But really, the fact that such moral considerations are even in play among the hosts signifies a departure from Season 1. “Is this what you want?” Given what humans have done to Dolores and the other hosts for decades in the park, she could make a sound argument that retribution is the appropriate response. “We’ve ridden 10 miles and all we’ve seen is blood, Dolores,” he tells her. There’s a path as wide as Monument Valley between those two poles, but there’s no telling where, precisely, Dolores will ultimately walk.įor now, she’s freaking Teddy out a bit. Dolores expresses herself with tremendous confidence (“I have one last role to play: myself”), but even she contains a continuum of competing influences, with the optimistic Sweetwater prairie gal on one end and the mass-murdering “Wyatt” on the other. Now that Dolores, Maeve and the others are busting out into the open, the possibilities are exciting for them and for the show, but everyone has to live with uncertainty, too. Even when “the reveries” were causing hosts to deviate from their routines, we at least had those routines as a point of comparison, like the control group in an experiment. They’ve all been born again.Īnd so, in effect, has “Westworld.” In the first season, the loops had as much of a stabilizing presence for viewers as they had for the hosts, guests and engineers at the park. The world has opened up for them, but they haven’t yet defined themselves individually, let alone together. Where before it was always Teddy who promised a grand romantic destiny in their loops, now it’s Dolores who fully commands their relationship, reassuring him that she “knows how this story ends” and that it ends with the two of them together. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), Dolores has been hellbent on stalking the partygoers and administering a form of Western justice. In the immediate aftermath of the gala melee, which commenced with shooting her co-creator, Dr. Nor is it clear for any of us, for that matter.) In the past, they only fantasized about getting to this point together, and that fantasy was programmed into them like Minesweeper in an old PC.
(Let’s keep the scare-quotes around “freedom” for now, because it’s not clear that the hosts are ever truly liberated from their loops. The hosts, led by Dolores, have engaged in a violent revolt against their human oppressors, and they finally have a taste of what real “freedom” is like. The shot recalls their old loops at the park, when their daily routine included a pleasant respite from the guests’ unsavory attention in Sweetwater, complete with lacquered promises about how they’ll truly be together one day. That shot came to mind watching Dolores and Teddy (Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden) stand together, alone, against a picture-postcard Western backdrop in “Journey Into Night,” the mostly gripping return of “Westworld” after a 17-month hiatus. They take a seat the back of the bus, exhausted and elated, but after a pause, the same thought appears to hit them simultaneously: “Now what?” Where will this metaphor-on-wheels take them? Do they even have a viable future together? Nichols captures the very first moment they’ve considered those questions. After successfully stopping his ex-girlfriend Elaine (Katherine Ross) from marrying some square that met with her parents’ approval, the film’s hero, Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), whisks her away from the chapel and onto a crowded bus. Mike Nichols’s “The Graduate” ends with one of cinema’s most famously ambiguous final shots. Season 2, Episode 1: “Journey Into Night”