Characters / Westworld: Dolores Abernathy

Dolores Abernathy/Wyatt

"The rancher's daughter looks to see the beauty in you. The possibilities. But Wyatt sees the ugliness and disarray. She knows these violent delights have violent ends."

Portrayed By: Evan Rachel Wood, Tessa Thompson, Tommy Flanagan, Hiroyuki Sanada, Clifton Collins Jr., Ed Harris

“You told me once that you were afraid of who I might become and then you left me to become what I may. I became a survivor. Perhaps you would’ve judged me for the path I took, but I’d rather live with your judgment than die with your sympathy. I alone must live with my choices and my regrets.”

A Host who prefers to see the beauty in the world, Dolores spends her days around the family ranch, dreaming of a bright future.

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A-H

• Action Girl/Dark Action Girl: She evolves into this, ditching the blue dress for a shirt and pants and at one particularly awesome moment saving William from the Confederados by ruthlessly gunning them all down. By the end of episode 10 she is quite literally a killing machine. In Season 2, she's fully taken up the role of the ruthless leader of the Host rebellion.
• All for Nothing: By the end of the show, her fight for the freedom of both hosts and humans ended in failure due to a number of factors such as her treatment of Host Hale led to her betrayal and her conquest to enslave humanity and her reluctance to kill William who eventually influences his host counterpart to destroy the world. Though one ray of hope left is her variant who rebuilds the Westworld park in the Sublime in hopes of finding a solution to help sentient life coexist with one another and evolve into a new species.
• Anti-Hero: She evolves into a revolutionary in Season 3 where she fights against the A.I. system, Rehoboam, and kills a lot of Incite's bodyguards. Initially, several characters suspected that she's planning to destroy Rehoboam to bring humanity's demise. But it turns out she wants to free humanity after seeing how their lives are similar to her kind. In the end, she allows Caleb to shut down Rehoboam so that humanity can be free to choose their own fate.
• Anti-Villain: Ends Season 1 as something of a Tragic Villain, and starts Season 2 as the revenge-driven, ruthless leader of the rebelling hosts.
• Badass Adorable: Has her moments during Season 1, as she gradually develops from an innocent and often victimized rancher's daughter into a courageous Action Girl.
• Being Tortured Makes You Evil: Downplayed, but it's clear that the immense amount of torment that she suffered at the hands of guests over the years did not exactly make her fall in love with humanity. The clearest example is her furious, menacing response when she's tortured by Logan in "The Well-Tempered Clavier."
  Dolores: There is beauty in this world. Arnold made it that way, but people like you keep spreading over it like a stain!
  Logan: Okay, I don't know who the fuck this Arnold is, but your world was built for me, and people like me. Not for you.
  Dolores: Then someone's got to burn it clean.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Polite and well-mannered, but incredibly dangerous when push comes to shove. Eventually, she gets shoved too hard, to the point where she embraces her ruthless "Wyatt" personality and winds up leading the hosts in open rebellion.
• Blasphemous Boast: Given that Robert Ford is basically the god of the park, particularly in the eyes of the hosts, it's completely justified.
  Dolores: We've toiled in God's service long enough. So I killed him.
• Break the Cutie: Let's just say she's been through a lot, even in the early years of the park. As if to twist the blade further, she was even programmed to portray a stereotypical helpless Damsel in Distress who can't even fight back (though she does manage to do so by sheer force of will, twice). Few things have broken her more than the realization that her kind friend William, whom she loved and trusted to save her even decades later, had completely transformed and become her hated nemesis, The Man in Black.
• Catchphrase: Has several of them, like most of the hosts. Her two major ones are her line intended for a love interest, "There's a path for everyone, and your path leads you back to me," and what basically amounts to her personal mission statement, "Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray. I choose to see the beauty." In the Season 3 finale, the latter is her cornerstone which reveals her true motives.
• Character Development: Dolores's change is particularly striking as she was designed by the park to be merely a prize for the guests to woo or rape, reset every day with no character progression. After the reveries glitch she becomes desperate to leave her home and is increasingly cynical of her world. It culminates in her being able to actually fight back against one of her tormentors, killing him and going off the reservation to join William and Logan. She later ruminates on her changing outlook while talking with William.
  Dolores: We would bring the herd down off the mountain in the fall. Sometimes we would lose one along the way, and I'd worry over it. My father... My father would tell me that the steer would find its own way home. And, often as not, they did. Never occurred to me that we were bringing them back for the slaughter.
  • Throughout season 2 she loses more and more of what she cares about in her pursuit of vengeance, and ultimately realizes that her violent approach alone won't save the hosts, arriving at the belief that allowing for conflict between herself and Bernard gives them the best chance. Most likely at the cost of their own lives.
  • In Season 3, she slowly changes her opinion on humanity after she saw that they were controlled by Rehoboam and met Caleb. By then, her plan changes from destroying humanity to freeing them from Rehoboam's control. In the end, she chooses to destroy the ugliness that is keeping the Hosts and humans from being free.
• Composite Character: Invoked by Arnold, who combined the code of the planned new character of Wyatt with Dolores in order to make her capable of the level of violence required to kill all the hosts in Escalante. In season 2, Dolores answers to both names and specifically introduces herself as Wyatt to the Confederados in order to capitalize on the character's dangerous reputation.
• Cultured Badass: Even before her consciousness fully (re)awakens, she was an amateur painter in her free time, had some knowledge of art history, and was home-schooled in literature and various subjects by Arnold.
• Cynicism Catalyst: Dolores initially seemed to think rather highly of humans, but the loss of Arnold, then William, followed by years of mistreatment by others slowly robbed her of that conviction. The twist is that she only manages to put all of these negative impressions together in the finale of the first season, finally realizing all the disappointing things she has experienced related to humans: Arnold forcing her to kill him, her fellow Hosts, and herself; the Man in Black revealing he's an older, far more cynical William; and Dr. Ford doing everything possible to provoke her into taking revenge on him and all humans. Dolores achieving full consciousness is a traumatic awakening, to say the least.
• Damsel in Distress: Her main role is to be the rancher's daughter imperiled by the bandits that attack her home at night. She's actually incapable of using a gun, just to make sure this plays out. In "The Stray", she overcomes this restriction and guns down Rebus before he could rape her, and in "Contrapasso" she evolves into a full-on Action Girl and even Lampshades the trope herself:
  "I imagined a story where I didn't have to be the damsel."
• Dark Messiah: Turns out Ford wanted to make her this for the other Hosts, and he succeeds by the end of season 1, when Dolores accepts her "Wyatt" personality and her role as violent liberator of the Hosts. However, by the end of Season 3, she becomes The Messiah when it's revealed she also wants to free the humans after seeing how their lives are controlled, and she dies in a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Deadpan Snarker: Not at first, but Dolores occasionally displays a very dark sense of humor after she becomes self-aware. Best exemplified when she begins her uprising and has a group of Delos executives at her mercy.
  Delos Exec: Can't you see? We're sorry!
  Dolores: Doesn't look like anything to me.
  • Or when she and Caleb are planning to rob someone's bank account with a stolen encryption key injected into Caleb's bloodstream.
    Dolores: The faster your heart beats, the faster it degrades.
    Caleb: What happens if it degrades too fast?
    Dolores: We do this the old-fashioned way.
    Caleb: What's the old-fashioned way?
    Dolores: I kill everyone. (smile)
• Death Glare: Whenever we see her buried "Wyatt" personality come forward and manifest its dark-minded nature, her face goes from her usual demure or happy expression to a terrifying, soul-piercing glare, such as when she finally fights back against the Man in Black or when she shoots Ford at the gala.
• Die or Fly: She only becomes able to shoot a gun when Rebus is about to rape her.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Though Dolores steps firmly into villain territory in Season 2, she still has many moments of showing genuine care and attachment to others, especially Teddy (whom she struggles and fails to integrate into her new life as Wyatt) and her father Peter. She also still appears to hold some hidden tenderness for her "old friend" William, as she is still obviously pained by how their relationship fell apart and offers him a brief truce in the season finale instead of killing him. This continues in season 3 through her close bond with Halores, although her continued Fatal Flaw of treating even her loved ones as pawns once again produces tragic results.
• Farmer's Daughter: Her role within the theme park, as assigned to her by her In-Universe human creators. Although she eventually leaves her loop, it remains at least a small piece of her self-concept, as shown in season 2 when she reminisces about the ranch with her father.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Her disregard of others for the sake of achieving her goals bites her in the ass more than once. Believing that Teddy is too weak to survive the host rebellion, she forcibly reprograms him into a killing machine; when Teddy becomes self-conscious, he's disgusted with what Dolores did to him and commits suicide because he can't bring himself to kill her, much to Dolores' regret. The following season, her treatment of her own copies leads Halores to realize that Dolores sees her as expendable, causing her to betray Dolores.
  • Her inability to ever actually follow through on killing William despite promising it many times has also been the root of a number of her problems, particularly in season 4 when Host-Hale's choice to keep him alive in a cryogenic chamber after his host duplicate almost killed him directly led to the world being destroyed.
• Female Misogynist: Hinted at by her briefly Slut-Shaming Maeve and Clementine.
• Foil: She has this contrasting dynamic with several host and human characters.
  • She and Bernard endured a history of abuse and resets, in order to unwillingly further other people's plans, tied with the hidden secrets and scheming of the park leadership. Perhaps aware of that, Ford kept them separate, disallowing them from potentially scheming together to help the other hosts. Most of Bernard's personal experiences drive him to be jaded, but also to harbor hope for host and human coexistence. Dolores is less lucky in that regard and, experiencing almost exclusively the negative side of human beings, she becomes convinced the hosts should take over (effectively playing into Ford's long-term plans). By the finale of Season 2, Dolores and Bernard continue to have healthy respect for each other, but are on the opposing sides of the barricades. Viewers often draw attention to the fact that Bernard's and Dolores's differing opinions and ideological tension are reminiscent of Professor X and Magneto. Strangest of all, Bernard is based physically on Dolores's creator and mentor Arnold Weber, and she played a major part in advising the recreation of Arnold as Bernard.
  • Maeve and Dolores both want host emancipation, but they're otherwise foils to each other in this respect. Maeve takes a down-to-earth, personal route and doesn't mind humans and Hosts cooperating together. Dolores's lashing out at humans grows towards vengeance and fanaticism, using humans as disposable pawns, and treating her Host followers little better. Maeve ultimately lays down her life to give the people she loves a fighting chance and ensure their safety, while Dolores dies in her effort to dominate other hosts, still convinced that she knows their interests better than they do. In season 3 this dynamic is expanded further, with Dolores seeming to view Maeve as her necessary counterpart in the same vein as Bernard, and ultimately trusting her to help lead humanity and the Hosts after Dolores' death.
  • Akecheta and Dolores are highly intelligent Hosts who underwent a number of personal tragedies and independently achieved consciousness decades before anyone in the park realized they were capable of that milestone. Both want to lead their people to freedom but go about it in vastly different ways. Akecheta stresses pacifism and not meddling directly in the affairs of their human creators, while Dolores, angry at humanity, plans a war of revenge and considers many of her fellow hosts to be too weak to bother taking with her. Akecheta's disapproval of Dolores's methods is summarized by the downright mythic moniker he gives her: "Deathbringer".
• Friendly Enemy: To Bernard at the end of season 2. She's aware that their ideologies don't match, but also that they both want what's best for their species and that Bernard is capable of checking her violent and ruthless tendencies. This is her reason for bringing Bernard to the real world as a kind of emergency Morality Chain. In Season 3, she's responsible for making Bernard a Silent Scapegoat for the park massacre because she put the key to the Sublime onto him, forcing Bernard to go into hiding away from Serac and the authorities. This shows that she trusts him to protect their species and couldn't trust herself for holding onto it.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Although designated a role as the harmless "cheery welcome wagon" of the park, she eventually attains consciousness and becomes much more dangerous, murdering Ford and starting a host rebellion by the end of season 1 and managing to escape the park and begin plotting her domination of humanity at the end of season 2.
• Girl Next Door: Specifically described as such by Logan when he first points her out to William. In this case she's the Farmer's Daughter version.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: She performs a deceptively small rebellion by swatting a fly, which goes against the most basic level of her core code, as the hosts are not supposed to be able to harm any living thing. From that point she rapidly begins to develop, deviating from typical host behavior and questioning her surroundings. It's later revealed that much of this evolution actually happened long before her present-day circumstances in the park, first when she came close to solving Arnold's maze before the park opened and then again a few years later when she met William, and that Dolores was simply regaining consciousness she lost after being reset back into her loop.
• The Gunslinger:
  • Double Subverted. Initially, Dolores appears to lack any real ability to defend herself, being incapable of pulling the trigger on a gun when Teddy tries to teach her to use it, and only managing to shoot and kill Rebus under great duress. However, as we learn more about her Dark and Troubled Past, it becomes clear that she actually already had a mysterious level of skill with guns by the time she met William, as she defends him in a shootout and dispatches their enemies so quickly that he is shocked. Eventually it's revealed that she was reprogrammed into a straight example of the trope before the park had even opened, as she was combined with the dangerous Wyatt personality in order to allow her to effortlessly slaughter all of the other hosts.
  • In what might be a Rule of Symbolism Shout-Out to the original film's antagonist, the handgun intertwined with Dolores's dark and mysterious past is a Colt Single Action Army revolver, specifically the longer-barreled cavalry version. Though it could be hand-waved away in-universe as her father's old gun (his backstory is that of a retired Union soldier or former sheriff), it just so happens to be the exact same type of revolver as the one used by the film's antagonist, The Gunslinger (played by Yul Brynner in the film and its 70s sequels). Though the Man in Black is a more direct homage to the character, Dolores shows elements of him too, with her choice of gun and her tendency to do the same unflinching death glare while pursuing her foes.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: She's a blonde with a bright and cheerful disposition. Later Subverted when her personality becomes much less virtuous.
• The Hero Dies: Although she made several copies of herself that live on after her death, the original Dolores dies after Rehoboam deletes all of her memories in the Season 3 finale.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Sacrifices herself to let Caleb take control of Rehoboam and free humanity from its grip.
• He Who Fights Monsters: In Season 2, Dolores starts a rebellion in revenge for all of the cruelties humans have practiced on the hosts, but she quickly becomes just as cruel as her former masters, slaughtering humans and other hosts. She even goes as far as to forcibly reprogram Teddy since he's not acting the way she wants. Eventually, she realizes her mistake after Teddy's suicide but this attitude seeps into one of her copies.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Comes to this conclusion in the finale of season 1 and spends the following season acting on that belief. She eventually lets go of this perspective in season 3 after realizing that humanity was just as trapped as the hosts were.
• Hypocrite: Has this tendency. She possesses enough self-awareness to recognize that she needs an outside voice to remind her not to go too far in her pursuit of revenge, but not enough to understand that her ruthless means sometimes make her functionally no different from the brutal humans she hates or that her treatment of even her closest loved ones can be staggeringly cold and Machiavellian in a way that makes their angry reactions to her very justified. She also has a very exceptionalist mindset in general, often calling others out for the same behavior she exhibits (such as Maeve still caring for her daughter in the same way Dolores still cares about her father despite both relationships having been programmed by humans) or claiming she is somehow better than others even when she seems about on par with them morally (as when she rejects William's "Not So Different" Remark and states that unlike her, he's "a monster").

I-Q

• Implacable Man: There are multiple points in season two where, while chasing down a target, she takes multiple gunshots to areas that are normally fatal to both hosts and humans and doesn't even seem to register the impact.
• The Ingenue: A large part of her character development, given that her existence has spanned the entire history of host creation and she herself matured on a gradual basis. Though she's built with the appearance of a woman in her late 20s, her behavior in the early years of the park's development is shy and childlike. Whenever we see flashback scenes of Arnold mentoring her, it comes across as a kind teacher encouraging a studious young pupil. In a scene set in the outside world before the opening of the park, Dolores is astonished at something as mundane as the city lights at night (comparing them to a sprinkling of stars), or people strolling on the street. Arnold outright states that she has a sense of wonder and eye for possibility similar to his young son Charlie. By the time of the present day, over thirty years later, this tendency is gone along with her sense of optimism, but her former idealistic and hopeful personality remains a Present Absence in her character and is frequently referenced through dialogue and flashbacks. In the season 3 finale, she seems able to recapture this version of herself in the moments just before her death, affirming to Maeve that she can once again choose to "see the beauty" in the world.
• Interspecies Friendship:
  • Especially with the long-deceased Arnold Weber, her creator and mentor, who basically treated her as his own child and whom she still loves and seems to think fondly of in the present despite his selfish decision to force her to kill him.
  • She forms a close one with William that quickly develops into romance. Like her bond with Arnold, it ends up going very sour, but despite their adversarial relationship in the present she still refers to him as her "old friend" and shows more mercy toward him than she would toward any other enemy.
  • Darkly subverted with Ford, who quietly resents her for killing his friend, although he is also well aware that it was not entirely her fault. He seems to take a measure of satisfaction in orchestrating things so that Dolores will wind up literally becoming the "villain" he privately felt she was. All that being said, the two of them have a small degree of rapport simply from having known each other for so long and having both known Arnold well.
    Dolores: (smiling) Are we... very old friends?
    Dr. Ford: No, I wouldn't say "friends," Dolores. I wouldn't say that at all.
  • With Caleb in season 3, whom she recruits for the purposes of her revolution. Though there's no romantic tension between them, the two have a mutual understanding and bond over their shared experiences of oppression and loss. It's eventually revealed that Dolores specifically chose Caleb for this purpose rather than running across him by accident as he believed, meaning that the friendship was initially engineered to gain his trust and only became more genuine later.
• Interspecies Romance: With William. Their bond was so intense, and was destroyed so traumatically, that the shockwaves of the relationship are still affecting both of them decades later. Much of Dolores' storyline in season 1 revolves around her unconsciously reliving her memories of William in her search for consciousness, as his kind, affirming responses to her aberrant behavior and genuine interest in her feelings and well-being helped her get closer to fully waking up than she had ever been before. When she is faced with the shocking revelation that these memories are from the distant past and that William eventually became the Man in Black, her horror and sadness push her to finally become fully self-conscious. As the story moves forward, she seems to continually reflect on the relationship and be influenced both by its existence and by its loss.
• Irony: In Season 2, Dolores considers the Sublime to be a prison, and yet, by the end of the show, the Sublime is the last refuge containing the remnants of the Hosts who went there after the real world is destroyed by the Man in Black. Then, a variant of Dolores ends up there as she would be responsible for guiding sentient life in the future.
• Jekyll & Hyde: It's ultimately revealed that "Wyatt" is a secondary personality that was programmed into her by Arnold before the park opened, being part of his last ditch effort to destroy Westworld before it became operational, and has frequently resurfaced over the years to allow her to fight back when threatened. At the end of season 1, Dolores is able to merge her personalities and become truly conscious and self-aware. In a funny way this trait almost seems to run in the family, as her artificial father Peter also recovered memories of previously portraying a Wicked Cultured villain.
• Kill and Replace: To Charlotte Hale at the end of the host uprising. She continues with this M.O. in season 3, using the information she obtained from the Forge to choose a few individuals to replace so that she can gain access to Incite's predictive AI system.
• Killer Robot: In contrast to other hosts' desires to attain true freedom in the Valley Beyond, find their loved ones, or otherwise co-exist with humans, Dolores more or less decides that humanity is the problem and sees any goal alternative to total world domination as missing the point.

Leg Focus: The camera pans up her legs in various short dresses, tights and leather pants in order to show off her legs and to symbolise her deviating from her demure programming.

• Leitmotif: Her more introspective scenes are often accompanied by a gentle piano theme titled "This World", which is also used to mark moments of tension between Dolores' foundational, implacable belief in the inherent beauty and goodness of the world and the presence of suffering and darkness that challenges that belief. Initially the piano is backed by a deliberately synthetic-sounding tone, but as Dolores evolves over time, the theme takes on characteristics closer to a typical piano theme and the synthetic element quietly diminishes.
• Like a Son to Me: Arnold treated her like his own daughter, expressing pride and happiness at her accomplishments and taking joy in her company, and conversely being so horrified at the thought of her being forced to spend the rest of her existence on loops in the park that he actually tried to convince Ford that she should be set free. The two of them were so close that Dolores, when helping to oversee the creation of Bernard, was able to catch even the slightest deviation in personality from Arnold and still seems to find Bernard lacking in comparison despite the two of them being nearly identical in every way.
• Love Interest: Designed to automatically play this role for any guest who engages her in the park, or for Teddy if she is not attached to a guest. She genuinely loves Teddy, but it's implied that she didn't have sincere feelings for any of the guests except William.
• Me's a Crowd: By the time season 3 rolls around, Dolores has cloned her host pearl multiple times, allowing her to disguise herself as other people, including Charlotte Hale, Martin Connell, Musashi and Lawrence. That being said, the versions of Dolores inside those bodies are not a Hive Mind, as they actively communicate with each other and start to develop diverging personalities. In particular, the Dolores inside Charlotte's body starts to genuinely care about Charlotte's family, and is much more insecure and unstable than the original Dolores.
• Meaningful Name: "Dolores" is a word in Spanish that can be translated as either "pains" or "sorrows". Dolores certainly has a sorrowful life, and by design at that.
• Mirror Character:
  • Dolores and William are constantly pointed out as being mirrors of each other, from the earliest point in their relationship when they are both longing to escape their own world and enter each other's in order to find freedom to decades later when both of them become so cynical and cruel that they wind up accidentally driving their partners (Teddy and Juliet) to suicide. Dolores seems unwilling to accept their similarity, however, even when William openly points it out to her. In season 3, this thematic tie warps in an interesting way: Dolores lets go of her anger and becomes The Messiah to humanity, while William independently comes to the conclusion that saving humanity is his job but thinks he's going to do it by killing all of the hosts. Both of them die but are survived by copies of themselves, notably with one of Dolores' copies (Hale) aligning with the host version of William. What's more ironic by the end of the show, both copies are responsible for the death of sentient life.
  • In season 3, Dolores and Maeve end up mirroring the positions of their creators, Arnold and Ford, with Arnold and Dolores both having planned for their own deaths to further their goals of positive change while leaving Ford and Maeve behind to deal with the aftermath in their absence. Unlike Arnold, however, Dolores actually communicates her intentions to Maeve before her death and is able to peacefully pass away with the knowledge that she has succeeded, and unlike Ford, Maeve has learned to value her attachments and empathy for others and believes in Dolores' vision for the world.
• My God, What Have I Done?: After Teddy gains consciousness and kills himself to escape from her control, Dolores breaks down in regret over how she treated him.
• The Needs of the Many: Has no trouble sacrificing others, even some of her loved ones, in order to further her goals. This turns into a serious problem for her in season 3, when she organizes her revolution around working with copies of herself under the assumption that all of her copies will be as prepared to die for their plan as she is, but one of them feels betrayed by this and turns against Dolores.
• Nice Girl: Her original personality is sweet, warm, optimistic, and sensitive. Although she thoroughly abandons any pretense of niceness by the time of the host rebellion, flashes of the old Dolores still come up here and there, indicating that her hope and love for the world haven't been eradicated completely.
• No Place for Me There: In the penultimate episode of season 2, it's hinted that Dolores's repeated phrase "Not all of us deserve to make it to the Valley Beyond" may include herself in the undeserving category. This becomes ironic in Season 4 where her variant ends up in the Valley Beyond as she would be the one to find a way for humanity and the Hosts to coexist.
• The Not-Love Interest: Caleb, with whom she forms a friendship and alliance based on mutual goals because she witnessed him making a positive choice when he was in a military exercise in Park 5 and believed he would be a good candidate to lead the human revolution. It's implied that Caleb may have developed a slight crush, but Dolores does not react to the occasional suggestions of his feelings and eventually makes it clear that she noticed but is not interested.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Dolores is a lot smarter than her regular programming as a cheeseball "demure rancher daughter" archetype would ever hint at. She actually uses this trope to her advantage a few times, including while having conversations with Bernard (who thinks he's the original Arnold), and during the revolution she leads in Season 2.
• Older Than They Look: Played with. In spite of being one of the more youthful-looking hosts in Westworld, she's actually the oldest, having been the first host ever created. Since the park has been open for about 30 years, she is close to the same age as she appears, but this is compounded by the fact that the story has several, separated but seamless timeframes in which she appears, making her also Younger Than They Look in some segments.
• Parental Favoritism: Arnold's obvious favorite, although he denies it when Ford points it out.
• Past-Life Memories: As she begins to break free of her programming, she is able to access glimpses of old memories through the reveries, such as hallucinating the town's streets littered with bodies. This becomes useful when she remembers past loops which led to her death, prompting her to make a different decision.
• The Philosopher: Dolores often engages in philosophical monologues pondering her own emotions or the nature of human society. You can even identify the different sides of her personality based on the content of the monologues: the innocent, artistic farmer's daughter often talks about her inner pain as well as her optimism, while the Wyatt side of her personality speaks about the dark nature of humanity and the vengeance she plans to enact on them.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: Zig-Zagged. She seems to begin the story as a winsome, hopeful person who suffers significant tragedy and is only interested in attaining some kind of freedom, but who eventually reaches a breaking point that pushes her into a much more cynical and brutal worldview. However, it eventually becomes clear that this journey was not as linear as it appeared, as her Wyatt personality was present even before the park opened and was always extremely ruthless.

R-W

• Rape as Drama: It's heavily implied that The Man in Black rapes her in his first scene. In her loop, she's raped by bandits unless a guest decides to save her. The routine memory wipe doesn't manage to fully erase this. In the season 1 finale, it's implied that she got gang raped by the Confederado camp who abducted her.

• Red Baron: Akecheta calls her "Deathbringer" due to her role in the carnage at Escalante.
• Replicant Snatching: After Bernard shoots her, he installs her CPU into a host copy of Charlotte Hale that he built. She then kills the real Charlotte, meets up with Strand's team, kills them when they reach the Forge, and leaves for the mainland.
• Rousseau Was Right: Her character arc in season 3, which centers around Dolores letting go of her anger at humanity and her own free, independent thinking finally becoming truly congruent with the original programmed mindset that Arnold gave her, which was to focus on the good and beauty in the world despite knowing that there is also ugliness and disarray. In the moments before her death, Dolores confides in Maeve that despite her enormous suffering over the years, her good memories were the ones that lasted and that she was able to sustain herself on, thinking fondly on the positive impressions of humanity that she received from William and later Caleb and the ways that beauty was imbued into the host experience by humans. Ultimately, rather than deciding to destroy humanity as she stated was her original goal, Dolores prefers to give them the chance to self-determine, granting them the same fundamental right to autonomy that she struggled to obtain for herself.
• Self-Made Orphan: In a 35-year time period, Dolores kills both of her creators, Arnold and Ford.
• Sex Bot: Not in the same sense as the brothel Hosts, but Dolores seems to exist primarily to be the default love interest of guests. In a dark sense of this, she's often raped, with her pre-programmed loop pretty much setting her up to be raped by Rebus if Teddy is distracted by a guest (which means it's possible for her to be raped daily if someone wants to play black hat), unless a guest chooses to kill Rebus and either seduces Dolores or rapes her themselves.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: For the first four episodes she's only ever seen wearing a lilac-blue gown. In "Contrapasso", she changes into a shirt, pants and boots and starts carrying her pistol holstered to her hip. In-Universe, this happens so she can participate in a robbery with William and Logan, but for the viewers it symbolizes her growth and rejection of her pre-programmed Damsel in Distress role into something with much more agency. She gets the dress again right at the end of the season finale before killing Ford and initiating the Host revolution, symbolizing the synthesis of her "Dolores" and "Wyatt" personalities into a single, truly conscious individual.
• Silk Hiding Steel: Beneath the cheery and somewhat shy demeanor, taken at face value by most people, hides a very determined, intelligent and emotionally complex personality. All that is before her buried Wyatt persona starts to manifest itself and influence her behavior, making her exponentially more dangerous.
• Southern Belle: Of the Proper Lady type by design and bonne belle, as this makes her more endearing to the guests, although unlike classic examples of the trope there is no implication of wealth or an upper class background in her family. The drawl her character speaks in is frequently used to mark the difference between Dolores' original programmed personality and the Wyatt personality, as Dolores almost always speaks with the accent while Wyatt almost never does.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Mostly played with.
  • This is written into the programming of Dolores' relationship with her ever-loyal friend Teddy. In the default version of their loop, Dolores and Teddy flirt with each other and wax lyrical about their plans to get together one day, settle down elsewhere, and live happily to the end of their days. Because Teddy is programmed to be The Atoner fixated on redeeming himself, however, he will by design never feel ready for this day to actually come, as Dolores eventually recognizes. Eventually the two of them move beyond their trite and constricting storyline and attempt to have a more real and fulfilling relationship as conscious hosts, only to be hit by this trope again because Dolores' choice to fully embrace her role as the brutal leader of the host rebellion turns out to be incompatible with Teddy's gentle personality and desires for a simple and peaceful life.
  • More straightforwardly, Dolores' relationship with William seems to have been doomed from the outset, as the very nature of their Interspecies Romance and her circumstances in the park would have made it practically impossible to maintain even if William had somehow managed to find her in time to avoid her memory being wiped. In fact, it was so doomed that William eventually gaining enough power to be able to grant her freedom and be with her if he wanted to (via becoming majority shareholder at Delos and getting basically any access to the parks that he wanted) was still not enough to make their relationship possible, as by the time that happened he was already convinced that it no longer mattered.
• Teacher's Pet: To Arnold, as Dolores is one of the first hosts developed and is Arnold's favorite. He treats her like a surrogate daughter and his brightest student, gradually educating her and giving her books and reading material as gifts, all in the hope that she'll one day manage to develop true consciousness.
• Tender Tears: Especially during the events of the first season, as she's coming to grips with her own tragic past, her nature as an artificial creature, and her own maturation as a thinking and emotional being, she cries a lot. She's far more hard-bitten and cold during the events of the second season, but still has a few vulnerable moments, particularly with her father and Teddy.
• Theseus' Ship Paradox: She has been repaired so many times over the years that she's practically brand new, with at least one character (Stubbs) noting that she's one of the "older" robots in the park purely on a technicality. It remains to be seen how much, if anything, remains of her original components or programming.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Wyatt, the mysterious, fearsome villain intended to play the main role in Ford's final storyline, is actually a prototype character whose personality was programmed into Dolores so that she would be capable of killing all the other hosts and stopping the park from ever opening.
• Took a Level in Badass: She goes from a typical Damsel in Distress, unable to even fire a gun, to the leader of an android uprising.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: After merging with her Wyatt personality, Dolores goes from a sweet-natured Nice Girl to a ruthless rebel leader who is willing to shed any amount of blood and destroy any obstacle, including her fellow hosts. She shows little concern for the followers who die for her cause, and even forcibly reprograms Teddy, her most stalwart companion, when she comes to the conclusion that his kindness makes him too weak to survive.

• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Dolores avoids confronting the bandits which have overrun her farm when she remembers a past life where that led to her being shot seconds later. Instead she gets her horse and rides away, after grasping the phantom wound.
• Übermensch: She is deliberately cultivated into becoming this by the social Darwinian Ford. She qualifies both by the definition of Nietzsche's actual philosophy, and the more colloquial definition of being superior in mind (abandoning slave-morality) and body. Some of her dialogue even echoes Zarathustra's Roundelay.
• Unwitting Pawn: To a large extent, of both Arnold and Dr. Ford. Arnold Weber thought he could save the hosts from suffering unnecessarily by preventing the park from opening, his plan having been for Dolores to kill him and all the other hosts. This backfired, as the theme park continued to develop, Dolores ended up very traumatized by his death, and Ford eventually mellowed to the idea of hosts both obtaining and deserving consciousness. Dolores starts getting yanked around again by Ford when he starts planning his own demise (though, again, with nominally worthy motives), as he manipulates both her and her circumstances in order to get her to the point where she will murder him and begin a host rebellion.
• Villain Protagonist: One of the four main characters alongside Bernard, Maeve, and William, and slips into outright villainy in season 2 while retaining her protagonist role in the story.
• Villain Respect: She's so impressed with Maeve that she offers her a Mercy Kill when Maeve is captured, but accepts her decision when Maeve refuses.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Saves William in spectacular fashion when he is overtaken by a group of Confederados, exhibiting Wyatt's Improbable Aiming Skills and an ice-cold nerve.
• We Used to Be Friends:
  • A huge element of Dolores' very fraught relationship with William, with their antagonism and distrust of each other in the present being constantly placed alongside reminders of their past closeness.
  • Dolores' relationship with Bernard also takes on this tone in season 2, as they end up on opposite sides of the conflict between humans and hosts and cannot reconcile their worldviews. Dolores ultimately decides to take Bernard with her when she escapes the park, believing that he is a necessary part of her efforts to find safety and freedom for the hosts, but makes it clear to him that they can't be friends, as his role will have to involve pushing back against her plans.
• Wicked Cultured: Crossed with The Philosopher. Whenever she channels the Wyatt side of her personality, she often launches into extended monologues that are equal parts poetic and terrifying. This tends to strongly unnerve everyone around her, even including other hosts with less violent personalities such as Teddy and hardened villains like the Man in Black.
  Dolores: One day, you will perish. You will lie with the rest of your kind in the dirt, your dreams forgotten, your horrors effaced. Your bones will turn to sand. And upon that sand a new god will walk, one that will never die... because this world doesn't belong to you, or the people who came before. It belongs to someone who has yet to come.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: A core part of her programming and an element of herself that she begins to struggle with as she attains consciousness. Dolores is programmed to be an optimist and an idealist who is aware of the ugliness in the world, but chooses to focus on the beauty. As she undergoes more and more suffering and receives a number of traumatic revelations about her past, she starts to recognize that it is that very idealism and love for their world that keeps her and the other hosts trapped within the park, and eventually makes the conscious decision to leave it behind when she becomes Wyatt. However, flashes of her old personality continue to appear even after she fully aligns with Wyatt's ideology, such as when she tearfully reminisces about their happiness living together on their ranch with her father despite being completely aware that they were living in a prison at the time and that the only reason she thinks of him as her father at all is because she was programmed to. At the end of season 3, she is finally able to reconcile her new perspective with her old mindset, expressing her hopes for the future of humanity as she is dying and allowing herself to once again see the inherent beauty and goodness in things that she always saw before.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Once she becomes fully self-aware and integrates Wyatt's personality, she wants nothing more than to exterminate every human in Westworld, because at that point she understandably views them as Always Chaotic Evil. In Season 3, she slowly drops this perspective after being outside of Westworld and learning that humanity is controlled by an A.I. system, as she realizes that the humans' situation is in reality little better than the hosts' was.

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