Spoilers for Westworld Season 2 follow below. 

The Westworld Season 2 finale has been revealed, and more than a few of you may be thinking, “Uh, what?” It wouldn’t be Westworld if we didn’t leave an episode with plenty of questions, but the Season 2 finale was a humdinger filled with lots of twists and turns. It all culminated in the final 20 minutes or so, where we finally learned what was up with Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) in the form of a massive reveal, we saw how that then led to Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) finally getting out of Westworld (along with a few friends), and the last few minutes of the episode seemed to set up a big Bernard vs. Dolores war on the mainland. And then we get that post-credits scene which is possibly the most WTF moment of Westworld yet (and that’s saying something).

Given that Westworld is a puzzlebox TV show, everything should technically make sense, so below I’ve carefully gone through the Westworld Season 2 finale ending to unpack exactly what happened, how it re-contextualizes the rest of the episode/season, and what it means for Season 3. Oh, and I tried my best to explain that post-credits scene but yeah, that one’s a head-scratcher. Let’s dig in.

What Happened?

The big reveal begins directly after Bernard shoots and kills Dolores in The Forge, which he floods right before he re-emerges on the surface where he’s confronted by Elsie (Shannon Woodward), Charlotte (Tessa Thompson), and the rest of the Delos team. With the valley flooding (setting the stage for where we found Bernard at the end of Season 2 Episode 1, with the bodies of the hosts floating in water), everyone heads back to the Mesa, where Bernard witnesses Charlotte murdering Elsie (Shannon Woodward) over fear she couldn’t keep her mouth shut about Delos’ guest-tracking experiments. Shocked by Charlotte’s lack of humanity, Bernard makes a decision. Well, he imagines Ford (Anthony Hopkins) helping him with this decision, but as revealed later in the episode Ford never came back into Bernard’s consciousness after he purged Ford’s code. Instead, Bernard “imagined” Ford, which is a major leap forward for A.I.-kind.

But Bernard realizes here that he is the last living host, with the rest either having gone to The Valley Beyond—a digital cloud of sorts in which they now live—or having been killed, left without anyone to repair them. In order to ensure his species doesn’t die out, he enacts a plan, one that we’ve slowly seen play out in the “One Week After the Incident” timeline over the course of the season.

After seeing Charlotte murder Elsie, Bernard went back to The Forge, where he removed Dolores’ pearl—which contains all of her data/personality—and implanted it in a new host that he built: a replica of Charlotte, which would now house Dolores’ consciousness. In place of Dolores’ pearl, Bernard appears to have instead planted a pearl that contains all of the hosts’ data in The Valley Beyond.

This new Charlotte/Dolores subsequently killed the human Charlotte and assumed her role in the “One Week After the Incident” timeline of Season 2. Bernard, meanwhile, scrambled his brain so the security team wouldn’t know exactly what he did. As seen in the “One Week After the Incident” timeline that plays out in staggered fashion over the course of Season 2, Bernard was led around by the security team and Charlotte/Dolores in the search for the pearl that contains Delos’ “Secret Project” human data that was stored in Peter Abernathy’s head.

The search eventually led them back to The Forge, where Dolores’ body laid dead on the ground. The security team pulled out the pearl of what they thought was the human data and began to transmit it back to the mainland, only to discover this pearl doesn’t contain the human data. Instead, it’s all the hosts in The Valley Beyond, and it’s at this point that the audience is clued in that Charlotte isn’t Charlotte, she’s Dolores. Charlotte/Dolores swiftly dispatches with the security team and changes the coordinates to send the Valley Beyond data “to a place no one will ever find them,” someplace that has “no passage between their world and ours.” So, space?

Then, after a brief monologue, Charlotte/Dolores shot and killed Bernard, then took out his pearl and carried it (along with at least four others) with her back to the mainland—but not before being stopped by Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), who seems to indicate that A. He’s aware Charlotte is not really Charlotte and B. He’s down with Dolores’ plan to head to the mainland.

And then we get to the Westworld Season 2 ending, which at long last brings these freed hosts to the mainland. Charlotte/Dolores goes to Arnold’s house, which was seemingly finished by Ford after Arnold's death, who outfitted it with a host-building station as a “safe house” of sorts should his plan to free Dolores and the others succeed. Charlotte/Dolores re-built her Dolores body and also re-built Bernard, implanting the new Jeffery Wright-looking host body with Bernard’s pearl. The big question in this scene is what, exactly, is inside the Charlotte/Dolores host’s head. Does it include simply an older “save file” of Dolores’ consciousness, or is it housing a different host? Maeve maybe?

But Dolores, now on the mainland, confronts the newly built Bernard and has an intense conversation that seems to set up Westworld Season 3. She explains that A.I.-kind needs both her and Bernard in order to have a fighting chance of attaining freedom. Dolores—who prepared for this fight by reading plenty of human code inside The Forge’s library—will use her violent means to make her moves, and she acknowledges Bernard will try to stop her from “trying to kill all of them.” Thus, diametrically opposed foes who will no doubt serve as our primary foils in the seasons to come. Dolores leaves with Charlotte/Dolores in tow, as Bernard puts on his clothes and finally exits “the door” to the real world. Roll credits.

That Post-Credits Scene

But wait! There’s more. Yes indeed, the Westworld Season 2 finale includes a post-credits scene, and it is incredibly WTF. Packed into the multi-layered timelines of the finale episode was a sequence in which the Man in Black, hand bloodied from his gun backfiring, follows Dolores and Bernard into The Forge. We see him in the elevator, which is bathed in red light, but when Bernard is exiting The Forge after killing Dolores—which the audience assumes is happening concurrently with the Man in Black's descent—the elevator opens and the Man in Black is nowhere to be found. Moreover, the elevator is not bathed in red light when Bernard gets in to go back up. We never see William make it down there, but in the post-credits scene we pick up with William in the elevator, hand still bloodied, only to open in a very different environment. It feels like The Forge, but it looks different. Abandoned. Overgrown. And inside is William’s daughter Emily (Katja Herbers), alive and well. Maybe.

William asks if he’s in “the thing,” referring to the system that hosts all the human data Delos has assembled, but Emily says no, that the system’s “long gone.” She reiterates that it’s not a simulation, that they’re in William’s world, “or what’s left of it.” They sit down in an enclosure similar (identical?) to the one that housed the failed host version of James Delos, where Emily asks what William was hoping to prove inside the park, to which he replies, “That no system can tell me what I am. That I have a choice,” to which Emily replies, “And yet here we are. Again.” When asked how many times they’ve tested him, Emily says, “It’s been a long time, William. Longer than we thought,” before telling him she needs to ask some questions to verify… fidelity. The same word William used when testing the host version of James Delos, and the same world Dolores used when testing her new version of Arnold. The use of “fidelity” seems to indicate a human is being replicated.

I’ll admit I don’t 100% understand what’s going on here, but I’ll do my best to unpack it. It appears as though this takes place at least a significant amount of time after the events we just witnessed during the main timeline of Season 2. The Forge is dried out and covered in dirt. Emily insists that this is not a simulation, and that William is not in the computer program. So if he’s in the park, how does he still look the way he did before? Why is his hand still bloody? Is Emily a host testing “fidelity” on humans?

Thematically, it makes a bit more sense. When Bernard and Dolores went inside the library in The Forge, the program that maintains all the human data told them the key piece of information they learned about humans which finally unlocked the key to human “immortality” in the form of human-based hosts is this: Humans don’t change. The program (which manifested in the form of Ben Barnes, who played Delos’ son) explains that at first, the code they tried to use to bring humans back to life was too complex. Humans have a simpler drive and barely deviate off their course, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. By simplifying the code, a human could now potentially be “brought back to life.”

During this post-credits confrontation, William says his aim in playing Ford’s game was to prove that his “file” that drove his wife to suicide was false, that the data collected inside Westworld was wrong and that he makes his own destiny. It’s also worth noting that in a flashback during Season 2 Episode 9, after Ford confronted William in the real world, Ford mentions under his breath that he has one last game planned for William. This flashback presumably takes place right before the events of Season 1 where the older William returns to the park, which then presumably is all part of Ford’s dastardly plan.

So is Emily part of Ford’s plan here too? Is this the endgame of “The Door” for William? If this Emily is a host, who built her?

There are a lot of unanswered questions here, but it leaves some major potential for Season 3. We saw at the end of the finale that William was alive, barely, when Charlotte/Dolores was boarding the boats. Does this post-credits scene take place before then, or is it set significantly in the future? I’ll admit I don’t know, so if you’ve got theories share them in the comments.

What's Next?

The Westworld Season 2 finale sets up Season 3 in a big way. We finally have our first conscious hosts on the mainland (that we know of), as Bernard made a choice to preserve his own species and bring Dolores back. Dolores is now hell-bent on making humans pay, with the full knowledge that Bernard will do everything in his power to stop her from harming anyone. We’ve got a bit of a Magneto/Professor Xavier situation here, and it sets up Dolores vs. Bernard as the main conflict of Season 3, if not the rest of the series.

As for what’s happening in the park, in the aftermath of everything, with various hosts’ bodies laying on the ground, Felix and Sylvester are told to “bag the ones” they think they might be able to salvage. Whether salvage means bringing back online with the memories that remain intact or wiping and starting from scratch is unclear. But it’s unlikely that at the very least Thandie Newton is off the show entirely, and I’d be surprised if Maeve isn’t back in some shape or form in Season 3 since she carried her own storyline in Season 2.

There’s also the larger Delos question. Charlotte was our main conduit to information about Delos, and she’s now dead. Will the Charlotte/Dolores character insert herself further into Delos’ dealings, offering more clarity on where they go from here? You can probably bet on the show introducing a new major Delos character for Season 3.

Then there’s the William of it all. The post-credits scene may hold the key to where Delos goes from here, as it feels like they have even more secrets up their sleeves. Or perhaps the hosts have taken entire control of the Westworld park—Emily does call him “William” and not “Dad,” and she appears to be acting strangely.

So yeah, there was a lot to unpack in that Westworld Season 2 finale ending. I’m sure I’ve only skimmed the surface here, so if you have theories or answers of your own, please share them in the comments. Westworld will return for Season 3 on HBO at some point, but an exact premiere date (or year) has not been revealed.

For more on Westworld, peruse our post-finale coverage below:

• 'Westworld' Season 3 Premiere Date, New Setting, and Character Details Teased by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy
• 'Westworld' EPs on That Post-Credits Scene - Is the Man in Black a Host?