The stars of HBO’s “Westworld” talk about which “host” abilities they’d most want to share. Robert Hanashiro/USA TODAY
Spoiler alert! The following contains details from Season 2, Episode 7 of Westworld, “Les Écorchés.”
We’re getting somewhere now.
The first half of Westworld‘s second season mostly kept the main players in separate locations and on different paths. But Sunday’s bombastic episode saw people colliding left and right, often with deadly consequences.
In “Les Écorchés” we get answers about Delos’ secret project and Ford’s magical resurrection, but the episode is far more about power. Human, host, resurrected human? It doesn’t matter. Who wields power at any given moment is the most important determinant of the future. The episode is littered with both subtle and drastic power shifts as the park is thrown into further chaos by Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), with a big helping hand from Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins).
Who has the power at the end of the season will likely determine whether humans can live forever and whether the hosts will ever be able to fully escape their oppressors. And while Dolores had a big win in this episode, it all comes down to what happens in the valley beyond.
Secrets, secrets are no fun
Well, Bernard, it was going to come out eventually.
Back in the “present” (with this series you never know which timeline is accurate), Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) is outed as a host after Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård) accuses him and Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) of conspiring to get the Delos data (or “the key,” the episode’s new, more efficient term). He brings the pair to Ford’s old pet homestead, after discovering that’s where Theresa (Sidse Babett Knudsen) really died in Season 1. In the secret room in that house, they find yet another secret door (seriously, guys?) which is a cold storage room for other host bodies that look just like Bernard. Whoops.
Now that they know Bernard is a host, Strand and Charlotte (Tessa Thompson) are able to torture him for information, and specifically where Dolores has taken the key. Bernard’s weird memory glitch means the scenes in the present bookend the episode, so after a long trip to the near past, he fesses up the location to Charlotte. Whether that’s the actual location of the key, Dolores or anything remains to be seen, but Strand calls it the “valley beyond.” Better be some valley, after all this buildup.
Voices inside your head
Between scenes in the present, we flash back to where we left off with everyone last week. Bernard is still plugged into the cradle and having a nice little chat with Ford.
Ford gets some handy exposition out of the way, explaining that the immortality program wasn’t just for Jim Delos (Peter Mullan), and that the company’s datamining of the guests was research for that program (this part of the explanation that didn’t track with me, but I’m just going with it). Ford confirms he forced Bernard to copy Ford’s mind and put it in the cradle before Dolores shot him.
The reason Ford is in the cradle and not walking around in an Anthony Hopkins-shaped host is that the immortality program only works inside the cradle. In the real world, he’d go insane, just like Jim.
This new piece of the Westworld mythology is a bit confusing because Ford keeps referring to “copies” of minds. Wouldn’t that mean that the Ford Bernard is talking to is an entirely new consciousness, and that the human Ford really died on the night of the gala? Or is the show suggesting his consciousness moved from his body to the cradle? This is a familiar hiccup for sci-fi of this variety (Fox’s short-lived Dollhouse…
