I’m sensing a theme here. For the third week in a row, HBO‘s Westworld opens on Dolores. Bernard is holding a diagnostic session with her, where he gives her a copy of “Alice in Wonderland” to read. One of his son’s favorites, Bernard declines to offer any more info on him (we later learn, unsurprisingly, that he died, but do not yet know the circumstances) but does ask why Dolores asked about his son. Personal questions are designed to ingratiate ourselves, explains Dolores.
Waking in her room for a new day, Dolores finds something strange in her drawer – the gun she dug up last week, wrapped in a cloth. She flashes back to being dragged into the barn by the Man in Black, and when she returns to the here and now, the gun is gone. She continues with her day.
William is taking a stroll through town when a deputy brings in a wanted criminal, Horace Calhoun. Calhoun breaks away, kills the deputy and a few bystanders, then takes Clementine hostage. William decides to step up and levels his gun at Calhoun, but Calhoun gets him first, dropping him with a shot to the shoulder. William ends up with a bruise on his shoulder, pulls it together, and shoots Calhoun dead. A bounty hunter invites William out with him, while Clementine invites him into the saloon to show her appreciation. Logan shows up, and the bro talk reveals that William is engaged to Logan’s sister. Logan wants William to go add something to his “spank bank,” but William wants to go off with the bounty hunter.
Teddy and a female guest have a brief gun battle with a host named Samuel, then go into the saloon for a drink. The guest has a celebratory roll with Clementine, and Maeve has a strange memory of Teddy sitting in a clean room, waiting to get hosed off and sanitized. She brushes off the vision, and Teddy heads out to help Dolores with a dropped can and they resume their narrative. They ride to her home, taking in the surroundings, and Dolores wants to go down south, where the ocean meets the land, and start over. Teddy promises someday he will take her, but she is troubled by the vaguery of this. Teddy promises it will happen, but first he has some “reckoning” to do. They arrive at her home and their nighttime narrative begins.
Ford is talking with Teddy, amazed that he has died at least 1,000 times, yet it doesn’t seem to dull his courage. He reminds Teddy that his job is to keep Dolores here, in case any of the guests want a good time with a milkmaid. Teddy has never been given a reason for the “reckoning” he is to wreck, but Ford is here to rectify that, give him a “fiction rooted in truth.” The villain of Teddy’s story is Wyatt, an Army sergeant, who was Teddy’s commander. In the middle of maneuvers, Wyatt disappeared. When he returned a few weeks later, he was a changed man with strange ideas, claiming this land didn’t belong to settlers or natives, but to something “yet to come.”
Back in town, a small posse of men surround Dolores, making lewd and threatening comments to her. Teddy appears to defend her, which makes the guest traveling with these men anxious. He was promised something easy, and the posse takes off. Teddy takes Dolores out to the middle of nowhere to teach her how to shoot. She can’t pull the trigger – it’s not in her programming. Teddy thinks it might be for the best. A small posse, including the sheriff, the female guest Teddy was with earlier, and a male guest, ride up. The sheriff thinks they have a lead on Wyatt, explaining that Wyatt wiped out an entire settlement, and Teddy may be the only person to go up against him and live to tell the tale. Of course, Teddy has to go hunt him down, get his reckoning. The group comes across several bloated, rotting corpses tied to a tree. Suddenly gunfire rings out, and everyone rushes for cover. It’s a trap. One of the hosts takes a fearful male guest back to town, while Teddy, sheriff, and the woman remain to battle. They try to trail Wyatt’s men, but they are led straight into a trap. The woman trips a tripwire and Wyatt’s men jump out, slaughtering the sheriff. Teddy and the guest can’t escape, so they start shooting. Realizing they are fighting a losing war, Teddy sends the guest off without him, promising to hold them off as long as he can.
Elsie is analyzing the host that last had contact with Walter, and shows a video to Bernard. In it, Walter is having a conversation with no one, but addresses someone named Arnold. He killed six hosts, but let three go. All six were part of stories that, at one point or another, had killed Walter. It’s like he was holding a grudge.
The board is uneasy about the new storyline Ford is planning to launch. He has carved out a huge chunk of the park for his story, and it is putting others in disarray. Bernard takes this and some other concerns to Ford. He worries that they misdiagnosed the problems with Abernathy and Walter. Video shows both hosts were talking to the same imaginary person, named Arnold. Bernard wants to know the truth, and Ford finally reveals that originally, he had a partner who helped develop the hosts in those first few years, before there was a park, before there was a board of directors, when they were just free to create. But when Ford brought on business partners, they were happy to scrub the partner from the records. Ford’s partner’s name was Arnold. Arnold wanted to create “the real thing,” give the hosts a consciousness, based on the theory of the bicameral mind: one part of the mind “speaks” while the other part “follows.” Arnold built a version of the hosts where they heard their programming as inner monologue. It caused many of the hosts to go literally crazy, and the idea was abandoned. It was Ford who came up with the idea to wipe the hosts’ brains every night; it’s the “least we can do.” Arnold died in the park. By the end, he would only speak to the hosts, and he saw something that wasn’t there. Ford assures Bernard that an update should take care of the voices, and reminds Bernard that the hosts are not real and not conscious. “Don’t make Arnold’s mistake.”
A host has strayed from his storyline, so Elsie and Stubbs go track him down. They find the group he left behind. The group is stuck in a repeating loop because the stray was the only one programmed to chop wood for a fire. Elsie freezes the hosts and checks out the stray’s tent. He enjoyed whittling, but Elsie is concerned when she sees constellations carved into the turtles and bears he has whittled. That isn’t a programmed activity. They continue hunting the stray, and while Elsie takes a pee break, she discovers him – caught in a deep crevasse. It’s like he got there with an idea he had, one that they didn’t program. Stubbs doesn’t want to wait for the recovery team to come out tomorrow, so he rappels into the crevasse and starts sawing off the host’s head. His eyes open and Elsie yells at him to stop, but it is too late. The stray knocks back Stubbs and climbs out of the crevasse, threatening to pummel Elsie with a huge rock. Instead, he crushes himself with it.
Bernard has another meeting with Dolores. He needs to decide what to do with her, and thinks he should restore her to the way she was before (I assume, before the update). He commands her to drop the script and provide improv answers. Bernard asks which version she would rather be, but she doesn’t understand – “There is only one version of me. I think when I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” Ultimately, Bernard decides he doesn’t want to change her back; he wants to see where this leads.
It is night in town, when the guy who left Teddy up in the hills returns. He promises Dolores he will get a team together to go check on him in the morning. Dolores returns home, but has to face the bandit storyline herself. She sees her father, but in her mind the face is replaced with her other father. The posse is there, the ones who cornered her in town earlier, and the leader of the posse drags her into the barn, just like the Man in Black did to her so many times. In the struggle, she took the villain’s gun, and has it pointed at him. The would-be rapist laughs because she can’t pull the trigger. Suddenly, Dolores sees this villain as the Man in Black, approaching with a knife, and she is able to shoot. She races from the barn, and arrives in time to see her mother die. Another member of the posse shoots her, and a gunshot wound appears, but then it’s gone and she manages to escape on horseback. It is morning when she finds her way into Logan and William’s camp, passing out in William’s arms.
You can watch a preview for the next episode, titled “Dissonance Theory,” using the player below.
