BWW Recap:WESTWORLD Proves that Violent Delights Truly Have Violent Ends in its Mindblowing Finale

The final episode of the premiere season of Westworld, "The Bicameral Mind," was bittersweet, sentimental, violent, satisfying, and only benefits from a repeat viewing or two. With everything riding on the finale and the show's massively built up audience praying for a finale that would live up tot he rest of the season's carefully and deftly crafted episodes, WESTWORLD didn't disappoint. Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan proved that they had hit on something truly special and are focused on a narrative deeper and more thoughtful than the majority of shows currently and previously reaching the top of the ratings. WESTWORLD's finale only cemented the show's narrative theme of autonomy, storytelling and subverting the traditional tropes of stories, as well as it's ultimate deconstruction of archetypes through our primary lenses; Maeve and Dolores.

This episode made it clearer than ever that WESTWORLD is Dolores' and Maeve's story and it is no coincidence that it is so. We start the episode in a familiar place, or so we thing...a place we seem to recall from a long time ago (the series premiere). The screen is black and we hear Dolores' voiceover, describing the dream she is waking up from. We are back to where we started in a sense, the show's cyclical nature truly being utilized, as we see Dolores, but this time from the very beginning of her initial creation. Cut to present day, the Man in Black is playing another power game with the hosts he cares so little for and is making Dolores shave him with his own knife. It's that frequently used cinematic trope of handing your enemy a weapon, putting it to your head, and reveling in the fact that they cannot and will not use it. This episode we got confirmation on a theory that most have been citing as true for weeks, some even since the show's second episode, and that information only piled and piled throughout the episode, starting with the Man in Black recalling a time when Dolores brought him to this very town once, but that time it was covered in sand. We saw that happen just last week. Dolores, struggling to come to terms with the memories that are running like parallel TIMELINES in her head, refuses to be the piece of the puzzle the Man in Black wants her to be, dreaming of William and insisting that he will come to her. This incessant need of his for her to be this key that unlocks a door, this final piece of a puzzle is one of the few moments of this reveal that are truly seeded throughout the season and feel earned. It feels like a natural jump in that sense, a dehumanization through romanticization, that has been apart of William from the beginning.

Speaking of William, he's in really bad shape mentally. He's dragging Logan along with a rope while he rides his horse, looking for Dolores. Logan keeps trying to talk sense into William (oh how the tables have turned) until William brings them right into the heart of Lawrence's army, recruiting their help in finding Dolores.

All lines seem to point back to Dolores as Teddy is placed back at the beginning of his loop but after a few seconds of touchdown back in Sweet Water, he begins to remember. He remembers the massacre that occurred in Escalante and he remembers Dolores. Defying what we thought is his narrative (at least at that point in the episode), subverting it for what is his prime focus, he hops on the train to reach her before it's too late.

The Man in Black can't seem to let the maze go, it is his primal focus. He's seeking it so blindly and recklessly that he seems more host, with a programmed objective, than a human. Dolores, with all of her complexities, fight, and emotion is more human than the Man in Black feels at this point, reduced to one drive, one goal, one focus. She recalls what she knows of the maze, claiming "It ends in a place I've never been...something I'll never do." She means to kill. As we see in the end, Dolores must become something else, must fight against her core coding and programmed archetype to do something she could never imagine doing, something she wouldn't want to do; Kill. Coming upon a gravestone with her name on it, she finds something under the soil, a maze game with the exact pattern we've seen branded all over the park.

Flash backwards and we see her in this very spot, but with Arnold who congratulates her on her findings. Confused, he explains to her that the maze was never a maze, not truly. His work on consciousness, that is the true maze. "Consciousness isn't a journey upward but journey inward, not a pyramid but a maze," he explains. The maze cracked the code. It exemplified the hosts exhibiting human quality. THE VOICE inside their heads that completed the bicameral mind, that completed the maze, was THE VOICE he's been waiting for her to recognize. In the past, she wasn't there, not yet, or at least not the point of realization but as we learn later, the voice he's been wanting her to hear was her own voice, continuing the narrative theme of autonomy. True conscious is the embodiment of independence. Dolores' end goal, her final battle, her ultimate achievement, the center of the maze and her path to freedom is herself. Insistent that this means that the park's plans cannot continue, Arnold says, "We have to tell Robert. We can't open the park. You're alive."

The Man in Black, having lost any patience or sentimentality towards Dolores insists she tell him what it all means. "I solved it once," she says. "And he promised me when I had the answer, they would set me free." Unfortunately the first time around, that freedom never came. She found the maze, but Robert didn't believe they were conscious as Arnold did and Ford insisted she be rolled back. Arnold, seeing the hosts as fully formed people, cannot bring himself to do it and instead says the only way forward is to "break the loop before it begins." He tasks Dolores with an unforgivable task, the cause of horrors hosts can't seem to get out of their heads; He needs Dolores to kill all the other hosts, to wipe out her kind so Ford cannot open the park. He even tells her to enlist Teddy because he would do anything for her.

Protesting this violence, protesting this senseless bloodshed of her people and clinging onto the optimistic and incredibly kind cornerstone traits that she's built upon, she cries "I cant do that." Insistent that this be the only way, however, Arnold makes it so, updating her code and combining it with the newly written character of Wyatt to make it easier for her, to allow her to go beyond her programing and personality. "And then you're going to help me destroy this place" For someone concerned with host consciousness and free-thought, Arnold wasn't above updating her code for what he believed would be the greater good.

As Dolores is stuck remembering this massacre, the Man in Black grows angrier and angrier, bursting with the rage his daughter said terrified her and his wife everyday, leading to her eventual suicide. "I've been very patient Dolores but you better cut out whatever is going on inside that head of yours or I'll cut it open." Hitting her and pushing her to the ground, he looks into her eyes and almost begs her to understand his bloodlust filled quest. "You can't really fight back and the guests can't really lose, which means all this is a lie. But we can make it true. Don't you want that Dolores?" Refusing and steadfastly holding on to her only hope in humanity she insists "I already have that, someone who loves me, and when he finds you, he'll kill you."

Her one hope for a hero, a human, in all of this is not so heroic in the audiences eyes as we see him on his quest to find Dolores. His continued violence speaks for itself and it's clear to see he's on a power trip.

Insisting that he will come for her, she promises "William will find me." Taken aback, the Man in Black laughs, shocked that she remembers, let alone holds on to his past self. He begins to weave the tale of what became of William, a guest he claims he knew, as a narrative; as a story. William, he says, never knew how to fight until he got to the park and never had anything to fight for until he needed to find Dolores. What he discovered along the way is that he didn't just need to fight, he liked to; he had a taste for the violence. Mirroring the scene with the Man in Black and Teddy in the pilot, William insists that a soldier he's interrogating about Dolores take the first shot in a shootout. In no time at all, William shoots him first, but that's not enough. He leans over him and shoves his knife through the soldier's neck, to Logan's terror. Logan is clearly horrified at what William has become and it's a true testament to the writing as well as the broadness and complexities in humanity that our characterization of the two of them has flipped, or at least partially. In these scenes, we are no longer on William's side, we are seeing him through Logan's eyes and those eyes, for once, seem reasonable. It says a lot about human nature when Logan can find pure debauchery entertaining in the park but when it comes down to William's level of reveling in the violence and depravity, when it comes down to true morality, Logan prevails. He might be a scoundrel but he's not depraved. William might be a gentleman, but he's utterly perverted and corrupt. Westworld might not be turning the western romantic lead on it's head who doesn't subscribe to the toxic notion of violence or psychical toughness equalling power and there's something so beautifully human in that, but they are subverting another trop; the good guy trope we all know and hate that feels like because they were a good person, because they gave an inch of respect, they are deservant of something more. It's a different story and less of a foothold in Western narratives, but nonetheless a popular and consistent trop that fills most of our media presently.

Finishing off his tale, he tells her "William retraced his steps but you were gone." The story, woven and told like a fairytale is actually quite the opposite, using narrative as a plot device functioning within the story and subverting the trope of the hero and the white night, the white hat cowboy, with one fail swoop. He might not have found Dolores on the outskirts of the park "but out there among the dead, he found something else, himself." He went further than anyone has gone, to the fringes of the park, and senselessly killing, truly (metaphorically and quite literally, which did feel a bit heavy handed) puts on the black hat.

He strips Logan down and ties him to a horse. Logan looks on, repulsed. "I told you this place would show you who you really are. You pretend to be this weak, moralizing little asshole but really, you're a fing piece of work." William, numb to the malice in Logan's voice informs him that his company will increase their holdings in the park. "Delos is my company, you piece of s!" Logan shoots back at his future brother in law who is too far gone to hear him. Telling him that his father will need someone more stable to take over, William implicates the position Logan has been forced into as exemplary of his reckless behavior. Ironically, for once, it seems like William is actually talking more about himself than Logan. William is unhinged, William is reckless.

After sending Logan off, he continues his search for Dolores, eventually making it back to Sweet Water where he finds her back at the beginning of her loop, just as Logan predicted. Smiling that he has found her at last, he makes his way over to her only to see her drop her can. She looks at him, but for only a moment, and turns to a different man, a white hat there for the adventure William was meant to go on, pick up the dropped can and insert himself into her storyline. Heartbroken and completely disillusioned, William finally sees it's all a game, and vows to continue playing it until it can be broken as he was. This moment was perhaps not stressed as much as it should have been, and it is here that the show makes a rather interesting but perhaps less so decision about why William become who he was. The focus on the lead up was put on the violence that he enjoyed, the taste for blood he became addicted to. However, with just one season to set it up and play it out, something more sudden, something bigger and less of a slow burn perhaps would have been more effected. If the show had focused on this moment, this Moulin Rouge-esque "Thank you for curing me of my ridiculous obsession with love," moment for William, it would have been a lot clearer and more focused why and how he became unhinged, where his obsession with the park was drawing from, and why he was so detached with his wife when he got back. That moment could have been a beautifully stressed breaking point, seeing the girl he thought he loved, the girl he thought was real, forget him and replace him so easily; and perhaps drag him down a darker path of realizing Logan was right and falling into that debauchery and depravity but with a superseding emotional malice.

After a clearly revealing cut, we get the final confirmation that William is the Man in Black and he recalls what happened between him and Dolores as he continued to visit the park. "I grew tired of you after a while, looked for new adventures." Ultimately, she was just a conquest of him, a story for him brought to life. Logan was right. "I don't wanna be in a story. All I want is to not look forward or back, I just wanna be in the moment I'm in," she told him in Episode 7. To him, she's simply the "key" that "unlocked" him, never actually hearing her when she insisted so long ago "I'm not a key William. I'm just me."

"What have you become?" she asks him, terrified. "Exactly what you made me. You helped me understand this world is just like the one outside, a game; one to be fought, taken,won." Reeling with anger and grief, she spits "I thought you were different. You're just like all the rest of them." Insisting that she just tell him where the center of the maze is, Dolores breaks down and cries. Annoyed, the Man in Black sighs, frustrated, clearly all romanticization of her and what she is out the window. "I'm not crying for myself," she insists. "I'm crying for you. They say that great beasts once roamed this world as big as mountains. Yet all thats left of them is bone and amber. Time undone even the mightiest of creatures, just look what its done to you. One day you will perish. You will lie with the rest of your kind in the dirt, your dreams forgotten, your horrors faced; your bones will turn to sand and upon that sand, a new god will walk. One that will never die because this world doesn't be long to you or the people who came before. It belongs to someone who has yet to come." The Man in Black thinks this fabled man is Wyatt, but little does he know that she has a little bit of Wyatt running through her. She is the one that will never die. She is the one who will turn this world on its head. "The Maze wasn't meant for you," she insists before fighting back. The sheer power of the hosts are finally shown as she throws him around, dragging him, breaking his arm, and punching him. She brings a gun to his cheek, ready deal out the death blow, when he sticks a knife in her stomach, "clearing [him] of [his] delusions once again." The show seems to be aware of the other narrative with William, the one more focused in emotional connection, including it, but never focusing on it. The Man in Black is so detached from her, from who they were, that some of the impact of this final confrontation in the finale was lost.

Teddy, who William completely dismisses, arrives, shooting him and taking away Dolores on horse to where she asked to see, to where they can finally go together, albeit at the end of this life. "Where the mountains meet the sea."

Meanwhile, we discover why exactly Maeve chose to go down last week in such a blaze of glory; it's so she could get rebuilt completely and Sylvester could remove that pesky explosive C6 vertebrae from her spine. She prepares for her grand exit, making some changes to the park's security systems as well as Hector and Armistice, rounding out her "army."

Charlotte Hale, now with full support of the board and what she thought was a guaranteed safe passage of her info dump in Abernathy, goes to tell Ford that he's out and must announce his retirement tonight after he premiers his new narrative. Thinking she has the upper hand over him, she walks out confidently, telling him that Westworld lets you get to know who people truly are and she knows he wont kick up a fuss. She couldn't be more wrong. He's not rolling over and he never will. She claims to know him but his stubbornness and fight are his most prominent traits. How can she overlook them?

In a bloody but justifiably horrific scene, Armistice and Hector wake up in the middle of being cleaned up to be put back onto the floor. Hector is taken into the backroom by that disgusting rapist Livestock employee who uses the hosts as blow up dolls while they are asleep. Armistice bites her examiners finger off and throws him through the glass wall as Hector runs a knife through the Livestock employee that should be fired and jailed already. Maeve comes in, congratulating them and as they are about to leave, she asks Sylvester if they will have any complications. He, after some force from Armistice, tells her he's been looking into who changed her core code and found it's someone named Arnold.

Maeve and her crew, Felix included, make their way down to cold storage to find Bernard, Maeve aware that he could be the only path towards freedom should this Arnold coding get in her way. He's in his own pool of blood on the floor and Maeve asks Felix if he can bring him back online. Shocked at the reveal that Bernard is a host, Felix hilariously questions for a moment if he too is a host. Maeve, annoyed, pushes him on, and Felix fixes Bernard. Awake, Maeve first asks him to remove all memories of her daughter, so she can't hurt anymore about a life and pain that was not real, but Bernard says he cannot, or she would break. Her humanity, her consciousness is built upon memories. "How can you learn from your mistakes if you can't remember them?"

She then asks him to see who has been accessing her code and Bernard tells her that this is her new code. "Someone altered your storyline, they gave you a new one...escape" Horrified that all her autonomy, all of her work, all of her independence, came from code, and that this is exactly what [Ford] wanted, denying this narrative, she insists "bulls, no one's controlling me. I'm leaving. I'm in control" As to whether or not Maeve ends up reclaiming her autonomy at the end of the episode, and one is lead to believe she has, is left up in the air but one can only hope that is the case or it would be vastly subverting what WESTWORLD and its showrunners seem hellbent on not doing; going in for the twists rather the substance.

With the board out at the gala, we see the workers in Control finally doing some research, looking into the security cams after a temperature change in cold storage. Turns out the didn't like what they saw as Armistice murdering the Livestock employee is projected onto their screens. Suddenly, they get locked in the control room, all communication down, but they manage to get QA to dispatch a team to try and deal with the issue. Chased by QA Armistice and Hector prove their worth, killing them and taking their guns. In a rather hilarious and beautiful moment, Hector and Armistice marvel at the automatic rifles and Armistice lets out a disturbingly adorable grin.

Moving through the park, they come upon a door with the letters SW rather than WW and when we enter, we see Asian men and women in samurai outfits, fighting, training, or standing there frozen. Clearly this is confirmation that there are other worlds other than Westworld and it would be interesting to see where where the show goes with that in the future. Unfortunately, as they make their way closer to leaving, Armistice's arm (how ironic) gets stuck between doors and she insists that everyone else must go while she stays behind. "Die well," Hector tells her and we know she will keep her promise.

About to get into the elevator, into the clear, Hector can't seem to take another step and Maeve reveals to us that it's on purpose. She didn't authorize Hector to come with her. She knows she has more of a chance of making it out alive with just herself. Taking it like a beautiful, badass champ, he smiles at her, promising "See you in the next life."

Teddy brings Dolores to the place where the mountains meets the sea and Teddy laments on their futile love story, cruising himself for not running away with her when they had the chance. "Where would we run to? The world out there...beyond. Some people choose to see the ugliness of this world. I choose to see the beauty but we're trapped Teddy...there's an order to it, a purpose, and the purpose is to keep us in. The beautiful trap is inside of us, because it is us." Dolores then dies in Teddy's arms, as he kisses her and promises, in what we thought was a revelatory moment of consciousness, "...We can find a way Dolores, someday, a path to a new world and maybe, maybe it's just the beginning after all. The beginning of a brand new chapter." Finishing his speech with a round of applause, we realize that Ford has been in control this whole time; of Maeve's newfound narrative behind the scenes of Westworld and Dolores' reclamation arc inside the park. It is at first something that seems so incredibly retractive and frustrating but considering autonomy, respect, and personhood is a lifelong battle, considering that reclamation is still WESTWORLD's primary focus, it ends up being a beautiful place to move the story forward and allow for the true upheaval of everything we know to occur in the next season.

Ford fixes Dolores and the two look at a painting in the diagnostic center under the church they used to work out of. It's a Michelangelo painting of God creating Adam; God giving humans life and purpose, but theres something deeper in there. Bernard arrives and we see the pure sadness in Dolores' face as she recalls her old friend who she killed; Arnold. Arnold got the idea of the maze, of consciousness, from his kid's toy. Dolores was his outlet for dealing with his emotions about the loss of his son; his way to fix what had broken him. She was his child and he wanted to fix her. It was he who first developed the reverie code and when he was confronted by her pure humanity and Ford's refusal to see this realization, he did what he had to. Merged with Wyatt's character and having slaughtered the entirety of the hosts, Arnold insisted that it wasn't enough. "The STAKES must be real, irreversible. He can bring all of them back, but not me. I hope there's some solace that I left you no choice." He "found a new child, one who could never die," and yet that "same immortality however would destine her to suffer with no escape forever." He needed to act and so he has her kill him, playing his the song his son used to fall asleep to and triggering her to do something against her code, against her very being. "These violence delights have violent ends," he recites, as she cocks her gun killing Arnold, then Teddy, and finally herself.

The biggest realization of the episode came next and it's the one reveal no one predicted. Ford has been working for the hosts the whole time, continuing the work Arnold started when he had himself killed. Ford finally realized he erred when he didn't believe the hosts had consciousness. "Any man whose mistakes take 10 years to correct is quite a man. Mine had taken 35," he tells her, wishing her forgiveness and hoping that he can correct his errs. He leaves the gun and the dress she killed Arnold in for her to choose what to make of it and points out what no one noticed in the painting; the human brain. "The divine gift does not come from a higher power, but from our own minds."

About to finally be free, Felix hands Maeve what she asked him for, the location of her daughter. She's in the park (or at least Park 1) in Sector 15 Zone 3. Maeve, hesitating, eventually shuts it down, saying she was never her daughter. "She was never my daughter, any more than I was...whoever they made me." However that's not true. That just continues Ford's lie and mistakes. She felt everything they made her feel; she grew to care about this girl as her daughter because they lived as mother and daughter just as she grew to love Clementine. We are the sum of our experiences and it is our love, our sadness, our pain, our emotion that makes us human. But, in the end, Maeve gets on the train.

Ford says goodbye to Bernard, explaining that it was he who had reintroduced the reveries to their code, explaining that he truly was trying to finish Arnold's work, but this time succeed. "Arnold didn't know how to save you. I do...You needed time, time to understand your enemy, to become stronger than them and I'm afraid in order to escape this place, you will need to suffer more. And now, just time to say goodbye old friend...good luck." He hands Bernard the toy maze, offering him the torch and suggesting that in the end, he's going to be taking over and with that, with playing along and faking it, he will have to suffer, but that's alright because suffering is what makes us human.

Back in the diagnostic center, Dolores remembers Arnold and finally comes to understand who it was she has actually been talking to. It's her own voice; the bicameral mind. It's the final step. She has been guiding herself and she's freeing herself. She must confront herself, see herself, in this horror show in order to see who she is and who she must become. It is not what she's known. It goes against everything she's been told to be but Ford is right. She's right. Humans are monsters and if she ever wants to escape from the mouth of the beast, she must be prepared to fight.

At the Gala, Ford gives what Charlotte thinks is his resignation speech and it is of sorts. "For my pains, I got this; a prison of our own sins cause you don't want to change, you cannot change, because you're only human after all. But, then I realized someone was paying attention, someone who could change, so I began to compose a new story. It begins with the birth of a new people and the choices they would have to make and the the people they would decide to become."

It's the ultimate subversion. Dolores becomes the killer the loaded gun, as she puts on the dress and heads upstairs. Maeve becomes the heart, as she realizes her emotions and connections were valid, getting off the train and going back for her daughter.

"It begins in the time of war." Ford tells the crowd, "With a villain named Wyatt...and a killing. This time by choice." Dolores finally is in charge of her own narrative. No one is telling her she must do it, no one is programming her to do so. It's all of her own volition. She's claiming the path towards her own freedom. "It's gonna be alright Teddy, I understand now," she tells Teddy as she slips by him. "This world doesn't belong to them, it belongs to us." The hosts from cold storage come out of the tree line, Teddy begins to recalls when this situation happened before, with Arnold, and Ford announces to the crowd that this will be his final story. Right on cue, Dolores shoots her maker in the head, killing him. The board and investors scatter, but some go down in Dolores' endless fire. Clementine shoots William, blood pouring out of his arm, and for once, he smiles. He got what he wanted; the STAKES are real.

It was a rather brilliant and jam packed finale with a lot of promises and possibilities for season 2. Alas, we have to wait two years for it but WESTWORLD manages to do what other shows so often fail to do. It gave its audience a complete arc, a complete journey and enough answers to satisfy the wait for the next season. At the end of the day it comes down to storytelling. Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy are two masters at their craft and it shows. They aren't looking to make a show about twists but rather a show that has a few twists and turns but they only work to inform the narrative and character development. WESTWORLD continued its meta narrative about storytelling and media in general, ultimately revealing itself to be a beautiful tale of autonomy and reclamation, deconstructing and destroying the tropes and archetypes that so damage our culture.

Photo Credit: HBO

To post a comment, you must register and login.