It’s been eighteen months since the Westworld season 1 finale dropped all the wham moments at once – Liam McPoyle turned out to have been the man in black all along, Maeve broke out of the park, and Dolores completely broke her programming and shot Anthony Hopkins right in his classically trained head. Of course, these were the culminations of a hell of a lot of plot and musing on the nature of humanity, so it’s only appropriate that this season started off with a longer-than-most recap on where we’re up to.
With both Jimmi Simpson and Hoppy now out of the picture, we’re running low on main characters – so this episode centres us squarely on Bernard, who’s appropriately enough in a bit of a haze, with all familiar support systems rudely torn away. We catch up with him passed out on a seashore, as if he’s hit his head that hard he’s woken up in Lost, but that’s not what’s happened at all. After the chaos of the previous episode, the cavalry has finally arrived to find the survivors – and, it seems, try and ward off the hassle they’re getting from the Chinese military.
(Which suggests that the park’s on an island, specifically one all the way out in the South China Sea.)
How bad, exactly, did it get after the credits rolled on the last season? Well, you remember the ‘everybody’s dead, Dave’ bit from Red Dwarf? Granted it’s not everybody, but you wouldn’t guess it with the amount of bodies lying around. And Delos’s security forces are only adding to the count, summarily executing hosts for no apparent reason – which obviously worries poor old Bernard. But how’d he even get here? Well, that’s a long story…
(I realise that the realism of shows like this precludes them from making the screen go all wibbly-wobbly to denote a change in timeframe, but I maintain this is to their detriment.)
So, after the end-of-year bash goes south, Bernard, Charlotte, and some poor doomed mooks end up cowering in a barn while Steven Ogg’s recurrent ne’er-do-well host indulges his sadism on the other guests.
They make a plan to duck out and head straight for the nearest exit, only to be surprised by a friendly farmhand host – who they immediately butcher, much to Bernard’s distress. One might point to this being a very quick adoption of a kind of ‘human is human and host is host and never the twain shall meet’ mentality, but as they were guests in the park it may have just been a reflex.
Some five minutes or so later, the mooks meet their violent end when they cheerfully blunder into a trap set by some marauding hosts, and are missed by no-one. Bernard and Charlotte do a bit better when they find a maintenance elevator, which at least gets them out of the way of robot cowboys. Underneath they find one of the lesser-used backrooms, where blank, more-robotic-looking robots wander endlessly around keeping things running – and where it turns out Delos has been keeping files on guests’ DNA all this time (obtaining it in what I’ll politely call the old-fashioned way).
As Bernard looks through the park’s various beep-boops to see if there’s any way of getting the hosts to calm down a bit, he finds himself reading up on the symptoms hosts can suffer, which turn out – as the camera starts to go all fuzzy – to begin with blurred vision. Luckily, Charlotte is distracted just long enough for Bernard to inject himself with the clear, nutrient-rich goo on which the hosts run.
Who exactly was it directing the band of hosts who killed all the mooks? Easiest question in the world, it was good old Dolores. Who’s basically out for mass, splash-damage, general revenge, with Teddy by her side in the classic Bonnie-and-Clyde-style combo. And for all the navel-gazing they get up to against picturesque plains backgrounds, at this point she’s acting worryingly like the man in black – who, to be fair, is responsible for a lot of her formative experiences.
As for uncle blackie himself, he’s just keeping on keeping on – two hosts jump him, and as he does away with them, if anything there’s a sense of gratification that it’s no longer on easy mode. Then he runs into a child host who seems to be channelling Ford’s spirit, establishes he’s by no means given up on finding the centre of the maze, and shoots the kid, because that’s just the kind of guy he is.
On the subject of children, Maeve’s decided not to escape the wider facility, but instead to go back in and find her daughter. Which is lucky for Sizemore, because he’s seconds away from being literally eaten alive by a host from his schlocky plotline before Maeve turns up and saves him. Despite Sizemore’s unthinking contempt for hosts, and his laughable lack of any sort of loyalty (‘Might even some of them be dressed as human?’ he asks the strike team, while mugging furiously towards Maeve) she keeps him around to help – and so she can mock his stilted writing whenever she suffers the indignity of having it tumble out of her mouth.
At one point, Sizemore points out that Maeve’s daughter even being her daughter is a relic of her old programming – something still, mistakenly, bouncing around in her mind. And while this enrages her about as much as you might expect, he’s not technically wrong. So any emotional reunion between Maeve and her daughter will very likely be horribly undercut almost immediately.
Finally, we return to Bernard’s future timeline – where he and the Delos guys stumble open the ocean that Ford had secretly built into the park (pesky old Hoppy), which is full of dead hosts, including poor old Teddy, whose death count is possibly unrivalled at this point. Then we have Bernard’s revelation that it was him who killed them all. Boom, smash cut, credits.
So, Westworld is decidedly back. And while parts of it seem like they’re reacquainting the viewers with the setup in much the same way as that five-minute recap – I point squarely to the man in black reasserting he wants to get to the centre of the maze, and Dolores going all ‘screw the humans’ – this has also thrown us some big, meaty developments straight away, most notably Delos keeping tabs on their customers’ personal information (sound familiar?) and bringing in the heavy squad to sort everything out. Not forgetting, of course, that Bernard has admitted to what’s effectively a mass murder – even after all his pained glances at humans maltreating hosts.
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.
