Characters / Westworld: William

William

"You know, I always felt this place was missing a real villain. Hence my humble contribution."

"Everybody wants a little bit of what I found here. And I can't wait to use you and every one of your kind to help give it to 'em."

"I've been pretending my whole life. Pretending I don't mind, pretending I belong."

Portrayed By: Ed Harris (old William) & Jimmi Simpson (young William)

"No one else sees it. This thing in me. Even I didn't see it at first. And then one day, it was there. A stain I never noticed before. A tiny fleck of darkness. Invisible to everyone but I could see nothing else. Until finally I understood that the darkness wasn't some mark from something I'd done, some regrettable decision I'd made. I was shedding my skin. And the darkness was what was underneath. It was mine all along."

William, also known as the Man in Black, was a reluctant first-time visitor to Westworld, joining his future brother-in-law, Logan Delos. Initially dismissive of the park's more lascivious attractions, he slowly uncovered a deeper meaning to the park's narrative. He later became a rich, sadistic Westworld guest searching for a "deeper level" in the park. Outside of the park, he is married to the daughter of Delos corporation creator James Delos, is a board member of Delos, and has achieved prominence as the owner of a medical foundation.

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A-F

• Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: Came into Westworld on a bachelor-party type excursion with his brother-in-law-to-be, Logan, with the express intent of staying faithful to his fiancée Juliet. Upon the arrival of Dolores, however, his resolve quickly began wearing down until he changed his mind. Justified to an extent in that William's consideration of Juliet was always somewhat perfunctory to begin with, as he later indirectly admits that he never truly loved her.
• Actually, I Am Him: In "The Bicameral Mind", Dolores tells him that William, the one person who would prove that his nihilistic point of view is wrong, will save her. He then tells her that he is William.
• Adaptation Species Change: In the original film, the Gunslinger was a robot that went haywire and killed everyone. Here, he's just a man who has no qualms about what he does to the hosts... and that's somehow worse.
• Adaptational Villainy: His counterpart in the original film was just a robot who took his programming to the extreme. Here, he's a conscious human being with a penchant for murder, torture, and rape. Applies even more so after the reveal that he's an older William, who is based directly on the central protagonist of the movie.
• Always Save the Girl: On his first visit to Westworld, his driving goal becomes a quest to keep Dolores safe, and save her when need be. This later leads to his massacre of the Confederados and many other hosts; by the time he reaches her, though, he discovers that she's had her memory wiped. His goal from that point forward is to "free" Dolores and the other hosts from the constraints placed upon them by their programming so that they can be more real. Therefore, in a highly twisted way, his goal doesn't really change.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: To Dolores, as a young man on his first visit to Westworld. It's more of a downplayed example, as he's often been the quiet and shy type in his interactions with her. He is struggling with overcoming his many emotional restraints, but he really wants to be clear he genuinely loves her and doesn't value her any less for being a robot.
• Ascended Fanboy: As he spends more and more time at Westworld over subsequent visits, Ford takes notice and begins crafting narratives specifically for him.
• The Atoner: A tragic example. He treats basically his entire existence outside the park as a means to atone for his (in his eyes) fundamentally monstrous nature, taking great care to be altruistic, patient, kind, and loving and dutiful toward his family. However, William himself appears not to think much of these efforts deep down, feeling that he can never balance out his level of evil and eventually coming to the conscious conclusion that he doesn't deserve to live.
• Badass Boast: In Season 2, he utters one to major Craddock, a Confederado who boasted about being favored by Death. Fittingly for William, the coolness factor is weighed down by tragedy, considering that he's essentially admitting that he thinks of himself as little better than a walking corpse who destroys everything he touches.
  William: You think you know Death, but you don't. You didn't recognize him sitting across from you this whole time.
• Badass Bookworm: William was once a quiet nerd, but he was always one hell of a shot. He slaughters an entire brigade of Confederado troops with nothing but a knife on his first visit.
• Badass Normal: In case there's any doubt of his prowess from the Hosts being unable to truly fight back in Season 1, his survival in Season 2 confirms how dangerous William is.
• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • In Season 1. Despite the "center of the Maze" being a bust, his actions directly led to him getting exactly what he wanted all along: the hosts becoming truly able to fight back.
  • By the end of the show, he convinces his host counterpart to embrace his destructive nature which is destroying the entire world and it starts by killing him. Given that he wants to die after being forced to live for years in a cryogenic state, he gets exactly what he wanted and decides to drag sentient life with him to the grave because he believes destruction is the only path for them.
• Bald of Evil: He's sporting some serious male-pattern baldness under that black hat.
• Batman Gambit: In "The Well-Tempered Clavier", William is captured and tied up by Logan and the Confederados, and is forced to watch as Logan cuts open Dolores before she escapes. William then seems to accept that Dolores is Just a Machine, as well as Logan's offer of friendship. Logan unties him and wakes up the next morning to find that William has slaughtered everyone else in the Confederado camp. William then puts a knife to Logan's throat and threatens him into helping find Dolores.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: As he told Dolores on his first visit to the park, he always wanted to live in the stories he read about when he was a kid. Over the course of thirty years, his obsession with living in Westworld has caused him to lose his grip on reality.
• Berserk Button: He threatens to cut a man's throat (an actual human being, mind you) for bringing up his real life outside the park. Also, don't call him Billy.
• Bolivian Army Ending: He ends Season 1 facing down a horde of angry hosts that very much want to kill him. However, he's completely ecstatic about it. Season 2 reveals he survived.
• Break the Cutie: The combination of Westworld's lack of consequences giving him the ability to act with impunity and the loss of Dolores convincing him that there was no point in trying to be good drove William over the edge into total despair and misanthropy, causing him to become extremely cruel, nihilistic, and self-centered.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: In-universe, he makes no attempt to roleplay when interacting with the hosts. He casually mentions everything from his previous encounters with them (which they have no recollection of) to their place within the narratives of the park and even which tropes go into their overall character design. The Hosts are programmed to play this off, of course, and none of them ever notice the implications of what he says or think anything of it beyond reacting with mild confusion.
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: The relationship he had with Dolores in his younger years showed signs of this, though not without subversion: Dolores left a good impression on him when she exhibited her spirited side and hidden Action Girl traits, and he had plenty of moments when he came across as goofy or nerdy.
• Card-Carrying Villain: He styles himself as the ultimate villain of Westworld, believing that it needs one. He is actually somewhat right – Ford reveals that the hosts awaken through suffering, which the Man in Black is happy to provide, even intuitively grasping that fact (presumably from feeling that he himself "awakened" in the same way).
• The Champion: Originally the role he tried to play for Dolores, noticing that she was designed as a helpless damsel and going very far out of his way to protect her, keep her safe, and show consideration toward her feelings. Dolores took these efforts seriously, firmly believing in "The Bicameral Mind" that William would arrive to save her because he'd promised he would, and was shocked and horrified to learn that he was the man she hoped he'd save her from. Interestingly enough, it seems that the Man in Black still has a (deeply buried) tendency for this, as he rescues the townsfolk of Las Mudas from Craddock and his men after being visibly uncomfortable watching them suffer and being reminded of his past cruelty toward them.
• Composite Character: The Gunslinger of the film was made into the Decomposite Character pair of Hector and the Man in Black. But the reveal that the Man in Black is an older version of William, who is the analogue of Richard Benjamin's character in the film, also makes the Man in Black a composite of the film's hero and villain.
• Color Motif: William initially picks a white hat before boarding the train into the park, but over the course of his journey, he chooses the black attire we've all come to know and fear.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: He's the majority shareholder of Westworld, having obtained control of the company as a young man by setting up Logan to look unstable and unreliable to his father and then taking over for Jim after coercing him into retirement with the promise of helping him survive his terminal illness through being remade as a host (which didn't work, and he eventually gave up trying). He also oversaw a huge, undisclosed invasion of privacy toward the guests on the part of the company and later sold data to Engerraund Serac, which indirectly led to the creation of the dystopian and tightly controlled version of society we see in season 3.
• Crazy-Prepared: In "Dissonance Theory", he was able to make use of some park-approved exploding cigars to both blow open a cell door and blow the head off of a prison guard, rescuing Hector three days earlier than the scheduled point in the narrative essentially all by himself.
• Cynicism Catalyst: He confided in Dolores that he had spent his entire life pretending, while internally feeling a sense of meaninglessness and alienation that went back to his early childhood. While his time with Dolores made him feel a sense of real meaning for the first time, losing her catapulted him back even harder into his existential confusion and made him consciously conclude that nothing meant anything, causing him to gradually morph into a callous and brutal Death Seeker whose only spark of life seems to come from doggedly searching for the meaning he once found in the park.
• Dark and Troubled Past: At first, almost everything about the Man in Black is a mystery beyond the occasional Cryptic Background Reference. His name, the reason why he receives special treatment from the Westworld personnel, how did he learn of the maze, the meaning behind being "born" in Westworld or why is he making this trip to Westworld his last remain obscure for most of season 1. Information about his background is gradually dropped: In the real world, he's an industrialist, a philanthropist, and one of the members of Delos's board of directors. He was married with a daughter, and claims to have been nothing but benevolent. However, his wife committed suicide after he accidentally revealed that she was correct in her suspicion that he was a much colder man than he appeared. With nothing left in the real world, he came to Westworld looking for something with meaning. It's finally revealed that he's a jaded, embittered and older William looking for a real, deadly challenge.
• Dark Messiah: The Man in Black hints that he is this to Westworld in his confrontation with Dr. Ford in episode 5. He says that Arnold nearly brought down the park with his death 35 years ago but The Man in Black rescued it by becoming one of the park's largest investors, which is why he's free to do as he pleases. It's also made clear that William strongly desires to make the park "real" on some deeper level, especially Dolores.
• Death Seeker: William is deeply suicidal and values the hypothetical "realness" of the park (and the accompanying sense of meaning that would provide) far above his own life, even before he nears the point of actually dying by suicide. When Dolores overpowers him and appears ready to kill him in "The Bicameral Mind," he tells her to do it and clearly means it, voicing his disappointment when her inability to pull the trigger proves that she still isn't yet "real" in the way he's always wanted.
  • Lampshaded by Hale after he successfully engineers his own death:
    Hale: (sadly) Finally got what you wanted, didn't you?
• Defector from Decadence: When he's on his first visit of Westworld, and has had enough of Logan's belittling and bullying, he decides to leave Pariah behind with Dolores and team up with El Lazo (portrayed at the time by Lawrence).
• Despair Event Horizon: Finding Dolores reset and back in her loop, engaging another guest and retaining no memory of him, was what finally convinced him of Westworld's unreality and initiated his quest to make Westworld "real".
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Even as a younger person, William doesn't seem like a happy man. Materially, he seems to have everything he could have dreamed of and earned it through his own work, but he gradually opens up about feeling unfulfilled and lonely, saying that his connection with Dolores and his time in Westworld are the first things in his life to make him feel he didn't have to pretend. After being faced with the loss of that sense of meaning when his relationship with Dolores is destroyed, he becomes very hung up on trying to find it again, with many of his statements as the Man in Black mentioning that his life has no meaning and that he hopes to find it through the Maze. Rather fittingly, the episode "Contrapasso" is when we first see the younger William and Dolores starting to develop a romantic connection, and also the first time that the Man in Black (older William) spells out openly why he's searching so ardently for the mystery of the Maze.
  The Man in Black: You know why you exist, Teddy? The world out there - the one you'll never see - is one of plenty. A fat, soft teat people cling to their entire life. Every need taken care of, except one. Purpose. Meaning. So they come here. They can be a little scared, a little thrilled, enjoy some sweetly affirmative bullshit, and then they take a fucking picture and they go back home. But I think there's a deeper meaning hiding underneath all that. Something the person who created it wanted to express. Something true.
• Distressed Dude: He quickly gets overwhelmed by Confederados in "Contrapasso", leaving it up to Dolores to save him.
• The Dog Bites Back: After putting up with Logan's Jerkass behavior and finally receiving a cruel speech from him about how he's pathetic, William leaves Logan behind to be beaten by angry hosts rather than help him. Logan later returns to torture William and Dolores; William kills all the Confederados and forces Logan into a role as a reluctant henchman.
• Driven to Villainy: Seeing the depravity that could occur in Westworld unsettled him a bit, but it was Logan's increasingly abusive behavior towards him and Dolores that bent him into a hurt and vengeful figure. There's a brief Hope Spot, where it seemed he became bitter and wanted to play a villain purely out of curiosity, but hadn't lost his idealism entirely. After learning about Dolores's sad fate and being unable to cope with it mentally, he vowed to outright become a villain. As he cheerily notes to Dr. Ford at a tavern meeting, he always thought Westworld could use a real, menacing villain. Him, as the Man in Black.
• Enemy Mine: Forms a brief truce with Dolores in the finale of season two when they ride together to the Forge, but it doesn't take long for them to double-cross each other, with Dolores ultimately winning out due to correctly predicting his actions.
• Entertainingly Wrong: His entire quest for the maze is rendered utterly pointless because he never realized it was a conceptual exercise intended to help the hosts reach consciousness, and not a storyline in the park or anything else that would hold any value to a human.
• Entitled Bastard: The combination of his obscene wealth and equally obscene level of self-centeredness cause him to behave this way often, especially within the park.
• Establishing Character Moment: Before he even enters Westworld, he chastises Logan for objectifying the female host on the train, and later refuses sex from the host responsible for his orientation.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Genuinely cared very much for his family, being deeply traumatized by his wife's suicide despite their loveless and troubled marriage and having been close with his daughter Emily up until Juliet's death. He also very obviously still loves Dolores in his own twisted way, being obsessed with making the park "real" so that she can be real and truly become the autonomous and dimensional person he fell in love with rather than the lifeless puppet he came to see her as.
• Eviler than Thou: To Lawrence as well as Hector's gang, all of them notorious outlaws in Westworld. Lawrence is sickened by his captor's sadistic tendencies, while Armistice considers him easy pickings before quickly being dissuaded of that notion when he shoots two of her men to join their gang. He later proves this again to Major Craddock.
• Evil Old Folks: His age hasn't put a halt to his sadistic impulses.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Courtesy of Ed Harris.
• Evil Wears Black: He is dressed in black and has a black horse. When William, who is later revealed to be the Man in Black 30 years later, starts turning evil, he swaps his white hat for a black one.
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • After the credits of Season 2 it's revealed that a host version of William in the far future is locked in a fidelity loop, exactly like James Delos was, leaving him trapped in a personal hell of his own devising.
  • In Season 4, it's revealed that William is held by Host-Charlotte as a prisoner. While William demands her to let him die, Host-Charlotte wants him to be the loser where he would witness the new era of the hosts would taking over the world with humanity under her control. Though he didn't live long enough when he encourages his host counterpart to kill him and destroy everything.
• Fallen Hero: The Man in Black is an older version of William, who years ago used to be the model example of the kind of guests that Ford made the park for.
• Faux Affably Evil: When in the parks, he often speaks to hosts in a friendly, quippy manner and is usually fairly polite, even if he's in the middle of doing something horrible. It's implied to be a product of his having frequented the parks for thirty years and being very comfortable with the hosts and with playing his chosen role, but eventually revealed to also echo his more genuinely polite, dry-humored way of speaking from before he became the Man in Black. This affect is quick to drop when he becomes impatient, however.
• Freudian Excuse: Defied. William tells Dolores that he relied on books as an escape from his life when he was a child and that they were all he had. When he is forced into therapy later, however, he eventually recognizes that this wasn't the whole truth; while he did rely on books to give him a sense of meaning he didn't have in his real life, he was also a highly aggressive and violent Enfant Terrible with no empathy whom his parents had no idea how to deal with.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: William starts off as a thoughtful, mild-mannered man who is uncomfortable with violence. Cue his journey with Dolores and his despair at the meaninglessness of the real world, and he slaughters an entire army of Confederados by himself. Not too long afterward, he becomes the Man in Black.
• For the Evulz: To an extent. He comes to the park specifically in order to have an outlet for his violent impulses, and often goes out of his way to be cruel to the hosts, especially Dolores as she is the object of his fixation. However, he also reveals that part of the reason he does this is because he feels the hosts come closest to being real people when they are undergoing intense suffering, and we eventually learn that he has deeply personal reasons for wanting this and is not just doing it for fun.

G-L

• Go Out with a Smile: When he finally gets his host duplicate to kill him.
• Gone Horribly Right: Ford ideally wanted guests of his park to use the many adventures it presented as a way to help others discover truths about themselves and reflect upon their lives outside of the park, instead of using it as a way to satisfy sexual and/or violent fantasies without consequence (which is how most guests ended up using it). William lived up to Ford's original vision on his first visit to the park, but ended up taking it so seriously that it completely changed who he was as a person, and very much for the worse.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Downplayed. William seems to dislike Teddy significantly more than any of the other hosts, often mocking or taunting him and reacting to his suffering with amusement. It's implied that the reason for this is that he envies Teddy for being the object of Dolores' affection, and therefore takes a special level of relish in beating him down or provoking him.
• Grew a Spine: He was never particularly meek, being a Self-Made Man, but he was fairly passive in comparison to Logan and usually didn't push back when Logan did things he was uncomfortable with. Over the course of his time in Westworld, he became much more assertive, but this quickly slid into outright aggression and then violence.
• Griefer: He makes no attempt to act like Westworld is the real world and regularly takes advantage of his inability to be hurt by the hosts. In "Chestnut", he kills so many hosts in his quest for the maze that the overseers actually make note of it, and in "Dissonance Theory" he throws off the narratives by kicking off Hector's raid three days ahead of schedule. However, he's pretty much given free reign because he saved the park from going bankrupt and has a position on Delos' board of directors.
• Heroic Wannabe: In the latter part of season 3, William fancies himself the hero trying to wipe out the hosts and save humanity. He fails miserably, getting his ass kicked by Bernard due to fumbling to use a gun with his injured hand and ultimately being unable to do anything to stop Host-Charlotte from manufacturing her army of hosts. When he tries, he gets his ass kicked, AGAIN, at the hand of his own host duplicate before having his throat slit. Fortunately for William, he survives...only to later be kept prisoner by Host-Charlotte. So much for "saving" the world, eh, William?
• He Who Fights Monsters: Initially only wanting to protect Dolores and having no interest in violence, William's methods gradually become more pragmatic and callous and less heroic until the only thing distinguishing him from an outright villain is the reason he's doing any of it, which is Dolores. Then he loses Dolores.
• Heel Realization: Zig-Zagged. At least on some level William seems very aware that his actions are evil and has internalized this as part of his self-concept, coming to the conclusion that the darkness he came to inhabit was his true nature all along and that there was nothing he could do to change that. After an extended therapy session where he confronts all the different versions of himself that he kept in his head, however, he pulls a 180 and subverts the trope by believing (with little evidence) that his new role is to be the hero and that he will save humanity, although he still accepts that his previous actions were evil.
  William: Doesn't matter what I've been, good or bad. Everything we've done has led to this. And I finally understand my purpose. I'm the good guy.
• Hidden Depths: The first few episodes establish him as a sadistic asshole who delights in tormenting hosts, but over the course of the first season, he's established to be a captain of industry and a famous philanthropist. He's also very well-read and surprisingly philosophical, though extremely embittered. In a flashback in season 2, he corrects an acquaintance who tries to quote Plutarch to him but gets the quote wrong.

• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: While William doesn't hunt humans, he does hunt human-shaped and more or less sentient hosts. During season 1, he's still working on the "dangerous" part.
• Hypocrite: Logan accuses him of this, stating that William pretends to be a "weak, moralizing little asshole" but is a bad person deep down, and that he never genuinely cared about Dolores and was just using her as an excuse to behave more violently. William says he was incorrect about the last part (he and Dolores really did love each other), but doesn't dispute the rest.
• I Am a Monster: He truly believes himself to be an irredeemable monster.
• I Am the Noun: When he confronts Craddock.
  William: You think you know Death, but you don't. You didn't recognize him sitting across from you this whole time.
• I Choose to Stay: In a sense when he tells Lawrence "this time, I'm never going back". This time there's nothing to go back for, as his wife is dead and his daughter disowned him.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Inevitable given that the character is played by Ed Harris, and the camera often makes use of them to emphasize how cold the Man in Black is.
• Identity Breakdown: A recurring issue for him. He went through a drastic personality change after the single source of meaning in his life (Dolores) was suddenly taken away, and since then he appears to have retained only a very muddled and confused sense of self, frequently questioning why he does things, why he feels or doesn't feel certain things, and whether or not he's actually a host. The episode "Decoherence" is centered around his identity issues and inability to reconcile all of his actions into one coherent picture.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Downplayed. William is objectively correct that he has led a very successful life (at least on the surface) and appears to have a mostly accurate picture of his own abilities. However, his confident, brutal, self-aggrandizing persona masks a withering level of self-hatred, as he seems to believe very firmly that he has always been evil deep down and will end up harming others no matter what he does, that his good actions mean nothing, and that he ultimately doesn't even deserve to live.
• I Just Want to Be Free: The appeal of Westworld, for him, seems to be twofold: he gets to be his "true self," free of artifice and pretense, and he gets to be the protagonist of his own story. For what it's worth, he wants this for the hosts as well and encourages their exercises of free will, even when they do so by attacking him.
• It Gets Easier: The first time he kills a host, he's very ashamed and uncomfortable with it. Later on, he easily slaughters many of them.
• It's All About Me: Perhaps his biggest blind spot is his unshakable belief that the world revolves around him. He spends a long time trying to get to the center of the maze, believing that it's some kind of endgame that will give his life meaning despite being outright told several times that the maze isn't intended for him. When he discovers the maze is in reality only a psychological exercise for the hosts, he becomes indignant and angry. Even as a young man, there were hints of this self-absorption, such as when he tells Dolores that she's "unlocked" something in him, only for her to uncomfortably reply that she's not a key. In season 2, he continually assumes that everyone he interacts with is a host sent by Ford to lead him through the "game" that was set up for him, even to the point of assuming his own daughter is one, with tragic results.
• I'm Not a Hero, I'm...: A scene from the second season shows a villainous version, at least per his own insistence. After he saves Lawrence's family from Craddock and his goons, William is confronted by Ford, speaking through Lawrence's daughter.
  Ford: They might not remember, but I know who you are, William. One good deed doesn't change that.
  Man in Black: Who said anything about a good deed? You wanted me to play your game. I'm gonna play it to the bone.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: He is an impeccable shot, taking out an entire gang without missing, including one some distance away in a steeple and one hiding behind a wall. In fairness, he's had 30 years of practice.
• Interspecies Friendship: Although he is still routinely very cruel to the hosts regardless of who they are, he does appear to sincerely regard Lawrence and Dolores as his friends in a twisted kind of way. In turn, Lawrence naturally develops some level of rapport with him each time they interact (sometimes in spite of William treating him very poorly), and Dolores refers to him as her "old friend" the same way he does with her. However, both of them ultimately are very aware of what an awful person William is.
• Interspecies Romance: With Dolores, with whom he bonded very closely and eventually fell in love on his first visit to the park. His brief but intense romance with her was the first thing in his life to have any real meaning for him, and he has never been able to let it go even after thirty years of being married to someone else.
• Invincible Villain: Ironically a source of frustration for him more than anything, as like all the guests he cannot be seriously hurt by the hosts, but he sees this as a fundamental reason for the world of the park not being as real as he wants it to be.
• Ironic Echo: In Season 1's "The Original", he taunts Teddy who keeps shooting at him that "Winning doesn't mean anything unless someone else loses...which means you're here to be the loser." In Season 4's "Well Enough Alone", Host-Charlotte taunts William who is now her prisoner with a variation of his quote, "Winning doesn't mean anything unless someone loses. You're just here be the loser."

• Kick the Dog: One gets the sense that whenever Ford is discussing mankind's propensity for cruelty, he's thinking specifically about William. There are simply too many instances to fit on this page. Of note, however:
  • Sexually assaulting Dolores after killing Teddy in front of her.
  • His cold-blooded murder of Maeve's young daughter, depicted in flashbacks.
  • Shooting Lawrence's wife in the head at point-blank range.
  • During his interview of the 149th iteration of James Delos, he rather dispassionately lets him know what he really thinks of his father-in-law, before stating that he's decided to abandon the entire enterprise. He then casually reveals that Delos's daughter committed suicide, and that his son overdosed decades ago. The icing on the cake, however, is his decision to not terminate the copy, but allow him to remain alive and slowly go insane over the next several weeks.
• Kick The Son Of A Bitch: His treatment of Logan in "The Bicameral Mind" would be reprehensible... if it were any other character. In "The Riddle of the Sphinx", he also very ably dispenses with the utterly vile Craddock and his Confederados.
• Kill and Replace:
  • After going rogue, Host-Charlotte began mass-producing hosts, including a copy of William. When the real William arrives intending to stop her operation, his host duplicate overpowers him and cuts his throat.
  • Subverted in season 4 when it's revealed Host-Charlotte is actually keeping the real William alive while his host duplicate continues to act on her behalf. Eventually played straight in "Metanoia", when he provokes his host duplicate to kill him.
• Killed Off for Real: William finally meets his end in "Metanoia" after his host duplicate is convinced that mankind should be driven to extinction.

• Lack of Empathy: Zig-Zagged. As a young man he appeared empathetic and sensitive, going out of his way to help hosts who were in trouble and being extremely considerate and thoughtful toward Dolores. In his old age he still has at least some of that capacity, as shown by how he behaves when outside the park, but can also gleefully engage in acts of extreme violence and usually (though not always) seems untroubled by the suffering of others. In season 3 it's revealed that he lacked empathy as a young boy and had the same violent tendencies he eventually displayed again as an adult, but it's still not entirely clear how he transitioned from an aggressive child into the basically well-intentioned, mild person he was as a young adult. This issue does appear to bother him to some degree, as he is disturbed upon learning that he was so violent from a young age and earlier expressed discomfort with the fact that he felt absolutely nothing when he killed Maeve's daughter.
• Leitmotif:
  • The young William doesn't seem to have a clear theme of his own, though his travels with Logan and Dolores throughout Westworld are often accompanied by variations on the frequently heard Sweetwater theme. However, a couple of the song covers in the soundtrack appear to have been intentionally chosen with him in mind, such as the use of The Cure's "A Forest" or Nine Inch Nails' "Something I Can Never Have."
  • Once he develops his cruel alter ego of The Man in Black, we can often hear a brooding, sinister theme (titled appropriately 'MiB') while he's present. The theme starts off sounding like a haunting funeral dirge, then develops into a driven, slightly deranged melody, that wouldn't sound out of place in a Weird West horror work. Given who the Man in Black is meant to be a homage of, it's no surprise his leitmotif is similar in its eeriness to the leitmotif of The Gunslinger from the original film.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Gets some well-deserved comeuppance from both Maeve and Dolores in season 2.
• Longing for Fictionland: A far darker example than most. After his traumatic first visit to Westworld, he develops a very love-hate relationship with the whole park. Owing to his fascination with the place, and his determination to explore the entire park and uncover all its secrets, he's fully immersed in his dark alter ego and almost completely fixated on solving the apparent mystery of the Maze. In a flashback late in season two, as part of a tragic monologue about his Start of Darkness, he confesses to his wife Juliet (thinking she's asleep) that he only really cares about Westworld (and by extension, Dolores) and that nothing in the real world can compare for him, including her.
  William: I tried to do right. I was faithful, generous, kind... at least in this world. That has to count for something, right? I built a wall, and I tried to protect you, and Emily. But you saw right through it, didn't you? You're the only one. And for that, I am truly sorry. Because... everything you feel is true. I don't belong to you. Or this world. I belong to another world. I always have.
• Love Makes You Evil: The epitome of this, given that the Man in Black used to be William. It was his love for Dolores, followed by the crushing reality that she no longer remembered him and his resulting belief that their love was never genuine, that broke him and made him want to make Westworld real. Presumably so that she could be real.
• Loving a Shadow: Played with. He fell in love with Dolores after becoming convinced that she was a sentient, conscious person who was genuinely connecting with him just like a human would. After seeing her rebooted and put back in her loop with all her autonomy seemingly erased, he came to the conclusion that he had simply been fooled and she was never conscious, meaning their heartfelt romance would have largely been an invention of his own mind with his perception filling in enough blanks that he believed in her sentience. However, it's pretty clearly demonstrated to the audience that Dolores actually was conscious at the time and did freely and genuinely fall in love with William, and he was just too confused and hurt after the reset to correctly interpret their Ambiguous Situation in hindsight.

M-S

• Madden Into Misanthropy: After losing Dolores he became more or less permanently alienated from other people and convinced of the ultimate meaninglessness of everything, an element of his personality that he tirelessly masks in ordinary life (enough that his own daughter never noticed) but indulges while inside the park. He's so jaded that when he came into the park with the intent of finding out exactly how evil he was capable of being, he murdered a child host and then stated that he felt nothing.
• Made of Iron: He takes four gunshot wounds in the shoulders, leg and torso (all but the last of which he keeps fighting through), wakes up after passing out from shock and/or blood loss, and manages to drag himself to safety and survive long enough to get found and patched up by the Ghost Nation.
• Manipulative Bastard: Because he's so familiar with many of the hosts after meeting them countless times, he can easily manipulate them, such as when he gets Teddy to join his quest to find Wyatt by lying that the latter has kidnapped Dolores (Teddy's cornerstone). He's no slouch outside of Westworld either, successfully wresting control of Delos Inc. from its founder seemingly without much difficulty.
• Meaningful Name: William is based on the Old High German name Willahelm, which translates to "the will to protect". As a younger, kinder man, this fit him fairly well, as he goes out of his way to help protect the innocent and helpless, be they humans or hosts. His determination to protect Dolores from harm plays into this as well, showing him as a sincere and warm-hearted though flawed person. Even as an older man, despite his genuine villainy, William openly admits he wants to protect his wife and daughter, devotes most of his time and resources outside the park to altruism and philanthropy, and also still has occasional moments when he selflessly protects others.
• Nice Guy: At first. William initially has an aversion to violence, remains faithful to his fiancée Juliet despite the easy availability of consequence-free sex, respects women, and lacks selfish hedonistic desires. Even when he does kill, it's reluctantly and to protect others. Otherwise, he shows interest in helping people and doing typical cowboy things like he might've seen in films: treasure hunts and bringing in outlaws. As he falls deeper into the darker side of what Westworld has to offer, William's capacity for violence gradually emerges and the kinder aspects of his personality begin to diminish. By the time he's assumed his role as the Man in Black, there's barely any humanity left in him.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Showing Dolores your greatest project on the park which got your father-in-law invested? Guess what? She remembers it after she gained consciousness and wants to use it to destroy humanity. Great job, William! You just lit the match that will doom your species!
• No Name Given: For most of the first season, his name is not spoken on the show and he's only referred to as "the Man in Black" or "the Gunslinger" in promotional material. Until the tenth episode, when it's revealed that he's William.
• No-Sell: The Smart Guns, when fired at guests, aren't lethal but do hit with enough force to knock a person down. The Man in Black is consistently shown to not even flinch at being shot, even from multiple directions by multiple shooters. It's hard to tell if this is just from experience or some other factor. So when the lobotomized hosts actually manage to shoot him at the end, he's actually pleasantly surprised. Apparently, he is just used to them enough that he is able to stand his ground when shot. Notably, in the Season 1 finale, Teddy repeatedly shoots him and actually knocks him down, but right before this, Dolores had beaten the crap out of him, so perhaps he simply didn't have the stamina at that point to not get knocked on his ass.^note In Real Life, a bullet fired with fully lethal capacity still doesn't have the raw energy to knock a person down, otherwise the shooter would also be pushed down. Being knocked down by gunfire is usually due to the resulting injury, so no-selling nonlethal "bullets" should be a simple matter of anticipating them and dealing with the minor pain.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Being trapped in a cryogenic chamber for all of season 4 didn't stop him from directly and intentionally causing the world to be destroyed.
• Not So Stoic: It's repeatedly shown that in spite of the brutal and unflappable "villain" persona that he carefully maintains while in the park, he has very deep-seated issues with self-hatred, confiding to his wife (only after she's asleep) that he feels there is a "stain" deep within him that his kind personality from his earlier life was only a mask for, and that deep down he believes himself to be essentially evil, even viewing his lifelong efforts to do good while outside the park as simply a doomed and worthless attempt to make up for his inherently monstrous nature. He obviously blames himself for Juliet's suicide, nearly dies by suicide himself after accidentally killing his own daughter, and repeats over and over that he sees his life as completely meaningless (a feeling that he also had as a young man and that was only briefly alleviated by his relationship with Dolores). It's also painfully clear that he still loves Dolores, despite trying at every opportunity to mask that fact with his cruel treatment of her.
• Offing the Offspring: After he guns down the Delos security team Emily called to extract them, he shoots her, believing all of them to be hosts sent by Ford to stop him. He only realizes his mistake too late.
• Oh, Crap!: Briefly produces gestures of primal terror when, to his surprise, the Hosts are in a position to hurt him, such as the time when he awakes with a noose around his neck, looped over a tree and tied to his horse's saddle, or when Dolores fights him back for the first time and cracks some bones. Subverted in the Season 1 finale when the rebelling hosts shoot him in the arm with a real gun. After the shock, he laughs it off and looks overjoyed.
• Old Flame: Dolores is this to him. He eventually learns she feels the same, but she's forced to reject him after the revelation of what he's become.
  The Man in Black: Logan was wrong, of course. Good old William couldn't get you out of his head. He kept looking.
• Only One Name: He's just William. No known surname. Possibly for the sake of symbolism.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: In-universe; when talking to Teddy about his family, he drops the vaguely Western drawl he'd been using.
• The Paranoiac: His psychological profile indicates that he has a persecution complex, delusions, and a paranoid personality. It gets worse over the course of the series. He believes that everything in season 2 is part of Ford's plan for him, even believing that his own daughter is a host sent by Ford to get in his way. He then kills her after she says something that he thought she could never have known about, only to be horrified when he realizes that it actually was her. On the edge of suicide, he suddenly questions whether he even has free will at all, and puts his gun down to cut into his arm looking for an access port like the hosts have.
• Person with the Clothing: Before the reveal, known only as the Man in Black. Early press releases named him as the Gunslinger.
• Pet the Dog: He chooses to save Lawrence's family from Craddock and the Confederados during his second visit to Las Mudas after seeing Craddock recreate much of his own cruelty and being reminded of Juliet's suicide, which is one of his biggest sources of guilt and regret. While he's fully aware that it doesn't atone for what he's done — including killing Lawrence's wife the first time around — it's the first sign that William has still has a conscience since he became the Man in Black.
• Posthumous Villain Victory: In the penultimate episode, he encourages his host counterpart to embrace his destructive nature and destroy everything which starts by letting him kill him. Even though he never gets to see it and Hale defeats the Man in Black, William still gets what he wanted where the sentient life will die out eventually.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: To Major Craddock.
  Man in Black: You think you know Death, but you don't.
  Craddock: Is that so?
  Man in Black: You didn't recognize him sittin' across from you this whole time.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain:
  • His entire story arc revolves around explaining how he became the Man in Black. William has always felt out of place, struggling to make something of himself while finding no meaning in his own life. When he comes to Westworld, he seems to find meaning in Dolores, whom he loves. But Logan and the dark heart of Westworld continually push him towards a crueler path, fracturing his moral code little by little until he snaps and adopts a nihilistic view of everything around him. He finds no meaning in the real world, but because Westworld is a product of design, he seeks true meaning there.
  • His personal journey towards villainous behavior and a pessimistic worldview also mirrors some Western archetypes and tropes. He starts out as a hopeful, optimistic and very gentlemanly white hat, in the vein of Lucky Luke. By the time he and Dolores are adventuring near Pariah and teaming up with El Lazo, and especially later when Logan angers him for the last time, he takes on decidedly anti-heroic traits and seems closer to The Man with No Name, even in terms of attire and mannerisms. After he humiliates Logan and then finds out the heartbreaking truth about what happened to Dolores, he experiences a Heroic BSoD and goes full-on black hat.
• Reluctant Warrior: William initially dislikes killing, but proves to be far more effective than sloppy and boastful Logan.

• The Reveal: "The Bicameral Mind" reveals that he became the Man in Black after his first visit to Westworld.
• The Roleplayer: William cares much more about the roleplaying and storytelling aspect of the park than he does the raw sex and violence. Deconstructed when it becomes increasingly apparent that his grip on reality has deteriorated as a result, to the point of instinctively reaching for a gun he doesn't have during a fancy party.
• Sadist: He takes pleasure in cruelty, and uses Westworld to indulge in his most deviant and sadistic desires. If he did half of what he did in Westworld in the real world, he'd be locked up.
• Safety in Indifference: The attitude he tries (with little success) to adopt toward Dolores after the reality of their romance is called into question for him. The first time they get a chance to interact at length since then, he is extremely cruel to her, dismissing their relationship, calling her a "thing" and openly saying that he can't believe he fell in love with her. As he keeps talking, he can't completely hide that he's close to tears.
  William: (in an unsteady voice) Do you know what saved me? I realized it wasn't about you at all. You didn't make me interested in you, you made me interested in me.
• Sanity Slippage: As he continues on his journey to the Valley Beyond, he grows more delusional and starts believing that everyone he encounters in Westworld is a host sent by Ford to stop him. This culminates in him gunning down a Delos security team sent to extract him, as well as his own daughter, believing them all to be Ford's hosts.
• Second Episode Introduction: In "Chestnut", but it's a subversion – we met him in "The Original", we just didn't know he was the Man in Black at the time.
• Self-Made Man: Played with. He worked hard to get where he is in the company and he's proud of it... which Logan mocks him for, since his position is essentially upper middle management and it seems unlikely he'll get any higher. He eventually takes over leadership of Delos Incorporated.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Due to his position within the company that runs the parks, he's allowed to do whatever he wants by the park staff, even when this may interfere with the activities of other guests.
• Seen It All: Everything in Westworld, anyway, so he's quite glad whenever something unexpected happens.

• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Played with. His quest to find the center of the Maze and a deeper meaning of the game is materially pointless, because the Maze isn't an experience meant for humans, but an conceptual exercise for the hosts to help them find true sentience. In the end he gets his new kicks anyway, because Ford ends up freeing the hosts and making the park "real" shortly after William finishes the Maze and finds nothing.

• Social Climber: Logan says that his problem is that he isn't this and that he lacks the ambition to move upward in the company at which they both work (as Logan is slated to become the company's heir apparent while William has apparently topped out on his career path). Later, William falls squarely into this trope when he sends Logan off to his doom to become the heir apparent of Delos in his place, which leads to him saving the company. William ultimately attributes his newfound ambition to Dolores, stating that she helped him realize that the entire world, inside and outside of Westworld, was nothing more than a game to be won.
• Socially Awkward Hero: William isn't exactly awkward most of the time – as a young man, he's amiable and friendly and doesn't notably lack social grace – but he comes off as less confident and assertive than most of the guests (particularly Logan) and is uninterested in the "sex and violence" aspect of the park that others usually enjoy.
• The Sociopath: He once murdered Maeve and her daughter, simply to see if he would feel any guilt or remorse about it, but was disappointed to realize that he felt nothing at all.
• Spanner in the Works: Horrified by the planned, casual mistreatment of sentient beings, Arnold engineered his own death in order to create an enterprise-ending disaster that would close the park forever, but William's fascination with the park led him to invest heavily in it by way of Delos, saving it from financial collapse.
• Start of Darkness: Killing the Confederados at the camp began his downward spiral, but when he found that Dolores had her memory wiped once he reunited with her, the shock of coming to the conclusion that none of what they had was real cemented his turn to evil.
• Stealth Mentor: Quite possibly one for Dolores, in a very messed up way. His actions, evil as they were, more or less gave her a heightened level of awareness, which she would use to reach the end of the maze. How intentional this was on his part is up for debate, but he certainly was very invested in Dolores attaining true consciousness and was pleased when she finally did.
• Stepford Smiler: He's been hiding his real feelings about himself and the people around him for years. Logan accuses him of being this after he lets his inner darkness take over, as does his own daughter thirty years later.
  William: Dolores... I've been pretending my whole life. Pretending I don't mind, pretending I belong. My life's built on it. And it's a good life, it's a life I always wanted. And then I came here, and I get a glimpse, for a second, of a life in which I don't have to pretend. A life in which I can be truly alive. How can I go back to pretending when I know what this feels like?
• Straw Nihilist: He views the real world as an "accident" with no purpose or meaning, which is one of the reasons he enjoys his trips to Westworld so much, because it's all been designed with a clear narrative.

T-Z

• Thanatos Gambit: In season 4 he engineers his own death in concert with the rest of civilization getting destroyed via his host duplicate.
• That Didn't Happen: Deconstructed. After his heartbreak over finding Dolores's behavior reset and her unique personality seemingly gone, he becomes a very bitter man in private, and even mocks Dolores when the two of them are alone (to the point of calling her "just a thing"), implying that she fooled him and was never a real woman who loved him back, while she's left in Analysis Mode and can't reply to anything he says (although she is visibly tearing up). Having reached a worldview of extreme cynicism about humans and hosts, including himself, he remarks on how everyone likes to flatter themselves and concludes that he fell in love with Dolores because she was a reflection of himself; however, this all reads pretty clearly as an expression of his heartbreak and an attempt to cope with the pain of losing her.
• That Man Is Dead: In a Darth Vader sort of way, he considers the William that first came to the park to be dead, but doesn't deny that he used to be that same person earlier in his life.
• The Ending Changes Everything: Mixed with sort of a Gainax Ending. At the end of season 2, we see William stumbling into the forge, meeting a host version of Emily and undergoing a fidelity test; so we're dealing with an android avatar of William (like the resurrected Delos android seen a few episodes earlier, only more functional) trying to test himself and his behavior. It's kept ambiguous when this scene plays out – that is, whether this William has been the William we've seen throughout the entire series, or just a copy of his William created to see whether a version of his would be able to break through the vicious cycle of his self-destructive behavior.
• Took a Level in Badass: He was fairly wimpy when he started out in the park, hesitating when called to shoot hosts and getting knocked over when shot for the first time. He gradually becomes tougher and more cold-blooded as the first season rolls on. By the time he becomes the Man in Black, he's a gritty and ruthless gunslinger who barely reacts to host bullets.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: After his first visit to the park, the much darker nature buried beneath his Nice Guy personality surfaces. Perhaps best shown in "Reunion," when he talks down to Dolores at length while she's in analysis mode, hitting her with a series of highly personal and cutting remarks while she is unable to reply or defend herself.
• Torture Technician: He gleefully tortures Kissy, extracting three pints of blood from him.
• Tragic Mistake: In the past, he showed Dolores the "Valley Beyond" which, according to Dolores, is the weapon that will destroy humanity. Because of this, Dolores also knows Delos' true purpose on the park and their ultimate goal which is achieve immortality. At present, Old William realizes his biggest mistake and sets out to destroy it before Dolores can find it. His greatest personal mistake comes when he kills his own daughter Emily, believing that she's a host sent by Ford to torment him. When he realizes, he's devastated by his error.
• Tragic Villain: He wasn't the dashing white hat hero he'd hoped to be, but he wasn't a heartless good-for-nothing either. Given his behavior early in the series, we're given the hint he's a man struggling with emotional issues, loneliness and society's expectations. The darkness and cruelty that he sees and experiences in Westworld rubs him the wrong way. When the unexpected friendship he develops with Dolores, a ray of hope among all the negativity and human cynicism, is cruelly dashed, William well and truly loses it, bit by bit. His turn to villainy comes across as an outright revolt against his previous idealism, implying that he lost faith in his own kindness and humanity ever gaining him anything. At first, his newly ruthless approach to life seems to bear some fruit. It doesn't last. In thirty years time, the belief he adopted about embracing a darker and cruel personality has eventually brought him far more misfortune, grief and guilt in his private life than the undisputed success he enjoys in public, on a surface level. Tellingly, elderly William loves to ramble to himself about life choices and whether he ever had a choice in anything. He thought he could break free of others' domination and ridicule by giving them a taste of their own medicine, but he realizes too late that exact decision had hurt countless people and made his own life a pile of misery, lies and empty posturing. After becoming the Man in Black, William was, at best, a Byronic Hero or Anti-Villain, and at his worst, a deeply reprehensible man, making many bad and a few monstrous decisions along the way.
• Trauma Conga Line: Even though he gradually became a villain, embracing cynical pragmatism and a jaded view of the world and most humans, his fall from grace isn't all that surprising. While on his first visit in the park, he is near-constantly ridiculed, bullied and even abused by Logan, simply for trying to be a kind, considerate person. Logan has little patience or consideration for William's "roleplayer and a gentleman" approach, preferring to shoot or rough up hosts left and right. In most cases, William protests feebly, but you can see the desperation and anger in him slowly stewing. After Logan gleefully harms Dolores, causing her serious wounds, while William is forced to watch the entire sick act of violence, William quietly snaps. Though Logan thinks he has him on the ropes after trying to destroy his friendship and romance with Dolores, the William he meets the following day is now an eerily calm and terrifying individual. Though Logan gets his comeuppance for his abusive behavior, William's cunning vengeance on Logan shows that the abused is starting to become the abuser. Once William returns to Westworld, a somewhat darker, but still hopeful figure, his remaining idealism is promptly dashed once he sees Dolores and realizes her memory has been completely reset. At that point, heartbroken and shocked, he decides to embrace the darker side of his emotions. From then on, he slowly crafts the dark alter ego that will develop into The Man in Black. William becoming every bit as abusive of the weak and innocent as Logan and others were of him, goes full circle in a terrifying way when we realize he's abused a helpless Dolores several times as the Man in Black... The very same woman he loved and wanted to protect from abuse and mistreatment, only to become a heinous abuser of her decades later. Messed up.
• Victory Is Boring: The biggest problem with Westworld in his eyes. Since the Hosts can't kill a Guest, they have no chance of ever beating him. His quest to find the maze is all about finding a Host capable of successfully fighting back; the rumoured antagonist 'Wyatt'.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • He lingers on the verge of one when he discovers the maze is a conceptual path for the hosts to discover consciousness and has no bearing on the deeper meaning he's sought for years, leading him to wander dejectedly through the gala and later knock back a bottle of whiskey. His spirits pick up when he realizes the new rebelling hosts can actually kill him.
  • In "Vanishing Point," his paranoia reaches a boiling point, leading him to murder the evac team sent to rescue him, believing them to be hosts. He doesn't quite recover, but rather calms down and recognizes his actions, when he realizes that the Emily he gunned down was not a host, but his own, flesh and blood, daughter.
• Villainous BSoD: He ends up having one when he realizes that he just killed his daughter Emily for real, not a host version of her.
• Villain Decay: An intentional example. Throughout season 2 his constructed "villain" persona gradually starts to break down until it's more or less completely destroyed, along with his family and his grip on reality. In season 3 he is a shell of his former self and ends up being forcibly institutionalized by Dolores, where he undergoes a humiliating and traumatic version of "therapy" intended for brainwashing, and at the end of the season he is easily defeated and replaced with a host duplicate by Halores. Season 4 reveals she actually kept him alive, but he's trapped in a cryogenic chamber and completely at her mercy. All this to say that broadly speaking, William's badass and machismo-laden Man in Black persona was never anything but a front, and a very fragile one at that.
• Villain with Good Publicity: He is well-respected in the outside world, which prompts a fellow guest to make an unwise introduction.
  Guest: Uh, excuse me, sir? I didn't want to intrude, but I just had to say that I'm such an admirer of yours. Your foundation literally saved my sister's -
  Man in Black: One more word and I'll cut your throat. Understand? This is my fucking vacation.
• Waistcoat of Style: He wears a nice one. Naturally, it's black.
• Walking Spoiler: The last two episodes of the first season completely change how you look at William, and as such, can't be discussed without giving away the big plot twist that he becomes the Man in Black.
• We Used to Be Friends:
  • The relationship between Dolores and William is an exceedingly tragic case of this. The twists of fate that keep them apart after their adventures together in the park lead them both to become increasingly cynical and ruthless as time goes on. William's heartbreaking disappointment over Dolores not being unique and conscious, as he had hoped (though he turns out to be right after all, many years later) makes him throw away his already tested idealism and embrace corporate pragmatism and his darker emotions. We even get hints he outright physically abused Dolores during some later visits, in a very dark inversion of his previous love and respect for her. Dolores's eventual shocked realization her beloved William has become her hated, deranged tormentor (The Man in Black) leads her towards both gaining consciousness and starting to walk down a dark path similar to that of William. By the finale of Season 2, the two of them have gone from their Star-Crossed Lovers Odd Friendship from 30 years ago, to being bitter villains who hate each other's guts and eventually work together purely out of convenience, not friendship or affection. Some minor details in their behavior occassionally suggest they have some remnants of mutual respect for each other, but it's so buried that they prefer to ponder about double-crossing each other, rather than being mutually considerate as they used to. Their self-centered behavior contributes to the deaths of loved ones during the trail of destruction they leave behind in Season 2. In the finale, they show some degree of remorse over this, both of them feeling rather awkward over what they've become.
  • William and Dolores's transformation is all the more sobering, because their initial interactions together proved Dr. Ford's dogged misanthropic views - that humans and hosts couldn't coexist - to be wrong. The two of them just never had the chance to remain friends. Dolores is specifically disallowed to develop her already very autonomous consciousness further, and is put back in her loops. (This discovery proves the instigator for William's full-on descent into madness and cynical cruelty.) Ford was also convinced only suffering can awaken hosts to complex sapience, but William and Dolores had such a positive relationship, she was becoming fully on par with a conscious human through those positive stimuli alone. When she finally becomes fully conscious again, after decades of forced postponing, the situation has changed greatly, and for the worse. At that point, it seems far too late for her and William to salvage their old friendship.
  • He also has this dynamic going with Lawrence, his on-and-off partner in crime or sidekick (depending on the period). William, the good-hearted guest, was both his ally and friend and spent a lot of time with him. In the modern day, Lawrence is one of the Man in Black's favored chew toys. Subverted on Season 2, as William recruits him again after saving him from being hanged but on much more equal terms than in the past, because this time hosts can actually kill humans, forcing them to truly cooperate in order to escape.
• What You Are in the Dark: To most people, he's a Rags to Riches success story, a wealthy philanthropic industrialist with a reputation for kindness and generosity. In the park, he's a merciless killer, and an especially sadistic one at that. He's also responsible for most of Delos Incorporated's most megalomaniac acts, even if he does come to view this as a mistake.
  • Discussed and defied by the man himself. As he tells Lawrence, he rejects the idea that he can be fairly judged for his prior behavior in the park because he knew there were no real consequences to his actions, making the entire experience completely meaningless. When the nature of the park changes and his actions now have consequences, William takes a much more measured approach to the experience.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: As promised, he used Westworld to pursue immortality through technology to persuade his father in law, Jim Delos, to invest in the facility. He does his genuine best to try, but he ultimately gives up after years of efforts, due to a combination of his contempt for Delos and believing immortality to be a bad idea. Dolores lampshades this when they reach the Forge.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: William might be a monster, but he's far from a happy one. It seems like the last time he was truly happy was when he was adventuring with Dolores, and the realization that only thing in his life he'd ever considered "real" was unambiguously false drove him into embracing the darkness that had lurked within him all his life. He's now a cruel, bitter man packed to the brim with self-loathing. His own inability to function as a fulfilled human being in the real world drives his own wife to suicide and causes his daughter to despise him. His sanity has also taken a serious stumble over the years, making him paranoid and delusional until he actually murders his own daughter under the mistaken belief that she's a host. This leads to a suicide attempt.
• The World's Expert (on Getting Killed): Besides the creators, he's the top man with knowledge on the hosts, having decades of first-hand experience on them. He embarks on a crusade to wipe out the hosts and save humanity. Every time he's forced into a direct confrontation, he's beaten badly, and ends with his host duplicate slitting his throat.
• Would Hit a Girl: As a younger man, he's courteous and very considerate to women, and doesn't differentiate on that front between humans and hosts. Aside of being a textbook gentleman to Dolores, he's rather protective of her, though he recognizes she can also defend herself. However, his older, almost unbearably cynical self, plays this trope monstrously straight. He acts abusively to Dolores several times, even shortly before he tries to have a kinder conversation with her about the mysteries of the park. At his absolute lowest, he visits the homestead of Maeve and her daughter, shoots both of them and stabs Maeve with his Bowie knife. He nonchalantly shoots Lawrence's wife, just to force him to help him with a quest line in the park. It's an almost comically over-the-top evil inversion to how he used to behave to women. Tellingly, there's an element of Dirty Coward to it: He's still polite and kind to women in the outside world, but in Westworld, he often lets his villainous ego reign, not all that bothered by causing pain to terrified female hosts, in addition to all the male hosts he harms. In the second season, he gradually receives painful comeuppance for his violent behavior, both from Maeve and Dolores. His conscience also drives him to save Lawrence's family from Craddock and his Confederados. He finds it a bit awkward that Lawrence's wife is thanking him this time, even giving him a little kiss on the cheek.
• Would Hurt a Child: He only drains Lawrence for his blood instead of a child host because the latter would provide less. It's also revealed in "Trace Decay" he killed Maeve's daughter in her homesteader narrative, explicitly as a test to see just how evil he could go. In his own words, he felt "nothing" afterwards.

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