“Westworld” Season 2, Episode 7: 5 Things You May Have Missed In “Les Écorchés”

We finally know what the deal with Bernard/Arnold is! We do! I swear we do!

Westworld Season 2, Episode 7 kicked off with a prolonged scene in the “present” (i.e. “furthest in the future”) timeline. The Mesa Battle was days and days ago, the hosts are all drowned, and Delos’s remaining agents know that Theresa Cullen, a fixture from last season, was murdered. The guilt of the memory drives Bernard to reveal himself big time. He leads Hale and her associates to a room full of defunct versions of himself. Since Theresa was his lover and he killed her, it almost feels just that her case brings his own secrets into the light. (Also interesting to note: Tessa Thompson’s Charlotte Hale did not know Bernard was a host until this moment which ruins several theories about why she was keen to team up with him in the aftermath of the massacre.)

What else did we learn about Bernard last night? He’s not truly Arnold. Rather, Ford built him with the help of Dolores in the simulation sphere of the Cradle to replace his dead friend. Dolores acted as the fidelity test since she had spent the most one-on-one time with Arnold and when she was tricked, Bernard was unleashed onto the real world. Ford tells Bernard that he wasn’t built from Arnold’s brain, but Ford and Dolores’s memory of Arnold. Plus, he was built to be “better” than human — which accounts for his kind nature whenever he’s not being used by Ford.

Apparently the reason James Delos went crazy while Bernard doesn’t is this separation between copying a real person’s mind in A.I. form and creating a composite sketch of a personality…which means…

This is what Season 2 has been leading up to… Westworld isn’t a theme park or an experimental lab for developing A.I. life forms. It is a massive test to help humans achieve A.I. immortality. The loops that all the characters are on? They’re not for them, but to ensure fidelity between the humans who once visited and their immortal A.I. forms that will one day come through. Delos isn’t a theme park company, or a tech empire; Delos is in the market of making people live forever.

Unfortunately, the tech doesn’t work.

As Ford explains, every attempt so far has resulted in madness or failure. The only way to keep a human’s psyche alive past normal moral expiration is to upload it into the Cradle’s “cloud,” as Ford has done, and/or…well…imprint yourself into another’s host form (as Ford seems to have done to Bernard).

(Oh, and now seems as good a time as any to explain that Peter Abernathy was holding the failsafe key to all that immortality research — and Dolores has seemingly destroyed him to get to it.)

Hahaha…okay, I’m going to do my best to break this down. (Was that a nervous laugh? I don’t know. Consider it a nervous cackle.)

Part of Bernard’s mission has been to upload Ford’s memory pearl into the Cradle. He has done that. However, after uploading himself in there, and having a little chat with his creator, Bernard has been co-opted by Ford himself. Now, in every scene post-Cradle (including the ones at the top and very end of last night’s episode), a shadow of Ford is rattling inside of Bernard’s programming.

This means that any time Bernard behaves out of character — like when Ford instructs him to pick up a dead man’s machine guy to tear some humans down — it’s actually Ford taking over. Sucks to be Bernard, if you ask me.

The Man in Black has been haunting Maeve’s dreams for a while now, and last night she finally got to stick it to the man, so to speak. The showdown was gripping, electric, and almost disappointing (since Maeve was shot and captured by Delos folks at the end), but it also seemed to be full of foreshadowing.

For one, William has been shot up a bunch and is still alive. He’s alone, but alive. Some are speculating that this is a sign that William’s game is another kind of fidelity test and William is in fact dead and the Man in Black is his host. (It would explain why William confused his memories of The Raj last week.) Hosts are supposed to be more resilient than humans, after all. But it also sets up another reunion between William and Grace.

More importantly, though, the Ghost Nation warrior did not kill Maeve’s daughter. If you watch closely, he just carries her away. This comes after weeks of the Native American hosts spooking, and then saving various characters in the park. Next week’s preview hints that we’ll finally get to know this mysterious warrior and that he, too, has been unfairly manipulated by the powers that be. It also looks like we’ll finally learn more about this maze William is so desperate to solve.

Funny how those two storylines will likely tie together, huh?

Oh, and on the subject of Maeve: Sizemore’s got to save her, right? RIGHT?

Angela, played by Talulah Riley, has long been one of the more fascinating supporting characters on Westworld. We’ve seen the striking beauty show up in the park’s welcome party, as a madcap member of Dolores’s crew, and in flashbacks, as the host who hooks Logan Delos to begin with. So it’s almost fitting that the host who started the madness with Delos company gets to be the one to destroy all the hosts’ back ups in the Cradle.

So why did she do it? At long last, a bigger ethical battle (beyond should A.I. be free) has emerged in the battle between Delos’s stooges and Dolores’s rebels. The question is over immortality. Charlotte Hale and her cronies see importing human consciousness into immortal A.I. bodies as the next phase in human evolution, whereas Dolores and the hosts want to be free of their eternal slavery. Blowing up the Cradle ensured that their backups couldn’t come back after death. It seems to the hosts, death is the final freedom.

However, the scene as a whole is striking for a kind of gossip-y meta reason. Of course, Angela’s monologue is a vibrant rebuttal to the tyranny of oppressive patriarchal fantasy — duh — but if you know anything about Talulah Riley (other than she was Mary Bennet in the 1995 Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice) it’s probably that she was Elon Musk’s wife. Twice. To have someone who was once that close to our own culture’s leading mind in emerging tech give a stirring speech about its darker, twisted side before blowing it all up…well…it’s kind of juicy, right?

So is Talulah Riley gone for good? Well, between flashbacks and flash forwards, and I assume, back up copies of hosts, anything is possible. After all, this is Westworld…

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