Westworld Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: Off the Rails

I’ll say this for this week’s Westworld: A secret cameo from Anthony Hopkins is a pretty good way to make sure people will tune in for Westworld next week.

And it’s a good thing that Westworld promised at least one meaty sequence, because this week’s episode, "Phase Space," asks viewers to spend a week digesting some pretty thin gruel. There are, at least theoretically, some interesting revelations in this episode. Dolores’s existential interrogations—which seemed, at first glance, to be flashbacks to her conversations with Arnold—are actually conversations with Bernard, with Dolores tricking Bernard into thinking he’s the real Arnold. She’s probing his brain for… something? It’s not really clear.

And that’s the key problem with Westworld’s second season: The delayed gratification caused by pointless, foot-dragging obfuscations. This is the sixth episode of a 10-episode season, and it definitely feels like a middle chapter. We get to check in with a bunch of our old friends—Dolores, Bernard, Maeve, the Man in Black—who are all primed to do something interesting, someday, once Westworld is willing to let them.

It’s no accident that the season’s best subplots have been introduced and wrapped up in a single episode: The tragic, extended life of James Delos, or the brutal betrayal orchestrated by Dolores at Fort Forlorn. I wish I could add Shogun World to that list, but "Phase Space" takes last week’s season-best episode and grafts on an extended, unnecessary coda. After a very well-staged sword fight with literally no relevance to anything we care about, Maeve leads her new friends to Snow Lake. Akane burns Sakura’s heart as a final tribute, and refuses the invitation to join Maeve in the real world—just like she did last week. It’s an extended set piece that looks beautiful and says nothing, and assumes, bizarrely, that the audience isn’t really paying attention. (And while we’re on the subject: What’s with the constant flashbacks to Maeve and her "daughter" whenever she looks at Akane? Does Westworld really not trust the audience—or Thandie Newton’s excellent performance—enough to understand what might be going on in Maeve’s brain?)

Maeve was the only one clear-eyed enough to poke a hole in Dolores’s increasingly indefensible revolution, but she’s also the only fully awakened host who stubbornly sticks to one her previous backstories. So it’s a relief when she re-emerges in Westworld to enter the farmstead where she raised her "daughter." This story ends the only way it could have, as Maeve realizes—to her horror—that the Delos Corporation has already assigned a new host to play her daughter’s mother. And when the theoretically violent Ghost Nation rides up and invites Maeve to join them, she runs away. What’s the payoff to all the mystery about what the Ghost Nation is doing? Who knows? We’ll find out whenever Westworld’s plot machinations require it to tell us.

In another corner of the park, we revisit the Man in Black as he reacts to the revelation that Emily is in the park. The Man in Black initially suspects that Ford, in all his posthumous mindfuckery, has created a host to play his daughter. (And hey, I guess that’s still possible.) But his suspicions quickly give way to a painful conversation about their shared tragedy: The loss of the Man in Black’s wife/Emily’s mother, who died by suicide. Emily apologizes for blaming the Man in Black, and insists that he abandon his idiotic plan to die in Westworld in a blaze of glory. The Man in Black agrees… and then rides off while Emily is sleeping, leaving her to chase after him again.

Fine! I guess it’s good to have someone on this show who really knows the Man in Black, and someone who is willing to call him out on his pathetic LARPer bullshit. But if this is supposed to be the seeds for a redemptive arc, well, I’m not clear on why we’re supposed to care about the ultimate fate of Man in Black at all. In flashbacks, William is a naive dunce and a smarmy creep. In the present, he’s either a sadistic asshole or a man who’s role-playing as a sadistic asshole. Either way, Westworld has never come up with a convincing reason for why we should be interested about him. And given that the entire Westworld apparatus has broken down, I’m definitely not clear on why we should care about the elaborate narrative that Dr. Ford developed solely with the Man in Black in mind.

What about Dolores? She’s on a train, executing the next phase in her rebellion. Teddy is an asshole now. (Westworld, being Westworld, makes sure you get it by having him ignore a stray can of condensed milk in favor of a bullet.) It’s kind of interesting to watch her become the kind of sadistic, amoral oppressor she’s attempting to rebel against, but it’s also the same damn thing she’s been doing since her on-the-nose monologue in the Season Two premiere. I’m sure Westworld will explore the actual ramifications of Dolores’s actions someday, when it’s convenient. Probably in the season finale.

And then there’s Bernard. Bernard’s Season Two arc—which jumps around in time and relies on a bunch of interminable mumbling—has been pretty frustrating. But it looks like we’re reaching the endgame of it. Early in the episode, Bernard and Elsie have an impenetrable conversation about the Cradle and the Mesa—two key aspects of Westworld’s behind-the-scenes power structure, which are each vying for control in the wake of the revolution. Bernard jacks in and wanders around an idealized version of Sweetwater until he discovers none other than Dr. Ford, plying the keys of a player piano.

Back in Season One, Dr. Ford radiated menace, intelligence, and mystery—which, in the end, turned out to be a bunch of smoke and mirrors to disguise a character arc that never really added up. But I’m hoping Dr. Ford’s presence in Bernard’s meta-narrative leads to some actual narrative clarity. In 2018, a TV show only assumes the continued, sustained interest of viewers at its own peril. Westworld is threatening to leap off the rails, and I’m not convinced it’s deep or interesting enough to follow it wherever it goes. But maybe the return of Dr. Ford is the simplest and smartest way to clarify exactly where Westworld stands.