‘Westworld’ Finale And Where It Leaves Us For Season 2
It’s been a week since the Westworld finale, and viewers’ minds are a lot closer to digesting everything that was packed into the episode than they were a week ago, but many questions remain. Luckily, there will be a Season 2. Hopefully some of our new questions will be answered then. Let’s take a look at a few of those questions.
A big Westworld fan theory was revealed, and that is that William and the Man in Black (MIB) are the same person. In a conversation with Delores, the MIB explained that he had spent a lot of time looking for her. He didn’t find her, he said, but he did find himself. He found his more violent and vengeful self. But some questions about William/the MIB remain. Back in the beginning of Season 1, Delores’ father short-circuited when he saw a photo of a woman we later learned was the woman outside of Westworld that William was engaged to. What connection is there between Delores’s father and William’s fiancee? And just how did William’s marriage play out? First, a related question is about what happened to Logan. He was William’s future brother-in-law. Did he just ride out to the Westworld desert and die? Would corporate let that happen? According to other backstory about William that we learned earlier in the season, he did get married, but his wife killed herself because of his obsession with Westworld and likely with Delores. Just how did that happen? And how did the relationship between Wiliam and Ford begin? Did William know Arnold? They both believed the hosts were capable of sentience. Did they discuss this before Arnold died?
There are several questions related to hosts/humans and programming/consciousness. One has to do with a Westworld character we never completely figured out – Anthony Hopkins’ Robert Ford. Is he a malicious manipulator or the victim of his own bad decision? He may be a bit of both. He realized his mistake in not embracing Arnold’s theory that the hosts could achieve consciousness. He spent 35 years trying to make up for that mistake by trying to get Delores to achieve consciousness. He explained in the Westworld finale that she had not quite reached it when she killed Arnold because it was an act that Arnold programmed her to do, making it a sort of technological suicide. Was his death the same? Had Robert programmed Delores to kill him and everyone at that party like Arnold programmed her to kill him and all the hosts previously? Or is she truly self-conscious now and made that decision on her own? Further, is Ford dead? Was that Ford or was it a robotic version of Ford?
Regarding Ford, there was another storyline in the Westworld finale that posed several questions. Maeve decided to break out. She learned from Bernard that all the choices she thought she had been making on her own had been programmed, but we didn’t learn who by. Was it by Ford? And was everything we saw her do in the finale all part of that program? Or was it by Charlotte or someone hired or ordered by Charlotte to do the programming? Maeve left with a bag, but when she returned she didn’t have the bag. There’s a gun in that bag and maybe more. Was her leaving the bag behind purposeful? Was Ford or Charlotte or someone else trying to get some information out of the park? Why?
And speaking of the Westworld park, what is it? Where is it? It seems to have a larger purpose than to simply act as an amusement park for the rich, but what is that larger purpose?
There are so many more questions. Does Maeve’s daughter exist? Does Samurai World exist or is it still in development? How many other parks are there? If Maeve’s daughter is real, which park is she in? Bernard stumbled upon the home that Robert had hidden from everyone, the one related to his own childhood. What was the rest of the story behind that? There seems to be more significance to his childhood, what is it? We didn’t actually see Elsie and Stubbs die, are they still alive?
The finale of Season 1 of Westworld answered many questions, but it raised at least as many as it answered. Will Season 2 give us answers to the new questions? Probably some, some in part and some in full. And it will likely raise many more. Unfortunately, we have a long wait as Season 2 isn’t expected until sometime in 2018.
[Featured Image by HBO]
