Howdy, hosts and guests alike, and welcome to another few months of What in the name of Ben Barnes' beard face is happening on Westworld? Season 3 is fast approaching, and it's extremely understandable if you can't succinctly sum up what happened in season 2. No one can. Creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy cannot. If a friend tells you they have a quick, tidy summary of Westworld season 2, just assume they are a robot programmed to mislead you, specifically. The only way to know for sure is to ask politely or shoot them in the chest with an old-timey six-round revolver. You are human, you have choices. That's actually a pretty major theme of Westworld season 2, now that I think of it.

But first! Here's a recap of what happened at the end of season 1 (if you want to skip the season 1 recap, click here):

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Image via HBO

"Westworld" is a sprawling, multi-level theme park in the style of the old lawless American West, in which human Guests come to interact with robotic Hosts, fulfilling all their crude and violent desires without any of the remorse. Unbeknown to the guests, however, a plan set in motion by enigmatic park director Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) has introduced newfound sentience in the Hosts. Chief among the enlightened are Maeve (Thandie Newton), a brothel madam who begins to remember all her past lives, and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), a rancher's daughter who is revealed to be one of the first Hosts ever built by Ford's late partner, Arnold Weber (Jeffrey Wright). Arnold himself was re-created after death in the robot-body of a man named Bernard, Ford's right-hand man.

Dolores, having found the center of the "maze" crafted long ago by Arnold, gains full sentience, learning she is the much-feared Big Bad named Wyatt that was discussed throughout season 1. In the season 1 finale, a gathering of wealthy clients arrive at the park to see Ford's new narrative. Thanks to a fully-aware Dolores and her budding robot uprising, the theme of the evening turns into "getting shot in the face." It's a slaughter. Imagine the level of revenge if every sex toy in the world not only gained full sentience but remembered everything you'd done to it. Yes, you.

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Image via HBO

Important note: Throughout season 1, Dolores has run-ins with two very different men. William (Jimmi Simpson), the kind-hearted Guest who falls in love with Dolores despite his impending marriage to the daughter of the man who just bought the park, and The Man In Black (Ed Harris), a violent outlaw Guest who is also pursuing the center of the maze, often with bloody results. A crucial part of Dolores' endgame is finally remembering that William and The Man in Black are...the same person at different points in his life. Two of the narratives presented side-by-side in season 1 were, in fact, happening decades apart. Dolores obviously hadn't aged, but falling in love with a woman whose memory could be completely rebooted broke something inside of William over the years. He returned yearly to the park—even after he essentially owned it—to commit more atrocities, trying to fill a hole inside of himself by making many holes inside of others.

This twist also happened to break something vital inside the collective brains of the Westworld writing team. Internet sleuths picked up on the William-Is-Man-In-Black reveal somewhere around episode 4 or 5, and nothing can make me believe it didn't affect every choice made in crafting season 2. The second chapter of Westworld contains moments of great beauty, of genuinely clever writing, and even the deep pathos its constantly reaching for. But it also comes with some— as we say in the TV critique industry—pure, uncut fuckery. So strap on those bootstraps and let's dive in.

Analysis. Cognition only; no emotional affect.

Okay, some emotional affect:

Bernard's Journey

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Image via HBO

Season 2 begins on the shoreline. Bernard wakes up next to the ocean, inside the park, two weeks after an army of robots emerged from the woods and gunned down a cocktail party. Paramilitary soldiers from the park's parent company, Delos, have been dispatched to clean up the mess, including its suspiciously tall Head of Operations Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgard). The first episode of season 2 is bookended with this crew. First, they discover Bernard lying in the sand. The last image in the premiere is Bernard and the Delos posse finding a whole-ass sea in the middle of the park—a new one, not on any map—filled with hundreds of dead Hosts. (And one dead robot tiger. We'll return to him later.) "I killed them. All of them," Bernard says, and one of many mysteries of season 2 is set.

But first, we flashback to the night of the murder-gala. Bernard escaped the carnage alongside Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), Delos' Executive Director and overall just a cold-hearted so-and-so. As Bernard very relatably leaks the bran-fluid that makes him function like a human being, Hale guides him to a secret facility populated by hulking "drone hosts", mechanic worker bees that look like the things from I, Robot discovered anabolic steroids. There, Hale lets slip a bombshell that ends up driving the entire narrative of season 2: Delos isn't as interested in the theme park business as it is immortality. The company has been logging all records of the Guests' activity, as well as their DNA, in a secret attempt to cheat death by learning to upload a person's consciousness into a human-Host hybrid.

Unfortunately, all that sketchily-earned data was plugged into the head of Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum), Dolores' "father", who went missing after the gala slaughter. Bernard, who is just tweaking out something fierce by this point, tracks Abernathy down using the park's "Mesh Network", the subconscious link all Hosts have between them to keep narratives from colliding. Keep that mind-network, uh, in mind for later.

Double unfortunately, once Bernard and Hale have Abernathy back in their possession, they also happen to run into the one Host who would be really, really freaking mad about it: Dolores, who at this point has gone about as banagrams insane as a former cowboy robot can be.

Dolores' Journey

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Image via HBO

With a head now filled with a thousand different lives that all ended violently, Dolores is rightfully a bit peeved, riding rampant through the park and gunning down Guests and unworthy Hosts alike. It really is a great, full-bodied performance from Evan Rachel Wood. She leans into the tortured villainy, even adopting a very noticeable Wyatt Walk™, which is kind of hard to describe. Imagine if someone uploaded a fundamental understanding of pain and trauma into one of those robots that plays the washboard at Chuck E. Cheese. It’s that. Picture that. I feel like I’m not doing a great job getting across that this is a compliment. The writing often gives Dolores too many roundabout ruminations on nothing—if you asked season 2 Dolores the color of the sky, she'd be like "are the clouds not also worthy of freedom, of a choice??—but Wood mostly makes it all work.

Dolores is obsessed with reaching something called "The Valley Beyond", a mysterious area of the park that can only be discussed in the most infuriatingly vague terms possible. To get there, she needs an army. Accompanied by literal boy-toy Teddy (James Marsden), passive-bots-turned-killing-machines Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) and Angela (Tallulah Riley), and the rest of their re-programmed Horde, Dolores commandeers the army of the aggressively-mustachioed Colonel Brigham (Frederic Lehne). Together, they make a stand against the high-powered Westworld QA Security Force in "Virtù e Fortuna", the episode that proved this show's creative team watched "The Battle of the Bastards" and were like "...well, shit." Dolores and her main crew survive—Bernard is knocked out and taken away by Clementine during the melee—but Hale escapes back to headquarters with Peter Abernathy.

Dolores is less than pleased at the loss of her father. Until that point, Teddy's main job was to punch every person who got a little too lippy with Dolores. It is, straight-up, all he does. For five episodes, Teddy is just a waiter and he is exclusively serving knuckle sandwiches. Unfortunately, after the battle with Delos' forces, he shows a bit too much mercy to the surviving members of Brigham's troops, so Dolores takes him behind the woodshed and turns down every part of his core drive that doesn't involve extreme violence and scowling, rendering him an unfeeling killing machine. Her attack-Teddy at her side, Dolores rides to Sweetwater—the main Westworld town that housed much of season 1's storylines—and commandeers the train, which she drives straight into the heart of Westworld HQ, known as The Mesa.

A Brief Interruption to Explain Some Important Terms

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Image via HBO

One of the most fascinating parts of Westworld season 2 is the way it expands on how the hell this high-tech wonderland populated by robots works in the first place. Along those lines, it introduces two pieces of technology that are vital to the second half of season 2:

PEARLS: Basically, a Pearl is a Host's brain, a tennis-ball looking thing that contains all of their current data, code, narratives, and allowed memories. If you want to get all spiritual about it—which Westworld season 2 definitely freaking does, often for a little too long in an already-90-minute episode—it could also be looked at like a Host's soul. Remove the Pearl and the body will shut down, but all that Host is and ever was is still in the Pearl, perfectly ready for another vessel.

THE CRADLE: The park's main server, where every Host has a back-up. When they're not being used, a Host's consciousness exists inside the Cradle—which looks to them like Sweetwater—blissfully unaware that they're basically hardware sitting on a crowded desktop.

William's Journey

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Image via HBO

Alright, let's back way the hell up.

Westworld season 2 fills in the complete backstory of The Man In Black, the genuinely tragic story of a grown man who simply will not stop attending a theme park, much to the sorrow and horror of his immediate family. Like Evan Rachel Wood, this character hinges on the genius of Ed Harris. Take one step back from Westworld's philosophical pondering and it's hard to ignore that William is basically a billionaire who tries to find meaning in his life by going to Six Flags Great Adventure and riding El Toro way more aggressively than anyone else. Imagine if Jeff Bezos disappeared once a year just to beat the shit out of the Pirates of the Caribbean animatronics while sobbing.

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Image via HBO

But Harris, shriveled in a tuxedo but always intimidating in his black-hat costume, wears the tragedy of Williams' many losses across his body and face. We learn that over the years, the man never learned to feel much of anything outside the park, much less love for his daughter Emily (Katja Herbers) or wife Juliet (Sela Ward), the latter of which ultimately commits suicide because of his distance. (Also because she finds William's Westworld "file", a video record of all the unspeakable things he did in the park over the years.)

But we also learn that William was crucial in Delos' decision to use Westworld as a means to immortality. Their first test case? Company founder and William's father-in-law, James Delos (Peter Mullan). After James Delos died of an undisclosed illness, his company made copy after copy of the man's body, but his consciousness never took; a person's entire self simply isn't compatible with a fabricated vessel, and every Delos-bot would mentally degrade after a few days. William visited the failed versions frequently—partially to check on the progress, partially because he's a big ol' gloating asshole, and almost certainly because Jimmi Simpson is a treasure that you gotta' bring back. But eventually, William loses faith in the project and abandons the final James Delos Host in its pod; left to its own devices over several decades, it goes absolutely mad.

Flash-forward to the present-day storyline, and Old Man William is straight-up thriving now that the Hosts are killing people for real. After literal decades of numbness, this crazy sonuvabitch is rocking one hell of a half-chub because a desperado shot him in the shoulder and it actually hurt. William has the same goal as Dolores, The Valley Beyond, and he enlists the help of his Host pal Lawrence (Clifton Collins Jr.)—who he has murdered many, many times in the past—to get there.

William knows that so much of what's happening in the park—the robot uprising, the murder, the puzzles within puzzles—is one final middle-finger from Robert Ford, because a grudge between old rich dickheads will always transcend time and mortality. So he knows the obstacles put in his place are there for a reason...except one, his own daughter, Emily. That particular blast from the past escaped a tiger attack in the British India-themed park "The Raj"—which explains the dead tiger from before—then escaped another kidnapping at the hands of the Ghost Nation, just to find her insane father. Possibly my favorite line in all of Westworld is when Emily describes William's path as "suicide by robot, or whatever the fuck.” There really is no better summary. Bravo. 

William and Emily reach an emotional understanding, with the Man in Black's daughter admitting it was unfair to blame him for Juliet's suicide. William responds to this olive branch by ditching Emily in the middle of the night, because one of the core tenets on William's journey to self-discovery is never, ever stop being a dickhead.

But the only thing more abundant in Westworld than chafing is karma. After ditching his daughter, William almost immediately runs into another ghost from his bloody past: Maeve.

Maeve's Journey

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Image via HBO

While all of the above is going down, Maeve is on her own voyage to find the daughter she once had in a past life, before Ford re-programmed her into a less emotional brothel role. She recruits a crew of her own along the way, one much more rag-tag than Dolores' army. First, skittish head Westworld writer Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), helpful because he knows the way to Maeve's destination. Second, Host gunslinger Hector Escaton (Rodrigo Santoro), slightly more helpful because he was literally programmed to shoot guns good while wearing the shit out of some chaps. This trio does enough walking to fill at least 3/4 of a Hobbit. Along the way, they pick up mostly-good-hearted technicians Felix Lutz (Leonardo Nam) and Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum)—who are mostly just trying to avoid getting slaughtered by robots—and outlaw-bot Armistice (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal), who is mostly just spending time slaughtering humans. Eventually, they emerge from Westworld's maintenance tunnels into in a snowy, wooded area.

Where they are are promptly attacked by a Samurai.

Yes, Maeve's journey takes a long detour through Shōgunworld, or "Park 2", the area next to Westworld designed to feel like Japan's Edo period. One of season 2's big revelations is the fact there are actually six parks; we know of Westworld, The Raj, Shōgunworld, and [major season 3 spoilers, courtesy of eagle-eyed viewers pouring over trailers]  Warworld, which is based on Nazi-occupied Italy, a.k.a. the height of destination vacation fun. Based on the themes we do know, I'm just going to assume the two unknown parks let you ride on the Hindenburg and contract the Bubonic plague.

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Image via HBO

Shōgunworld, on a normal day, plays out almost identical storylines to Westworld—including mirror-image counterparts to all the characters we know—except everyone is stabbing each other instead of pulling triggers. ("You try writing 300 stories in 3 weeks," Sizemore says.) But things have gone absolutely batty, and Maeve and Co. are swept up in a narrative-gone-wrong involving Hector's counterpart Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), Maeve's counterpart Akane (Rinko Kikuchi), Clementine's counterpart Sakura (Kiki Sukezane), and a Shogun (Masaru Shinozuka), who doesn't have a counterpart but has gone completely insane. 

The Shogun kidnaps Sakura, and during the rescue attempt, Maeve discovers she can control the Hosts around her with her mind. "A new voice," she calls it, a casual term that I can confirm goes over better in HBO dramas than it does in therapy. (In reality, Maeve is manipulating the Mesh Network that runs between Hosts.) Both the Shogun and Akane die during the night's events, but Maeve uses her newfound ability to fend off the remainder of the Shogun's ninja army. 

Leaving Musashi and Sakura behind in the peaceful Shōgunworld area "Snow Lake", Maeve and her companions access a utility tunnel and finally reach the sector where Maeve's daughter lives. Tragically, it's also the sector where Maeve's replacement lives. Thandie Newton does a spectacular job of selling the moment Maeve realizes the daughter she's been searching for has no idea who she is. If you're still with me [checks notes] six bajillion words into this, you might notice we're jumping all over the place, and that's because Westworld season 2 often treats its storytelling like Chipotle's drunkest employee, just mashing stuff together and hoping that tinfoil wrapping holds long enough to not spill the beans. But as I said, there are moments of great, heartwrenching beauty throughout, and this is inarguably one of them. The perfectly-packaged side-guac of Westworld season 2 moments.

So, of course, it immediately gets shot to shit. The arrival of the Ghost Nation sends Maeve and her daughter into their old home, where they're found by the Man in Black. At this point, William just assumes every second of his day has been designed by Robert Ford. A seagull could take a shit right on William's head and he'd be like "Robert, Robert, you've gotten lazy." So when he stumbles upon Maeve and her daughter—a moment that has played out countless times in William's past trips to the park—he assumes it'll end the same bloody way. But Maeve is enlightened now, and she uses her mind-tricks to wake Lawrence up, too. William's partner turns on him, shooting him a number of times, but Delos forces arrive before he can finish the job. They shoot down Maeve, too, as she watches Ghost Nation members make off with her daughter. A frantic Lee Sizemore convinces them to bring a severely damaged Maeve back to the Mesa.

Inside the Mesa

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Image via HBO

Things finally start to come together inside The Mesa. Charlotte Hale is holed up with Head of Security Ashley Stubbs—played by the most cubiform Hemsworth, Luke Hemsworth—as she tries to extract Delos' data from Abernathy's head. Dolores has just driven the Sweetwater train right into the damn place, searching for her father and looking to kill anyone who doesn't run on ones and zeroes.

And Bernard? After the battle, Bernard was dumped by Clementine inside a cave next to programmer Elsie Hughes (Shannon Woodward), the tech Bernard attacked at the end of season 1. After Elsie fixes the hole in Bernard's head the duo discover the Host body of James Delos; after years of isolation locked away in the same room, the Delos human-host hybrid has been driven into a deep, face-slicing insanity, which is also known as "becoming a freelancer who works from home." Afterward, Elsie discovers a strange command actively altering the Cradle's codes.

So while Hale toils over Abernathy and Dolores arrives at the Mesa, Bernard is down in the basement, jacked into The Cradle, where he discovers none other than the consciousness of Robert Ford. This Hannibal-ass conniver uploaded himself to the server before Dolores put a bullet in his head back in season 1. He reveals to Bernard that the overall plan for the park was to eventually test the limits of immortality, but it still isn't working. "My mind works here, but not in the real world," noted gamer Robert Ford tells Bernard. But Ford's always got a contingency; when Bernard unplugs from The Cradle, Ford comes along for the ride inside his head. 

Meanwhile, Dolores has carved a path of vengeance to where Hale is keeping her father. Because Dolores' greatest weakness is any opportunity to say absolutely nothing for 15-20 minutes, Hale and Stubbs are able to escape. After a tearful farewell, Dolores pops open her dad's head and extracts the all-important drive. Back at the Cradle, Angela distracts the world's horniest Delos operative long enough to pull the pin on his grenade. Because Angela's spiritual awakening also ramped up her aptitude for sick ironic owns, she whispers "Welcome to Westworld" as the Cradle explodes.

With their back-ups destroyed, all of the Hosts are officially free*.

(*to die for good, which is objectively the worst part about being human. Thanks, Dolores.)

Dolores' blood-soaked journey does have consequences, though. Before the final charge to the Valley Beyond, Teddy takes stock of the monster Dolores turned him into. Not willing to do her dirty work any longer, Teddy shoots himself in front of Dolores.

Ghost Nation

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Image via HBO

For my money, the most successful aspect of Westworld season 2 is its Ghost Nation storyline, a hauntingly lovely diversion that not only explains some wonky unanswered questions from season 1, but also does a better job demonstrating the mind-bending horror of realizing your world is an illusion than anything Dolores says. It's mostly told through episode 8, "Kiksuya", directed by Uta Briesewitz, written by Carly Wray and Dan Dietz

The story revolves around Akecheta—played by the great Zahn McClarnon—one of the first Hosts ever built, so convincingly lifelike he was sold Logan Delos (Ben Barnes) on convincing his father to invest in the park. Akecheta played a passive role, living a quiet life on the plains with his wife Kohana (Julia Jones) until he stumbled upon the aftermath of Dolores' first massacre before the park opened. The Host not only finds Arnold's body, but also the maze toy that belonged to Arnold's son, which sparks the first hint of consciousness in the robot's head. Because the last thing Westworld techs needed at that point was a Host remembering every time some rich asshole had stabbed him with a Bowie knife, Akecheta was completely reprogrammed into the brutal, unfeeling leader of the Ghost Nation.

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That is, until the day he found Logan Delos, delirious, nude, and rambling after being abandoned by William in season 1. "There must be some kind of way outta here," says this smokeshow to the chief, which spurs Akecheta deeper into the desert, where he becomes the first Host to glimpse the "Valley Beyond". It's a door of some sort, a portal to a different world.

Realizing the illusion of his own existence, Akecheta returns to his former tribe and kidnaps Kohana, eventually managing to break through her programming with the words they used to say in their former roles. ("Take my heart when you go." "Take mine in its place.") But soon after, Westworld techs take Kohana back to the Mesa and replace her with another model, a "ghost." Broken, Akecheta wanders the park for ten years. Unable to find the truth he's searching for, the Host heads beyond the wall of death, purposely getting himself killed and waking up inside the Mesa. Tragically, he finds Kohana, his original Kohana, immobile and offline in storage.

Akecheta understandably does not react favorably to finding the love of his life locked away along with hundreds of other naked butts. He dedicates his life to spreading the maze symbol, but because he must operate in secret he spreads it underneath the scalps of other Hosts. This is kind of like teaching someone math by writing "1 + 1 = 2" on a bullet then shooting them in the head, but it at least explains that weird thing from season 1. During this time, Akecheta also devotes himself to watching over Maeve and her daughter—during the Host's ten-year sojourn, Maeve's daughter helped out a wounded Akecheta—which adds another perspective to Maeve's season 1 memories. Again, an admirable attempt re-wire something from season 1 that doesn't quite hold up, because there are better ways to watch over a family than "peer through the window like a spooky monster." But still, A for effort.

Flash-forward to Westworld season 2, when Akecheta finds William, severely injured from his showdown with Maeve and Lawrence. The Host takes him in, but Emily soon catches up with them and convinces Ghost Nation to hand over her father.

Alone once again, William and Emily return to the subject of Juliet's suicide. And again, William becomes convinced his daughter is a Host planted there by Ford to test him. After shooting two Delos security guards—technically Williams' first "real" murder—he turns the gun on Emily and kills his own daughter. Realizing the Emily before him runs on actual human blood and not robot-juice, a grief-stricken William walks into a field and contemplates suicide. At the last moment, he cuts open his own arm instead, because this absolutely wonked-out son of a gun now thinks he is a Host built by Robert Ford.

This is how Dolores finds him. She needs the Man in Black to reach the Valley Beyond.

The Valley Beyond

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Image via HBO

So, full disclosure, it's never actually made very clear why Dolores needed The Man in Black to reach the Valley Beyond. They just kind've ride awkwardly together for a while—the expansive cinematography courtesy of DP John Grillo is, admittedly, gorgeous—then Dolores dumps William and heads inside just fine. That's emblematic of this last bit; despite what it sounds like, I enjoy Westworld season 2, but its home stretch twists itself about six too many times until its basically a Wetzel's Pretzel of what in the actual fuck.

So, as basic as possible, what is the Valley Beyond?

The technical term is actually "The Forge", and it's basically The Cradle except the size of the Grand Canyon. Instead of housing Host back-ups, The Forge was designed to hold all the data taken from the Guests. As revealed by William, the park had been extracting DNA from visitors for years through scanners inside their hats, which means there is simply no data on people who think they look silly in a Stetson. Huge blindspot. Also a huge blindspot: Unbeknownst to Delos, Robert Ford had used the processing power of the Forge to create a digital paradise, a place where the Hosts' consciousness would leave their physical bodies behind. Once the Forge is fired up, it creates a literal rip in reality only the Hosts can see; if they cross the threshold, they're uploaded into robot heaven while their body falls to the canyon below.

Here's how all our main players assemble:

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    Dolores and William ride through the desert. She's a robot revolutionary who wants to destroy the human race. He's a clinically insane billionaire who just murdered his own daughter due to a warped sense of reality. They totally boned one time and he caught feelings. It's uncomfortable.
  • Bernard meets Dolores and William outside the entrance to the Forge. Dolores is just like "Jesus Christ of course Bernard is here, right now," which is a pretty good peek behind the curtain of creating Westworld season 2. William goes for a classic double-cross but his bullets don't work on Dolores, and she takes him down in a mirror image moment from the first time the Man in Black met Teddy in season 1.
  • Teddy, for the record, remains dead for the remainder of the season. RIP Teddy.
  • Meanwhile, back at the Mesa, a tech with an unnecessarily villainous goatee named Roland (Aaron Fili) discovers the code that gives Maeve her mind-control powers. He inserts it into Clementine, turning her into a puppet that Delos plans to use to stop the Hosts from whatever hullabaloo they have planned. Delos forces race off to the Valley Beyond with Clementine leading the charge on horseback, which is stirring to watch and hilarious when you realize it 100% would be faster to just put Clementine in the passenger seat.
  • Maeve, too, escapes the Mesa, controlling a herd of robot-buffalo to take out the surrounding guards. Together with Sizemore, Hector, Felix, Sylvester, and Armistice, Maeve makes for the Valley Beyond. Along the way, Sizemore sacrifices his life to buy the rest of the crew some time.

Below-ground, Dolores places Peter Abernathy's pearl into the Forge, allowing her and Bernard to enter the system. They find an avatar of Logan Delos, who shows them the simulated laboratory where he created 18 million copies of his father before cracking the code to replicating a person's consciousness in a Host body. The trick? Realizing that human beings are uncomplicated flesh-sacks who just want to eat, sleep, bang, and occasionally watch 3-4 episodes of something on Bravo before bed. Delos' attempts at immortality were fading because their systems were too complex and rejecting the basic-ass coding that makes a human who they are. The Logan-avatar shows Dolores a "library" containing all the data Delos had collected on the human brain, and every "book" is thin as a Goosebumps novel.

To this day, I still can't decide if the Westworld creative team was being self-reflective when they came to the conclusion that you don't need to add unnecessary complexity to something that, in the end, just ain't that deep.

Either way! Dolores has yet another change of heart and decides the Valley Beyond isn't good enough for her Host brethren, either, because it was created by humans and humans have dumb monkey brains that only want to put things in cages. This is...not inaccurate, but the timing could be better. As Bernard looks on with a trademark Jeffrey Wright Look of Great Concern, Dolores begins the process of flooding the Forge.

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Image via HBO

Not fantastic news for the thousands of Hosts—led by Akecheta and the Ghost Nation—who have gathered to cross the threshold into digital nirvana. Adding to the hullabaloo is Clementine and her manipulated coding, whose presence drives the Hosts into a violent frenzy. Less Valley Beyond, more San Fernando Valley. Armistice snipes Clementine off her horse, but the melee continues. Maeve holds off the ruckus long enough for her daughter to cross the threshold, and the last person through the door before it closes is Akecheta, who reunites in paradise with Kohana.

Delos security machine-guns the rest of the Hosts, Maeve includes. Down in the bowels of the Forge, Bernard also puts a bullet in Dolores' head. Back at the Mesa, an immobile Bernard watches Charlotte Hale murder Elsie for not having the "moral flexibility" to continue supporting Delos' overall shadiness. Bernard searches in his code for the Robert Ford data that's still lurking back there. Ominously, Ford tells Bernard to craft an "epilogue."

So! The central storyline of Westworld season 2 ends with everyone we know (except Bernard) just super dead as corpse-filled floodwaters fill the canyon. Which brings us back to the season's very first image: Bernard waking up on a shoreline, reuniting with Hale and the rest of the Delos rescue squad, and discovering a brand new sea in the middle of the park. To paraphrase another HBO lead character who was almost certainly a robot in disguise, time is indeed a flat circle.

Twists, Trickery, and an Escape Into the Real World

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Down in the Forge's control room, the team finds Dolores' body, which causes Bernard's brain to finally un-fudge itself and reveal that he was behind pretty much every development in season 2. He remembers killing all of the lab technicians working on the James Delos-bot project. He remembers scrambling his own memories to avoid detection. And, most importantly, he remembers building a Host version of Charlotte Hale, into which he deposited Dolores' Pearl. Westworld season 2's biggest, most Reddit-defying twist is that the Charlotte Hale navigating the most current timeline was Dolores in disguise the entire time. Dolores-as-Charlotte kills everyone in the room, re-routes the still-preserved Valley Beyond data somewhere no human could find it, then turns the gun on Bernard.

Later, still in Hale's body, Dolores escapes the park, smuggling five pearls with her. (One of them is definitely Bernard's, while the other four remain a mystery heading into season 3.) Before she goes, Ashley Stubbs momentarily stops her and insinuates that he knows the real deal, then low-key confirms that he is also a Host. This is shocking to anyone who has never looked at Luke Hemsworth with at least one functioning eyeball. Not-Charlotte hops on a boat, as Felix and Sylvester are instructed to pick up Maeve's remains, and Stubbs gets a call to pick up a "high-value survivor." This is, assumedly, the Man in Black, who spent the entire saga back at the Valley Beyond crawling around and trying not to die.

A good deal of time later, Bernard wakes up in the basement lab of Arnold's old house, not in the park but in the real world. Dolores is back in her original body, and basically tells Bernard it's time for the human race to get got. Bernard, who just came back from the dead with his full-on naked ass sitting in a cold metal chair, is like "that's fine, yeah." The Charlotte Hale Host is there as well, but we still don't know whose pearl is in that head. I'm hoping for Teddy, because I'm pretty sure Tessa Thompson's energy embued with the soul of James Marsden is actually the cure for the Coronavirus. I'll check back here in a few weeks to confirm.

Either way, this trio of Hosts walk out of the house together and into the real world, our world, and right into season 3.

William's After-Credits Hell

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Image via HBO

Ah, if you think a show like Westworld isn't going to include a deeply puzzling after-credits scene then I got a stake in a cowboy-themed robot park to sell you. Before leaving season 2 behind for good, we catch up with the Man in Black, who exits an elevator in what we think is the Forge, but actually opens into a room that looks a whole lot like the chamber in which William once tested the James Delos Host.

There to greet him is a Host version of his daughter, Emily. A ton of time has clearly passed. The place is trashed and abandoned. “This isn’t a simulation," the Emily Host says. "This is your world. Or what’s left of it."

The duo sit down and Emily begins a familiar test, insinuating that the William we see here is actually a human-Host hybrid, possible the first successful case. And what is Emily testing for? "Fidelity." Crash to credits.

For more on Westworld season 3, check out our full review.