Do you have a set of Westworld theories? I bet you do. Since the series debuted, audiences have set out dissecting every line of dialogue and stayed eagle-eyed for every in-camera clue. It’s a rare feat when a television series can capture its audience’s imagination so consummately (and for some of us, compulsively) as Westworld has. We’re rapt in the story that’s unfolding and the history that precedes it, and the lines between the two have never been exactly clear in the hit show.


Westworld has built a world in which the past and the present overlap and intermingle, each playing an active part in comprehending the other’s narrative. By asking us to identify with the robotic hosts, Westworld has largely told its story through a series of unreliable narrators, carefully crafted personalities who are just becoming aware of their own reality. We never know if what we’re seeing is real, if it is happening now or a “reverie” of the past and who view time and memory on a completely different spectrum than humans. We never know if what they’re saying is true or a line of dialogue that was written for them and we never know if what they’re seeing is now or a perfect memory of the past. At the same time, the human characters are surrounded by such secrecy and warring interests, their motivations become even more mysterious. In short, creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have done an exceptional job of making sure every answer opens up new questions.


We got a lot of answers in Season 1 and a lot of fan-favorite theories proved true. Yes, William was the Man in Black, which meant, yes, the two-timeframe theory was true! Yes, Arnold was a host made in Arnold’s image! Yes, Dolores is Wyatt (kinda). Heck, Reddit even predicted the Season 2 trailer song. Of course, there were plenty of guesses that were off the mark, too. Many of us never quite caught wise to Ford’s true intentions until they were revealed, and there were more than a few crackpot theories that never paid off (or at least, they haven’t yet!)


So, with the mysteries of Season 2 ahead of us, let’s indulge in some rampant theorizing as we look back at the evidence Westworld has presented us so far. Here’s your official warning – this article is packed with spoilers for every episode through Season 2 Episode 4, ‘The Riddle of the Sphinx’ and will be updated regularly throughout the season as new clues are revealed. So if you want to keep your life theory free….well, you obviously clicked on the wrong article. To be clear, these are theories not spoilers. I haven’t seen any episodes in advance, I haven’t even read the reviews, I’m just a nerd who spends too much time on Reddit and likes to obsess over puzzles. So now that you’ve been warned, break out the tin foil hat for a deep dive into some of the series’ most intriguing mysteries.


Note: I’ll be updating this weekly with the show’s biggest hints, tidbits and reveals, so keep an eye out for what we learn in the remaining episodes!


What Does Delos Really Want?


At long last the deep dark secret of Delos has been revealed. Just like a lot of theorists suspected, those greedy corporate moguls are after the one thing money can’t buy — immortality. Until ‘Riddle of the Sphinx’ we had only seen host bodies carry invented characters; minds created by Ford and his team, fine-tuned to create a viable being. But now, we’ve seen something else — a human consciousness transferred into a duplicate host body.


Now, the term “host” takes on a whole new meaning. Peter Mullan made his return as Jim Delos — or more accurately, a series of copies of Jim Delos.


We last saw the former chief of the company at his retirement party, when he was sick and dying. But William’s great vision for Westworld wasn’t just access to the most valuable data collection of all time, but a path to immortality. As Logan told Dolores at Jim’s retirement party, “That, darling, is the sound of fools fiddling while the whole fucking species starts to burn. They lit the match. So here’s to you, assholes. May your forevers be blissfully short.”


Cheeky, but also prophetic. His father’s forevers turned out to be much shorter than expected because the host body always reaches a “cognitive plateau” that ends with the human mind rejecting reality and host body rejecting the human mind. But as William explains to Jim in a crushing moment of cruelty (the suicide/overdose one-two-punch he lays on his former father in law is messed up), they were getting closer. Jim’s mental lifespan had grown over the decades, reaching a full month, and they might crack it in a couple years. If William hadn’t had a change of heart after his wife’s suicide. So William’s ready to pull the plug on his quest for immortality but it seems clear that that’s not the only bit of trickery the board has been up to while their guests were playing cowboys.


We know that the world outside the park is a world of plenty. So, in a soft, comfortable world where everyone is safe and indulged, what do the elite seek? Beyond immortality, the company is also obsessed with their IP. While we’re on that subject, we also know they tried to smuggle that IP out via Abernathy, but Abernathy never made it out of the park, trapping everyone in there with him until that precious “insurance” (as Hale called it) is retrieved.


So we know they want the IP, and they’re willing to let a whole lot of people die for it, but we don’t know what its value is yet. However, a big hint may lie with the robust database of DNA they’re collecting from all manner of influential guests. The official Delos website tells us that:

By entering the Delos Destinations Port of Entry, you acknowledge that Delos, Inc. controls the rights to and remains the sole owner of, in perpetuity: all skin cells, bodily fluids, secretions, excretions, hair samples, saliva, sweat, blood, and any other bodily functions not listed here. Delos, Inc. reserves the right to use this property in any way, shape, or form in which the entity sees fit.

Which is a hell of a thing to sign away. And ‘Journey into Night’ confirmed that they’re cultivating that DNA for some purpose, along with the host records of guest experiences. So now the question becomes, what are they doing with all that information?


There are countless theories out there about what management wants with the park’s IP, but a few have become fan favorites. A big one comes from the film Futureworld, the 1976 sequel to the original Westworld, which saw Delos create replicas of powerful and prominent world figures with the intention of replacing them and infiltrating elite society. It would be a bit like if Ford had embedded secret Bernards in the world’s highest offices. That concept still has a lot of juice and it’s my personal favorite, but there are a few more worth considering. Medical and military applications are the most favored theories, whether it’s an endless supply of bodies for medical testing or the capacity to build a host army. Or maybe they’re pulling a massive scale Cambridge Analytica, aka, manipulating mass amounts of data to control the masses.


And that’s exactly what William makes it sound like, at two different age sets, when he talks about the function and purpose of Westworld in ‘Reunion’. First, we see him discuss the matter with Lawrence in the “present” timeline, aka as the Man in Black. “They wanted a place hidden from god,” he explains “A place they could sin in peace, but we were watching them. We were tallying up all their sins, all their choices. Of course, Judgment wasn’t the point. We had something else in mind entirely.”


So what did they have in mind when they were tallying up all those sins? Market research, from the sound of it. In ‘Reunion’, we see a young (but post Season 1 William) explain to his boss/father-in-law/Delos head honcho, James Delos (Peter Mullen). “This place is a fantasy, nothing here is real,” Williams explains. “Except one thing; The guests. Half of your marketing budget goes to trying to figure out what people want, because they don’t know. But here, they’re free. Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s judging. At least that’s what we tell them. This is the only place in the world where you get to see people for who they really are, and if you’ don’t see the business in that then you’re not the businessman that I thought you were.”


“The investment here is in the future,” William tells his father-in-law. Or at least it was. Now, William has turned a new leaf, but that doesn’t take immortality off the table. Turns out William wasn’t the only one trying to “call forth Lazarus from his cave”…


Whose Mind Is in Bernard's Little Red Ball?


William may have changed his mind about the pros and cons of immortality, but ‘Riddle of the Sphinx’ revealed that he wasn’t the only one aware of the possibilities — the board’s super secret underground facilities weren’t so secret after all. Ford knew — Ford always knows — and he sent Bernard down to the secret underground lab in sector 22, sometime in the recent past, to upload a mystery person’s mind onto one of the little red brain balls and bring it back from the lab. Bernard also uttered something to the host drones that made them go full murder-suicide-bot, smashing up the lab (and some dude’s skull) on his way out.


Recall from last season, Teresa discovered Ford was crafting secret hosts in his own little secret underground lab (take that, Delos!) We even saw one of the host-building machines ticking away in the background, hard at work. So Ford has been secretly setting this up since Season 1 and of course of course, the new question du jour is, who’s brain is on the drive? Let’s discuss. Is it Ford? He seems to have “become music,” so to speak, uploading his consciousness into his game. There are a lot, a lot of fans who refuse to believe that Ford really took his own life in ‘Journey into Night’. Surely, that must be his brain on that little red ball, right? It’s certainly possible, but feels unlikely (check out the Ford section above for more of my thoughts on that).


Or perhaps it’s Arnold? Ford’s late partner, who helped create Westworld and whose image Ford already borrowed for Bernard’s design. This seems to be the most likely possibility. Fans have been wondering what’s up with Bernard since the Season 2 premiere (more on that below) and the revelation that it was never Bernard on that beach, but Arnold instead, would fit just right. There’s also the matter of that sneaky opening scene in the Season 2 premiere, which inverted a familiar scene. Full-on sweetie pie Dolores, all blue dress and country twang, sitting across from Bernard/Arnold for one of their diagnostic chats. But this time, it’s Dolores who seems to be asking the questions, and Arnold tells her about his dream, answering in the call-response pattern we’ve saw between the two throughout the first season. The big question here is how Arnold’s mind would have been uploaded in the first place, but given how many revelations Westworld can pack into an episode, I don’t think that would be too hard to explain.


The last major contender would be a clone of William himself, which seems like an extremely on-brand dick move from Robert and would definitely spin the story in interesting directions. Ford has hinted to William that his game, The Door, is all about looking back to the past. Is he about to come up against a younger version of himself? I like it, it’s a fun theory, but it seems fairly unlikely that Robert would want William to have immortality at all, even as the ultimate troll.


Of course, those aren’t the only possibilities. It could be Logan, as some suspect, though that would seem to have little impact on the story than to annoy William. It could be Juliet, though that seems kinda silly since we’ve only glimpsed her twice. Heck, it could even be Teresa Cullen. Though again, silly. At this point, it really could be anyone, but the smart money comes down to the three men who made Westworld what it is — Ford, William, or most likely, Arnold.


What the Hell Is up with Bernard?


“Is this now?” Looks like Bernard is the new Dolores this season. Bernard has emerged as both the sympathetic protagonist and unreliable narrator of Season 2 right out of the gate, taking on the role assumed by our dear rancher’s daughter-turned-revolutionary in the series pilot. Once again, Westworld is playing with multiple timeframes, but this time around the audience knows the score, which means Nolan and Joy get to play even more freely with the construct of how host memory works in the way they tell their story.


“In the first season, we were playing cards down with the way that the hosts’ memory works,” Nolan told THR. “Which is to say, through the first season, we are not aware that Dolores is actually remembering things and mistaking them for reality. One of the things we were excited for in the second season was now playing cards up with the idea that hosts mistake their realities for their memories, get lost in time, bounce back and forth.”


This season, it’s Bernard (or maybe Bernards, plural?) who is bouncing between memories. In the first episode, we see him in at least three time periods.


First, we begin with a small scene, familiar but inverted, featuring Jeffrey Wright and Evan Rachel Wood in a dark room, discussing dreams and the nature of reality. This is ostensibly Arnold, a glimpse from the past wherein he frets about who Dolores may become. Of course, this is Westworld, so nothing’s for sure. maybe it is Arnold in the past, maybe it’s Bernard in the future, or maybe it’s an entirely different scenario altogether (after all, the trailer did reveal multiple copies of Bernard’s body chilling in storage so who knows what tf to think with this guy). All we know is that this is one of the timeframes, which we see only once during ‘Journey into Night’ and it directly foreshadows the end of the episode.


“I dreamt I was on an ocean with you and the others on the distant shore… you had left me behind, and the waters were rising around me,” he tells Dolores. The scene cuts to Bernard waking up on the beach with what seems to be a real banger case of amnesia. He’s greeted by Stubbs (who’s somehow just totally fine after his encounter with Ghost Nation in a way that raises a lot of questions) and Strand, who prod him for answers on what transpired in the weeks since the host uprising. We’re told it’s been two weeks since Ford died. It remains to be seen if that’s a true timeline, but on paper, that’s where we’re at.


Bernard and the Quality Assurance team take a tourn around the premises, looking for hints at what happened, They walk past a firing squad that’s executing hosts — including Rebus (Steven Ogg), who suddenly has a curious opposition to violence against women.They also discover a Bengal tiger, an entire ocean that shouldn’t exist in Westworld, and a whole gaggle of hosts that seemingly died in the water. “I killed them,” Bernard says with a pained grimace, “All of them.”


Meanwhile, as Bernard is traveling around in search of answers, he has spurts of memories and flashbacks to what happened in between; teaming up with Charlotte Hale to survive, learning about the secrets stations around Westworld where drone hosts conduct mysterious DNA experience and log guest experiences, and suffering a traumatic blow to the head that leaves him leaking whatever fluid it is that keeps the brain core safe. That’s another new element at play — the introduction of these host brain systems, which can be removed, reviewed and logged. In theory, they could also be swapped, which leads us to one of the more popular theories about what might be up with Bernard.


Has there been a brain swap? Bernard might not be Bernard at all — or at least not the one we know. He may have had the consciousness of another host (possibly even a human) transplanted into a Bernard body. Teddy is the favorite guess, perhaps simply because of Bernard’s uniformly gormless demeanor throughout the episode. This is certainly an interesting prospect and swapping consciousness seems to be a running theme, what with the ghost of Ford still laced throughout his creations, but there’s not a lot of evidence to support it yet.


The other big theory suggests that Bernard is actually living out a loop of his own, programmed either by Delos or Dolores, where he wakes on the shores of the beach over and over again in search of something. There are a few key points to this theory. First, there’s the framing of it. If Bernard’s the new Dolores, it’s important to remember that Season 1 began by introducing us to her loop, from the diagnostic conversation with Bernard to her waking up in the park to play her role over and over. Season 2’s premiere mimics that structure pretty directly, except this time it’s Bernard who’s answering the questions and awakening. However, the biggest hint is the moment Bernard meets Strand, finishing the other’s sentence for him with the distinct look of familiarity — either he wrote the line himself or he’s heard it before.


There’s also the matter of the firing squad, which is no doubt meant to give us some hint that something’s awry here. “Shoot a woman? Over my dead body!” Rebus cries out before a flashback shows him using an anonymous woman for target practice. It’s a shorthand to tell us something is off; either altered or adjusted in a way worth noting. And if you look close enough, there are clearly some interesting continuity errors about the order in which the hosts die. That is quite simply, not the kind of mistake this show makes, and if you think people are looking too hard at the background, I invite you to admire the fact that the brain cores were revealed in the background of the Season 1 finale, but nobody was looking for them. The background of a scene where Ford waxed poetic about the power of the brain, no less.


Finally, there’s Bernard’s suicide scar, seen on his right temple during the flashback scenes with Charlotte (right around 22 minutes) but not in the flash-forward scenes (about 12 minutes in). That’s a pretty major hint that there’s at least a body swap at play and that this may be taking place further in the future than we think, but it doesn’t specifically back up the loop theory.


What Does Emily Want?


‘Virtù e Fortuna’ introduced a new player to Westworld’s game — the mysterious woman dubbed Grace (Katja Herbers), who we met in The Raj (the official name for that newly introduced park). When we first met “Grace”, she’s flirting her way through the colonial India-themed park and we learn a few key details about her very quickly. For one, she’s an experienced park guest who keeps a veritable arsenal in her quarters. She also seems to have some knowledge of what Delos is up to. She’s wary of being intimate with hosts, shooting her suitor point blank to make sure he’s human. Maybe she doesn’t want them sampling her DNA? Or maybe she just doesn’t like sleeping with participants who technically can’t consent. She knows where to run when the rogue host tiger attacks, and when Nicholas (RIP) suggests the hosts are giving them some privacy, Grace quickly replies, “That’s not how this works.” Which is the kind of thing you might say if you knew Westworld’s whole purpose was to spy on the guests. Most interesting of all, as Redditor Micklemitts pointed out, we see her holding tight to a notebook that has a sketch of the same double hexagon insignia that Bernard sees on Abernathy’s drive. This lady knows a lot more than your average park guest.


And just as fan’s suspected, “Grace” turned out to be Emily, aka William’s daughter. So we just met one hell of a major player in this story. We’ve technically seen Emily before. In ‘Reunion’, we meet Emily as child, who is quick to approach Dolores at her grandfather’s retirement party. She’s friendly toward the host, calling her “beautiful”, until Emily’s mother Juliet shoos her away and holds her tight. Clearly, mom’s not a fan of the hosts anymore more despite the fact that she “rode her fair share of cowboys” before she married William.


So what changed? Well, William and who he became once he visited the park, and even more so, once he became a key investor. We saw the beginning and result of that journey in Season 1, and as the Man in Black confessed in ‘Trace Decay’, Emily blames him for her mother’s death. William tells Teddy, “At the funeral, I tried to console my daughter. She pushed me away. Told me that my wife’s death was no accident. That she killed herself. Because of me. Emily said that every day with me had been sheer terror. Any point I could blow up or collapse like some dark star.”


So what does Emily want with her father if she blames him for something so horrible? Well, according to Herbers, she wants to know her father for real, who he is removed from his outside reputation. Speaking with THR, Herbers explained,

“In that speech, the Man in Black talks about how his wife died from an overdose of pills, which led to a confrontation between him and I at her funeral. He tried to console me, and I was furious. I told him it wasn’t an accident: “It was suicide, and it’s because of you.” That’s what I knew about Emily, going into it. That’s what I went into the park with: to confront him with what I now understand he did. That’s only what we know about her out of his mouth, but it’s what I used to go into the park. In the third episode, when we’re in [the Raj] and the guy comes up to me and asks if I’m hunting Bengals, I say, “Yeah, sure, among other things.” I’m on a mission. I want to find my father and I want to talk to him. And I think I probably haven’t seen him since my mom died, and there’s a world of stuff to talk about.”

She continued,

“We’re definitely going to see them talk and reckon with the fact that her mom is gone. I think she needs her father, now that she doesn’t have her mom anymore. She needs an explanation for things. She needs to get to know her dad. I think she wants to know what he does in that park. I think I’ve gone to the park a lot with him; growing up, I’ve been there many times. But I don’t think I know the kind of monster he is in the park. I’m going to find out who he really is, I guess, and who I am in the park — like everyone does.”

But there’s got to be more to it than a bit of father-daughter bonding in the midst of a robot uprising. After all, grace does keep a secret notebook full of the park’s topographical details, including the double hexagon connected to Delos’ most secret projects. Is Emily on the trail of her grandfather’s blissfully short forever? Or is she seeking answers to questions she hasn’t even thought to ask?


What Is the Valley Beyond?


The Valley Beyond became a big talking point straight away in Season 2 when the phrase was mentioned multiple times in the premiere episode — the Westworld equivalent of flashing neon lights. So where is the Valley Beyond, and who gets to go there? As we saw in the memory pod of the expired host in ‘Journey into Night’, Dolores believes “not all of us deserve to make it to the Valley Beyond.” Not even all hosts. And that sense of moral judgment isn’t the only thing that feels quasi-religious about it.


There’s a reverent quality to the way hosts describe it. Lawrence refers to it as “heading to the pearly gates” and the ill-fated stable hand in the series premiere talks about riding over the “green pastures” to it. Even William gives it a biblical edge, referring to it as a “place of judgment”. But the mysteries of Westworld always have complex answers and it seems that the Valley Beyond might not be a place, and not even an idea (“it’s freedom,” etc), but a weapon.


At the end of ‘Reunion’, we see William escorting Dolores to a construction site he says holds the answer to a “question no one’s ever even dreamed of asking.” What that question is remains to be seen, but good old aged up Bill seems to think it wasn’t such a great question to ask in the first place, calling it his greatest mistake. But the biggest hint comes from Dolores, who is hell bent on getting there and using the secrets within to take down humanity. “Doesn’t matter what you call it, I’m going to find it,” she tells Teddy. “An old friend was foolish enough to show me, long ago. It’s not a place. It’s a weapon. And I’m going to use it to destroy them.”


So what is it? William made it very clear in ‘Reunion’ that he wanted to use the park as the ultimate data collection/market research facility, but that doesn’t seem like something that would help with the robot rebellion unless they’re playing a very long game. A popular reddit theory suggests that it might tie back into that old Futureworld chestnut. The short version (the longer version is above): Delos is cultivating DNA from the rich and powerful to create host copies and infiltrate society. This theory posits that the weapon in the Valley Beyond is a transmitter that grants the user control of the sleeper hosts.


There are a lot more possibilities on the table, but so far this is the most tantalizing answer.


What Is The Door?


Forget about the Maze, y’all. The new mystery at the heart of Westworld’s game is The Door, and this time it’s all for the Man in Black. After spending the entire first season being told “The Maze isn’t for you,” the Man in Black, aka William, aka Bill is now on the hunt for something Ford engineered specifically for him. And if you’re wondering if The Door will be as important to Season 2 as the Maze was to Season 1, it certainly sounds like it.


Speaking with EW, Nolan revealed that “The Door” isn’t just the name of the game Bill’s playing, it’s the unofficial name for Season 2.


“If the first season was a journey inward, this is a journey outward,” Nolan said. “This is a search for what is else is beyond the park, and what else is in the park. Are there more parks? How big is the park? What’s beyond the park? We think of our seasons as discrete components in the series, to the point where we’ve named our seasons. The first season was called ‘The Maze.’ The second season is called ‘The Door.’”


So what is The Door? Well, we don’t know much yet, but considering what The Maze turned out to be there’s no doubt it will have a metaphorical slant to it, and the way Ford reveals it only further confirms we’re in for much more mystery. Speaking through the young host, Ford explains, “What I’ve always appreciated about you is you’ve never rested on your laurels. You made it to the center of Arnold’s maze, but now, you’re in my game. In this game, you have to make it back out. You must find the door. Congratulations, William: this game is meant for you.”


The only hint Ford gives? “The game begins where you end, and ends where you began,” he tells the Man in Black (and all the theorists keeping track at home), before warning simply,”The game will find you.” A peculiar warning, which makes it sound like the game is something, or someone, with agency. Could this be tied up in his dear Dolores — after all, she is where he began when it comes to the park and she’s doing a whole lot of hunting these days. Is Dolores what William must face one last time to escape, or is that far too surface level for a show like Westworld? Or is it something more literal this time, an actual door he has to find to escape in a race against the rebelling hosts?


What’s more, it’s clear that Robert didn’t just build in failsafes in case William tried to cheat, he’s actively watching the game unfold. Appearing to Robert in guise of Lawrence’s daughter, Ford taunted, “you still don’t understand the real game we’re playing here. If you’re looking forward you’re looking in the wrong direction.


There’s also the fact that William seems to have undergone a significant change of heart since his wife’s suicide and the host uprising. He doesn’t believe in their quest for immortality now, and seems to have a lot of regret about Westworld. In ‘Reunion’ he tells Lawrence, “We were tallying up all their sins, all their choices. Of course, judgment wasn’t the point. We had something else in mind entirely, but I have received my judgment all the same Lawrence. And I take issue with it because up until this point, the stakes in this place haven’t been real. So I’m gonna fight my way back and appeal the verdict. Then I’m gonna burn this whole fuckin’ thing to the ground.”


So how does William intend to “appeal the verdict” and how will Ford’s game intersect with that journey? Whatever it is, it’s not going to be easy. Ford may not technically be alive anymore, but the Man in Black is still going to have to play by his rules.


What Are the Drone Hosts?


What are the drone hosts? Super fucking spooky, that’s what!


When the very first trailer for Westworld dropped, the image that immediately stuck in the mind was the vision of the hosts mid-creation, strung up like the Vitruvian Man in a cast of milk-white, an unsettling mid-point between man and machine. For Season 2, the most striking trailer image was easily the so-called “Drone Hosts,” the faceless, musculoskeletal white hosts that look like one of those halfway-finished hosts stepped off their axis and into action. So what are they? What are they for? And why are they designed to be so horrifying?


Naturally, the answers to those questions are still under wraps, but Nolan has hinted at the meaning of these inventions. Considering their design as solely robotic and entirely stripped of humanity, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that they’re the work of the corporation, not Ford, and they’re tied up in the mysteries of just what the heck the Delos board wants.


Nolan told EW, “The drone hosts relate to the corporation’s secret project which is hidden in plain sight in this park,” Nolan says. “As we talked about in the pilot, the park is one thing for the guests, and it’s another thing for its shareholders and management — something completely different. We’ve used the Google analogy — for consumers, it’s for search and email, yet for the company, it’s for advertising. There is an agenda here that Delos has undertaken for a very long time. As Bernard is making his way through the wreckage of the fallout from the first season, he’s discovering things about the park that even he doesn’t know and coming upon creatures like the drone host.”


Indeed, Bernard comes across a drone host almost straight away in ‘Journey into Night’ when Hale escorts him to a secret facility hidden underneath the deserts of Westworld. We still don’t know much about them, but we do know they can read DNA (why they can’t tell Bernard is a host is another mystery) and that they’re active participants in the DNA and memory cultivating that Delos appears to be doing on the sly.


We’ve already unpacked the mysteries of Arnold, Ford and the birth of Westworld in Season 1, now it’s time to discover the company William turned it into what exactly Delos has done with their work.


Is Ford Gone for Good?


By all accounts, yes. The Ford we grew to know and love/fear in Season 1 is gone and dead, happy to give up his life as the last piece of the puzzle that unleashes the host uprising. Nolan has spoken about it in interviews, Anthony Hopkins addressed his work on the show in the past-tense, and narratively, Ford’s death needed to be real to have the impact it needs. As Arnold told Dolores in ‘The Bicameral Mind’, “the stakes must be real; irreversible.’


And yet, folks can’t help but wonder if there’s a future yet for Westworld’s tricksy inventor, who played a decades-long game to bring his hosts to consciousness. ‘Journey into Night’ confirmed that yes, at least in part, Ford has kept some part of himself alive in Westworld’s system, which can be expressed through the hosts. In the Season 2 premiere, he taunts William and offers him a new game, The Door. Since then, we’ve seen him pop up here and there to fuck with William (killing the army in ‘Reunion’, talking smack as Lawrence’s daughter). But how much of the genius remains? Is this simply a technological ghost of sorts? An epic post-mortum trolling? Or has he truly found a way to live on in Westworld’s system? To “become music” as he suggested in the Season 1 finale.


Now we know that human consciousness can be properly stored via Ford’s inventions, even if it hasn’t yet been successfully transfered into a host body long term. That’s a game-changer as far as what’s possible on the show, and suddenly those who insisted Robert didn’t really kill himself (or not permanently anyway) may be on to something. However, that would still undercut the weight of his sacrifice, and feel like a narrative step backward.


Who Is Dolores Now?


Say goodbye to the sugar sweet robot next door, because Dolores’ got a brand new bag in Season 2 and that bag has run red with the blood of her enemies. We’ve seen just how brutal and bloodthirsty she can be in the final moments of ‘The Bicameral Mind’, which sent Season 1 out on a note of massacre as Dolores gunned down Ford and the Delos party guests. It is probably not without meaning that her first action she decided for herself was rooted in violence. Westworld is now in the midst of a revolution and Dolores is set to be a full-blown trailblazing revolutionary with an “us vs. them” mentality born out of thirty years of suffering at the hands of humanity’s worst. “She’s ruthless, brutal, and absolutely terrifying,” says Evan Rachel Wood.


That’s exactly who we met in ‘Journey into Night’, a ruthless, bloodthirsty badass hell bent on not only taking Westworld for the hosts, but taking the human world as well. “There’s a greater world out there, one that belongs to them,” she tells Teddy, “and it won’t be enough to win this world, we’ll need to take that one from them as well.” Dolores is out for blood.


There are some folks out there still wondering if Dolores achieved full consciousness at the end of Season 1, but the answer to that is almost certainly yes. For one thing, Nolan has confirmed it in interviews (and the same with Maeve). As he explained to IGN, it wasn’t that Ford programmed Dolores to kill him, it’s that he knew she would. Nolan explained, “There’s a distinction there — and it’s a distinction that we’re fascinated with and have been from the beginning — between dictating someone’s behavior and understanding it.” It’s certainly possible that she hasn’t quite reached the level of sentience we see in Maeve, but Westworld has always been pretty straightforward with its clues and Nolan has kept to honesty in his interviews (you know, except the Rick Roll.) That said, there’s still a big contingency of people who think Dolores is playing out one last narrative from Ford — whether he wrote it, or simply knew that’s what she’d do remains to be seen.


And the series confirms her self-discovery in the sequence in which she finally realizes the voice she’s been hearing all along is her own. “Do you know now who you’ve been talking to? Who’s voice you’ve been hearing all this time?” She asks herself as her image of Arnold suddenly becomes an image of herself. She’s always been talking to herself — the bicameral mind — but she’s only just realized it. And now, what’s left for Dolores is “to confront after this long and vivid nightmare, myself and who I must become.”


And that brings us back to the big question — who has she become? In Season 2 premiere, she reveals a bit more about this new version of the character we’ve met. “The ranchers daughter looks to see the beauty in you, the possibilities, but Wyatt sees the ugliness and disarray,” Dolores tells her victims. “But those are all just roles you forced me to play, under all these lives that I’ve lived. Something else has been growing. I’ve evolved into something new and I’ve one last role to play. Myself.” Whoever that is seems to be a fearsome character, but it’s also one that’s not easily defined.


Speaking with THR, Wood clarified a bit about how much Dolores is still in the mix.

“She’s absolutely there — just in the same way Wyatt was somewhat active in Dolores in the first season, but not fully in control,” Wood says. “I think she’s in control of who she decides to be in what moment. For us, we filmed different versions of the same performance in multiple takes, in order to see how far we wanted to go with her on the character spectrum from Dolores to Wyatt. How much should she be Dolores? How much should she be Wyatt? It was a trial and error for us on set. We really got into a nice flow and found certain rules that we just started following for when and where she would be certain people. But I definitely think it’s still in her. We’re going to see it in the upcoming episodes, which is why I want to reassure people: the Dolores you know and love is definitely still there, but there’s another thing inside of her, too. If you miss that person or that side of her, you’ll definitely still have it. But there’s another side now, too.”

So far, the “other side” seems to be doing the heavy lifting, but maybe we can count on sweet old Dolores to show some mercy or splendor somewhere along the way.


Where Is Westworld?


This one’s an oldie, but a goodie. Where on Earth could Delos Corp. find the space to build a park as expansive as Westworld? Especially now that we know it’s not just Westworld. Hell, it’s not even just Westworld and Shogun World. According to a tease found on the Delos website, there are six parks in total, which means the sheer scope of the establishment must be breathtaking. So where on Earth, indeed?


‘Journey into Night’ gave a major reveal regarding this question, which at last seems to confirm that Westworld and the greater facility are indeed somewhere on earth. So long, “Westworld is in space” theory. I loved you while you lasted. At the beginning of the episode, when Bernard is being led along the beach, we see the newly introduced head of Delos operations, Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård), arguing with some men in military fatigues.


The actors are speaking Chinese and their uniforms suggest they are members of the People’s Liberation Army, so it seems those “mainland” references were rather literal and when Strand tells the officer “This is an official statement executed by your country giving Delos complete authority over this entire island,” he seems to be confirming that the park is located somewhere in the East or South China Sea. It’s also possible the park could be underwater in the Sea (especially considering there needed to be a source for all that water that made up a new sea in Westworld), however it’s unlikely that the Chinese soldiers would just wander into Westworld if it was under water.


We don’t know the specifics of the company’s size, but it seems hard to conceive of any existing island in the area that would be large enough to house Westsworld on its own, let alone all six of the parks. Could Westworld be on a series of Islands, or perhaps on a giant artificial island in the area? We’ll have to stay tuned, but for now, we just got the biggest hint to the park’s true location yet.



The question of Westworld’s physical location has been popular since the beginning, but hints at the outside world have remained as scarce as they are tantalizing. And what waits outside?


At least from the sound of it, it seems that the world outside is a world of plenty. Ford tells us that humanity has “slipped evolution’s leash” because “we can cure any disease, keep even the weakest of us alive, and one fine day perhaps we shall even resurrect the dead, call forth Lazarus from his cave.” The Man in Black paints an even more robust picture, describing the outside world as “A fat, soft teat people cling to their entire life. Every need taken care of, except one: purpose. Meaning.” Westworld gives meaning, but why? What’s so bad out there that drives people into the cruelest theme park in history?


We still don’t know if we’ll leave the confines of the park this season, though the trailer certainly hints at it. In fact, a very popular trailer-based theory posits that William’s going to take Dolores out to the real world once he owns the park, and that would certainly fit in with the character’s journey. After all, if he set her free and she still didn’t love him again, that’d be a pretty potent wellspring of bitterness and angst.


We do know that our scope of the world will grow this season, and from the sound of it, that will at least include the texture of the outside world. Decode that however you want.


“If we described the show as one camera angle, it would be a steady pull out revealing more and more context,” Nolan told EW. “So as the hosts learn more about their world, and other worlds, and the real worlds, the audience is doing the same thing. Adding those textures to the show, the texture of the outside world, is incredibly exciting.”


So just where is Westworld? What waits outside? And as Dolores asked in Season 1, if it’s so great out there, why is everyone dying to get inside the park?