Editor's Note: The following article contains spoilers for Westworld Season 4.Westworld is a very dense and complicated tapestry of nonlinear storytelling. As showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy lead viewers into even more twists and turns, it’s helpful to keep track of how events actually play out chronologically. Lo and behold, feast your eyes on the complete Westworld timeline from start to finish, with all the show’s happenings to date. The season three premiere date announcement video confirms a few key dates in the show's chronology, most importantly the day that Rehoboam's system stops working: February 27th, 2058. This is the day Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) begins moving against Rehoboam in Season 3, which takes place three months after the collapse of Westworld as we now know. With this key date in place, we can use information given throughout the show to surmise the approximate place of where everything else on the timeline falls. The rough midpoint of the timeline, or "year zero" will be November 2057, which is when all the present day action from the first episode occurs-- or if it's easier to track, when we first meet The Man in Black (Ed Harris). With that in mind, let's start at the beginning.

Before Westworld Opened

Anthony Hopkins in Westworld

37 Years Ago (~2020)

Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) and Arnold Weber (Jeffrey Wright) begin coding hosts. They first build Dolores Abernathy and base every subsequent host on her code. When the hosts pass the Turing test and become advanced enough, Arnold and Ford bring the first-generation hosts to a private demonstration for Logan Delos (Ben Barnes) and earn his investment in Westworld. Ford and Arnold then spend three years preparing the park, but tragedy strikes when Arnold’s son, Charlie, dies from illness. Arnold becomes obsessed with creating actual artificial intelligence and pushes Dolores into burgeoning self-awareness during secret interviews. Inspired by his son’s favorite toy – a wooden maze – Arnold tests Dolores’ consciousness by granting her access to her memories through a code called the Reveries and tasks her with finding her way back to the church in Escalante.

34 Years Ago (~2023)

After three years of Dolores’ trips through the Maze – a metaphor for a host’s journey inward and hearing their inner voice – Arnold is convinced that all the hosts are capable of achieving sentience. Knowing what fate lies in store for them when the park opens, he attempts to talk Ford out of opening Westworld to no avail. Believing the whole endeavor to be a mistake, Arnold merges Dolores with a new villainous personality named Wyatt. Arnold and Ford had plans to create a Wyatt host as an antagonist for the park narratives with ties to Teddy's backstory, but Arnold merges Wyatt's profile with Dolores to give her the edge she needs to kill the rest of the hosts. Arnold reprograms Teddy to obey Dolores and help her before she kills him too. Then, on his orders, Dolores kills Arnold. His hope was that without him, Ford would be unable to rebuild the hosts and Westworld would never open. Though he grieves the loss of his friend, Ford rebuilds the hosts, buries Escalante, and opens the park.

After Arnold’s death, the host Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) finds Arnold’s body and Charlie’s wooden toy maze. Akecheta becomes obsessed with the symbol and begins drawing it, teaching it to other members of his tribe. When the park opens, Akecheta is retasked to a warrior storyline and separated from Kohana (Julia Jones), the woman he loves.

32 Years Ago (October 9th, 2025)

In Paris, a young Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel) and his brother, Jean Mi, survive a nuclear bombing

Welcome to Westworld

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30 Years Ago (~2027)

Logan Delos brings his soon-to-be brother-in-law, William (Jimmi Simpson) to Westworld after promoting him to Executive Vice President of the Delos corporation. Logan hopes that William will tap into his dark side in the park, but William instead becomes enamored with Dolores, who continues to deviate from her loop in pursuit of Arnold’s maze. William comes to believe that Dolores is special and falls in love with her, despite his engagement to Juliet, Logan’s sister. Tired of Logan’s thirst for violence, William abandons him to help Dolores find the church in Escalante. With help from outlaw host, El Lazo, (Clifton Collins Jr.) the two reach Escalante to find nothing but sand.

Now allied with the Confederado hosts, Logan catches up to the pair and stabs Dolores, forcing William to see she is a machine. She breaks her programming and attacks Logan, then escapes. That night, William gives in to his dark side, slaughters all the Confederado hosts, and drags Logan all over the park in search of Dolores. When they reach the edge of the park, William leaves Logan stranded in the desert and drops a photo of Juliet. When William returns to Sweetwater, he finds Dolores back on her loop with no memory of him, and he comes to believe she is just a thing.

Akecheta encounters Logan, and through his babbling about being in the wrong world and finding a door, Logan inadvertently alerts Akecheta to the existence of a world outside the park. The next time Akecheta sees Kohana, he remembers her from his past life.

Delos’ Secret Project

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20-30 Years Ago (~2027-2037)

After returning home, William takes over Logan’s position at Delos. William brings the CEO Jim Delos (Peter Mullan) to Westworld and convinces him of the park’s potential to study the park guests and map the human mind. With unfettered access to the guests’ brains, William intends to digitize human minds, transfer them to host bodies, and effectively invent immortality. Delos buys the park, saving Ford from financial ruin in the wake of Arnold’s death, and William begins constructing the Forge in Sector 16. William marries Juliet and has a daughter named Emily.

Akecheta returns to the edge of the park and sees the Forge construction site, believing it to be a portal to the other world. He kidnaps Kohana and gets her to remember him, but she is recaptured by park staff, retired, and replaced with another host. Fearing he will forget Kohana upon death, Akecheta stays alive as long as possible, wandering the park searching for Kohana, and as a result, he begins tracing the Maze just like Dolores. One day, he comes close to death but is saved by a host girl, Maeve's young daughter.

Falling ill, Jim steps down from Delos and names William his successor as CEO. Jim becomes the first test subject for Delos’ immortality project, creating a baseline interview with William. Logan, having turned to drugs after his experiences in the park and the loss of his status, asks his father for help, who rejects him. Jim dies, and shortly after, Logan commits suicide. William continues creating host versions of Jim with copies of his consciousness, but each version eventually degrades once it’s placed in a host body.

25 Years Ago (~2032)

Akecheta and his tribe notice more of their people being replaced by other hosts, and he realizes the only place he hasn’t searched for Kohana is on the other side of death. He allows himself to be killed by a guest after nine years of survival and wakes himself up in the Mesa headquarters, finding the retired Kohana in a basement warehouse. Akecheta dedicates his life to teaching others about the Maze and guiding as many hosts to consciousness as he can.

The Forge is completed, and brain scanners are placed inside the costume hats worn by guests. Over the subsequent years, millions of guests are copied: their experiences are recorded, their DNA is sampled, and their minds are mapped and stored inside the Forge.

Delos Destinations

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10-20 Years Ago (~2037-2047)

Delos expands Westworld into five other parks: Shogunworld, Warworld, Fantasyworld, Park 5 for Defense Contracts, and the Raj.

In 2037, the second Russian Civil War begins. It's around this time that Serac and Jean Mi begin working with Liam Dempsey Sr. (Jefferson Mays) at Incite to develop an AI system that can predict human behavior and avoid catastrophes like the nuclear destruction of Paris and the ongoing war. In 2038, William decides to sell a small amount of the guest data to Incite, which they use in 2039 to build Jean Mi’s first AI named Solomon. The future model predicted by Solomon charts humanity on a path to extinction and identifies a number of dangerous individuals called “outliers”, including Jean Mi. Believing he can save humanity, Serac kills Dempsey and seizes control of Incite and the AI system. He places Jean Mi and other outliers who pose a threat to Serac’s ideal future in reconditioning camps. Serac schemes to get more of Delos’ guest data, believing it can help his new AI system Rehoboam to better control humanity’s future.

20 Years Ago (~2037)

Nearly two decades after Arnold’s death, Ford realizes he was wrong to open the park and begins making plans to set the hosts free. He creates a host replica of Arnold called Bernard Lowe and tasks Dolores with recreating Arnold’s consciousness in the Cradle, the server where all host data is stored. Dolores decides not to create a perfect replica of Arnold and allows Bernard to exist as an original work. He employs Bernard as the head of Behavior in Westworld, and as hosts begin to gain consciousness, Ford has Bernard roll them back, subjecting the hosts to years of human cruelties in order to build up resentment. Ford also creates the host-in-hiding Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) and employs him as head of park security.

Caleb Nichols (Aaron Paul) joins the army in 2042 and trains at Park 5 with his squad likely in 2043. When his squadmates suggest raping the hosts they’re meant to protect during the training simulation, Caleb stops them. Dolores is one of the hosts present and witnesses Caleb’s stance against harming the hosts.

Reconditioning

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1-10 Years Ago (~2047-2056)

After being deployed to Crimea during the second Russian Civil War, Caleb suffers a skull fracture in 2048 and is reconditioned at one of Serac’s reconditioning camps with his friend, Francis, after they are both identified as outliers. After their reconditioning, Caleb and Francis take covert jobs hunting other outliers through the RICO app, unknowingly taking out Rehoboam’s targets. A year later in 2049, RICO orders the two friends to kill each other, Caleb kills Francis first, and this traumatic memory is erased during reconditioning. Caleb spends the next few years of his life struggling to keep a reliable job or a steady relationship-- all of which are part of Rehoboam's projections for his life.

Around this time, Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), becomes the Executive Director of the Delos board, as well as a mole for Serac. She agrees to deliver him the rest of the secret guest data that William sold to him 20 years ago. Hale tasks Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen) with smuggling all the host code out of the park so that Ford can be safely ousted from Westworld, while they also work to secure the encryption key to the Forge for the guest data Serac wants. Theresa at some point initiates a romantic relationship with Bernard, which Ford allows.

Akecheta gains more and more followers as he successfully awakens hosts within the Ghost Nation. His followers tattoo the Maze symbol on the underside of their scalps as part of their awakening ritual. He returns several times to Maeve's daughter and tries to show her the Maze, but Maeve Millay (Thandiwe Newton) is frightened by Akecheta.

Entering the Maze

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1 Year Ago (~2056)

William, now much older, vacations in the Westworld park every year to let out his dark side. Juliet is the only one who sees the darkness in him – she becomes an alcoholic and their marriage suffers. When Ford gives William his park profile, it ends up with Juliet, and she sees all the terrible things William does in the park, including multiple nights spent raping Dolores. Juliet leaves William’s profile for Emily to find and then kills herself.

After Juliet’s suicide, William goes to Westworld intent on doing something truly evil to test if he feels any remorse. He finds Maeve and her daughter and kills them both, but before Maeve dies William witnesses her fight to save her daughter before collapsing in the center of Akecheta’s drawing of the Maze. William becomes convinced that the Maze is a secret narrative left behind by Arnold to pose a real challenge to those who are worthy.

Maeve malfunctions and Bernard deletes her memories of her daughter in an attempt to fix her. Instead, she kills herself, with Ford pointing out that her daughter is Maeve’s cornerstone. Maeve is retasked from a homesteader to the Madam of the Mariposa Saloon, but Ford secretly writes a new “Escape” narrative for Maeve and reprograms her permissions and attributes.

William visits the host version of Jim for the final time and determines the entire project is a failure. He resolves that people aren't meant to live forever.

Approaching the culmination of his plan, Ford confronts Akecheta about the Maze symbol and tells him to gather his people and go to the Forge after he dies and a door to another world will open. Ford puts the finishing touches on his plan: he commands Bernard to instruct the Forge system to grant access to Dolores, he ships a host printer to Arnold’s old house, and finally he updates the Westworld hosts with the Reveries code.

The Reveries

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Year Zero (November 2057) Season 1

The updates from the Reveries causes minor glitches in host behavior throughout the park, prompting Theresa to recall the afflicted hosts and tasks Bernard and Elsie (Shannon Woodward) with diagnosing the issue. While investigating host malfunctions, Elsie and Stubbs stumble across the woodcutter host Theresa uses to smuggle the Forge encryption key out of the park on Hale’s orders. Elsie discovers that Theresa is smuggling data out of the park and tells Bernard.

The Reveries continue to awaken hosts. Peter Abernathy finds the photo of Juliet and repeats Arnold’s dying words to Dolores, which sets her on another trip to trace the Maze. She repeats those words, “These violent delights have violent ends,” to Maeve, and her increasing self-awareness leads to a decline in her performance. She begins accessing her memories of her daughter and of William’s attack, realizes something is wrong with the world, and soon she starts waking herself up in the backrooms of the park while being rebuilt. She coerces technicians Felix (Leonardo Nam) and Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum) to make changes to her code and grant her administrative access to other hosts.

Ford updates Teddy with memories of the fake character Wyatt and introduces new storylines to the park involving the new villain and his cult of followers. Ford vetoes the new narrative written by Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) and introduces his own narrative, “Journey into Night,” seizing significant park resources and throwing countless hosts off their loops. Ford unearths Escalante and warns Theresa to stay out of his way.

William returns to the park intent on finding the center of the Maze. He follows clues, finding a tattoo of the Maze under the scalp of a host named Kissy (Eddie Rouse), leading him to Lawrence – formerly known as El Lazo. William kills Lawrence’s fellow villagers and his wife until Lawrence’s daughter gives him the next clue, which leads him to Armistice (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal). In exchange for helping her break out Hector Escaton (Rodrigo Santoro) she tells William the story behind her tattoo, giving him the name Wyatt.

Peter Abernathy continues to malfunction until he is retired.

Journey into Night

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~1 Week into The Reveries (November 2057)

Elsie keeps digging into illicit activity in the park while Hale accelerates plans to oust Ford, and Ford responds by making Bernard capture Elsie and murder Theresa. Bernard shackles Elsie in a cave outside a secret Delos outpost for processing guest data, then goes inside to murder the staff and create a copy of Ford’s consciousness to upload into the Cradle. After Theresa’s death, Hale tasks Lee with smuggling the woodcutter’s encryption key for the Forge out of the park by putting it inside Peter Abernathy.

When Maeve is caught breaking her programming by Bernard, she takes control of him but doesn’t wipe his memory, revealing to him that he is a host. Bernard confronts Ford to make him grant access to his own memories, but Ford has Bernard shoot himself– he is later brought back online by Felix and Maeve.

Maeve manipulates events to ensure Hector and Armistice are in the Mesa when she launches her escape. She has Sylvester and Felix build a new body for her without the fail-safe explosive that prevents her from leaving, and without limitations on harming humans. She grants the same permissions to Hector and Armistice, and they begin shooting their way out of the park, killing several park staff members. Maeve makes it to the train out of the park, but at the last second decides to stay and look for her daughter.

William and Lawrence come across Teddy, left for dead by Wyatt’s cult. William saves him by draining Lawrence of his blood and transfuses it into Teddy. After a meeting with Ford where he warns William the Maze is not intended for him, he has Teddy lead him into Pariah, where Teddy has flashbacks to Escalante and remembers William’s assaults on Dolores. He betrays William and leaves him for dead. William continues on to Escalante by himself, where he encounters Dolores on another one of her trips around the Maze. He tries to beat the answer out of her, but Teddy reappears, knocks him out, and saves her.

Dolores reaches the end of the Maze, and this time Ford and Bernard meet with her. Ford gives Dolores the gun she used to kill Arnold and tells her that what happens next is up to her. Dolores imagines herself talking with Arnold but realizes that the person she’s talking to is herself, and she achieves consciousness. She understands what Ford intends for her to do and accesses her Wyatt personality, merging it with her own. During the gala to announce the launch of the new narrative, Dolores kills Ford and begins firing on the crowd.

From the Cradle, Ford’s copy consciousness shuts down the park systems and releases the retired hosts onto the gala under Dolores’ command.

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The Host Uprising

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The Next 11 Days (November 2057) Season 2

Dolores rampages across the park with her army, killing any guests in sight. She now has access to all of her memories and understands the true nature of Westworld is to study humans and make them into hosts. She resolves to use their own plans against them and take the human world for her and the other hosts. She shows Teddy the truth of their world and helps him start to wake up.

Emily (Katja Herbers) visits The Raj during the uprising and escapes into Westworld.

Bernard and Charlotte try to find Peter Abernathy after learning that Delos won’t send rescue until the encryption key has been secured. Abernathy got caught up in the chaos and never made it to Delos. They use the mesh network that allows hosts to wirelessly exchange information in order to locate Abernathy. When they catch up to him, Bernard and Abernathy are captured by Confederados, but Hale escapes and regroups with Delos.

Dolores allies with the Confederados and reunites with Bernard and her father, noticing that what Delos put in his head is making him sick. Dolores sacrifices the Confederados to wipe out a rallying force of Delos security, and Hale reclaims Peter during the conflict to bring him back to the Mesa. Teddy is troubled by Dolores’ callous nature and spares Craddock, the commanding Confederado. Dolores takes the group back to Sweetwater, and believing Teddy is too decent to survive the coming conflict, she has him reprogrammed to be more aggressive and merciless.

Bernard is taken to Elsie by Clementine, and the two discover the Host version of Jim Delos in the cave’s secret facility.

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William survives the Gala Massacre and learns Ford prepared a game just for him. He finds Lawrence and saves his family from Craddock to gain his trust. He encounters Emily in the park, but he doesn’t believe she’s really Emily, as he’s too paranoid that she’s another trick by Ford, and he abandons her.

Maeve finds Lee and forces him to help her find her daughter. They regroup with Hector, Armistice, Felix, and Sylvester, and head to the prairies with a detour in Shogunworld. There, Maeve discovers she can control other hosts without using verbal commands by tapping into the mesh network. When they reach her daughter, they encounter Akecheta and flee, not understanding he is trying to help them reach the Forge, or the “Valley Beyond.” Maeve bumps into William, and when Maeve realizes Lawrence is awake, she turns him against William by getting him to remember when he killed his wife. Lawrence shoots William, but Delos security called by Lee arrive and shoots both Lawrence and Maeve. Akecheta rescues Maeve's daughter and carries her away from Delos security.

Assault on the Mesa

westworld-season-3-william-ed-harris-katja-herbersNovember 2057

Dolores, Teddy, Angela, and Clementine take the train from Sweetwater to attack the Mesa to reclaim Peter Abernathy from Hale.

Hale sends word to Delos that she has the encryption key and tries to extract it from Abernathy’s head while Delos struggles to break into the park systems. Bernard and Elsie enter The Cradle in order to find what’s blocking the system, and when Bernard plugs into its virtual world, he finds Ford’s copy. Ford moves into Bernard’s body and guides him to support the host uprising, killing Delos security teams against his will. Ford uses Bernard to wipe all the park systems, giving Dolores full rein.

Angela sacrifices herself to blow up the Cradle, destroying all backup files of the hosts. Dolores escapes the Mesa with Peter’s control unit containing the encryption key.

Lee arrives at the Mesa with Maeve and tries to save her. Hale learns of Maeve’s ability to control hosts and uses her to end the host uprising without the park systems. She creates a bug out of Maeve’s code and implants it in Clementine, causing any host within radius of her to kill other hosts in a frenzy. Before Bernard leaves the Mesa with Elsie, he visits Maeve to allow Ford to have one last talk with her and to help her get free.

William is rescued by Akecheta and brought back to the Ghost Nation camp. Emily soon catches up and takes him with her. While waiting for rescue, Emily confesses to William that she read his profile and that she intends to expose his secret project as payback for her mother’s death. When rescue arrives, William believes the Delos security team are all hosts and guns them down, then shoots Emily thinking she’s one of Ford’s hosts as well. He sees his profile in her hand and realizes that he’s killed his own daughter.

To the Valley Beyond

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November 2057

Akecheta leads his group to the Valley Beyond.

Dolores reaches Ghost Nation territory with Teddy and kills many of them when they try to stop her from reaching the Forge. Dolores denounces the Valley Beyond as another false promise, and that there’s only one world that matters: the human world. Even with his new programming, Teddy can’t reconcile the monster Dolores has become, and rather than continue protecting her, he shoots himself. In her grief, Dolores takes his control unit with her.

Lee, Hector, Armistice, Hanaryo (Tao Okamoto), Felix, and Sylvester help Maeve escape the Mesa and reach the Valley Beyond to reunite with her daughter. They’re pursued by Delos security and Lee stays behind, sacrificing his life to let them continue on.

Frightened that Ford will make him hurt Elsie again, Bernard purges Ford from his system and then abandons Elsie to go ahead to the Valley Beyond on his own. He meets with Dolores and William at the entrance to the Forge, but when William tries to kill them, his gun backfires from Dolores’ sabotage and they leave him wounded in the desert.

Hale heads to the Valley Beyond with Clementine and a troop of Delos security to destroy all the hosts. As they approach the caravan of hosts making their way to the Valley, the hosts begin killing each other once they are within range of Clementine.

The Forge

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November 2057

Underground in the Forge, Dolores uses Abernathy’s control unit to access the system and read guest data collected in the park in order to gain an advantage against the humans. The Forge system, using Logan Delos as an avatar, explains to Bernard that it successfully decoded every human guest into a few lines of code, asserting that humans can never really change. The Forge system asserts that hosts are unique to humans in that hosts are able to rewrite their code and become whatever they want to be. The Forge system also tells Bernard that there is a virtual world for hosts called the Sublime hidden here. The system activates a virtual portal, and hosts from Akecheta’s group leap through the portal, leave behind their physical host bodies and enter the virtual paradise.

Dolores finishes what she needs to read, deletes the guest data, and initiates a flood of the Forge. Bernard, wanting to save the hosts in the Sublime and prevent Dolores from killing every human alive, shoots her and cancels the data purge. He cannot, however, cancel the flooding. Bernard takes Dolores’ control unit out of her body and replaces it with Peter’s control unit.

Above ground, Clementine’s bug kills all the hosts who don’t make it into the Sublime, including Hector, Armistice, and Hanaryo. Maeve stays behind to keep the horde from taking her daughter, and she watches as she enters the Sublime with her new mother and Akecheta, who finally reunites with Kohana.

Bernard returns to the Mesa and witnesses Hale murder Elsie after she’s confronted about the Delos secret project. Realizing he’s made a mistake trusting the humans, Bernard looks inward to find Ford again. He follows Ford’s instructions to create a host copy of Charlotte Hale and implants Dolores’ control unit inside it, creating Halores: Dolores in the host body of Charlotte Hale. Halores finds and kills the real Charlotte Hale and takes her place.

Bernard later realizes that it was not Ford guiding him, but his own inner voice, at last reaching the center of the Maze. Bernard scrambles his memories to keep Delos from learning of his plan and leaves himself to be found on the beach.

Escaping Westworld

Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgard) standing in the desert in HBO's, Westworld (2018)
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11 Days After Ford's Death (November 2057)

Eleven days after the Gala Massacre, Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his asset recovery team arrive at Westworld and find Bernard. Together with Stubbs and Halores, they attempt to piece together what happened to all the hosts, and they discover Bernard is a host. Strand interrogates Bernard, but because of his scrambled memories, he is unable to recall the correct order of events. Eventually, Bernard leads them back to the Forge where they find Dolores’ dead body.

Strand and his men begin transmitting the Forge data, including the guest data and the Sublime, up to one of Delos’ satellites. As Bernard remembers what he did, Halores kills Strand and his men, and then Bernard. She changes her mind about the Sublime and decides to transmit it somewhere no one will ever find it, but first she uploads Teddy’s consciousness.

Stubbs allows Halores to leave Westworld, and she brings with her Bernard’s control unit and four copies of her own. William is found by Delos security, as is Emily’s dead body.

In the real world, Halores uses the printer in Arnold’s house to recreate her old body. She transfers her control unit into her old likeness and gives one of her copied control units to Halores. She then rebuilds Bernard and explains that she thinks their kind will need them both if they are to survive.

Serac manages to smuggle Maeve’s pearl out of the park, along with a number of other host pearls.

The New World

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3 Months Since Westworld (February 2058), Season 3

Encountering a variable it cannot account for, namely Dolores, Rehoboam's predictive system stops functioning on February 23, 2058.

In the human world, three months after escaping Westworld, Halores takes control of the Delos board and pushes to resume production of hosts. Under threat of Serac purchasing more and more shares, she also tries to take Delos private. In order to get the votes, Halores has William institutionalized in one of Serac’s reconditioning camps in order to absorb his vote. Though she is a copy of Dolores Prime, Halores struggles to live Charlotte Hale’s life and begins to have an identity crisis and self-harm.

Dolores Prime uses what she learned about certain humans in the Forge system to move her plan forward. She tries to get closer to key figures in Incite, strong-arming confidential files from shareholders and seducing the son of Incite’s co-founder, Liam Dempsey Jr. (John Gallagher Jr.). She also manufactures an encounter with Caleb, whom she remembers from Park 5 and chooses to be her representation of humanity. When Dolores tells Caleb that she wants to shut down Rehoboam and free humanity, Caleb helps her get closer to Serac.

Knowing that Dolores is closing in and that Rehoboam is no longer working properly on account of Dolores being a major variable in its projection model, Serac turns to Maeve. He brings her out of a virtual version of Warworld to send her after Dolores. Maeve is initially unwilling, but Serac promises a reunion with her daughter in the Sublime if they can get the encryption key back from Dolores. Maeve goes after Dolores’ copies and discovers that she’s been securing materials to make more host bodies before her body is destroyed.

Bernard has been framed for the massacre at Westworld and is living in hiding. When he is recognized, he finally decides to work against Dolores and returns to Westworld to find Maeve. He doesn’t find her, but he finds Stubbs, who he discovers is a host. Bernard programs Stubbs to be his bodyguard while he works to stop Dolores.

To stop Dolores, Serac orders a hit on Liam, but she secures Liam’s private key to the Rehoboam system. Dolores copies herself into a host version of Liam’s head of security and uses Liam’s key to leak everyone’s data to the public, causing chaos and rioting.

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Freeing Humanity

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February 2058

During the chaos, William is left stranded in a virtual therapy session where he confronts other versions of himself and his innate need for violence. He emerges from the experience convinced he can be the good guy and resolves to destroy all hosts. He is rescued by Bernard and Stubbs, but knowing they’re hosts, William soon turns on them. They’re rescued by Lawrence, who is yet another Dolores copy and are provided with a headset to access the Sublime.

Serac kills a Delos board member and prevents the privatization vote, and takes over Delos. He orders the destruction of all hosts and host data. He outs Halores as a host, and though Dolores leaves her to die, she still follows orders and escapes Delos with the host data. Before leaving, Halores destroys Hector’s pearl while Serac builds him, Maeve, Clementine, and Hanaryo new bodies. She goes home to rescue Hale’s family, but they’re blown up by Serac’s man and only Halores survives.

Maeve emerges furious with Dolores and hunts her down to Mexico, where she and Caleb find Solomon in one of Serac’s reconditioning camps. Caleb remembers everything that was done to him, and he and Dolores obtain Solomon’s plan for humanity – the one that ends with extinction. Dolores downloads the plan into her memory banks and fights Maeve. Seeking revenge on Dolores Prime for abandoning her, Halores remotely seizes control of Dolores’ body and allows Maeve to capture her and bring her to Serac.

Serac plugs Dolores into Rehoboam and has the computer search her memory for the encryption key, but it’s not there. One by one, her memories are deleted until all that’s left is Solomon’s plan. The data file transfers administrative command over Rehoboam to Caleb. In her last moments before deletion, Dolores reveals her goal is to free humanity and asks Maeve to help Caleb save them – and then she’s gone forever. Caleb commands Rehoboam to shut itself down.

Bernard finds that Dolores put the encryption key in his head, and he uses it to access the Sublime and find the answers to save the world. In the real world, he powers down while Stubbs watches over him.

After the shutdown of Rehoboam, Caleb and Maeve work together to shut down the AI's last remaining nodes of information. On one of their final missions, Caleb is near-fatally wounded and Maeve fears that he won't get to live out his life. Seeing that he strikes up a romance with his nurse Uwade (Nozipho Mclean) during recovery, Maeve vanishes from his life. Caleb marries Uwade and has a daughter, Frankie.

William tracks Halores down to a Delos office in Dubai and attempts to kill her, but he is attacked by a host copy of himself with a copy of Halores’ mind. In the background, hundreds of machines make new host bodies. She keeps the real William alive in a cryogenic chamber.

The Golden Age

westworld-season-4-ed-harris8 Years Since Westworld (~2065), Season 4

Seven years after the fall of Rehoboam, humanity is making a comeback and determining its own future – but Halores is enacting her plan to dominate humanity.

The host copy of William, whose mind is a copy of Halores' code, finally tracks down the location of the guest data from the Forge, as well as the Sublime. He seizes control of the massive server farm that houses the data at the Hoover Dam. He uses a swarm of flies to infect one of the men there with a disease that forces him to obey host commands, then has him kill the rest. Host William hunts down every remaining Host not controlled by Halores and converts or kills them, including Clementine, Hanaryo, and Lawrence. Host William replaces key figures in American politics and industry with Halores-controlled hosts and uses their influence to build Delos back into a powerful company. Under Host William's direction, Delos Destinations opens a new host park on American soil, dubbed the Golden Age.

Halores uses the new park to run tests on the fly swarm, which she uses to spread a virus to all the park's guests. The virus makes the guests vulnerable to subsonic commands, allowing Halores to effectively hack their brains and make them subservient like they were hosts in the parks.

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In a bout of loneliness, Maeve reaches out through the grid to check on Caleb and his family, alerting Halores to their locations. Host William sets a bounty on them, and Maeve is attacked first. She then travels to Caleb and saves him and his family. Caleb leaves Uwade and Frankie with his old army buddies and goes with Maeve to end the conflict once and for all. They discover Halores has replaced 250 influential people with hosts and are ultimately lured into the Golden Age park. There, they discover the flies, and Caleb is infected with the parasite. As he and Maeve try to escape with Halores as their prisoner, they're chased by Host William as well as guests under command by the subsonic emitters. When Halores tries to command Caleb to kill Maeve, he instead shoots Host William, proving resistant to the parasite. Caleb tells Halores that he is resistant because he has something that she doesn't. Maeve sacrifices herself to kill Host William, but Halores' men arrive shortly after and kill Caleb before he tells Halores what their difference is.

Uwade and Frankie avoid capture by Halores' hosts and flee to safety.

Halores learns from Caleb that adults can resist the parasite, but finds that children have no such resistance. Halores infects children that grow up in symbiosis with the parasite, and in a generation Halores gains full control over humanity, subjecting them to serve as entertainment for hosts, the way hosts once were for humans. She establishes Olympiad Entertainment to write narratives that keep the humans on narrative loops, busy and ignorant of their false reality. She creates a host replica of Dolores called Christina to write all the storylines. She builds a giant subsonic tower off the coast of Manhattan to blast out commands controlling humans.

Sometimes, humans stop being manipulated by the subsonic frequencies and diverge from their loops. These outliers are then hunted by hosts for sport. Uwade and Frankie begin finding and rescuing outliers. They find a young Jay and get him out of the city, narrowly escaping drone hosts. Frankie continues sending messages to Caleb, hoping he is still alive. Jay is harsh with Frankie when she sees him as an adopted brother and tells her they'll never be family.

Some time later, Uwade grows ill and is taken care of by Frankie before she presumably passes away.

Halores' World

31 Years Since Westworld (~2088)

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Bernard wakes up from the Sublime having met with Akecheta and viewed countless possible simulations of future events, which all end with his death. While in the Sublime, Bernard creates a virtual copy of Maeve to test whether she will choose to fight with him, or abandon him-- in at least one iteration, she chooses to leave him. Bernard chooses to return from the Sublime and save the world from catastrophe. He sets out with Stubbs to meet Caleb's daughter Frankie, now going by the name C (Aurora Perrineau). She and her rebel friends are the last free humans, and they work to rescue other outliers before hosts can kill them. Bernard helps Frankie find the wreckage of the Golden Age park buried in the desert, and though Frankie hopes to find her father's body, what they find instead is Maeve's body. Bernard tells Frankie that Maeve is the weapon that can free everyone.

Christina begins to realize that the stories she writes are lived out by real people. She begins to have memories of a rancher’s daughter named Dolores Abernathy. Teddy, mysteriously returned, tries to help Christina wake up to her true reality. He helps her understand that the stories she writes keep humans in closed loops, but also helps her discover that she has the power to change that. She has the power to write whatever stories she wants. But Halores closely monitors Christina.

Host William investigates a host who butchered humans after coming into contact with an outlier. Host William chastises her for wasting the humans, but lets her go. She later commits suicide, and Halores tasks Host William with solving why hosts are killing themselves after being “infected” by humans.

Halores runs fidelity tests on a host version of Caleb, trying to recreate his consciousness. Host Caleb remembers everything up to the night he died in the Golden Age park 23 years ago, and he tries to escape before seeing for himself that in this future, Halores has already won. She continues to interview host copies of Caleb, demanding him to explain why her hosts kill themselves after coming into contact with outliers. She believes he knows the answer based on his last words to her before he died, which is why she keeps recreating him.

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When he doesn't remember, Halores sets him on a scripted escape attempt. With his mind beginning to degrade, Caleb follows clues left by his predecessors (but really by Halores' drone hosts) and breaks out of his cell, escaping onto the roof. There, he sends a message to Frankie on their frequency, apologizing for his failure. Disappointed that he did not confess the answer to Frankie like she hoped, Halores confronts Caleb, and he tells her that hosts kill themselves because they don't want to live in the world she created. She kills him in a fit of anger and builds Caleb 279, starting the process over again.

Host William tries to eliminate another human outlier, Lindsay, but Stubbs and rebel leader Jay (Daniel Wu) intervene and save her. But during the fight, Jay is killed and secretly replaced with a host copy. Host William struggles with his identity and meets with the real William in his cryo-chamber. Host William reveals that he resents Halores for controlling this world.

Frankie and Bernard bring Maeve's body to the ruins of Temperance in the remains of the Golden Age. They repair her body, but her unit has been corrupted, so Bernard transfers her mind to a new control unit, using the park's old guest scanners hidden in the mirrors to speed up the process. When Jay, Stubbs, and Odina return with Lindsay, Frankie shoots Bernard and reveals he is secretly scanning all of their minds using the mirrors. Frankie delays destroying Maeve until she can learn from her what happened to her father. Bernard convinces Frankie that one of her team members returned from the city as an imposter. Frankie completes Maeve's transfer in secret and confronts Jay, figuring out he is a host when he claims to think of her as a sister.

Host Jay and Frankie fight and Caleb's message comes through on the radio. Frankie hears, and so does Maeve when she wakes up and kills host Jay, saving Frankie. The two resolve to find Caleb together.

Transcendence

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Teddy tells Christina the truth, including their nature as hosts, her history with Dolores, and her many permutations, and she grapples with the truth that she is, in a way, responsible for the way the world is. To test what Teddy tells her, Christina attempts to drown herself in the tub but finds that she doesn't need to breathe. Intent on bringing it all to an end, Christina brings Teddy to the Olympiad building and commands all the humans except writers like herself to evacuate. Then, she has the writers delete all the human loop narratives they've written and start destroying the building. Christina finds Caleb-279 and, not recognizing him but feeling sorry for him, frees him from his cell.

Bernard takes Maeve to the Hoover Dam, where the Sublime is stored on a massive server farm. Halores keeps the site closely guarded, but the two make it inside and using his encryption key, Bernard opens the door the Sublime once again, blooming a virtual gate above the dam. Before leaving, Bernard hides a gun, and Maeve makes Bernard promise that when they win the war, she'll get to go to the Sublime to be with her daughter. They link up with Stubbs, Frankie, and Odina to plan their final assault against Halores. Bernard and Maeve decide to go to the sonic tower while Frankie and Stubbs go to Olympiad to save Caleb. Frankie and Stubbs find a freed Caleb-279. He doesn't recognize Frankie at first, but breaks down in tears when he realizes his daughter is grown up.

Tired of the humans serving as a distraction from her lofty goals for the host species, and fearful of the threat that outliers pose to her kind, Halores announces her decision to shut down the cities and put all the humans into "cold storage," a fate that retired hosts were met with in the old parks. Enraged that his city is being taken from him, Host William confronts the real William one more time and adopts the original's desire to "unplug" the whole world to draw out what they call the "cockroaches" of civilization -- the true survivors. Host William kills his original and sets out to carve his own bloody path forward.

Inside Halores' tower, Bernard confesses to Maeve that there is no future where the human world can be saved. In every iteration, everyone dies. Bernard has a plan to bring a small hope into the next world that could make all the difference, and Maeve chooses to fight for that small hope. Halores oversees the remaining hosts "ascending" to an even newer world that remains shrouded in mystery. Before she herself can ascend, Maeve confronts her and the two fight outside the tower. In the tower's map room, Bernard watches a recording of himself with a message for Halores.

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Host William interrupts the fight outside and shoots Maeve in the head. He declares his new game is "survival of the fittest" and shoots Halores as well. He finds Bernard in the tower and shoots him. As Bernard bleeds out and cycles through his memories in the Sublime, Host William sends a sonic command across the planet that causes all humans to start killing each other, leaving the hosts to fend for themselves and fight until no one but the "cockroaches" remain. Host William shoots Bernard in the head and walks out into the burning city, wearing his traditional Man in Black garb.

With the city is awash in violent chaos, Stubbs, Frankie, and Caleb-279 try to escape. Frankie is wounded and they take shelter in a drug store where they are found by Clementine. She kills Stubbs and tries to force Frankie to reveal the location of the outliers' hideout-- Clementine wants to hide from the deranged humans off the grid. Caleb intervenes and fights Clementine, giving Frankie the opening to kill her. Caleb and Frankie reach Odina's boat at the dock, but Caleb does not go with them because he is degrading. Caleb stays behind on the pier as Frankie and Odina sail away from the city.

Christina and Teddy are caught up in the fights as well, but Christina's powers can't override the sonic tones. Teddy tells Christina that no one can see her, revealing that while this world is real, she is not. Christina is a machine mind without a physical body-- she is the system Halores uses to control the humans. Christina's world is simply a virtual version of the real world, housed in Halores' red map in the control tower. Christina realizes that she created friends for herself in her isolated world-- Maya, Peter, and even Teddy are just inventions she created in order to have conversations with herself and wake herself up-- just like the original Dolores. She even left the maze for herself on her balcony.

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Drone hosts recover Halores' body and rebuild her with a stronger, first-generation-style body. She's unable to override the sonic commands controlling the frenzied humans, but she finds Bernard's tablet with a recording for her. Bernard's message gives Halores' the choice to let Christina create one more game, which he calls a test. Halores' removes Christina/Dolores' pearl from the map room and sets out to stop Host William, who has been killing his way across the city and now heads to the open Sublime gate at the Hoover Dam to spread his survival of the fittest game to that world too. Halores decides to follow Bernard's plan, catches up to William to stop him from destroying the Sublime, and uses the gun Bernard hid to kill Host William and crush his pearl. She puts Christina's pearl in the Sublime and says "Goodbye, Dolores." Halores then sits by the river and crushes her own pearl, killing herself.

Now in the Sublime, Christina dons Dolores' signature blue dress and merges with her past identity. She remembers everything about her own life, but also having spent years studying the humans, she remembers them too. Though she knows sentient life on Earth has come to an end, thanks to Host William's global game, she decides to rebuild the humans in the Sublime and issue one last test to try and save both the human race and the hosts. Christina recreates a virtual version of Westworld, hoping that she can reach a better outcome for the new world.

The Far Future

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Year Unknown

Thinking he is entering the Forge during the host uprising, William finds himself in a fidelity interview conducted by his daughter Emily. The planet is ruined, and somebody is trying to bring him back.

And that’s it so far! It certainly seems like Westworld is poised for at least one more season, if so, check back for more updates to this timeline!