‘Westworld’: 5 Things You Missed on The Season 2 Premiere, “Journey Into Night”

Westworld‘s biggest Season 1 twist can be summed up in one phrase: different timelines. So far, it looks like Season 2 of Westworld is — pardon the colloquialism — back on its bullshit.

Yeah, we’ve got multiple timelines at play here. Let’s see if we can break them down for you.

The easiest thing to remember is that Bernard seems to be doing all the time-hopping in this specific episode. We’ve identified three major timelines that Bernard is toggling between.

1. The one-on-one interview with Dolores that opens the episode. Much like last season, these conversations seem to exist outside of the episode’s overarching timeline. There’s no way to know when this conversation happens, but what is more intriguing is what is happening in this brief chat. In Season 1, Bernard was the one asking the questions and Dolores was the one coming to grips with her “dreams.” Here, it’s reversed. It’s a thematic flourish that frames the big difference in power dynamics this season. Dolores is the one leading a revolution in the park and Bernard is the confused pawn.
2. Bernard’s rescue by the Delos team a week or so after the Season 1 Massacre. When we see Bernard waking up on that beach, we are jumping ahead about a week and a half, two weeks into the future. Mayhem has ripped across Westworld and now a crack team including our old friend Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) and new “friend” Karl Strand (Gustav Skarsgard) has “rescued” Bernard. They’re also executing all the remaining hosts and trying to retrieve some very important information. Helpful hint: Anytime you see Bernard wandering through a hellscape with Gustav “Floki” Skarsgard, he is in this timeline.
3. Everything that is happening linearly and immediately after the end of Season 1. After Bernard flashes back to how he and Charlotte Hale escaped death at the party, we get a fairly linear look at what happened to everyone in the aftermath of Dolores’s big heel turn. So, when Bernard and Charlotte are on the run? They’re in this timeline. When Dolores is going on a killing spree? This one. Everything with Maeve? This one.

Okay, is that a little more clear? Good, it’s going to get a tad more confusing….

Immediately after Bernard’s little opening interview with Dolores, we get a mind-bending montage of scenes that link Bernard’s past with his future…we think?

The early clips clearly harken back to Season 1, but then we see something that we haven’t seen before: Dolores happily walking with Bernard in contemporary dress. After that, we see still more flashes of scenes that we haven’t really gotten to yet: Dolores’s “father,” Abernathy glitching out in a new location, Dolores confronting Bernard, and Bernard taking part in (???) the bloodshed himself.

Adding to the confusion? We hear actor Jeffrey Wright ask in voice over, “Is this now?”

Well, I don’t know. “Now” is a very thin construct in the world of Westworld. I do think, though, this montage gives us a sneak peek at some very troubling things to come. It also suggests that Bernard’s kind of confused about this timey-wimey stuff, too. Same, Bernard. Same.

If you were to ask me what the one key revelation from last night’s Season 2 Westworld premiere was, I would say, “It’s Facebook, fools!” By that, I mean that Delos isn’t interested in the business of theme parks as much as they are into data harvesting.

Bernard and Charlotte take shelter in a secret underground laboratory where Bernard encounters some creepy skinless hosts that he’s apparently never seen before. These are “drone hosts.” They are harvesting the “data” captured by the regular hosts and squirreling them away. And Bernard seems very, very concerned by this, even though Charlotte is completely nonplussed.

You see, the powers that be behind Westworld have not only been harvesting video recordings of all its guests’ numerous sins, but they’ve also been swabbing the discarded hosts for the guests’ DNA. Yep, that means blood, hair, skin, and…semen. Charlotte’s main concern seems to be securing all this priceless data and it looks like it’s all being held in the body of one Fred Abernathy…aka Dolores’s glitching farmer father.

If you’re still confused about all this, Vanity Fair’s Joanna Robinson has a super duper deep dive — including the really important insight that we kind of should have known about this twist from the start. If you read the fine print of the cutesy Delos “Terms of Service” contracts HBO posted for funsies in Season 1, you would have seen this damning phrase:

“By entering the Delos Destinations Port of Entry, you acknowledge that Delos, Inc. controls the rights to and remains the sole owner of, in perpetuity: all skin cells, bodily fluids, secretions, excretions, hair samples, saliva, sweat, blood, and any other bodily functions not listed here. Delos, Inc. reserves the right to use this property in any way, shape, or form in which the entity sees fit.”

Ahem.

Season 2 of Westworld is adding a few new faces, but the one that should have pop culture fans the most psyched is Betty Gabriel. The actress was the stone cold breakout of Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning horror flick Get Out and here she gets to show off her swagger as a Delos commando helping clean up the carnage. Yep, that’s Betty Gabriel strutting through Westworld with full armor and a machine gun.

Plus: It’s too soon to say but Gabriel’s character Maling might also know more about Bernard than she’s letting on. She has a deck of Delos “cards” that list various persons of interest and Bernard’s is rated “HIGH” priority. But the question is, do those cards signify folks that are thought to be human, or confirmed hosts.

Are Strand, Maling, and crew pretending that Bernard is a human just to use his knowledge as a host? We shall see…

Maybe the most fun storyline of Season 1 was watching Maeve come into her proverbial power. Not only did the Westworld madam slowly snap out of her coding, but she discovered the power to command other hosts in the park.

Well, it seems that Maeve’s ascent isn’t stopping yet.

In this episode we get confirmation that Maeve can control hosts outside the Westworld park grounds, as she’s able to command blood-thirsty hosts inside the labs. She also is establishing a canny knack for leadership and strategy. She manages to enlist Westworld writer Lee Sizemore to her crusade, all while keeping Hector happily by her side. In fact, she brings the human to heel in a stunning power move that flips the literal script on what’s gone on at Westworld so far.

Chaos might reign supreme on Westworld, but Maeve is in control.

Also, sort of spoiler alert, but not totally since HBO released this in its official trailer… but it looks like Maeve is going to have a lot of fun in this “Shogun World” everyone’s been buzzing about.

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