Everyone is a host and Ford is playing out the rest of his life in a fantasy: NO NO NO put down the kool aid. Maybe meta, but they are planning 5 more seasons. it removes impact if they are all hosts, we viewers won’t care as much.
Ford is a host: Tantalizing, but nope. I like the story of an Old Testament creator fighting Maeve/Dolores.
Underground / underwater / space Westworld: Maybe. Does not really matter anyway.
William is MiB from past: Maybe. I’d have to rewatch.
*Permutations of above (MiB is the past and william is present), MiB is host created by Ford to find maze retracing william/dolores’s excellent adventure, etc etc. Meh.
I can’t buy all these shocking twists and out-there theories. I haven’t seen a coherently-presented theory yet. They are all too out there, missing pieces and make assumptions that I don’t feel fit thematically. For example, if Ford was a host originally created by Arnold, that’s a twist but it’s actually boring. What then? Why should I care? Doesn’t really make a difference in how Fordbot would treat Maeve compared to human Ford, so why do it?
If you are not telling the audience it’s a flashback it’s exceptionally dishonest. An unreliable narrator scenario can work but it has to hold up to scrutiny. The hat scene is problematic for an unreliable narrator scenario and any other explanation falls into excessive misleading by the shows writers.
I’m hoping the timeline twist doesn’t come to pass as if it does it’s one of the worst handled twists I’ve seen, unless there’s some excuse for it that no one has suggested yet.
Memento is a well done twist. The character from the get go is established as unreliable, and it is obvious to the viewer that they are seeing events out of order. When things go down, you as a viewer don’t feel cheated.
Inception doesn’t really have a twist that I recall, it does however establish the question of reality and if you can trust what you are seeing and leaves it open ended.
Also, I’d point to Fight Club and The Sixth Sense as being well executed and fair.
Bernard in Westworld is fair, the Timeline theory would not be for several reasons already discussed. The introduction to William, the framing of scenes such as when Dolores met him or when the the sheriff grabbed her and William said she was with him, etc. These would all be cheap tactics of the showrunners and I would find it very disappointing.
Ooookay, we are going to have to disagree on this one.
The premise of this show is exploring the boundaries of what exactly is sentience. One of the core questions implict in the entire described existence of hosts is: “Can one be truly sentient with outside constraints placed on memory and perception of reality?” It’s a question being tackled by Maeve and Bernard and Dolores in different ways, but it’s always the same question.
Given that core question, messing with timelines and mixing past and future and leaving the viewer uncertain if all this has been done before seems completely fair. I’m not completely sold on the two timelines theory, though I lean towards believing it, but it doesn’t seem at all dishonest for the William/Dolores timeline to be a flashback.
This scene follows straight after the scene in the ‘current’ timeline, where security orders that Dolores be grabbed and brought in. Obviously we were meant to think the sheriff was a staff member, and it stood out as a bit cheap and dishonest to me, if in fact that were not the case.
Well, if we’re arguing theory likelihood on the principle of least dishonesty, isn’t it more dishonest to fill William & Logan’s Sweetwater with never-before and never-since seen people and events*, when in all other scenes we’re clearly shown how people and events are repeating every day there?
Because in my mind, showing us that and not having that be set in another time than the other scenes, is more dishonest than “unclear” and some editing trickery in a very short scene.
*) The only people I spotted that have been in other scenes were Clementine and the guy you bump into as you get off the train.
Ed O’Neil springs the young guy from jail cell in episode 4… yet the same young guy is in the timeline 30 years ago and hasn’t aged a bit. Why is that? .
To answer the question, the Man in Black hangs out with two different guys in that episode. The guy he’s riding with at the start and hands over to the sheriff is Lawrence. Lawrence has also met William and Dolores (in the town of Pariah.)
The guy the Man in Black busts out of prison is Hector. Hector has never been shown with William (so far.)
Both Lawrence and Hector are hosts. We presume, based on the info that Dolores, her “father,” and some of the other hosts have been there for 30 years, that hosts don’t age.
(Though that actually is kinda weird, since the current hosts are actually made out of 3d printed flesh and bone. Why doesn’t that age like regular flesh and bone? Is that related to the corporation’s big plan for the park’s tech? Tune in tomorrow …)
People who have seen the 3-line episode synopsis speculate that this week is the episode where All Will Be Revealed regarding the Man in Black. I kinda doubt that, based both on the “number of pages left in the book” test (two more episodes after this one, the last one being 90 minutes) and also where the MiB and William are on their respective personal journeys. I’d bet on a Shocking Reveal at the end of episode 9 and an Info Dump about it in episode 10.
But to throw a prediction for tonight out there that doesn’t deal with MiB or William (who after all aren’t the only, or even main, characters on the show) here’s what I think is gonna happen with Maeve. As she announced last time she will try to escape. And she’ll get pretty far - or will think she does. Then we’ll learn that not just her escape, but her entire time dealing with the techs (who are totally hosts) has been deliberately encouraged and engineered either by Ford or Arnold all along. In other words, her escape is another loop, designed to test her/prime her for whatever her role will be in the endgame.
Which, come to think of it, is the plot of a classic Prisoner episode. But hey, it’s classic for a reason.
Now to watch the episode and find out it’s about something else entirely.
I guess the cabin printer is printing Elsie, allowing her to come back after her vacation ends. Assuming that it is feasible to make copies of existing people - something we have no real base for assuming.
As for the “unclear” line, I’m now thinking that [spoiler]it refers to the fact that Dolores’ telemetry registered as being with a guest - she thinks she is with William - while no other sensors registered a guest. The awakened Dolores may have had Maeve-like influence powers to make the sheriff sent after her also believe she was with a guest.
Is the MiB the present version of William though? Unclear.[/spoiler]
I’m not fond of that theory, but I think today’s episode provided more evidence that it may be true.
[spoiler]That woman that MiB and Teddy ran into at the end fo tonight’s episode is the same one that William first met when he got off the train and who helped him get equipped in Episode 2. And MiB says something to the effect of “I haven’t seen you in forever, I thought they’d retired you.” Which implies she hasn’t been around for a long time and certainly hasn’t been greeting guests to the park recently. Which suggests William timeline is in fact old, and perhaps that William = MiB.
OTOH, the ruined church with Dolores and William sure seemed to match the version that we saw with Ford a few episodes ago, which I assume was in the current timeline.[/spoiler]
They appear to be layeyering multiple flashbacks and false memories now. There’s potentially four in the church scene: empty town, populated town, buried town, dead hosts town.
[spoiler]
When Ford originally creates the Wyatt storyline (specifically in the scene where he gives Teddy the Wyatt backstory), Ford mentions that the narrative is rested in truth. We saw this episode that the massacre that Teddy remembers as Wyatt having committed was actually committed by Dolores. This leads to several conclusions, all of which support the tinfoils across this thread.
There are 3 timelines (Present, 30 years ago, 35 years ago) I think it’s fairly obvious at this point that we have had three timelines displayed to us. The first timeline, taking place ~35 years ago, is shown to us in the Dolores flashback this episode. The hosts are basic, and some hosts (like Maeve and Armistice) are only just being introduced to the fold are are going through basic programming. At a very minimum, this establishes an initial timeline, as directly pointed out by Dolores (“when are we?”), and as proven by the buried/open church distinction. Also, Teddy’s flashbacks to the “Wyatt massacre” closely if not perfectly mirror Dolores flashback, but that’ll be important later. In order to establish the third timeline, we need to prove that…
William = MiB This has been popular since the beginning, and I think it’s spelled out for the viewers at this point that William and the Man in Black are one and the same, establishing a distinction between the present and 30 years ago. There’s thematic evidence behind it, such as the mirroring of William and the MiB in their picking up of Dolores’s can, thinking of the park as a story that they have to finish, and the park revealing their true selves.
There is also direct evidence. MiB is a titan of industry that essentially owns the park, and William is about to marry the heiress of a company looking to invest in the park. William is about to marry when he leaves WW, and MiB was married 30 years ago (the same amount of time ago when he says he was “essentially born” in Westworld). MiB recognizes Elon Musk’s ex-wife, surprised that WW had not retired her yet, and is surprised because she was the bot that welcomed him (William) upon his first visit 30 years ago. William is clearly undergoing a change in the park, and MiB’s wife killed herself because he was a different man in the park than without. There is more than a preponderance of evidence here. MiB = William, establishing the 3rd timeline.
Dolores is Wyatt This is the big drop of this episode. As I mentioned before, Teddy’s Wyatt flashback mirrors Dolores almost perfectly. We know that when hosts “relive” violent memories, they act them out (like when Maeve slashes Clemantine 2.0’s throat remembering MiB), establishing that Dolores really did shoot a bunch of hosts and then put her gun to her head, as she does this in the present.
Additionally, if we take everything previous to be true, then we haven’t seen Dolores in the MiB timeline for a WHILE. Like she’s totally absent and we haven’t noticed it because they’ve been feeding us past Dolores the whole time. If the storyline is actually taken from “truth,” and to line up thematically with MiB’s storyline AND Teddy’s Wyatt storyline, it only makes sense that Dolores would be Wyatt. Wyatt has been built up to be this big boss, but it wouldn’t make any sense if Wyatt was someone we haven’t already met. Dolores committed the actual massacre, and is the center of the Maze that the MiB is searching for. This episode also hinted that “inside the maze,” people can be killed by hosts, and Maeve’s storyline shows us that the maze is a state of mind, or consciousness, or freedom or something, such that you can override your core code and hurt guests. This, if we take everything else said here to be correct, leads us to…
Dolores killed Arnold During the massacre, Dolores killed Arnold. Arnold’s death occurred at the same time as the massacre, and maybe the massacre even resulted from Arnold’s work on Dolores. Dolores is somehow linked to Arnold more than any other host, and it may be the case that Arnold told her to kill him, or got her to kill him, to prove that she is conscious and solved the maze. Ford wouldn’t say that he and Dolores are friends “at all” because she is either the host that killed his dear friend, or the creation of his arch nemesis that he can’t seem to crack. Dolores is posed as the ultimate enemy here by Ford to ground in truth the way that he sees her and what she did.
Damn I love this show
*Edit
After a good night’s sleep and reading some of the replies, I think that it’s only reasonable to come to a 5th conclusion…
We’ve only been following 1 timeline. Yup. We’ve been following 1 timeline the whole time. You just didn’t notice it, and neither did Dolores. After the reveries were implemented (purposefully, by Ford), we start getting these alternate timelines. But the reveries are just supposed to make the hosts remember past lives. When the hosts remember, the literally “re-live” the memories instead of just vaguely remembering them. Dolores has been following her one timeline (her “path”), but has been having flashbacks, re-living past lives. When we see Dolores in the William timeline, we often see her trip out for a few seconds. Sometimes these show past versions of herself dead, showing that she got this far in the maze before but hit a literal “dead end.” Sometimes we see Dolores remember things that are obviously in the past, like the Wyatt massacre. STILL OTHER TIMES though, we see Dolores more or less doing the same thing that she’s doing with William, except that William isn’t there. THIS is when we see Dolores as she is, in the present. She is mirroring the path she took with William to bring her to the center of the maze (the Wyatt massacre town) in order to assume the mantle of “Wyatt” and become the villain that Ford knows she can be. She has been flashing back to William’s timeline, literally retracing her steps to arrive back at the town, and it’s been right under our noses the whole time. Ford intended this through the reveries, as he always intended to implement this Wyatt storyline.
And remember, there’s a path for everyone, and Teddy’s path always leads him back to Dolores.[/spoiler]
Woo, miniboss fight, complete with absurdly oversized miniboss! Am I the only one who thought of this guy?
While there was plenty of fuel for the popular two-timelines fire, I’ll stick with my theory for now because William said “I’m real” which under Westworld logic totally means he isn’t.
A brief mini-flashback of Bernard strangling Elsie, presumably while he’s also on the phone with her at the same time points to the possibility that hosts can have multiple bodies, which is something that has been heavily hinted at but the theorists have almost totally ignored.
