We did it guys, we got through Westworld Season 2. Are you still scratching your head?
Future Charlotte is Dolores
I didn’t see this one coming. It helps that Dolores read Charlotte Hale’s book inside The Forge and learned how to be her, though if you go back and watch you might notice Tessa Tompsom pull off some very subtle Evan Rachel Wood expressions. And just like that, passing by Stubbs (who is also a host?) she’s on a rescue boat on her way to freedom.
The Door
When I first saw the ridiculous looking zigzag fill up the sky I thought, are you serious? It got a bit better when they reveal it’s only the Hosts that can see it. This is the Door to the Valley Beyond, or as Lisa Joy refers to it, “The Sublime”. That and many other aspects of this season remind me a lot of the videogame SOMA where they also seek a digital afterlife. This is a happy ending for many of our characters even if they hurl their physical bodies over a cliff. Akecheta reunites with Kohana and Maeve sacrifices herself to save her daughter and her new mother. While Dolores first sees it as another prison, “a gilded cage,” she does end up putting Teddy in there and shooting their digital world via laser beams, seemingly into outer space, or somewhere they can’t be touched.
Loop da loop
If you switched off before the credits ended you may have missed the post-credits stinger. Marvel doesn’t have a monopoly on them, but for TV it is rather uncommon. If you were wondering what the heck was up with The Man in Black on the elevator this explains it, well… it might just put your head in a spin. When he sees his daughter Emily amusingly William straightaway thinks he’s in The Forge, “I’m already in the thing, aren’t I?” but she reveals that this is far in the future and she is testing his fidelity, which means, like James Delos, they still haven’t cracked the whole human mind in a Host body thing and he’s doomed to repeat this loop for all eternity.
If you stop to think about it, it stretches the realms of believability, having to recreate humans as Hosts just to play out the same experience of older William in the park. But it does prove Humans are as predictable as Hosts and free will is sadly not a thing. If William did this to himself to prove his humanity, it hasn’t worked. No matter how many times William repeats his loop and hoping for another result, he still ends up killing his daughter.
What’s next for Season 3?
The audience for Westworld has reduced in numbers from Season 1 and from the sounds of things HBO aren’t too happy to be shelling out millions of dollars to film hundreds of people in the desert. That may have helped propel the story to its ultimate conclusion with a more reduced cast. Dolores and Bernard are now free on the outside with someone or something in Charlotte’s Host-body (along with five mystery Host orbs), and although they aren’t on the same page when it comes to what to do with the human race, they have more in common than they like to think.
With Game of Thrones coming out this time next year it’s gonna be another long wait until the next chapter.
TV has always been a part of Michael’s life, but since the influx of streaming shows now he can’t stop (someone send help). He also dabbles in films and video games, and has a mean board game collection.
Michael has a Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies from Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. He has previously written about video games for publications including Game Console, Salient, and ButtonMasher.
