‘Westworld’ Season Finale Recap ‘The Passenger’
Westworld Season Finale Recap ‘The Passenger’
Well, that was a doozy of an episode.
Dolores finds the Man in Black alone in the desert trying to prove to himself that he is real by cutting open his arm. She doesn’t kill him, instead allowing him to accompany her to the Valley. Once there, they find Bernard. The Man in Black turns on Dolores, shooting her several times, but she isn’t phased by his attacks. In fact, she was expecting his betrayal and jammed his gun before giving it back to him earlier. The gun misfires, destroying the Man in Black’s right hand. Dolores and Bernard head down into the facility, leaving him to die. Inside, Dolores activates Abernathy’s code and she and Bernard go inside.
They find themselves in a series of memories that were being used to test the fidelity of James Delos. In order to test the fidelity of one of the guests, they are placed within scenarios they lived out in real life. They need to make sure that the “fake” version acts in the same way as the real person would. The only issue is that the fidelity doesn’t pass over once they place them inside a new body, as was seen with James. Inside the core, they meet the system operator, who looks exactly like Logan. He tells Dolores and Bernard that he was built to oversee the coding, taking them to the library where everyone’s information is stored. Every guest has a book containing their “code.” She surmises that humans simple and can be boiled down to a certain number of words. Knowing what she must do now, Dolores returns to the real world and activates the destruction of the mainframe. This will destroy all the guest information as well as the Hosts who are making their escape into an untainted world built for them by Bernard. Seeing what Dolores has become and what she is willing to do to escape to the human world, Bernard kills her.
While all of this was going on, the Hosts are making their way to the Valley where they see a door open up. As they are passing through the door and into the new world, Delos unleashes their ultimate weapon: Clementine. As she rides through the line of Hosts, they start killing each other. Maeve, who managed to free herself at the Mesa, has only just arrived with Hector, Armistice, and Hanaryo (Lee gave his life in order help them escape some soldiers and it was a really great moment as he recited the lines he had written for Hector). Maeve rushes to her daughter and tells her to escape. She will keep her safe. Maeve then turns around and freezes the attacking Hosts in place as Akecheta leads her daughter to safety. Then, Delos’ men open fire on the Hosts. Maeve, Hector, Armistice, and Hanaryo are killed.
This season has dealt with the jumping memories of Bernard and now we finally piece together what happened. Bernard scrambled his own mind to keep his actions a secret from Delos. He needed them to do some work for him. This involved getting caught and outted as a Host. As Delos prepares the transmission of data to the outside, Bernard reveals the choice he made. After killing Dolores, he hid Abernathy’s core and was picked up by Charlotte and Elsie. Elsie thinks that Bernard is going off the deep end and wants to help him get better. She freezes him in place while she goes to talk to Charlotte about Delos’ next play. Charlotte kills her. This makes Bernard loose control and he puts his new plan into action. He creates a new Host and transplants Dolores inside of it. Charlotte is alone when she is confronted by a Host version of herself. She is killed and “Dolores” takes her place. In the present, as Delos is sending the files, they realize that the data is much more expansive than it should be. Charlotte then kills everyone in the room and changes the coordinates of the data receiver. Despite bringing her back, Bernard knows he must stand in opposition of her. Dolores kills him. Dolores/Charlotte then leaves Westworld, taking a few cores with her. She arrives at a home left by Ford for her, and inside, she finds a machine. She creates her old body as well as a new version of Bernard. In the final moments, Bernard walks out of the house and smiles as he leaves. We don’t know what he saw, but I’m thinking Dolores has revived the Hosts.
For the first time, there’s a post-credit scene and it is definitely not to be missed. The Man in Black managed to survive all of his injuries and made his way down into the facility to stop Dolores. During the episode, it was thought that the Man in Black would be in the elevator when Bernard made to leave, but when it opened, the Man in Black was nowhere to be found. The post-credit scene kind of explains why. The door opens and he enters an empty room. Then, Emily walks in. He follows her into a small living area, which looks similar to the room James occupied for all those years. They sit down opposite each other and Emily asks how long he has been here. He replies that he doesn’t know. Emily then says she has a some questions she would like to ask him. He asks why and she says to test his fidelity. So the Man in Black may not be the real William after all. The beginning of the episode explained that the mainframe ran simulations with the guests’ files, seeing how they would react to situations they’ve already been in. Perhaps everything we’ve been seeing from the Man in Black exists within his simulation. This would explain why he passed off as human when the soldiers tested him as well as not finding anything in his arm. Westworld likes to mess with our minds and make us question what we think is reality, and if the Man in Black is in fact a simulation, then who even knows what is real anymore?
I am definitely intrigued to see where Season 3 will take us.
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