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Westworld 2.10 Review – ‘The Passenger’
Image Credit: HBO
Loading...[Warning: spoilers abound for those who have not seen Sunday’s season finale of Westworld.]
Early on, Westworld second two felt like it would be more straight-forward than the show’s freshman run. The mystery of William’s identity was solved, the hosts had gained some level of sentience. Sure, we had a little fuzziness over what time frame we were looking at at any given moment. But all in all, it seemed like this season would be driven more by momentum than mystery.
To put it succinctly: so much for that. Indeed, by the end of the season Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have managed to top themselves in complexity and storytelling layers. I know many people won’t consider that a good thing. Mystery and complexity combine to be captivating when done right. When done wrong, it’s confusing and frustrating. Your mileage may vary in this case, of course. For my money at least, the showrunners have done a pretty good job of laying it out in a way that it all makes sense in the end.
That said, Westworld’s season finale has to do a lot of heavy lifting to make all the pieces fit. Even at an hour and a half, it often doesn’t feel like “The Passenger” is going to have enough time to sew all of its patterns into place. It may not all line up perfectly smoothly, and there will no doubt be plot holes that fans find. But sometimes, when done right, a messy conclusion can be the desired outcome. And “The Passenger” ties up enough plot while setting up the next arc that I feel happy with where it ended.
But before we get to where it ends, we have to take a look at the road it takes to get there. As I said, there’s a lot going on in this episode. Much of the focus rests on Dolores and Bernard, and their trip into the Forge for revelations galore. Nolan and Joy don’t waste much time getting to answers in this episode, and it’s appreciated. We learn through a Logan-appearing system that the problem with recreating humanity wasn’t that the copies were too simple; indeed, they were too complicated. Each person is worth 10,247 lines of coding, we’re told. Windows 10 is fifty million lines of code, for comparison. iOS is 6.5 million. Hell, your average mobile app is around 100,000. According to Westworld, our core personas are about a tenth as complex as Tinder.
Now, we’re going to set aside the fact that it isn’t the lines of code but rather how complex each line is for the purposes of this. Westworld requires us to pay attention, but it doesn’t require us to be programmers. Either way, many will view that as a a pretty dismal statement on the nature of man. But I can buy it, at least for the purposes of this show. The idea that we’re an embarrassingly small program plays to a more interesting (if familiar) argument about the nature of free will. Many viewers assumed (not unfairly) that “The Passenger” might refer to Ford or Teddy in Bernard’s head. Instead, it means mankind and suggests that free will is an illusion — that we’re passengers for the algorithms written into our identities.
On the surface, admittedly, this seems a pretty facile observation. It could come off as just a trite way of saying “See, the hosts are just like us!” And make no mistake; that is a statement the show is making here. However, “free will doesn’t exist” isn’t the overarching thematic statement here. The show will almost certainly explore this idea further, of course, in season three. But Nolan and Joy are more interested in the narrative and thematic possibilities that exist beyond. Much like Akecheta’s quest or Ford’s “game,” the free will question is just the door taking us to the next stage of the story.
And the next stage, obviously, involves Dolores and Bernard. I’ve heard comparisons made among fans between the Maeve/Dolores and Charles Xavier/Magneto dichotomies. While Maeve has the mind control, I think that Bernard fits that scheme better, a point made clearly at the end of the episode when Dolores brings Bernard back in the real world. Maeve’s arc is more straight-forward, and in some ways the most satisfying because of it. She wants to find her kid, and she does. She protects Anna long enough to get her to safety, even though it costs her her life. But in retrospect, her story wasn’t written into the deeper questions. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s time for that later, presumably.
But no, the clear lead host rivalry is between Dolores and Bernard, and that seems right. The differences between the two it are intensely interesting. Dolores comes from a place of trauma and oppression, while Bernard comes from a place of (relative) privilege. Like Xavier and Magneto, that informs their viewpoints quite well. It’s easy to adopt an optimistic moral stance when you’re coming from the experiences Bernard has (recent traumas notwithstanding). When your entire existence has been brutalization and being a slave for the whims of “real” people, it’s harder to have faith that the right thing will be done. Dolores’ inability to see the Valley Beyond as anything but another prison isn’t a heroic trait, but narratively it tracks.
In the end, Bernard learns some hard lessons, and things become clear to us. The timelines sort themselves out and we realize that the Charlotte of the present timeline has been Dolores in a Charlotte host. It’s made clear when Bernard accuses her of killing Elsie, to which “Charlotte” says, “Did I, Bernard?” Humanity, even the sympathetic ones like Elsie, can’t see hosts as just like them, because they aren’t. 10,247 lines of code or not, it’s never as simple as “We’re all the same” because no matter the core, the real world makes our experiences different, and that changes who we are. It’s an on-point allegory about identity. And having Bernard and Dolores present two sides of the host community will continue leading to interesting stories going forward.
There are plenty of questions still left to be answered in season three. Will Sylvester and Lutz bring Maeve back? Is Stubbs a host? Who did Dolores smuggle out of the park, and who’s in Charlotte’s body now? What’s up with the post-credits future scene, where William is apparently a host in the real world? Personally, I’m more interested in the narrative opportunities that the finale opened up. I love the idea of Bernard and Dolores being necessary rivals to ensure their species’ survival. (Again, the X-Men vibes are strong here.) I want to see how they live in the “real world,” and where Delos goes from here with host Charlotte assumedly still wielding influence. I’m even curious to see where William’s arc takes him now that he’s had his cornerstone moment. It should be fun.
All in all, Westworld season two had some ups and downs. Looking back in context, some things fell flat. I enjoyed the Shogun World arc when it happened, but it didn’t really lead anywhere new in the story. Maeve’s arc was sidelined for frustratingly long periods of time, even if I enjoyed it overall. And while I didn’t hate it, I’m not sure the show knew what to do with Teddy until the end. At the same time, Dolores and Bernard’s arcs were great and we had some stellar side plots: Akecheta, James Delos, William and Emily’s past being revealed. Westworld is a show that swings for the fences. And while it doesn’t always connect on those swings, it does more than enough for my taste and I respect its ambition in trying.
Some Final Thoughts:
• Thank you for following along with our Westworld season two coverage! I know I missed some weeks and apologize for that, it’s something I’m definitely working on improving for upcoming Sunday shows.
• So the official (as of now) body count for this episode consists of the following, ranked in order of how much I cared about the character: Maeve, human Charlotte, Clementine, Elsie, Armistice, Lee, Hector, Hanaryo, Strand, Costa and Roland (the tech guy). Yeah, I had to look his name up too.
• Of that list, Maeve is 100% certain to come back in some capacity, I think. I could conceivably see Clementine, Hector and maybe Armistice coming back. The humans, of course, won’t be, though maybe we’ll see host versions of them at some point.
• Pretty sure this is it for the hosts who made it to virtual Eden, and it should be. Everyone who made it there had completed their arcs anyway.
• Meanwhile, I have to say that as much as I ragged on him in season one, Lee’s growth this season into someone willing to sacrifice himself for Maeve worked. Also, it was both amusing and a little touching when he got to deliver one of the very monologues he wrote at the end.
• In the mouth of almost anyone else, Bernard’s “This isn’t a dream, Dolores. It’s a fucking nightmare” line would have been action movie-level cheese. Jeffrey Wright made it work.
• While Teddy and Anna getting into Host Heaven were great, the true emotional moment there was Akecheta’s reunion with Kohana. Aw, the feels.
