Westworld, Season 2 (no outside theories!)

Yeah, her name is Emily. How is it a pun, though? Honestly, what am I missing here?

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I enjoyed this episode a lot. What really kept me laser-focused was the beautiful Sela Ward as William's late wife. My gosh, I don't know how old Sela is but she still looks dynamite! Either she's drinking the blood of virgins or she has a "special" portrait stashed away in her house. I mean, she looks almost exactly the same as she did 22-years-ago when Sisters ended. What a woman!

EDIT: Okay, found out she will turn 62 on July 11th. Not that old, yet should be showing signs of aging...hmm, a Westworld host perhaps?

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Oh, crap, I don’t remember anything from the last episode.

Well, aside from Hopkins dialing up the creepy factor here:



So, uh... Ed Harris was a robot?

It seems like they're heading down the Ed Harris/robot road. And the season finale next week. Hmm, cliffhanger time, ya think?

Twist: Bernard is not a robot.

So if Ed Harris is a robot... then how is he aging? Or did William want to perfect that human/host thing and use Delos as a sort of guinea pig first before trying it on himself? Or did he not perfect it for so many years/decades that now he's old and finally is a host? Unsure how this all plays out, but am at least fascinated that William THINKS he is a host... enough to slice open his own forearm.

SEASON 2 FINALE: I think I loved it. Hard to tell, since I still feel they unnecessarily garbled Bernard's timeline a little too much. I think they overdid that. I loved the rest, though.

That's enough for now.

Post-credit scene?

Yeah.

Yeah, I almost missed it.

I feel like people aren't as engaged in discussion this season, which is a shame. Enjoying what little discussion there is though.

A few thoughts on finale...SPOILERS!!!!!


So glad that Akecheta got to be with his soul mate at the end. I was really engaged in his story, even if it was basically one episode.

Did not see the Hale twist coming, was glad I was thrown for a loop there. Of course I called it only seconds before it was revealed, but that's the beauty of the show. They write and shoot it to make the viewer be happy that they know things, mere seconds before the reveal.

Stubbs - Still on the fence if he is a host, or simply acknowledges that Dolores is in Hale. It could go either way.

Hopkins is just too good.

Hope our two boys can bring back Maeve and the others.

Post-credit. So I mentioned earlier that even the beach scene with Bernard could be in the past and everyone yelled at me NOOOO.

This is the present right now, the future if you really want to get technical. MIB is dead and he is stuck in Emily's torture. Reliving over and over his desire of a real park, but stuck in the knowledge of being a host. I think what we are seeing from the park really did happen, but he's just reliving it over and over like the Delos experiment.

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Suspect's Reviews

When you say the stuff in the park "really did happen," do you mean his shooting Emily? Because then obviously the shot-Emily was a host indeed, and that's just part of the endless MIB-testing the real Emily is doing, yes?

The fact that he was called a "high-value survivor" by the crew was just because Emily's still experimenting with him, yes?

Also, how did Hale/Dolores get past the humanity-sensor on the back of her neck? I guess, the same way the Emily host got past it in last week's episode? They're better incarnations of hosts? Real duplications of real people instead of simply hosts created for narratives for the guests?

I mean everything that the MIB did in the park, in my mind, happened and the host is just reliving it.

The shooting of Emily could be up in the air. Maybe that portion of the story was fabricated? When he left her she never did find him after? Or she is dead and it is a host testing a host situation? How far in the future is this, she looks the same age.

I imagine he's a high-value survivor due to being the one of the men behind the curtain. But it could still be that Emily wants to torture him endlessly for decades.

No idea on the humanity sensor thing. I thought for sure the jig was going to be up or that Stubbs would stop the person just before the alarm went off or something. So I'm lost on that one.

Here's a good link where the creators explain a few things:

And... a blog post synopsis of the entire episode. This was REALLY helpful:

https://www.hbo.com/westworld/season...enger/synopsis

Okay, I'm doing a little rewatch of the finale. Dolores and MIB are riding toward the Valley Beyond and he asks if the hosts know where they're headed. She says to him, "They're not looking for a path to your world. They want a place apart from you, and they're willing to die to get there."

So, now I'm confused. She finds him digging in his arm, and it doesn't look like what a human arm would look like if you were digging around in there. And now she's talking about him like he's human and not another host? Is it because he's copied from a human (and she's not) and she can make that distinction... and it's important to her?

And during the rewatch, I see Maeve getting shot and "dying" even though she wasn't shot through the eye like Dolores. (And why did THAT shot work but many shots to her chest didn't?) Anyway...

Here's an article interviewing Nolan, in which he says this: "The second season is a little more straightforward, but it is playing out in two distinct timelines — two and a half if you count the post-credits sequence, and complete with flashbacks. It’s not necessarily for everyone but all of these choices were rooted in the protagonists’ understanding of the reality around them, and centering this season on Bernard’s broken mind as he tries to navigate through the debris of memory. Subsequent seasons will be structured in … different ways.”

I guess I would have thought it was more than 2 or 2.5 timelines. This will take a few rewatches to figure everything out. I don't mind the concept -- in fact, I like it -- but I think parts of it were purposely sloppy or muddy so that we wouldn't too easily figure things out.


Full article here: http://ew.com/tv/2018/06/25/westworl...22%3a%22%22%7d

Finished up the season last night. Overall, I loved it. Definitely a little rocky here and there due to the fragmenting of Bernard's memories, but clearly that was on purpose, and I agree with Austruck that the reasoning was at least partially driven by a conscious effort to make it difficult for viewers to decode the twists as the season went along.

I am also a bit perplexed as to how Hale was able to get past the scanner - hopefully info emerges that clears that up.

End credit scene must be some time in the future, I presume?

EDIT - Just read Austruck's link, which confirms my last question in the affirmative.

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It was Hemsworth III. He vouches for her without scanning even though he knows what she is (and is probably a host himself).

Yeah, very far in the future, I'd say.

He is a host.

http://collider.com/westworld-stubbs-host-theory/