Westworld Finale: Let's Break Down Every Bonkers Thing That Happened

So, uh… what just happened?

A lot! At the tail end of a second season that was often pretty confusing and meandering, Westworld crammed a ton of plot into these final 90 minutes. I’ve only seen it once, so it’s possible I didn’t get everything, but for now, let’s just take it character-by-character.

Did we finally find out what the hell was going on with Bernard all season?

Kind of! The big reveal in the Westworld finale was that Bernard’s constant confusion and Slaughterhouse-Five-esque time-jumping was caused by… Bernard, who scrambled his own brain so the Delos Corporation couldn’t figure out what was actually going on.

Bernard, we learn, has a big choice to make: If he wants, he can kill all the hosts. He doesn’t, and Dolores gets away.

How does Dolores pull that off?

She creates a host version of Charlotte Hale, puts her consciousness into it, kills the real Charlotte Hale, and finally escapes Westworld by pretending to be her.

Wait. Tessa Thompson is playing Dolores now?

If only. When it was revealed that Dolores’s consciousness had been transferred into a host facsimile of Charlotte Hale, I got pretty excited, because—as much as I like Evan Rachel Wood—I love the idea that a totally different actress could take over the central role. For all its flaws, Westworld is one of the only shows on TV that could generate a plausible, in-universe explanation for how something like that could happen.

But it’s ultimately a tease, because Dolores-as-Charlotte also smuggles out a bunch of cores. In the real world, she gets a host-creating machine and uses them to create a new Dolores body and a new Bernard body. (For those keeping track at home, that’s three confirmed hosts operating independently in the real world—two of them controlled by Dolores, and one controlled by Bernard.)

Who else is actually a host?

Ashley Stubbs, maybe? When Dolores escapes the park in Charlotte Hale’s body, she gets cornered by Stubbs. It’s pretty clear he knows what’s up, but decides to let her leave anyway. He also tells Dolores that he was personally hired by Dr. Ford, and has always retained that loyalty. ("I guess you could call it my core drive," he says with a twinkle in his eye. "I guess I just stick to the role Ford gave me.")

So maybe Stubbs has been a host all along, or maybe he’s just speaking metaphorically because—as Season Two has repeatedly demonstrated—he’s ultimately more loyal to the hosts than the assholes who run the Delos Corporation. Either way, he lets Dolores escape.

Oh! The Man in Black. He’s a host too.

Hold on. The Man in Black is a host?

Apparently!

When did they reveal that?

After the credits! I hope you stuck around.

Has he always been a host?

As far as I can tell! Westworld isn’t above jumping around in time to provide new context for its twists, so maybe we’ll find out the real Man in Black was swapped out for the host version at some point in the series.

Was his daughter a host?

At least some version(s) of his daughter was a host! We’ve seen either two or three versions of (adult) Emily in Westworld. There’s the Emily that showed up in flashbacks that took place outside the theme park, who wanted to have her mother committed. It seems safe to assume this was the real Emily—but this is Westworld, so I guess we can’t be 100 percent sure.

Then there’s the Emily we first met in The Raj, who spent a few episodes riding around with the Man in Black before he concluded she was a host and shot her. At the time, Westworld wanted us to think he was just being paranoid, and that this was the real Emily, who he had killed for no reason. Bummer!

But the post-credits scene gives us a good reason to distrust that narrative. When the Man in Black reaches the inner workings of the park, he is greeted by… Emily. This version seems to be a host. (Among other things, she calls him "William," not "Dad.") And she reveals that the Man in Black, like James Delos before him, is actually a host with the original William’s consciousness implanted in a 1:1 facsimile of his body. She also reveals that the Man in Black has been tested over and over again without success. So while Westworld’s timeline remains fuzzy, I have a hard time believing that Emily would still look exactly as old as she looked in those flashbacks—which, if I’m right, means that neither "Emily" we’ve met in Westworld is the real thing. But maybe Season Three will prove me wrong.

Okay, that’s everybody who’s functionally immortal! Let’s talk about everybody who died.

Charlotte Hale is dead?

The real one? Yep.

Elsie is dead?

Yep. Sorry.

Clementine is dead?

Yep. But she was already a zombie anyway.

Dr. Ford is dead?

He was already dead! Now he’s even more dead, because Bernard has decided to move on without the ghost of his creator whispering in his ear.

Lee Sizemore is dead?

Yep. Who cares.

Maeve is dead?

For now! But almost definitely not for long. That loaded, lingering glance between Felix and Sylvester strongly implied that the pair will collaborate on bringing Maeve back to life.

The real question is what Maeve will do after they bring her back to life. As she said roughly 30 times this season, her whole thing was making sure her daughter was safe. Now that Maeve has successfully delivered her daughter to the Westworld equivalent of the Elysian Fields, what’s she going to do next?

Oh yeah. What was the deal with that big door in the sky?

It’s kind of like the Cloud—a kind of independent paradise, which Dr. Ford left for the hosts as a kind of posthumous parting gift. The catch is that the hosts needed to give up their bodies to do it. A bunch of hosts took the deal—most notably, Akecheta, the Ghost Nation leader at the heart of Season Two’s best episode, who finally got to reunite with his lost love Kohana. He also brought Maeve’s daughter, fulfilling his promise to look out for her in Maeve’s absence. My guess is that we’ll never see any of these characters again.

So… what’s going to happen next?

Good question! The Season Two finale really cleaned house on the core Westworld cast. For now, we’re down to three major characters, all of them hosts: Dolores (who can also secretly influence the Delos Corporation in her Charlotte Hale body), Bernard, and the Man in Black. The central conflict we’re left with is between Dolores and Bernard. Dolores has concluded that humans are an inferior life form to hosts, so she wants to kill all the people in the world and take over. Bernard still believes humankind deserves some kind of redemption. And when the episode ends, both Dolores and Bernard are in the real world—so it’s probably safe to assume that less of Westworld Season Three will take place in Westworld proper. (As usual, the Man in Black is a wild card; it’s not really clear where his story is going, or frankly, why we should care.)

Back inside the park’s walls, a few familiar characters are still walking around: Stubbs, Felix, Sylvester, our new buddies from Shogun World. Any of the dead hosts—Maeve, Teddy, Hector, Clementine—could at least theoretically be revived. And while Season Two introduced audiences to Shogun World and The Raj, there are six distinct parks run by the Delos Corporation—so there are still three entire Westworld theme parks we don’t know anything about. For better or worse, Westworld clearly has enough material to spin out dense, twisty, needlessly convoluted stories for years and years to come.

One more question. Did the season finale include a montage set to a Radiohead song?

You’re goddamn right it did.