Westworld Season 2 Episode 7 Recap: The Coward Dr. Ford

Westworld’s second season has leaned pretty heavily on the host side of the host-guest dynamic. In the absence of Season One’s most compelling human characters, like Theresa Cullen and Dr. Ford, one-note side characters like Ashley Stubbs and Lee Sizemore have been given bigger roles—which has not, sadly, made them any more interesting.

So it’s no surprise that Westworld finally found a way to bring back its most interesting human: Dr. Ford, who made a surprise appearance in Bernard’s mental meta-narrative at the end of last week’s episode. Dr. Ford’s arc in Season One could be frustrating—at times, it felt like the enigmatic nature of his plan was just a smokescreen for a fuzzily conceived storyline—but Anthony Hopkins always managed to elevate the material, and Ford was one of the few characters whose actions could actually affect all of Westworld.

And now that he’s back, Dr. Ford is… back on his bullshit! (He’s reintroduced quoting William goddamn Blake, like he just finished a freshman English class.) In a series of lengthy, pseudo-philosophical monologues, Dr. Ford takes Bernard on a tour of Sweetwater as it was before the robot revolution. It’s a dose of nostalgia for both Bernard and Westworld viewers—a time when characters like Dolores and Maeve, and Clementine were all in the same place, leading relatively happy lives in their short loops. It’s also a vision of the world as it could be if Westworld existed in a bubble, without a single human to interrupt its grand design.

That includes Dr. Ford, who is only "alive" in this mental liminal space. And with his allegiances now firmly on the side of his creations, Dr. Ford reveals the grand plan for Westworld. "The park is an experiment, a testing chamber," Bernard realizes in the middle of a Dr. Ford monologue. "The guests are the variables. And the hosts are the controls." (This is basically just what William already told us a few episodes ago, but I guess it’s good to have it confirmed by the big man himself.)

Of course, this grand scheme is just theoretical if the Delos Corporation can’t secure all that data, which remains locked in the control unit of Peter Abernathy. Charlotte Hale is trying to get the data out of the park, and Dolores is trying to stop her—and, ideally, get her dad back in the process.

This is a particularly dense Westworld episode, and anyone who’s deeply invested in the show’s overarching mythology will probably find plenty to chew on here—but I’m not particularly invested in that, and I wish Westworld would stop dropping it in big, exposition-laden sequences. To my mind, the best moments in Westworld’s second season have been relatively episodic and self-contained: Maeve’s brief jaunt into Shogun World, or Emily’s escape from The Raj, or the failed experiment designed to extend James Delos’s life after his death. But as soon as we return to the main cast and start talking about the Mesa and the Cradle and the Valley Beyond… well, at this point my eyes just kind of glaze over.

But I’ll at least give Westworld a little credit for attempting to ground all that mythology in the emotional story of Dolores’s relationship with her "father." The most emotionally affecting moment in this week’s episode is a callback to the pilot, when Dolores and Peter Abernathy repeat a conversation about how Abernathy went from fearsome ne’er-do-well to folksy rancher. "I am what I am because of you. And I wouldn’t have it any other way," Abernathy says, just before Dolores removes his control unit.

So Dolores has lost some key allies—including Peter Abernathy and Angela, who self-immolates to strike a decisive blow against the Delos forces—but her revolution is going pretty well (even as she continues to sacrifice the moral high ground to attain it). The same, alas, can’t be said for Maeve, who finally found her "daughter" in last week’s episode, only to discover that a different host had long since been programmed to replace her as the girl’s "mother."

This storyline should probably feel more poignant than it does. Maybe if Maeve had openly acknowledged the total, nonsensical futility of her quest—and pursued it anyway—it could have felt tragically quixotic, instead of just naive and uncharacteristically dumb. But Maeve’s reunion with her daughter does lead to a pretty fun encounter with the Man in Black, which doubles as a chance for Maeve to rewriter her previous, traumatic encounter with the Man in Black at the farmstead.

Does that sound familiar? What we’re seeing, essentially, is a reversal of the traditional host-guest dynamic. Maeve is getting the chance to take another crack at an old storyline; the Man in Black is seeing what it’s like to get shot at by someone who wants him dead. Westworld even gives the Man in Black a completely implausible but host-like fate, as he survives multiple bullet wounds—including one shot square in the chest—to live to fight another day.

So here’s where we stand. Maeve and the Man in Black are bullet-riddled, but hardly out of the fight. Dolores and her allies are heading for the Valley Beyond with Peter Abernathy’s control unit, which means the Delos Corporation’s army can’t be far behind. And even Dr. Ford is still a power player in the real world; for all of his talk about giving the robots free will, he can (and will) take control of Bernard when he decides Bernard needs to kill somebody. And there are still wild cards like Emily and Elsie who might shift the balance of power in any number of directions. Everyone is converging on the same mysterious place—and with just three episodes left in Season Two, my guess is that Westworld will finally start tipping its hand soon.