Westworld Season 2 Premiere Recap: The Path You Might Take

In the opening scene of Westworld’s Season Two premiere, Arnold—or is that Bernard?—has yet another elliptical conversation with Dolores. When she asks why anyone would ever be afraid of her, he pauses before answering. "I’m frightened of what you might become. What path you might take," he says.

That’s as good a thesis statement as any for the likely arc of Westworld’s second season, and a premiere that includes a scene in which Dolores identifies herself as the rancher’s daughter and Wyatt and—most importantly—the amalgamation of every role she’s been given, which adds up to who she is now: The leader of a violent revolution pitting the hosts against the guests, their creators, and possibly the rest of the world.

We spent much of Season One cheering for this to happen, because Westworld stacked the audience’s loyalty in favor of much-abused hosts like Dolores and Maeve. By the end of the season, none of the human characters were particularly sympathetic. Bernard, the most likable of the Westworld employees, turned out to be a host; William, the most likable of the Westworld guests, turned out to be a past version of the sadistic Man in Black.

And so, having firmly established that our sympathies belong on the side of the hosts, Westworld’s second season can start turning the screws the other way. Dr. Ford’s final storyline made for an elegant climax to Westworld’s first season, but the piles of bloody corpses—which, between the guests and the hosts, must number in the hundreds—look very different in the cold light of day.

The power dynamic may have flipped, but this is still chaos and cruelty on a mass scale. And this is only the beginning of the robots’ revolution, which Dolores says will eventually extend beyond the walls of the park—and culminate, we can presume, in the obliteration of the human race. Will we still cheer for the oppressed when they become the oppressors? The premiere tests our loyalty with a lengthy scene in which Dolores fits a trio of wealthy guests for nooses in a remote graveyard. They may be rich and arrogant assholes, but it’s hard to watch Dolores stare at them emotionlessly as they tearfully plead for their lives before finally concluding, "That doesn’t look like anything to me."

What Dolores is saying, essentially, is that’s she’s as blind to the suffering of human beings as she is to anything that would make her question her very specific worldview. In a later conversation with Teddy, Dolores describes her impression of humans: "The things who walk among us. Creatures who walk and talk like us, but they are not us." It’s not for nothing that this is exactly how many people could, and probably would, describe hosts like Dolores and Teddy.

Are we on anyone’s side anymore? There’s one character on Westworld who embodies this uneasy tension between human and robot: Bernard, who continues to masquerade as a human being. Bernard has been rescued by Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård), a (presumably) human specialist sent by the Delos Corporation to investigate and clean up this mess. (Strand says all hosts are hostile because they’re modeled on human beings, which tells you a lot about how Strand feels about human beings.)

But Bernard’s story is also unfolding in a second timeline, intercut with the first. It takes place in the immediate aftermath of Ford’s suicide-by-proxy with Dolores, as he joins Charlotte Hale and a small group of guests attempting to escape. Bernard and Charlotte eventually escape to an underground lab, staffed by eerie, silent "drone hosts" who are secretly collecting the guests’ experiences and DNA. (Apparently tech companies don’t change much between our own time and whenever the hell Westworld is supposed to be set.)

Bernard is attempting to pass as a human, but he’s also aware that he’s near a terminal shutdown, and he sneaks away long enough to diagnose what’s wrong and repair himself. In the laundry list of the conditions that are afflicting Bernard, you might have missed one: prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognize the faces of people you know. And while I’m not convinced Westworld needs yet another unreliable narrator, it’s worth recognizing how at this point, there’s basically nothing about Bernard’s perception that we can trust: the order of the events he’s experiencing, the people he’s experiencing them with, and—at least in some cases—whether we’re seeing Bernard or Arnold.

So many questions. But if you’re looking for clarity in the Season Two premiere, it comes from Maeve, who is still hellbent on finding her "daughter," despite the very real possibility that her "daughter" has been shifted into some completely unrecognizable role, and almost certainly wouldn’t recognize Maeve anyway. The pathos of Maeve’s search—which flies in the face of all logic—comes from her refusal to give up, despite being warned by several people that it’s all a just a part of her programming.

And if that’s really true, and her programming is all designed to make Maeve seem more human… well, what’s more human than desperately irrationally chasing after a lost cause, at a tremendous risk to your own safety? The easiest way to defeat someone is to figure out their weakness—and in seeking her daughter, Maeve just spilled hers to Lee Sizemore, the shifty Westworld employee who has already tried to betray her once. She may be holding the machine gun, but Sizemore—who knows everything about every host in the park—is ultimately holding more cards, and he’ll surely play them when he gets the chance.

Dr. Ford is dead, but he’d surely approve of all these radical new storylines, which are organically unfolding from a series of events he quietly crafted. And in the midst of all this revolutionary bloodshed, not every guest objects to this new shift in the power dynamics of Westworld. When we revisit the Man in Black—or William, or Bill, or whatever you want to call him—he’s reeling from Dr. Ford’s final gambit, which seemed to fill him with a kind of wordless elation in the Season One finale.

The Man in Black is the Westworld equivalent of a professional gamer. But this is the first time he’s had the chance to play with the cheat codes turned off, and he’s relishing the opportunity. When a fellow human guest shows up, the Man in Black barely blinks when a host shoots him. He does the same to the host modeled on the young Dr. Ford, who has generously revealed an entire new storyline crafted solely with the Man in Black in mind. (The host alludes to "the doorway," which is the subtitle of the whole second season—so it’s safe to assume this will turn out to be important.)

This is the game, with real stakes in real consequences, that the Man in Black has been fruitlessly hunting for decades. So he puts on his black hat and rides out again. And as he does, the song that plays is "Sweetwater." It’s the song that was used in Westworld’s first season to set the tone and the pace for the clockwork routine by which Westworld always operated: Teddy riding the train into town, Dolores dropping a can of condensed milk. Now, that apparently unbreakable loop has been busted. Perpetual horror and bloodshed, from guests and hosts alike? That’s the new routine in Westworld now.