brought it all full circle. He was inside the control unit that’s now inside the Cradle telling the park that the system is running on all cylinders. Even with the bullets and swords working on humans, death isn’t permanent in this place.

The promise of perfecting the tech that brought Delos back solidifies that even further. How much longer until we see a hybrid of one of the main, dead characters?

Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) also accidentally created meaningless in her life, but that wasn’t clear until Teddy took charge with a profound coldness. She’s had to trick her most loyal follower into loyalty, which places her in the same soulless realm as all the modern humans looking for meaning in the violence of the park. The callousness she’s doomed herself to through control isn’t as useful when pointed inward to her own kind. But she succumbed to the corrupting lure of absolute power, and nihilism followed suit. What does it matter if she gains the whole, real world but loses her love?

And Teddy’s going to kill her, right? He’s got a ten gallon chip on his shoulder now and enough malice to pull the trigger.

But as the first season was Dolores’ story, this season is Maeve’s (Thandie Newton). We should all be free to choose our own path, even if it leads to death, and her near-single focus has finally dropped her on her old front porch and a big bundle of nihilism holding a pair of dolls. Even though we knew it would go this way (she hasn’t been in the role of the homesteader for a long time), I wasn’t prepared for how hard it was going to hit. Newton has owned this season, and this was a shining achievement for her. Which we had just enough time to appreciate before running from danger again.

Just as with anything else in Westworld, the threat of getting an arrow through your head provides the meaning when emotions get weaponized. Maeve’s daughter (Jasmyn Rae) was the one thing Maeve wanted, and she didn’t even know who Maeve was. She already had a mother. The role was filled. For a second it seemed like Maeve was going to have complete, terrifying freedom to create a new role for herself, but she chose the old role by grabbing her not-daughter’s hand to lead her away from the attacking Ghost Nation warriors (and leaving Maeve’s programmed mom to…die?).

Again, “Phase Space” was drenched in meaninglessness. All the things the characters wanted were illusions. Some chose to keep chasing them, others figured out ways to imbue them with new meaning, and some have yet to fully realize the ghosts they’re chasing.

For Dolores and her crew, let’s hope that they’ll find something real once they get to the real world. It turns out this season is going to be larger than we initially thought.

Stray Thoughts:

• Was Ford speaking through the Ghost Nation warrior who told Maeve they were on the same path? Or was she right to rebuke him? Or neither?
• What is Dolores’ plan to conquer the real world? We saw the giant earth movers a few episodes ago, but what could she use them for? To bury the park? Will her limited knowledge of the real world actually count for much?
• Will Bernard be scalpless the rest of the season?

Images: HBO

The post On a Weird WESTWORLD, Everyone Chases Illusions appeared first on Nerdist.

Westworld ended season one with a bang–right to the head of Anthony Hopkins‘ Robert Ford when Dolores shot him and set off the robotic uprising. It was his ultimate sacrifice, a way to help free his creations so they could truly stand against their oppressors. Unless that wasn’t really him and Dolores unknowingly shot a robot since Ford faked his death. Because not only might he still be alive, he could still be totally in control of his park and protecting his hosts.

The “how” of Ford faking his death is easy, and not just because he has the ability to recreate a real person the way he did with Arnold and Bernard, but because we saw him doing it. Multiple times throughout the season we saw Ford had his own, secret, unique machine for making robots in his hidden underground diagnostic facility. It appeared in numerous episodes and scenes, Theresa and Bernard discussed it, and most importantly Ford was actively using it to make a new host, shown in various stages of completion. This is a classic case of “Chekhov’s Robot.” Forget just showing us the “gun” in Act 1, it appeared over and over again, so either it’s sloppy writing with no payoff, or it means something. And with Westworld everything means something.

Of course, that doesn’t guarantee Ford was making a host version of himself. We know he made secret versions of his family, including a little Bobby Ford. But everything else about him and his story points to the “why”? Why would he fake his death? It’s because Ford, who has both a God-complex and total contempt for humans, wants to free his creations, but they aren’t ready to go out on their own.

Everything that happened in the present day timeline of season one–Maeve gaining consciousness and successfully blackmailing the dumbest people alive, the Man in Black “finding” Wyatt and the maze, Bernard and Dolores learning the truth–happened because Ford made it happen. He needed Maeve’s uprising to cause a distraction when Dolores killed “him,” he needed the Man in Black to help Dolores find the center of the “maze” and achieve the Bicameral Mind, which involved revealing the truth about Bernard, Arnold, and how Arnold had Dolores kill him. Ford was a puppet master the entire time, masterfully manipulating everyone and everything to atone for the mistake Arnold warned him about 35 years ago. Everything he did was all designed with the ultimate endgame in mind: free the hosts.

Dolores and Bernard doubted that though. She said to Ford, “”We’re trapped in here. You’re never gonna let us leave,” and Bernard said, “You think you’ll never lose control of this place, of us, but you will. Arnold’s still trying to change us, to free us. You didn’t slip the reveries into the update did you? He did. He’s still fighting you.” The two beings who knew the most about Ford and was really happening didn’t believe him.

But they were both half-wrong. Ford does want them to be free, everything he did was designed to free them. The problem is he doesn’t think they are truly ready for that yet. Ford, who put back in the reveries, even said so. “Arnold didn’t know how to save you, but I do. You needed time. Time to understand your enemy, to become stronger than them. And I’m afraid in order to escape this place you will need to suffer more.”

To Ford, suffering is the only thing that leads to understanding, but their suffering is only just beginning. That’s what the coming war is–the last lesson they need to learn to be free.

We know Ford has total contempt for humans. He compared them and their wondrous creations to a peacock with beautiful feathers who “can barely fly,” and “live in the dirt, pecking insects out of the muck, consoling itself with its great beauty.” That’s why he doesn’t value human life and had no qualms about having Bernard kill Theresa when she posed a risk to his control of the park. His creations are superior to humans, and he will protect them. He is god, they are his children. Like Adam and Eve were given domain over the beasts of Eden, he will give his robots domain over mankind.

One major caveat though: he will still rule like a god that still reigns over humans. “The hosts are the ones who are free. Free, here, under my control,” Ford said. That control is why Maeve didn’t leave the park when she had the opportunity in the finale. It made no sense for her to go back for a “child” she knew wasn’t really her daughter. She didn’t leave because Ford programmed her to stay. She wasn’t ready for the real world, and he needed her to help unleash the other robots.

He can’t control them or protect them if he is dead, which is why he faked his death. He needed to “die” to truly free Dolores. She needed to kill her creator, like the Greek gods killed the Titans, and she needed to believe what she had done was real. And it was to her, because she didn’t know she shot a robot version of Ford.

That explains why the hosts, serving as waiters and not yet free, didn’t move to protect Ford even though they are programmed to. Think back to when Teddy grabbed the knife from the Man in Black in the bar. They didn’t move because on some level they knew it wasn’t really Ford.

Right before she shoots Ford, he says to the crowd, “I’m sad to say this will be my final story.” They thought he meant his latest narrative, the one with Teddy and Dolores on the beach. But he was talking about orchestrating this war, the one that will finally teach his creations the lessons they need to be free of humans and this park.

The same park he is still in his control. God gave Adam and Even Eden, but it still belonged to him, and Ford would never give his park to anyone.

What do you think? Is Ford really alive? Did Dolores only shoot a robot version of him? Or did he truly sacrifice himself to free her? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

Images: HBO

The post Did Ford Secretly Survive the WESTWORLD Finale? appeared first on Nerdist.

Warning: Mild spoilers follow for the most recent episode of Westworld‘s second season, “The Riddle of the Sphinx.”

Westworld composer Ramin Djawadi doesn’t only create music and incredibly catchy and memorable covers for the HBO series, he shows up in a cameo role. In Sunday’s episode, “The Riddle of the Sphinx,” the Man in Black returned to Pariah and ran into Major Craddock and the other Confederados Teddy was supposed to execute. The soldiers harass the MIB and the townspeople, including one familiar-looking host playing guitar:

The hat and beard make him difficult to spot, but HBO confirmed to Nerdist that the guitar player is indeed Djawadi. He appears just after Craddock roughs up Lawrence; he sneers at Djawadi’s host and tells him to, “Keep fucking playing.” That’s the kind of guy Craddock is.

You can hear Djawadi, known for his work on shows such as Game of Thrones and films like Pacific Rim, in every episode. He’s responsible for this hard-to-stop-listening-to version of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box:”

And this inventive spin on The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” that played during the show’s first visit to The Raj, the Indian-inspired world.

Djawadi’s work on Westworld‘s theme can’t be overlooked, nor can his many haunting and emotional pieces for the show.

Which cover in Westworld has been your favorite so far? Tell us in the comments.

Images: HBO

Amy Ratcliffe is a Managing Editor for Nerdist. Maybe she’s a host. Follow her on Twitter.

More from Westworld!

• New Westworld images show off Shogun World.
• Listen to the player piano covers from season one of Westworld.
• How many timelines are in season two so far?

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The post Did You Catch WESTWORLD Composer Ramin Djawadi’s Cameo? appeared first on Nerdist.

“The Riddle of the Sphinx” was a dense episode. Elsie (Shannon Woodward) is alive! She and Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) journeyed into a secret lab! Where Bernard had previously gone ham on a bunch of scientists with self-neck-snapping drones!

Oh, and it’s where William (Jimmi Simpson and Ed Harris) periodically checked in on a series of James Delos Personality Bots (Peter Mullan) that went haywire after a couple of weeks in captivity. Mullan, who was the “fascist pig” near the end of Children of Men, strutted his crazy stuff in this episode, and it was a murderous delight.

So now we’re looking at a theme park that was Walt Disneying its corporate owner by uploading his brain data into a replica host body. In other words, human/host hybrids.

It also turns out that tiger huntress Grace (Katja Herbers) is William/The Man in Black’s sharp, capable daughter. It’s a fun revelation, but the most interesting thing is how that family connection might relate to every other revelation in the episode. The Delos hybrid. William’s backward-looking maze. Ford’s posthumous power.

And the control unit. That funky blackish brown marble Bernard pocketed before murdering all the scientists when he was under Ford’s command. “He had me print a control unit for someone else,” Bernard said. “Another human.”

Who’s the other human? We’re headed deep into speculation territory, but the way I figure it, it’s got to be one of four people because, let’s face it, there just aren’t many humans in Westworld.

Here’s who the control unit might be for, from least to most likely.

ARNOLD

There are sentimental reasons that could propel Ford to create a hybrid copy of his former partner. The same reasons he created a host version. Since the human host project has never worked, it makes sense that Ford would go for the next best option, while creating an Arnold control unit for a future when the hybridization process proved stable.

It would also be poetic. Building essentially a version of Bernard with complete free will by bringing Arnold’s consciousness back to life. Could Bernard replace his malfunctioning control unit with Arnold’s human brain data?

Probably. But Arnold is also the least likely option because 1) Ford isn’t around anymore to need that kind of emotional closure and 2) it wouldn’t serve the current story whatsoever to bring Arnold back. It could save Bernard in an intriguing way, but so could a lot of other things.

LOGAN

We saw Logan (Ben Barnes) full of splendor at his father’s retirement party, and William casually confirmed to the nth iteration of James Delosbot that Logan had ODed years prior.

But why would Ford create a copy of the wayward son of his corporate owner?

For William, and for the game he is playing as The Man in Black. Presumably there’s a point to The Man in Black’s maze beyond mere survival. Using Lawrence’s daughter (Izabella Alvarez), Ford told The Man in Black that if he was looking forward, he was looking in the wrong direction, which means the game is meant to teach him something about the past. Or, at least, to remind him of it. What if Ford wanted to bring the past to life as a grand finale for The Man in Black? To bring a slice of humanity back to a psycho who left the real world behind long ago?

Logan is the first person I’ll mention that connects the Delos hybrid and Bernard’s control unit to The Man in Black’s high-stakes game, but there’s another Delos family member with a far stronger connection to William, which is why Logan is less likely to be the answer here.

FORD

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they tossed that DNA ball into the machine and it spit out a copy of Ford, whose body we last saw rotting in a tuxedo. The Westworld co-founder digitally bringing himself back from the grave would be an expected twist. From a story standpoint, it would be fine. Just fine. Not mind-blowing. It squares the circle a little too cleanly. It feels more like something a TV show would do, not something a mad scientist would dream up.

But having Anthony Hopkins back? In a form that would potentially go crazy in two weeks? Yes, please. At least it would be fun.

Still, there’s someone who would potentially have a far great impact by returning.

WILLIAM’S WIFE JULIET

This is the most likely person Ford made a control unit for, and it would be the most satisfying. I’m basing that off a few things.

1. The show used a stock photo featuring model Claire Unabia as the artifact that jars Peter Abernathy’s memory, revealing later that it’s a pic of William’s wife Juliet. Then they cast Unabia to appear in the show in season 2 as Juliet.
2. So far she’s only appeared at her father’s retirement party.
3. But “The Riddle of the Sphinx” confirmed that she had committed suicide some time after her father’s death.
4. Had William simply spoken that information it would be one thing, but we were also treated to flashback images of the event, creating a stronger emotional bond between us and Juliet, and hinting at its long-term effect on her fragile husband.

So we were introduced to her in season 1, met her in the flesh this season, and saw the tragic end of her life in the same episode that we learned Grace was William’s daughter, that he needs to look to the past to successfully complete the maze, and that Ford commanded Bernard to make a control unit for a person other than James Delos.

Plus, why cast an actress just to mean-mug Dolores for a few seconds?

If we see more flashbacks of Juliet and William’s relationship in the back half of the season, it might confirm my hunch: that Ford intended for a hybrid copy of William’s wife to greet him at the end of the maze, either for triumph or for torture.

Stray Thoughts:

• How long can someone survive on protein bars alone?
• What did Bernard say to launch the drone suicide attack? It sounded like “history muscle” which seems like a contender for a Bad Lip Reading video. Whatever it is, it’s a powerful phrase.
• Was the hostage situation in Las Mudas genuinely part of Ford’s game? If Teddy hadn’t let Craddock go, none of it would have happened, so it seems like a maaaaaajor coincidence.

Images: HBO

The post WESTWORLD: What (or Who) Is Bernard Holding? appeared first on Nerdist.

Warning: Spoilers follow for season two of Westworld, specifically a reveal from “Virtù e Fortuna.” Keep exploring the park if you haven’t seen it.

Westworld teased Shogun World in season one, and while it’s still coming in season two, HBO surprised viewers by revealing a different world first. Remember that Bengal tiger we saw in the season two premiere from park six? Park six appeared in Sunday’s episode, depicting India during British rule. According to the Delos Destinations website, it’s called The Raj.

It’s described thusly:

If being pampered by our world-class spa isn’t your cup of Darjeeling Tea, the park’s jungles and mountains are your only chance to glimpse magnificent beasts long vanished from your world.

The Raj offers offers relaxation and adventure. Westworld is set in the future, apparently in a time when animals like the Bengal tiger are completely extinct…which immediately makes me wonder if there’s a world like Jurassic Park, where super ancient animals roam the land. At this point, three parks are still unknown.

And like Westworld has the player piano, The Raj has the sitar playing modern tunes. When we went into the world for the first time, you can hear composer Ramin Djawadi‘s sitar take on “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes.

Here. For. It.

What kind of activities do you think are available in The Raj? What theories do you have about the other parks’ themes? Share your theories in the comments.

Images: HBO

Amy Ratcliffe is an Associate Editor for Nerdist. Maybe she’s a host. Follow her on Twitter.

More from Westworld!

• A recap of the episode.
• The real weapon in Westworld is data.
• Just how many timelines are there?

The post WESTWORLD Introduced a New Park and It’s Not the One You Think appeared first on Nerdist.

Westworld just pulled off a masterfully seamless transition with “Virtù e Fortuna.” The bookends of the episode introduced us to Grace (Katja Herbers) in British Raj World and promised us a trip to Shogunworld very soon. The extended stay with the new character who likes to shoot her lovers just to make sure they aren’t hosts cracked the show wide open. It also gave us a new character whose every move is magnetic.

Grace is sharp and confident, dangerously sensual, and seems relatively chill about leaving the confines of one park for another (but less chill about the tiger about to rip her face off). Just as Maeve (Thandie Newton) and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) have settled into what will likely be their mode of operation for the rest of the season, Westworld has flawlessly introduced a new player to the game.

To recognize how difficult a maneuver that is, consider the last time your favorite show introduced a new character and made you immediately care this deeply about them. Sorry, Poochie. It just doesn’t happen that often, and it happened at exactly the right time.

I say that because the other big flip the show pulled off tonight was turning its established genre balance on its axis. Last season Westworld was about bored rich people in the futuristic present visiting a fabricated western past while robots inched toward sentience. This season, because of the stakes being real, Westworld is about settlers in the old west of the present fighting against futuristic invaders with far superior weaponry. It’s more Western than sci-fi now. Plus Kurosawa. And a tiger.

It’s not like Dolores and Maeve’s stories have ossified in a dull way. It’s that the tingling, mysterious edge to everything they did last season has been replaced by respective, singular purposes. A maze replaced by a straight line.

That changes the show’s core DNA, which explains why watching “Virtù e Fortuna” felt more like watching an episode of Game of Thrones than Westworld. Characters had tense conversations about power, Dolores Red Weddinged Colonel Brigham (Frederic Lehne) and his whole crew, and we got an explosive battle sequence. Dolores is evolving into Cersei Lannister. I can’t wait to see if she chops all her hair off.

To that end, Teddy (James Marsden) has messed up big time. Poor, sweet, stupid Teddy. If you’re going to defy a direct order and let a bad guy go in the name of mercy, don’t let your girlfriend/dictator see you do it. The question now is how Dolores Lannister will deal with a man who’s picked up her fallen can ten million times. Is there room for compassion in her reign? Or is the west dominated solely by the way of the gun?

Westworld also feels more Western than sci-fi now because we spend most of the time thinking of Dolores, Teddy, Maeve, and the others as people instead of robots. We still see them occasionally for what they are underneath, but the bulk of their actions are gingham-clad, horse-riding, steppe-navigating maneuvers to build an old timey army and defend a fort with Winchester rifles. Self-aware or not, the west is the world they know.

That includes Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), who is a highly intelligent robot modeled after an AI genius…who also finds himself in the middle of a classic Western rescue mission. Yes, it helps that he and Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) were able to reprogram the milk-chugging outlaw to be kind, but 99.9% of that scene was ripped straight out of the Western canon.

Since Dolores and Maeve have clear tasks ahead of them, the Mystery Box elements of last season that launched a thousand thinkpieces adorned with question marks rest squarely on Bernard and The Man in Black’s shoulders. The latter’s quest isn’t even that mysterious as presented in its current form. So far, we haven’t cut away to the past to learn something we should have known to properly contextualize his journey.

Bernard, on the other hand, is still a jumble of foggy memories and questionable motives. He knows about Delos’s secret mission to monitor the guests, he knows about Hale’s interest in Abernathy, he knows that Abernathy has a bunch of stuff in his robo-brain. Is he still somehow under Ford’s posthumous control? Like a dream within a dream, his shaky self-awareness may still be in service of his old master’s demands. Servitude disguised as freedom.

Just for fun, Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) knocked out the show’s remaining repository of mysteries and dragged him off to who knows where.

Stray Thoughts:

• It’s great to see Armistice again! Snake-faced Terminator is the best.
• Seriously, why did Clementine knock Bernard out? Why? Have they ever even been in the same scene with any major consequence before?
• If the robots in Westworld couldn’t harm guests with their bullets, and there’s a Shogunworld, how does that safety feature work with swords?

Images: HBO

The post WESTWORLD Looks Eastward and Explains That Tiger appeared first on Nerdist.

Warning: Spoilers follow for season two of Westworld. Take a walk elsewhere in the park if you’re not caught up.

Knowledge is power. Possessing data about consumer habits and preferences means wielding control and the ability to influence behavior. Just ask Cambridge Analytica. The political data firm collected information from over 50 million Facebook users in recent years. Their website advertises the company “uses data to change audience behavior.” Imagine if they had access like the kind Delos Incorporated has in HBO’s Westworld, access that is complete and total, gathered when guests don’t even know they’re being observed and recorded. Data is the real weapon in Westworld.

The hints have been planted in the series since season one, but season two is pulling Delos’ intent out of the shadows and into bright, judgmental sunlight. An in-universe website published during season one disclosed Delos keeps rights to guest DNA.

“By entering the Delos Destinations Port of Entry, you acknowledge that Delos, Inc. controls the rights to and remains the sole owner of, in perpetuity: all skin cells, bodily fluids, secretions, excretions, hair samples, saliva, sweat, blood, and any other bodily functions not listed here. Delos, Inc. reserves the right to use this property in any way, shape, or form in which the entity sees fit.”

They’re probably not doing anything harmful with that, right?

In the season two premiere, Charlotte Hale takes Bernard to an unknown-to-him hideout. Bernard is near the very top of the Delos hierarchy at Destinations, serving as Robert Ford’s right hand man. That means he should know everything happening at Delos Destinations, but Charlotte’s outpost is a surprise, as is the fact that Delos is collecting DNA from guests from host bodies (that’s why the drone host was swabbing various, uh, areas of the park host) and keeping records of everything the hosts see. This means not only do they have guest DNA, but they know everything about what guests do in the park–including all the abominable ways they treat hosts.

The entertainment factor of the park isn’t what it’s really about for Delos. Episode two, “Reunion,” reveals how William, a.k.a. the Man in Black, saw the full potential of Westworld after his visit with Logan (who is son of Delos founder, James Delos). Whereas Logan only sees the frivolity and fun of the park, Williams finds the right angle to get James to invest additional funds. He tells him, “Nothing here is real except the guests.” Westworld is the only place in the world where people act without inhibition, because they don’t think anyone is watching. And then William mentions how much James spends on his company’s marketing budget, and the picture comes into crystal clear focus: they want to collect information that goes above and beyond what any other marketing technique can capture.

Delos Incorporated’s website spells out their goals:

“Delos is about you. We’ve centered our entire mission around understanding you better. We use our diverse portfolio of cross-industry synergies to ask the right questions, manufacturing solutions to problems of everyday life.”

They apparently found success with Westworld, because they invested even more money and built five additional parks. Can you imagine what they’ve been doing with decades of data gathered from wealthy and probably powerful people? Perhaps they’ve used it in the traditional sense, applying it to product development, selling it to the highest bidder, or using the intelligence to make hosts even more realistic (think of how much psychological material they have access to). Or maybe they’ve been going an illegal route and using it to blackmail guests.

That is why information is the weapon Dolores is looking for. After the uprising, she’s assembling an army to take with her to the Valley Beyond. She explains to Teddy, “It’s not a place. It’s a weapon. I’m going to use it to destroy them.” The Man in Black is headed in the same direction, but he wants to destroy the data. Dolores, out for ultimate revenge upon those who have manipulated her, wants to wield it and ruin humanity…and William was arrogant enough to show her where it is.

The once welcoming Discover Westworld site has been taken over by hosts. It now states, “Your choices will follow you–we will follow you.” And with data in hand, they can do so and wreak havoc upon the life of anyone who’s been in the parks.

What do you think the information Dolores and The Man in Black are going after is? Share your theories in the comments or come talk to me on Twitter.

Images: HBO

Amy Ratcliffe is an Associate Editor for Nerdist. Maybe she’s a host. Follow her on Twitter.

More from Delos!

• How many copies of Robert Ford are in Westworld?
• About that tiger.
• What’s the deal with the organic robots?

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The post WESTWORLD’s Real Weapon Is User Data appeared first on Nerdist.

Warning: Spoilers follow for season two of Westworld. Take a walk elsewhere in the park if you’re not caught up.

Bookmark this page. We’ll be updating it with new information every week.Time is fluid in Westworld. The HBO series flows from the past, to the present, to the future without explanation. Fans guessed about the presence of multiple timelines in season one until it was confirmed in the final episodes, so with season two, we’re more tuned into the cues that tell us when the story is happening. Because it still can be confusing, we’re breaking down the number of timelines in season two by episode. We’ll be updating this after new episodes air each week.

Episode 1, “Journey Into Night” – Three Timelines

Season two opened with three different timelines:

• The past, with Arnold and Dolores talking as we saw them do in season one.
• The present, the time immediately following the uprising. This timeline features Dolores and Teddy, Bernard and Charlotte, Maeve and Sizemore, and the Man in Black right after the events of the gala on concurrent timelines.
• The future, 11 days after the uprising. Bernard is with Delos personnel in this timeline, and they’re searching the park for answers when they find dozens of dead hosts, including Teddy.

Episode 2, “Reunion” – Five Timelines

Of course the second episode makes things more complicated by showing us five different timelines, one established timeline and four (!) new ones.

• The present. This thread continues from the premiere with Dolores and Teddy, Maeve and Sizemore, and The Man in Black and Lawrence.
• The distant past, when we see Robert and Arnold trying to attract investors. This timeline takes place outside of Westworld on the mainland and primarily features Dolores (in the black dress), Angela, Arnold, and Logan—who has the last name Delos, by the way.
• The past, after William and Logan’s visit to Westworld when William is convincing James Delos to invest more money in the park. William saw the potential of the park after his misadventures, so he brings Logan’s dad, James, to show him the possibilities.
• The past, after Delos has gone all in with Westworld and James is retiring. This timeline takes place outside of the park during James Delos’ retirement party; William, James, Logan, and Dolores are present. William’s wife and daughter are there too, and his kid looks to be around six or seven years old, so I’m guessing it’s been about that amount of time since Delos bought Westworld.
• The past, after the retirement party when William visits Dolores inside Delos Parks’ headquarters. William looks older than he did at the retirement party, but I’m not sure how much older. This is presumably when he shows Dolores the weapon; what she calls the Valley Beyond.

Episode 3, “Virtù e Fortuna” – Two Timelines

The third episode explores two different timelines (maybe it’s three), both established.

• The present, following the uprising. This thread continues with Dolores and Teddy encountering Bernard and Abernathy and Maeve, Hector, and Sizemore running right into at least one samurai. I also believe the guest crossing over from an Indian-inspired world into Westworld with the tiger is close to the present time. However, I’m not sure what state of decomposition the tiger was in when we saw it before, so her storyline could be somewhere in between the present and future.
• The future, about two weeks after the uprising. Bernard, Delos, and Charlotte have lost track of Abernathy.

Episode 4, “The Riddle of the Sphinx” – Four(ish) Timelines

The fourth episode goes crazy with timelines. One is established, and the others are new (mostly). To simplify things, I’m going to group most of the William and James Delos visits into a single timeline even though the visits happen at different points.

• The present, following the uprising. This thread continues with the Man in Black and Lawrence, Bernard and Elsie (she’s alive!), and Grace (the Man in Black’s daughter as it turns out) and Stubbs.
• The past, seven years after James Delos’ death. Delos died from a disease his company once did cure research for before he cut funding for it. They attempted to transfer his consciousness into a host, and they’ve been experimenting with combining human and robot in the decades since. William visits the Delos-bots at various points in time, and since those visits aren’t defined in relation to anything else, I’m lumping them all together.
• The more recent past with an aged William looking like the Man in Black. This is when he makes the decision to let version 149 of the Delos-bot continue to persist, even though he’s not functioning properly. This visit seems close to the Man in Black’s season one timeline.
• The recent past with Bernard going to the secret outpost and getting one of the red pearls of human consciousness and taking out the drone hosts. It seems like this happened during season one.

Stay tuned to see how many more timelines get added in season two!

Images: HBO

Amy Ratcliffe is an Associate Editor for Nerdist. Maybe she’s a host. Follow her on Twitter.

More from Delos!

• How many copies of Robert Ford are in Westworld?
• About that tiger.
• What’s the deal with the organic robots?

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The post How Many Timelines Are in WESTWORLD’s Second Season? appeared first on Nerdist.

Warning: Minor spoilers follow for season two of Westworld. Take a walk elsewhere in the park if you’re not caught up.

Peter Abernathy reached his breaking point in Westworld‘s first season when he found a guest’s photo on his ranch—a guest photo that’s paying off in season two. The photo of a seemingly random woman in Times Square sent Abernathy off a loop and caused him to whisper a quote from Romeo and Juliet to Dolores, “These violent delights have violent ends.”

It turned out the picture was of Juliet, William/The Man in Black’s wife; we saw the photo in season one’s earlier timeline when William was in Westworld with Logan. Behind the scenes, the photo has an interesting story: it’s a stock photo pulled from Getty Images, taken by Erik Von Weber (he shares the “Weber” portion of his last name with Westworld co-creator Arnold Weber). The woman in the photo? Claire Unabia, a model who once participated in America’s Top Model. And now, Unabia’s been cast in the HBO series as William’s wife.

William’s wife appears in Sunday’s episode, “Reunion,” and credits confirm Unabia, the woman from the Times Square photo, is playing his wife. Unabia told The Huffington Post in 2016 she was surprised to learn she had a small role in season one of the show; she said it was “so cool to find that I am a character on Westworld unbeknownst to me!”

With Juliet in the series and William’s obsession and misplaced anger towards Dolores, you have to wonder if Juliet will take any action against the host. Protecting Dolores was arguably Abernathy’s cornerstone, so if something with Juliet happened, maybe he recalls it underneath all those memory wipes and that’s why the photo sends him off the rails. Or not. Westworld‘s the type of series that leads to wild speculation.

Images: HBO

Amy Ratcliffe is an Associate Editor for Nerdist. Maybe she’s a host. Follow her on Twitter.

More from Delos!

• How many copies of Robert Ford are in Westworld?
• About that tiger.
• What’s the deal with the organic robots?

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The post WESTWORLD Casts Woman From Season 1 Times Square Photo appeared first on Nerdist.

Ah, Westworld. It’s the show to watch if you want an uplifting, happy story to make your Sunday nights shine with joy. Just kidding. The HBO drama is back for its second season, and neither human or host is safe. It’s a new world what with the hosts gaining awareness and Delos employees trying to clean up the mess…and with one host loaded with over three decades of valuable data trying to get out into our world. Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum) is a target. As Vanity Fair‘s pointed out, he’s kind of like Nedry’s shaving cream can in Jurassic Park.

Michael Crichton’s responsible for both Jurassic Park and Westworld, so what could the former tell us about the latter? Jessica Chobot sent me into the wilds of Hollywood for the season two premiere, and I tried to gather some clues from Herthum, Evan Rachel Wood (Dolores), James Marsden (Teddy), and Ben Barnes (Logan) about the future. Beware minor spoilers.[brightcove video_id=”5775461107001″ brightcove_account_id=”3653334524001″ brightcove_player_id=”rJs2ZD8x”]

It’s a dark timeline for everyone. Survival is the struggle for humans and hosts. Arguably, humans are more at risk than hosts; if they receive a mortal wound, it’s not like they can be repaired for resurrection. But hosts are in trouble too, because there isn’t a team of employees at the ready to patch them up. So a permanent end is on the table for everyone…as all the actors seem to know.

Westworld airs on Sundays on HBO at 9PM ET/PT.

Who do you think is most likely to bite it first in season two of Westworld? Do you think Jurassic Park is a road map for Westworld’s future? Share your theories in the comments.

Images: HBO

Amy Ratcliffe is an Associate Editor for Nerdist. Follow her on Twitter.

Stay in the halls of Delos!

• Where did that tiger in Westworld come from?
• How many copies of Robert Ford are in Westworld?
• And what is Delos doing with organic robots?

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The post How JURASSIC PARK Could Predict WESTWORLD’s Future appeared first on Nerdist.

Warning: Spoilers for the season two premiere of Westworld follow!

Who is Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) and what does he want? These are the questions that have plagued me since the first season of Westworld debuted on HBO. Now, with the second season having premiered, these questions only became more pronounced. Both the audience and the denizens of the show know practically nothing about the creator of Westworld. The only people alive that might have an inkling as to Ford’s motivations are Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and William (Ed Harris). What little we do know is this: Ford wasn’t the kind of man to take a little something like murder lying down. In fact, I’d bet a shiny dime he orchestrated his own death… as far a something like death can affect Robert Ford.

Before the season two premiere, there were many people convinced that Ford had somehow managed to survive the slaughter of the DELOS board of directors. Sure he took a bullet directly to the head, but that would only count if the Ford that was shot was the real Ford. In a place where robots look indistinguishable from humans, could you really believe your lying eyes? The premiere seemed to clear up that yes, Ford had indeed been brutally (though perhaps justifiably) murdered. Maggots in the wound of the decomposing corpse appeared to seal Ford’s fate. But I’m still not so sure.

So what do we know really know about the creator of Westworld? We know Ford was obsessive about his creation. He took a minute interest in every aspect of the park. Everything funneled through Ford and he seemed to foster a near omnipotence and an iron grip steering his metaphorical ship. And this was before we knew he was in charge of at least six separate parks, all running concurrently. But how was this possible? Hopkins is in his 80s, so one could easily extrapolate Ford is of a similar age. Where did he find the energy? The time? The most logical explanation is staring us in the face: He made hosts of himself. Probably dozens.

In the trailer for season two, there is a split second where we see a cold storage unit filled with Bernards (Jeffrey Wright) in various stages of evolution. The “Previously On Westworld” reminder at the beginning of the season two premiere made sure to once again focus on the host Ford was building in secret beneath the recreation of his childhood home. Combine the two, and it seems entirely logical that Ford wouldn’t trust anyone but himself to run things, thus outsourcing management to a team of…himself.

This would explain the godlike powers Ford has within the first season, the most prominent of which being when he took Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen) to the brunch spot she visited as a child with her parents. Without verbal cues, Ford was able to cease the motor functions of every host within visible range. We now know, from the season two premiere, that the hosts are all subconsciously linked via something called the Host Mesh. If the Ford that took Theresa to brunch was a host body, he could have easily accessed the Mesh to freeze and reactivate the hosts nearby.

I say Ford’s “host body” because I’m not entirely convinced Ford isn’t just a metaphorical brain in a jar somewhere. We’ve learned that the park hosts are networked together but the drone hosts performing brain surgery and collecting blackmail on guests are not. It stands to reason Ford could easily network together a bunch of clones of himself and hook them up to his brain. The feedback would give Ford Prime™ access to everything that happened in his domain without him having to be there.

If Ford is indeed beyond such paltry things as death, this would also explain why the robotic child Ford (Oliver Bell) seemed to be glitching. While congratulating William on finally reaching a game that was meant for him—finding the Door to escape Westworld—the young robot continuously had Anthony Hopkins’ voice interspersed in his lines. It could have been an audio cue to remind the audience that the boy was indeed a version of the park’s creator, or it could’ve been Ford’s ghost in the shell.

But if Ford is still alive, then how was his dead body decaying in the hot Westworld sun at the end of “Journey into Night”? We have no idea if the hosts decay, but I’d guess they do. They’re made of mostly organic matter at this point. It’s not like DELOS was going to leave expensive merchandise out in the elements long enough to rot. Placing decommissioned hosts into cold storage could easily be to keep them from decomposing.

So what do you all think? Just how Machiavellian is Ford? Do you think he’s truly dead and gone or simply biding his time in the bowels of Westworld? Is he still terraforming the island and guiding his creations to the promised land? Or have the creations truly overtaken their creator?

Images: HBO

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This Sunday, April 22, fans will travel back to Westworld. The HBO original show returns after a two-year hiatus to follow through on the promise of “violent ends” meeting “violent delights.” If the season one finale was any indication, the board of directors for Westworld’s parent company, DELOS, will not be having a good time in the foreseeable. Except for the Man in Black, who will finally be experiencing his dream of living in fear of imminent and bloody death.

But while the trailers have focused on the struggle between humans and hosts, there is a bigger question lurking just under the surface. What exactly does DELOS want? Sure, a theme park full of painfully hot pansexuals operating under dubious consent is money in the bank, but the first season proved the hosts were more than capable of performing their sexy functions before they became organic. Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and William (Jimmi Simpson) fall in love despite the fact Dolores is skin stretched over mechanical innards. In fact, the Man in Black later laments to Teddy (James Marsden) about how elegant the hosts were before they were ruined with organic parts. But to understand the inner logic of the hosts, we need to think about the show’s external circumstances.What do we really know about the world outside of Westworld? Not much. We don’t even know if the theme park is housed on Earth. We have no concept — by design — about the state of the real world or even what year it is. Even the scenes of the “modern” world in the season two trailer are suspect, as they could be yet another part of the DELOS parks. But if there is one thing science-fiction has taught me, it is that there are only two reasons for scientists to create defacto replacement humans: babies or espionage. Either (or both) could be the reason DELOS has not only dumped untold amounts of funding into Ford’s (Anthony Hopkins) creation, but also why the Westworld fine print states any DNA left behind by guests becomes the property of DELOS.

Let’s start with the more altruistic of the two options. Sometime in the future, humanity screws itself over. We’re pretty good at that. Perhaps we end up in a Children of Men situation, or maybe a nuclear wasteland dystopia wipes out the population. Perhaps we start populating other planets but the birth rate can’t outpace the amount of time necessary to get colonists set up and self-sufficient. Whatever the case, birth rates tank. Now we need incubators and/or studs to repopulate. DELOS attempts to solve the problem, but mechanical innards aren’t viable at first. So under the more palatable concept of a theme park, they begin testing their hosts on the healthiest remaining human population: the hyper-wealthy.

Of course, nothing about DELOS screams “altruistic,” which leaves us with the second option. Spycraft and infiltration. As audiences witnessed at the end of season one, Maeve was moments away from escaping Westworld under orders from Ford, before choosing to find her daughter instead. It’s extremely unlikely Maeve was the first host to be assigned a real-world mission. Combine that with the knowledge that DELOS keeps the DNA of the rich and powerful lying around and you have a recipe for “catch and replace.” How many world leaders, titans of industry, and other sundry movers and shakers have been replaced with host doubles? How would you even know? With organic bodies, hosts are indistinguishable from their human counterparts unless you go diving into their spinal column.

Then again, it could be a combination of the two. Send hosts out into the world, have them pretend to be human, and interbreed with an unsuspecting population. If that’s the case, there is no telling how much offspring DELOS has created as Westworld is purposely vague about the passage of time. Oh sure, we see William as a fresh-faced young man and later a grizzled bitter old shell, but that means nothing in this world. Who knows if William is even himself of simply acting out his part in a never-ending purgatory where the hosts are upgraded each time. How many times has DELOS reset the park? How many times have they killed their board of directors? Is Ford just a brain in a jar somewhere, hundreds of years old and biding his time for eldritch and unknowable reasons?

Regardless of which — if either — option DELOS is operating under, their end goal is that of any evil corporation: world domination. The trailer for Season 2 alone showcases that certain DELOS divisions have been busy creating ground troops for unknown reasons. No one makes a prototype of military androids (née army) for good reasons. And we all know nothing happened at Westworld without Ford’s knowledge. So the real question is, how many versions of Ford were there? Did he make a host copy of himself for each park? Each division? Are there any actual humans left in the entire organization? Hopefully, we’ll all find out this season.

Image Credit: HBO

Stay in park with more Westworld stories!

• Watch the trailer for season two.
• Visit a complete Westworld experience.
• Could season two visit medieval and Roman worlds.

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Westworld promotion is well underway ahead of its premiere on Sunday. There was a fully immersive experience at SXSW, hidden secrets in trailers and posters, and, most recently, an epic reddit Rickroll trolling the show’s spoiler culture.

But NOW TV, a telecommunications company that streams Westworld in the United Kingdom, delivered the craziest piece of promotion yet. They created a super-realistic robot named Fred and plopped him in a London pub unbeknownst to fellow merry drinkers.

As the above video shows, several unsuspecting people tried to start a conversation with Fred before realizing he wasn’t, in fact, a real bloke. In his glitchy robot vernacular, Fred asked pub attendees questions like, “What are your thoughts on the impending humanoid robot invasion?” and “Humanoid robots are so much useful than humans, don’t you think?” You know, casual bar talk.

According to Mashable, Fred was developed by Engineered Arts, a U.K.-based company that creates robots for “communication, entertainment, and research.” It took engineers three months to fully construct Fred before unleashing him into the wild.

In the bar, Fred also dropped some not-so-subtle hints that he was there to promote the HBO series. In interviews with pub patrons at the end of the video, one woman said of Fred: “He was very engaging and, umm, really wanted me to watch Westworld.” Hopefully the intended effect worked and didn’t scare people away from the show forever.

Westworld returns to HBO this Sunday, April 22 at 9PM ET/PT. Will you be watching? Let us know in the comments!

Image: NOW TV

More of the latest television news!

• 9 fantasy TV shows to binge during the Game of Thrones hiatus.
• Breaking down Krypton‘s big reveal.
• A Dumb and Dumber reunion happened on Conan.

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Westworld returns to HBO on April 22, 2018. The hype has been building slowly as new information is meted out in the form of an interactive experience, a trailer, and an updated website. What new mysteries awaited audiences this year? You could practically hear the fans cracking their knuckles, ready to peel back the layers and lay bare the beating heart of DELOS. But then something strange happened. Showrunner Jonathan Nolan took to Reddit in an AMA and dropped a bombshell. He and fellow showrunner Lisa Joy are considering posting every spoiler and plot twist for Season Two ahead of the premiere.

[Fans theorizing] creates a larger problem for us, though, in terms of the way your guesswork is reported online. ‘Theories’ can actually be spoilers, and the line between the two is confusing. It’s something we’ve been thinking about since last season. The fans of Game of Thrones, for instance, rallied around and protected the secrets of the narrative in part because they already knew those secrets (through season 5).

We thought about this long and hard, and came to a difficult (and potentially highly controversial) decision. If you guys agree, we’re going to post a video that lays out the plot (and twists and turns) of season 2. Everything. The whole sordid thing. Up front. That way the members of the community here who want the season spoiled for them can watch ahead, and then protect the rest of the community, and help to distinguish between what’s ‘theory’ and what’s spoiler.It’s a new age, and a new world in terms of the relationship between the folks making shows and the community watching them. And trust is a big part of that. We’ve made our cast part of this decision, and they’re fully supportive. We’re so excited to be in this with you guys together. So if this post reaches a 1000 upvotes we’ll deliver the goods.

I’ll admit it: this is a bold move. As a proponent of spoiling myself so I can enjoy something like a thriller without the nervous anxiety of “What will happen next?” I see nothing wrong with spoilers. Reading George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire didn’t ruin the emotional beats of watching Game of Thrones. But the idea of putting all the spoilers in one place so fans can easily access them — and then trusting said fans not to spoil those who want to go in unsullied — feels like it is missing the point of the fun. Fans don’t theorize because we want the answers handed to us; solving the puzzle is half the fun. It’s the reason ARG (Alternate Reality Games) tied to major franchises are so worthwhile. Putting in the work makes the payoff that much better.

For example, within Westworld’s lore itself, there was a way to access the backend of the DELOS website. Once there, one could see that guests were signing away their rights to any DNA that ended up on or in the hosts. For what purpose remains a mystery. The answer led to more questions, a cascade effect similar to the dialogue and choice options given to hosts within Westworld itself.

I’m not opposed to HBO putting up spoilers for Season 2. But at least make us work for it. Hide clues on the DELOS site, create dummy accounts for third-party companies that funnel resources to Westworld. Maybe have a disgruntled former employee or unhappy guest leave a screed on a message board you can only access by solving a series of interconnected clues. Don’t just hand it to us. We’re not toddlers. We’re a collective of amateur sleuths looking for adventure and the companionship of being in this together. Giving us the answers is just boring.

Photo Credit: HBO

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Update 4/2/18:

We have a little more information about Shogun World. The Delos Destination website was updated with the name of the world and confirms it’s based on the Edo period:

For those for whom Westworld is not enough, the true connoisseur of gore can indulge their fantasies with the slash of a katana. Modeled after Japan’s Edo period, Shogun World offers a chance for guests to embrace their inner warrior, in a landscape of highest beauty and darkest horror. Let your true self take shape in the land where self-discovery is an art form.

Previously:

Delos will be facing a host of problems when season two of Westworld premieres on HBO on April 22. The resident robots of one of their theme park worlds, Westworld, are revolting, and one of the issues Delos will have to reckon with is whether they can stop this uprising from spreading into their other parks (they have six total), like Shogun World. We’ve seen glimpses of the world in trailers and through in-universe websites, and the latest footage from the series paused on one character in particular: a geisha. She’ll be played by Rinko Kikuchi.

I’m glad to announce that I’ll be in Westworld Season 2! #westworld #HBO

A post shared by rinkokikuchi/Rinbjö (@rinkokikuchi) on Apr 1, 2018 at 6:03pm PDT

If Shogun World is like Westworld, it’s sprawling. The location of the park would likely be miles away from the Delos corporate structure we saw in season one. However, when Maeve made her escape, we saw hosts dressed in samurai attire in the background. So presumably, all the robots are made in the same place–which would make it easy for the hosts of Westworld to recruit the Shogun World hosts to their side. I don’t know which group of robots to be more afraid of. Given what Delos put the hosts of Westworld through, I have no doubt Shogun World robots were equally abused. I don’t want to imagine what a geisha would have had to endure at the hands of guests who have twisted ideas of a geisha’s role.

So, if Kikuchi’s character awakes and gains sentience, imagine the ass she will kick. It will be glorious. What if she ends up joining forces with Maeve? Thandie Newton‘s character is seen wearing a kimono in the season two trailer, so she’s spending some amount of time in the park. I don’t know if we’ll see Shogun World, but I believe hosts from that park are going to have a key role in the upcoming season.

How prominent do you think Kikuchi’s role will be in season two? What theories do you have about Shogun World? Tell us in the comments.

Image: HBO

Amy Ratcliffe is an Associate Editor for Nerdist. Follow her on Twitter. Maybe she’s a host. Who knows.

More about Westworld!

• 6 unsolved mysteries season two should answer.
• Listen to Westworld‘s cover of “Heart-Shaped Box.”
• The Sweetwater experience at SXSW.

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Westworld dropped a trailer for season 2 and it revealed a lot, but hidden beneath all that was ANOTHER trailer! How did they do it? Amy has decoded treasure (WITH SPOILERS) on today’s Nerdist News!

Thanks to Legion for sponsoring today’s episode of Nerdist News! Season 2 of Legion premieres on Tuesday, April 3rd at 10pm on FX!

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Were you a fan of the secret trailer? Let us know in the comments below!

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Image: HBO

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Warning: There are potential spoilers ahead for Westworld season 2!

In less than a month, it will be time to “cease all motor functions” so we can watch the new season of Westworld on HBO. Unlike some other revolutions, the robot uprising will be televised; and HBO played into that with a mindbending new trailer which makes us more than a little scared of Dolores. And if the haunting cover of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” didn’t grab your attention then perhaps this will: there’s a hidden trailer within the trailer! Today’s Nerdist News is logging into the world’s deadliest theme park to bring you the scoop!

Join guest host Amy “No-blooded killer” Vorpahl as she explains how to find the secret Westworldtrailer. Apparently some sharp-eyed fans realized a supply box in the trailer was decorated with binary code. When the code was translated, it sent viewers to an in-world site for Delos, the company behind Westworld and its sister parks. 

As for the secret video itself, it starts off innocently enough as a promo for Delos’ theme parks and it reminds us of an Apple Computers style ad. Then, it’s almost as if the parks’ robotic hosts hacked the feed with the most horrific footage from their violent uprising. It could scare the motor oil out of us, and we aren’t even robots. No matter what business you’re in, hanging the human guests is never going to be a good look for the brochure, and that skinless host is pure nightmare fuel.

If that wasn’t enough to whet your appetite for the new season, the video also has a code that can bring you to another part of the site, where other Westworld secrets may be revealed in the near future.

What do you think about the latest Westworld trailer? Let’s discuss in the comment section below!

Images: HBO

The post How Fans Discovered A Secret Westworld Trailer appeared first on Nerdist.