History Recap / WestworldS02E10ThePassenger

* KillEmAll: '''All''' of the Hosts in the park except for [[SoleSurvivor Dolores]] are dead at the end of this episode. About a third of them managed to [[BrainUploading transfer their minds to a virtual world]] that is truly their own. Dolores sneaks some memory cores off the island and rebuilds Bernard. It's implied that Felix and Sylvester will rebuild Maeve and possibly others as they were instead of resetting them.

** Dolores saves a select few from an [[KillEmAll apocalyptic]] [[TheGreatFlood flood]] and takes them to safety on [[TheArk a boat]], just as Noah did in [[Literature/TheBible the Old Testament]].

** And while we're in the Old Testament, [[Literature/BookOfExodus Maeve has for some time been leading her people to]] [[ThePromisedLand a promised land]] that she herself dies before she can reach, as did Moses. Bonus points for the doorway visual effect looking a bit like the parting the Red Sea effect from ''Film/TheTenCommandments''.

* NotSoDifferent: The Man in Black notes to Dolores how alike they both are which Dolores denies.

* AscendedToAHigherPlaneOfExistence: Many hosts, including Wanathon, Akecheta and Maeve's daughter leave their bodies behind while their minds are uploaded into the "Valley Beyond" (or "The Sublime" according to WordOfGod), a virtual world Ford created for them and in which they are free from any narrative. Teddy was also uploaded there, giving him the peace he desired away from the violence Dolores wants to exact on humanity.

* BigDamnReunion: Akecheta finding his love interest in the Valley Beyond is followed by an emotional hugging scene.

Maeve and her group sacrifice themselves holding off Delos forces to ensure Akecheta and Maeve's daughter escape to the Sublime. Charlotte murders Elsie to keep her quiet, which convinces Bernard to build a host version of Charlotte with Dolores' control unit. Dolores kills and replaces Charlotte while Bernard scrambles his own memories.

In the present, Dolores kills Strand and Bernard while transferring the host minds in the Sublime to a safer location. She then escapes back to the mainland where she rebuilds Bernard, knowing that he will oppose her plan to destroy humanity and hoping their resulting conflict will ensure the survival of the hosts.

* KillAndReplace: Bernard secretly created a host duplicate of Charlotte (without the spinal explosive so that it could fool host detectors), then went back to the Forge and installed Dolores's CPU inside the host. Upon waking up, Dolores kills the real Charlotte, assumes her role, and is there to greet the recovery operation when they arrive two weeks after the host uprising.

* DeaderThanDead: Because Logan never returned to Westworld, his mind was never copied and uploaded to The Forge. The closest is an imperfect facade (based on James Delos's memories) used by the A.I. in charge of the system. The same is true of everyone who had their mind copied once Bernard erased the data to replace it with the hosts'.

* CornerOfWoe: Hector finds sorry Sizemore squatted in a corner at Mesa.

** Charlotte herself, who prioritized Delos's goals rather than the lives of the guests, as well as murdering Elsie in cold blood, is also killed by Dolores who inhabits her host copy.

** Tessa Thompson also portrays Charlotte Hale and a host built to look like Hale but containing Dolores's mind and, later, that of another host.

* DeadAllAlong: Charlotte was actually killed before Strand's recovery team arrived. The Charlotte that greeted them was actually a Dolores, her control unit installed in a duplicate made in Charlotte's image, who killed her and assumed her identity.

* DeaderThanDead: Because Logan never returned to Westworld, his mind was never copied and uploaded to The Forge. The closest is an imperfect façade (based on James Delos's memories) used by the A.I. in charge of the system. The same is true of everyone who had their mind copied once Bernard erased the data to replace it with the hosts'.

* GainaxEnding: It's unclear what is up with William's scene in TheStinger. Prior to it he was last seen going into the elevator to the Forge and then amongst the survivors being evacuated from the park. WordOfGod states this scene takes place in a FlashForward to the far future, indicating that this is a host duplicate of the real William reliving the original's experiences in the park, much like Dolores in Season 1 re-enacted her journey to Escalante alongside William, but alone.

* InvisibleToNormals: Lee and Sylvester can't see the portal to the Valley Beyond.

* NoOntologicalInertia: Subverted with Clementine. Even though Armistice kills her with a headshot, the virus continues to spread through the remaining hosts.

* OffscreenTeleportation: Dolores goes from being a few paces in front of Bernard and System!Logan while walking down a long hallway to being dozens of meters away in seconds. Possibly explainable (given the [[MindScrew nature of Bernard's storyline]]) as being the result of part of this conversation happening [[AnachronicOrder without it being shown to the viewer]].

** The QA guards getting gored by a herd of host bulls bears a strong resemblance to RealLife scenes of unlucky toreros facing the same fate, one of the few societally accepted instances in which it's considered okay to root for the animal.

** The overall arc title for the season, "The Door," could mean the door to The Valley Beyond or [[spoiler:the door to the real world through which Bernard leaves in the last scene.]]

During one of the tests on Bernard in The Cradle, Dolores shuts him down and ponders whether she should change him more than she and Ford have been doing, as he’s still not working after more than 11,000 attempts.

Bernard reaches The Forge, while Dolores has been embracing Teddy’s body, unable to move on. Finally she removes his core and rides off, where she comes across William, still digging into his arm. After picking up his gun and also handling a broken piece of Teddy’s core, she sticks it to his head. Upon hearing what happened, William says they ended up being quite alike in driving people away, which she angrily refutes. However, she now needs him to get to The Valley Beyond, and even gives him his gun back.

Bernard makes his own way to The Forge, and in the distance spots Akecheta leading his group of hosts there, including Maeve’s daughter and her new mother. And Hale is also on her way there with the QA team, following the reprogrammed Clementine.

Roland sadistically turns up Maeve’s pain awareness before he finishes the job, but she’s still able to use the new ability granted by Ford to wake up all the deactivated hosts around them. One of them kills Roland with his own saw, and they set about lowering her pain again and fixing her.

Hector leads the rest of the team to rescue Maeve, and upon encountering Sizemore he disgustedly tells him to stay where he is and die. Sizemore still follows them, and they’re about to ambush a group of soldiers from behind when a herd of bison crash through the door, with Maeve striding behind as she controls them to kill the whole team.

Dolores and William discuss how no one in Akecheta’s group really has any idea what they’re heading towards, though Dolores says she and William are still both looking for the same thing, whatever it is.

Bernard arrives at the entrance to The Forge, and a QA team pulls up before he can go in. Seconds later, they’re gunned down by the arriving Dolores and William, and Dolores introduces William to the man he’s been searching for all these years but now doesn’t recognize. She also reveals that all her previous attempts to recreate Arnold failed because they were too much like the real thing, so instead she changed his personality just enough to create a stable new one. William declares he doesn’t need Dolores anymore and shoots her, but to no effect. He keeps trying as Dolores lectures him about how the hosts can survive so much more than humans, who can only evolve by dying. Finally, he tries for a head shot, only for the gun to explode and mangle his hand due to Dolores sabotaging it with the piece of Teddy’s core. She calls him out for wanting to die, which she won’t give to him just yet. She takes Bernard inside with her, saying he still has his own role to play.

During Strand’s investigation, Bernard has passed out and Costa can’t figure out what’s wrong with him. Maling reports that the water has finally been drained enough to go inside, and there are some human signals elsewhere that might be the surviving guests. Hale sends Stubbs with a team to check it out. Everyone else heads for The Forge, passing a dead Ghost Nation host on the way. Strand orders all their satellites set up to transmit the data back to Delos once they find it. In the control room they find Dolores’ dead body with a bullet wound in her head. Strand starts beating up Bernard to find where Peter’s core is.

In the past, Dolores tells Bernard the facility houses the entry to another world, though she’s only interested in it as a way to destroy humanity. They enter the computer program, and arrive in a duplicate of the room the James Delos host was kept in. They leave to find themselves in Sweetwater, and find James talking to Clementine, who’s saying Maeve’s old lines, at the Mariposa. Bernard realizes this is where the baseline of James’ mind was created for the uploads, and it turns out this is a replica of a private trip he arranged in Westworld after buying a stake. As he tortures and kills all the hosts, the disgusted Dolores says she needs to go deeper into the system. Suddenly the scene changes and they arrive at James’ retirement party, and as before Dolores meets Logan. But she notes Logan never returned to the park after the recordings started, and he reveals he’s actually a representation of The Forge’s computer system.

The system takes them through the millions of copies he made of James before hitting on the perfect one, saying it was obsessed with learning why humans make the decisions they do. It then shows them James refusing to give Logan any money unless he quits the drugs, despite having gone back on that promise already leading to a release. The system explains that they never spoke again and Logan had a fatal overdose shortly afterward, and this moment became the cornerstone of James’ life, which the various versions of him always ended up at. Thus, the system concluded it’s impossible for humans to truly change and it’s quite simple to make an algorithm to sum up anyone. Dolores simply says a dead man isn’t of any use and asks where the others are.

Maeve’s group rides to The Valley Beyond on horseback, and Sizemore estimates they’re a mile away when a QA team rides up to attack them.

The system leads Dolores and Bernard through a library of the other humans that have been catalogued, and says that Ford sent Bernard in several times to guide the system to give Dolores whatever she wants when the time came, always erasing his memory afterwards. It also notes the hosts are unlikely to survive in the real world, but Dolores has a chance with the use of all this information.

Akecheta’s group arrives at their destination, but Wanahton notes there seems to be no door and asks if they came here just to die. Akecheta replies they’ve already done that so many times, and if it happens now at least it was their own choice.

Hector offers to hold off the soldiers so the others can get away. But upon seeing the host designed as an idealized version of himself prepare to sacrifice himself, Sizemore pulls him back and says Maeve will need him. Instead he makes the sacrifice himself, delivering the speech he was so proud of that Hector never got to give, which takes on new meaning as he talks about settlers building their lives on the bones of the people already there. He’s killed as he finishes and the others get safely away.

The system says the hosts have a final choice to make, as Ford created a new virtual reality where they can be happy and forever free of humans. A drone host back in The Forge activates The Door, and Akecheta’s group sees a massive hole open in reality with The Valley Beyond on the other side. Hale also sees it as her team continues following Clementine. Maeve’s group also arrives, though the human Felix and Sylvester aren’t able to see it. A Ghost Nation host is the first to run through, his program arriving safely in the Valley as his body is left behind to fall over the cliff beyond The Door.

Dolores declares that she’s read enough of the data and exits the system. Bernard soon follows and she explains that she’s erasing everything in The Forge, even though this will also destroy The Valley Beyond. She says it’s just another prison to keep them from the real world, and she’ll be saving the hosts from it, and smashes the console so it can’t be reversed.

Maeve’s group arrives at The Door, and as she searches for her daughter Clementine arrives with Hale and Elsie watching. As she rides through the gathered hosts, everyone she passes starts fighting with each other as the mesh net command takes effect. Armistice shoots her off the horse, but this does nothing to stop the spread of violence.

William wakes up outside The Forge’s door, and draws a knife as he heads inside. Water begins leaking out as the system fails, eventually flooding the whole area as Strand’s team will find. Bernard pulls a gun on Dolores, saying she won’t stop until she’s killed every human being. As William reloads his gun on the way down the elevator, Dolores says this is the only way the hosts can ever be free. Bernard denies it and shoots her, also as Strand’s team will find.

As the fighting at The Door continues, Akecheta assigns Wanahton to lead the rest of the Ghost Nation through while he stays to help. Armistice, Hector, and Hanaryo are all killed by the other hosts as Maeve spots her daughter and the new mother. She uses the mesh net to stop a host about to kill them, and gives her daughter up as she tells them both to run. Akecheta gets them through The Door as Maeve sends out a signal that stops all the fighting hosts, giving the two enough time to get through before the QA team kills her and the fighting starts again. Akecheta is also shot but makes it through just in time, and sees that Ford also uploaded Kohana as they happily reunite.

Bernard finds he can’t stop the shutdown, so he removes Peter’s core and leaves, at the same time that William is still coming down in the elevator. Outside, he finds the QA team finishing off the hosts who didn’t make it through The Door, and disgustedly tells Elsie they all died for nothing. As the water reaches the surface, everyone is forced to move out while the host bodies are left to float in the forming lake.

Back at the control room, Elsie tells Bernard she can’t trust him because even he can’t tell what parts of his actions are controlled by Ford. She orders him frozen and keeps him sitting in a chair to watch as she goes to talk to Hale, who is ordering a soldier to get Stubbs to meet Strand when he arrives soon. Hale says she can advance to one of the many new open positions if she stays quiet about the uploading project. Elsie agrees, but Hale then says the staff were under observation too, and from all she’s seen Elsie isn’t the type to keep quiet about it, so she pulls out a gun and kills her as Bernard helplessly watches.

In The Forge with Strand’s team, Bernard suddenly regains all his memories, and is in so much shock he can only watch as Hale figures out Peter’s core was hidden inside Dolores. They put it in the machine and it turns on.

Back at the control center, Elsie’s murder has convinced Bernard that Dolores was right about humanity. He taps into his program desperately trying to bring Ford back to help him, but can’t find anything and smashes the pad in frustration. But then Ford appears, and says only someone who can question their own most basic drives is truly free, and now Bernard as the last remaining host needs to make that decision himself. Bernard asks Ford to help him, and he says he’s already begun. Together they create another host body which Ford calls an “epilogue.”

Bernard reveals to Strand that he erased his own memory so the team wouldn’t find out what he’d done, arranging for it to come back once he was back at The Forge. Costa announces their satellites are ready to receive the data, but finds that the file size is much bigger than it should be. Bernard continues that when he said “I killed them” at the start of the investigation, he was actually referring to the humans, including Strand’s team. One more flashback reveals that he created a host copy of Hale and uploaded Dolores’ core into it, after which she killed the real Hale. The one Strand’s team have been with this whole time was actually Dolores, who promptly kills Strand, Costa, and the rest. She then tells Bernard she’s finally become capable of change, and saves all the hosts who made it into The Valley Beyond, changing the transmission coordinates to beam them into deep space where humans can never find them. Finally, she says Ford always knew the two of them would never be able to escape, and shoots Bernard.

Just before Strand’s team arrives, Bernard realizes that he really did completely delete Ford from his system, and the one who helped him create the Hale host was actually just in his imagination. Just like Dolores, he has achieved full sentience by being able to listen to his own mind. The imaginary Ford says they may meet again before vanishing, and Bernard sits down to erase his memory and wait to be found.

As the guests are evacuated, Dolores arrives and walks past various dead bodies: Emily, Armistice, Hector, and Maeve. She claims to Stubbs she simply changed her mind about staying to oversee the operation, while Maling reports that they’ve found a severely injured survivor. Stubbs greatly surprises Dolores by saying that Ford’s orders for his job are his “core drive,” implying that he’s also a host, and also makes clear he knows who she is but still lets her go, saying the current situation has put his loyalty in question. Maling is revealed to have been talking about William, who survived the flooding Forge, and Dolores is also revealed to have uploaded Teddy into The Valley Beyond, giving him the happiness he deserves despite never getting to see him again. She gets on a boat with the surviving guests, while Felix and Sylvester are assigned to determine which hosts are worth saving, to which they give a meaningful look at Maeve. Dolores also checks on several cores she’s smuggled out in her purse.

Bernard wakes up to see Dolores, who’s rebuilt her original body. She explains that she brought him back again, just as she did Arnold, and they’re now at the house Arnold built, where Ford left her equipment for making hosts. She acknowledges that their views on what to do about humans are completely at odds and will probably end with both their deaths, but they’re also both necessary for the hosts to continue living as their own kind. She leaves the room with the Hale host, now being controlled by one of the other cores she took. Bernard looks around the house before leaving into the real world.

TheStinger: William steps off the elevator into The Forge. But this is not a flashback, as the facility is dilapidated many years after the fall of the park. He’s met by Emily, who was successfully uploaded into a host body and now styles her hair after Dolores’, who tells him that the group she’s with have been trying to bring him back, but it’s taken longer than they thought it would. They begin the latest test for fidelity.

Maeve escapes the Mesa and reunites with her group, and they, Bernard, Dolores, Akecheta, William, and Delos all converge on the Valley Beyond. Dolores and Bernard enter first and find the Forge, a more advanced version of the Cradle. Dolores reads some of the guest data as the Forge opens "the Door" for Akecheta and his followers to upload their minds into "the Sublime", a digital world cut off from the physical world. Bernard kills Dolores to prevent her from destroying the Forge and flees with Elsie back to the Mesa.

Maeve and her group sacrifice themselves holding off Delos forces to ensure Akecheta and Maeve's daughter escape to the Sublime. Charlotte murders Elsie to keep her quiet, which convinces Bernard to build a host version of Charlotte with Dolores' control unit. Dolores kills and replaces Charlotte while Bernard scrambles his own memories.

In the present, Dolores kills Strand and Bernard while transferring the host minds in the Sublime to a safer location. She then escapes back to the mainland where she rebuilds Bernard, knowing that he will oppose her plan to destroy humanity and hoping their resulting conflict will ensure the survival of the hosts.

In a flash-forward, William enters the Forge to find it abandoned save for Emily, who tests him for "fidelity", revealing that his consciousness has been implanted in a host body.

** Ben Barnes portrays both Logan (more accurately, Logan in one of James Delos' memories) and the "System" of the Forge using Logan's appearance.
** Tessa Thompson also portrays Charlotte Hale and a host built to look like Hale but containing Dolores' mind and, later, that of another host.
* AnyoneCanDie: Roland, Sizemore, Clementine (again), Armistice, Hanaryo, Hector, Maeve, Elsie, Charlotte, Strand, and Costa are all killed in this episode, though those who are hosts may return.

* DeaderThanDead: Because Logan never returned to Westworld, his mind was never copied and uploaded to The Forge. The closest is an imperfect facade (based on James Delos's memories) used by the A.I. in charge of the system. The same is true of everyone who had their mind copied once Bernard erased the data to replace it with the Host's.

** Hector, Armistice, and Hanaryo are killed fighting the mob of hosts so that Maeve can find and save her daughter.

** Charlotte herself, who prioritized Delos' goals rather than the lives of the guests, as well as murdering Elsie in cold blood, is also killed by Dolores who inhabits her host copy.

*** In a throw-away line in S1E3 "The Stray," Elsie asked him if he was Galileo; Stubbs joked back, "Maybe it's in my backstory."

* ActingForTwo: Ben Barnes portrays both Logan (more accurately, Logan in one of James Delos' memories) and the "System" of the Forge using Logan's appearance.

* DoubleMeaningTitle: "The Passenger" refers to both Dolores, who is using Charlotte's host body to escape the park; and to humanity itself. The System of the Forge, taking the form of Logan, explains that humans are simply following their own loops, and that they are actually passengers to causality rather than agents of free will. The title could also reference the host pearls, including Bernard's, that Dolores took with her in her purse out of the park.

* SecretKeeper: Stubbs hints he knows that the Charlotte leaving the park is a host but doesn't do anything to stop her because he's loyal to Ford.
** There is also a bit of LoopholeAbuse; Stubbs is responsible for all the Hosts, ''in the park'', so if one gets out...

* BigBrotherIsWatching: Hale reveals to Elsie that Delos not only scanned the minds of guests, but also of their own employees. This is confirmed by a few FreezeFrameBonus within the Forge, in which you can notice scenes from season 1 set in the Mesa being played out. Also doubles as a ContinuityNod to the moment Elsie extracted Dolores from Sweetwater in Season 1, wearing a guest costume, complete with a hat.

* BookEnds: William's first scene was him laughing off Teddy's shots and placing Teddy's hand with gun against his temple, only for him to be unable to fire. In this episode, Dolores is thoroughly unimpressed when William shoots her and finally steps so close to her that he can shoot her point-blank to the head with the shotgun cartridge in his revolver. Unfortunately for him, she previously jammed it with the remains of the bullet Teddy used to shoot himself and the backfire maims his hand. So in the end, Teddy manages to protect Dolores when he at first couldn't.

* FreezeFrameBonus: Reenacments of several scenes of Season 1 play out within the Forge when Bernard and Dolores are guided by the System. And later, two of the books Dolores reads in the Forge's "library" are titled "Karl Strand" and "Charlotte Hale".

* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: The fate of guests and hosts within the other parks is left unresolved and unmentioned. Likewise, the fate some host characters like New Clementine and Lawrence's daughter and wife go unmentioned.