‘Westworld’ Season 2, Episode 9: 5 Things You May Have Missed In “Vanishing Point”

Westworld Season 2, Episode 9, “Vanishing Point” finally introduced us officially to Mrs. Man in Black: Juliette Delos. Yes, we’ve seen her portrayed in stock photo props and quick flashback shots by model Claire Unabia, but we’ve never really met Juliette. That is, until now.

Sela Ward plays the older version of Juliette and it turns out she’s as complicated as you would expect. William and Juliette’s daughter, Emily, believes her mother’s problems are simply those of an addict, but William knows it’s something more. Juliette is the one person who suspects that William might be something darker than just a philanthropic bizillionaire. (Please note that since I don’t know how far into the future Westworld takes place, I have adjusted William’s fortunes to account for inflation. Hence, he is a “bizillionaire.”)

William confesses to a sleeping Juliette that he is kind of an evil sociopathic asshole who is obsessed with Westworld. The twist is Juliette was not asleep. Juliette is driven to kill herself after seeing all the atrocities on William’s Westworld file —  a file that she leaves for Emily to find.

Remember how Westworld introduced the Cradle (or CR4-DL) a few weeks ago? Well, meet the Cradle’s human counterpart, the Forge.

Just as the Cradle is a secure server hosting all the, uh, hosts, the Forge is also a server storing backups of people from the park. The only twist is that the Forge is where every human guest’s file is stored. This is the data that Delos is hoping to turn into the next stage of human evolution. Basically, the Forge – which is conveniently in the Valley Beyond (because I guess Westworld loves “Valley Forge” puns) — is a cloud where everyone’s humanity is stored and if Dolores blows it up, Delos will never be able to download everyone’s consciousnesses into immortal A.I. form.

Coincidentally, it seems that everyone’s storylines are driving them to this mysterious Forge for one final battle. Dolores wants to destroy it to spite the humans, the Ghost Nation wants to use it as some sort of gateway to another world, Charlotte Hale wants to protect it, William’s daughter wanted to co-invest in it to save her mother’s memory, and Bernard wants to “end” stuff there. So next week’s Season Finale should be fun.

William might have believed his daughter Emily was just a host, but you should not. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Katja Herbers confirms that her character’s death was legit: “Emily is definitely human. [William] has killed his human daughter. This is a terrible tragedy.”

However, because this is Westworld, that doesn’t mean the show is done with Herbers. After all, it’s quite the coincidence that prior to this awful scene, Emily herself touts the Forge as a way to bring their dead loved ones back for answers, if not also a second chance. Plus, Emily has been hanging out in the park since she was a child. If anyone’s got a full and complete profile in the Forge, chances are it’s her.

Did we mention that there’s going to be a showdown at the Forge next week? We did, didn’t we? Just saying!

He certainly wants to be, right? Throughout Westworld Season 2, Episode 9 “Vanishing Point,” we saw William rubbing at his forearm, in precisely the same place that Bernard finds a data access point in himself. The idea is that William worries, and later hopes, that he is actually not human, but a host under Ford’s control. The obsession mirrors his steady decline into madness, and poses a lot of questions.

We won’t know officially until next week — at the earliest — but we suspect that William is human. First, the Delos rescue crew he mowed down didn’t notice anything suspicious when they scanned him. Second, it’s a much crueler twist to force William to confront his own inhumanity by reaffirming his actual humanity. If he’s a host, he can absolve himself of his crimes. He can tell himself he’s Ford’s pawn. If he’s a human, he needs to find a way to earn recompense for his sins, the most egregious of course being that he murdered his own daughter.

Again, that Forge place is looking like quite the setting for a dramatic showdown, huh?

Poor Clementine. It seems that she’s always a pawn in someone else’s game. As a host, she worked as a prostitute for Maeve. Then, she fell in line with Dolores. And now, she’s a carrier for a cyber virus designed to turn the hosts on each other.

In case you missed it, last week, a Delos tech told Charlotte Hale that Maeve’s “power” was just her sending data through a mesh network that connected the consciousnesses of all the hosts. Usually this network was just used to bring hosts back online, but Maeve’s ability to use it as a conduit to send messages gave the Delos folks an idea. They have rewired Clementine to do the same, only she’s sending a command to hosts in her immediate radius to turn on each other and fight to the death. It’s like she’s a cyber Typhoid Mary, only instead of spreading Typhoid, she’s spreading a rabid self-destructive type of insanity.

And yes, it looks like Charlotte will be deploying Clementine upon all the hosts who converge upon the Forge next week. (And it also looks like a back up of LOGAN DELOS is in the Forge, too!) The Forge! The Forge! It all comes down to the Forge!

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