In the ‘Westworld’ recap, Bernard makes a startling discovery about himself, Delores gets closer to the truth and the Man in Black comes full circle…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
All season long on ‘Westworld’, we’ve been teased with the looming revelation about the park’s original co-creator Arnold, who was killed several years ago when his attempts to make the hosts become self-aware cost him his life.
It turns out, we met Arnold in the first episode of the season even if we didn’t know it was him.
Following his tragic death at the hands of one of his creations, Arnold was recreated as a host by his old friend Dr. Robert Ford except we’ve known him as Bernard this entire time.
The revelation was made in the penultimate episode of the season as Bernard got a history lesson in his creation while trying to turn the tables on Dr. Ford after he became aware that he was a robot once again. Dr. Ford has meticulously erased any trace of Bernard’s past encounters where he might realizes he’s more machine than man, but this time he woke up outside of the parameters set by his old friend.
So Bernard decided to get to the truth about his creation — and what he found was even more disturbing that he could ever realize and ultimately he paid for it with his life (or at least that’s the way it looks for now).
Meanwhile, another huge theory that’s been floating around ‘Westworld’ took one more step towards reality as Delores continued to delve into her past with William and seemingly her present with the Man in Black, who appear to be one and the same. The idea that ‘Westworld’ has been operating on two different timelines throughout the season was nearly confirmed by the twist that closed the latest episode as Delores came face to face with someone she may have known for more than 30 years.
Add to that, Maeve’s plan to escape the park took another step towards reality while Stubbs, the head security officer, found out just how real things are getting inside ‘Westworld’.
With that said, let’s recap the latest episode of ‘Westworld’ titled ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’…
Follow Me to Hell
As last week’s episode came to a close, Maeve was suffering from another flashback to her previous programming where she had a daughter that was murdered by the Man in Black and it led to her slashing new Clementine’s throat before the technicians from the park wrangled her back into the lab. It was a worrisome altercation considering Maeve’s parameters are set as such that she should never harm Clementine in that situation.
So as we kick things off this week, Bernard is examining Maeve when he discovers that many of the behavioral settings are off the charts. He begins asking Maeve to reveal where these changes came from and that’s when she wakes up — because she was never actually asleep in the first place — and it turns out she can control Bernard just like every other host in the park. Maeve’s ability to control Bernard also serves as a wake up call to him as he begins to realize (yet again) that he’s actually a robot and not a human. Remember, every time this realization has happened in the past, Dr. Ford has wiped his memory clean.
This time around, Maeve is the one who wakes him up and Dr. Ford isn’t around to calm Bernard down and explain how everything is going to be all right.
Before leaving, Maeve orders Bernard to mark her as park ready again and she disappears back into her storyline before making the mad dash for the door in what we have to assume will be the season finale.
Back inside the park, Maeve tracks down her favorite outlaw Hector before helping him to realize that he’s been locked inside the same loop since his creation. Her revelation comes after predicting the exact outcome of his gang turning on each other while jockeying for money that’s hidden inside the safe they just stole before Hector and his right hand girl Armistice gun each other down in the end.
It all plays out — except Maeve shoots Armistice before she can kill Hector.
Maeve then helps Hector to realize just how much he’s a pawn in a game being won by kings when she opens the safe to reveal nothing inside. That’s when Hector starts to remember a scenario similar to this one before and a kiss that he shared with Maeve before they were both cut down in a hail of gunfire a few episodes back.
Maeve asks Hector to follow her into hell to crack open the real safe that contains their freedom. It’s a painful journey to get there, however, as Maeve and Hector have sex while a kicked over lantern burns down the tent all around them. The idea must be that Maeve and Hector will be brought up into the lab after “dying” and her lackeys Sylvester and Felix will repair them both before they eventually escape the park once and for all.
The Man on the Board
After Teddy started to regain some of his own memories, which led to him knocking out the Man in Black, the two of them were ambushed by Wyatt’s gang. Teddy got an arrow in the shoulder and this week he was forced to remember more of his past while speaking to Angela, who helps him to look back on his time as part of Wyatt’s gang when they gunned down a bunch of innocent civilians while serving as part of the Union Army.
The dig into Teddy’s damaged mind goes deeper when he starts to remember a time when he engaged in the same exact shootout — even going as far as killing Angela — while he was wearing a badge on his chest as the marshal over a town. In other words, Angela is making Teddy realize that he’s reliving the same loop over and over again.
Teddy still can’t quite process what he’s remembering and that leads to Angela gutting him with her knife and remarking that perhaps he’ll be ready to handle all of this better on the next cycle. Killing Teddy resets the loop, which means he’ll have to live through all of this again before he could potentially “wake up”.
Meanwhile, Angela turns her attention to the Man in Black, who she explains isn’t ready to take a trip into the maze but she’s happy to have him play one of their games before knocking him out. When the Man in Black wakes up, a noose is tied around his neck with the rope stretched over a tree and the other end tied to his horse standing a few feet away.
When the skittish horse makes a run for it, the noose tightens and the Man in Black is lifted in the air, but thankfully he grabbed onto the knife planted in Teddy’s belly before being hoisted up to his certain death. The Man in Black falls back to the ground before he spots a pair of expensive high heels standing just a few feet away.
It’s Charlotte Hale — the Delos employee sent to get the park in order while trying to get rid of Dr. Ford at the same time.
She reveals that the Man in Black is actually a board member who helps to make decisions for the park and she wants his vote to get Dr. Ford out of power. Charlotte also notes that it was partially the Man in Black, who helped “save” Dr. Ford many years ago when something similar to this was taking place. An educated guess would be when that “incident” happened 30 years ago when Arnold was killed but somehow Dr. Ford remained in power.
Regardless, the Man in Black is on board to vote Dr. Ford out of Westworld, but right now he’s got more important things to tend to — like tracking down the entrance to this elusive maze and now he’s back on the hunt after missing out on the opportunity to meet Wyatt.
Cornerstones
Now that Bernard is awake once again, he wants some answers and the only person who can give them to him is Dr. Ford.
So Bernard lures Dr. Ford down into the sub-basement where all the old hosts go to die and that’s where he springs his trap. Knowing that he can’t physically harm Dr. Ford, Bernard reprograms the lobotomized Clementine to follow on his commands. He then orders her to keep a gun pointed at Dr. Ford with explicit instructions to shoot him dead if he attempts to harm Bernard in any way.
The goal of this little intervention is for Bernard to force Dr. Ford to upload all of his past memories all the way back to his beginning so he can understand his creation and the relationship he shared with the park’s original co-creator Arnold.
Bernard is convinced that there’s something in his history that will explain this strange connection he has to Arnold but the only way to find out is to remember everything Dr. Ford made him forget.
As the memories start flooding into Bernard’s brain (or hard drive if you will), he flashes back to the death of his son and the conversation with his wife about her passing. Of course these are implanted memories to create Bernard’s back story just like every other host in the park and that’s when he comes to a revelation.
Remember last week when Maeve was brought into Dr. Ford’s examination room after the Man in Black killed her daughter some years ago and she couldn’t be controlled and wouldn’t respond to voice commands. In the end, Maeve grabbed a gun and shot herself in the head because she couldn’t let go of that moment in her mind where the Man in Black murdered her daughter.
According to Dr. Ford, these are “cornerstones” — the part of the host’s back story that keeps them centered in that narrative. For Maeve at the time it was her daughter and when she was killed, she couldn’t separate that tragic moment from her reality. In Bernard’s case, he always remembered the death of his son and those final few minutes he spent with him before he died.
So Bernard is forced to dig even deeper while letting go of the sadness that constantly surrounded him whenever thinking about his son. Finally, Bernard goes back further — to the moment when he choked Elsie to death after she discovered code he was writing in Arnold’s name. He then remembered his time with Theresa despite Dr. Ford erasing that a week ago.
Finally, Bernard went all the way back to the conversation he had with Dr. Ford at the beginning of the season where they had a discussion about Arnold for the first time and he learned about the “bicameral mind” — a plan the former co-creator behind the park had investigated as a potential way to “wake up” the hosts and bring them to true consciousness. In that moment, Bernard remembers looking at the photo on Dr. Ford’s desk that showed him standing next to Arnold.
Remember, the hosts are programmed to ignore certain things when it could affect their reality and this was one of those instances. The person standing next to Dr. Ford in the photo was Arnold — and Arnold looked exactly like Bernard.
It turns out after Arnold’s death, Dr. Ford missed his old partner so much that he recreated a host in his image, except this one would follow his every command, and that is when Bernard came to life. Ever since that time, Bernard has continued to help Dr. Ford write code and upgrade the hosts all while walking around with the same face as his former partner Arnold.
All of this is finally too much for Bernard to handle and he orders Clementine to shoot Dr. Ford except for one problem — she can’t pull the trigger.
That’s when Dr. Ford reveals that his control over anything and everything in this park runs much deeper than a few lines of code. He has back up systems inside back up systems to ensure that none of the hosts can ever turn against him.
When Bernard wonders why he went through this entire exercise to remember everything from his past if Dr. Ford was only going to erase him anyways because he was never truly out of control? It seems Dr. Ford has gone through this exact same conversation with Bernard several times in the past and at the end of the loop, he would ask to be wiped clean and put back into the life he previously led. This time, however, Bernard led an uprising and tried to have Dr. Ford killed by another host.
That’s enough for Dr. Ford to realize that his time with Bernard has come to an end. As he leaves the room, he orders Bernard to shoot himself in the head so this 30 year long experiment will be finished because he can no longer trust his “friend” and former partner. As Dr. Ford exits, Bernard follows orders and pulls the trigger before falling to the floor.
Despite Bernard’s death, something tells me we haven’t seen the last of him in this series.
Stand Down
Elsewhere in the park, Stubbs — the head of park security — is alerted to a beacon inside the park belonging to one of the programmers who is supposed to be on vacation. It’s a tag belonging to Elsie Hughes — the missing programmer we believed was killed by Bernard several weeks ago.
When Stubbs goes to investigate, he can’t seem to get a strong signal in that part of the park — it’s a distance piece of land where no guests have traveled in many, many years.
Out of nowhere, Stubbs is confronted by members of the Ghost Nation tribe and they aren’t responding to verbal commands. In the end, Stubbs is tackled by one of the soldiers and we don’t yet know his fate.
What we do know is these were more hosts who didn’t react when given a verbal command by a human. That’s all going to be bad news in the end when all the robots start to do the same exact thing.
A Glitch in the System
Last week, William and Delores were captured on their way back to Sweetwater by his old pal Logan, who had teamed up with the rogue Confederate army after his soon to be brother-in-law left him for dead following a double crossed deal gone wrong. Now Logan has endeared himself to the Confederates and he took William and Delores hostage before returning to their camp.
That’s where Logan starts to lay out the truth to William — this is all just a game except he’s gone in far too deep and he’s taking this way too seriously. When William protests and tries to explain to Logan that Delores is different from all the other hosts — she’s smart, she remembers and she’s not just a mindless robot there for the guest’s pleasure. She’s so real in fact that William wants Logan to work some magic with the Westworld board of directors to free her from this place.
Delores voices up and asks why William or Logan would be so convinced that she actually wants to leave. What’s so special about the outside world? After all, everybody else seems to be fighting to get inside of Westworld so why would she go anywhere?
“You both keep assuming I want out. Whatever that is. If it’s such a wonderful place out there, why are you all clamoring to get in here?”
~ Delores
While Delores certainly seems to be acting outside of normal behavior for a host, Logan is more concerned about William, who has fallen under the delusion that she’s special and they are somehow meant to be together. Logan decides to help William with a large dose of reality before they venture back home from this little vacation.
First, Logan taunts William with photos of his sister — the woman he’s supposed to marry in a few weeks. He then tucks one of the photos in William’s jacket pocket.
Now if you look closely the photo that Logan holds up to show William is the same photo that Peter Abernathy found in his field that seemingly woke him up and sent him directly onto the scrap pile after they couldn’t fix him. When he showed that photo to Delores she gave the programmed response saying “that doesn’t look like anything to me”, which is what the hosts are supposed to say when confronted with “reality”.
The photo all but confirms the long standing theory that William is indeed the Man in Black in a story that’s taking place 30 years before our current timeline on the show. There’s a lot more evidence to come.
After showing William the photos, Logan further explains how Delores is nothing more than a robot covered in skin when he stabs her in the belly and reveals gears and pistons churning away inside of her instead of organs. Delores was one of the first hosts created for the park and back then they had very robotic insides before the more organic versions were made years later.
With her stomach gutted, Delores finally fights back by cutting Logan’s face with a knife, shooting a few more hosts and running away while William promises to come find her.
Later that night, William decides that this is all just one great big fantasy and he explains to Logan that he’s finally realizing what this place is about so he’s ready to return to normal. Logan cuts him free and they start drinking down a bottle of whiskey to commemorate this special occasion.
The next morning as Logan wakes up from a drunken stupor, he discovers that all of the other hosts in the camp have been slaughtered. Killed and cut up for parts — most of them robotic because they were first generation hosts — and William is standing there covered in blood. William then tackles Logan and explains how he’s the one who killed all the hosts and now he needs his “friend” to help him to find Delores.
It seems William’s transformation from naïve newcomer to experienced player is finally complete. Something tells me it won’t be long before he trades in that tan hat for a black rimmed one.
Meanwhile, Delores escapes the camp and makes a run for it, but she begins flashing back to several past encounters before ending up at the church where she always seems to travel in her dreams. Inside the church, Delores sees all the other hosts — presumably the ones who have glitched and had memories just like her — before she takes an elevator down to a lab.
There Delores continues to flash back and forth between the past and present before finally sitting down in a chair opposite Arnold. Remember those conversations that Bernard had with Delores throughout the first few episodes? Those seem to either be past encounters between Arnold and Delores or Bernard recreating the same exact scenarios with Delores in current time, which could have led to her reawakening.
The most important piece of information revealed during this encounter is that Delores remembers that she’s the one who killed Arnold. That seems to lend to the evidence of the “incident” that happened 30 years ago that nearly shut down the park. Delores was the host that revolted and killed somebody and that somebody was Arnold.
Finally, Delores exits the confessional booth that originally contained an elevator to Arnold’s lab when she hears knocking at the front door of the church. Delores runs to the door while yelling for William, but when they swing open it’s actually the Man in Black.
This all but confirms that Delores has been flashing back and forth between now and the past throughout her appearances on the show as she remembers her first encounter with William before finally realizing that she’s the one who killed Arnold and then flashing back to present day where she encounters her beloved William once again — except it’s 30 years later and he’s become the Man in Black.
Next week is the season finale of ‘Westworld’ so don’t miss out at 10pm ET on HBO and follow up with our recap after the episode airs!
