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Recap / Westworld S 02 E 01 Journey Into Night

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In the hours following the massacre of the Delos board members, Bernard and Charlotte take shelter in an underground bunker, where they resolve to work together in locating the decommissioned Peter Abernathy and securing aid.

Ten days after Ford's death, Dolores has embarked on a bloody campaign to hunt the survivors. She tells Teddy her programming has caused her personas to merge and that she has greater plans for the hosts. Maeve recruits Hector and forces Lee to help her find her daughter. William, who also survived the massacre, encounters the young Robert Ford host, who reveals that a game designed just for him has commenced.

Two weeks later, a security team sent by Delos to reassert control over Westworld finds Bernard and enlists his help in investigating a series of anomalies. The investigation leads them to a lagoon filled with hundreds of dead hosts that Bernard claims to have killed.


This episode provides examples of:

  • Almost Dead Girl: Maeve finds one of her hooker friends lying in the corridor with Blood from the Mouth. She puts the girl to sleep with the code phrase.
  • Anachronic Order: Even more so than last season, though a little more blatant. At minimum, in this episode, there are three timelines at work: the immediate aftermath of the Delos board massacre, the two-weeks-later timeline, and some long-ago timeline wherein Dolores and Bernard are conversing. Helpfully for the audience, Bernard loses his glasses in his first two-weeks-later scene, making it easy for the audience to tell when his scenes are taking place.
  • Back for the Dead: Rebus is captured and executed by the Delos Security Team, although he continues to appear in flashbacks. The child Host version of Robert Ford is shot by William.
  • Badass Bandolier: Dolores wears one as she rides around shooting down guests.
  • Black Site: Delos has a secret facility inside the park, unknown to Westworld executives like Bernard, which is operated by Drone Hosts and used to collect DNA and videos of guests from the bodies and memory cores of Hosts. Charlotte and Bernard use it as a refuge when the escape hatch is compromised by hostile hosts.
  • Call-Back:
    • The outcome of the Delos board massacre is shot and framed quite similarly to the Escalante massacre of hosts that Arnold set up prior the opening of the park and which we saw many times in Dolores's flashbacks in Season 1. Even a Host wolf passes by similarly to the Host dog seen in the Season 1 flashbacks.
    • The Ghost Nation Host scalped by Costa has the maze symbol tattooed in the inner side of his scalp, just like Kissy did in Season 1. Presumably all Hosts share this trait.
  • Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Sizemore makes himself useful to Maeve by offering to show her how to find her daughter. Despite an attempted betrayal, she keeps him around because he's better than nothing.
  • Continuity Nod: Sizemore is attacked by the cannibal Host he had been programming back in the end of Season 1.
  • Cranial Processing Unit: As hinted at in the previous season, Hosts have a processing unit in a protected shell inside their brains. The actual brain matter surrounding it is just for realism. This can be removed to read all of a Host's memories. Bernard, who shot himself in the head last season, learns that he damaged the shell, causing him to leak cranial fluid which maintains the processing unit (presumably coolant of some kind) and necessitating that he replenishes it before he shuts down completely.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: Delos collecting the DNA and images of the guests from the bodies and memories of the hosts for a still undisclosed goal sounds like a futuristic version of Facebook collecting the private data of its users to sell it to private interests.
  • Electronic Speech Impediment: When Section 53 of the Mesa goes offline, the female Computer Voice slows down.
  • Evil, Inc.: Delos is perfectly willing to let everyone on the Island, including board members and their CEO, die because Charlotte Hale had failed to send "the package" which carried the source code for the Hosts (the decommissioned Peter Abernathy).
  • Exact Time to Failure: Bernard does an analysis of himself to determine exactly how long it will take his body to shut down after that gunshot wound last season. He borrows some cerebral fluid from the nearby inactive Host to prolong his own life. It must have worked, since he's still up and around two weeks later.
  • The Faceless: Drone Hosts have no facial features whatsoever.
  • Fake Kill Scare: Dolores puts her revolver into the mouth of a guest and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. Turns out the gun wasn't loaded.
  • False Innocence Trick: Maeve pretends to be a park employee when the Quality Assurance guards show up. They are fooled by her outfit until one gets suspicious due to Sizemore signaling him with his eyes while asking about Hosts dressing up as humans.
  • Flies Equals Evil: When the rescue team arrives at the site of the Delos board massacre, flies can be heard buzzing around the corpses.
  • Four Lines, All Waiting: Following the flashback to a conversation between Dolores and Arnold, we get four story lines in the episode: Bernard's, Dolores', Maeve's and William's.
  • Gory Discretion Shot: The headshot to the woman who gets William Telled by hosts is only shown from the inside of the barn.
  • Grievous Harm with a Body: Sizemore is trapped in a room with the cannibal Host he was programming in the past season threatening him. He grabs a severed leg (one hopes from a Host) and tries to use it as a club, but the Host just takes it from him. Maeve comes in and makes the Host stop.
  • He's Back!: William calmly treats his arm wound, then re-dons his black hat and finds his horse.
  • I Need a Freaking Drink: Sizemore helps himself to a bottle of booze when they meet Hector.
  • Ironic Echo: The robots are programmed to say "Doesn't look like anything to me" whenever they see anything anachronistic or from the outside world. It's also what Dolores says as she leaves a small group of guests balancing precariously on gravestones with ropes around their neck.
  • Killed Mid-Sentence: One guest comes out complaining to William about the host assault and promptly gets a headshot from a sniper while lamenting.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: Charlotte Hale told Theresa in Season 1 that Delos cares nothing about the Hosts, the Guests or the park personnel. Guess how she's treated by Delos after she requests extraction but hasn't delivered the decomissioned Peter Abernathy?
  • Let's Get Out of Here: After watching the Lured into a Trap incident, Hale tells Bernard that they have to get out of there.
  • Lured into a Trap: The Hosts kill some technicians and prop their bodies up against their car, tricking the scared guests into approaching in search of rescue. Then the guests get gunned down. Bernard catches on and keeps Charlotte from falling for the trap, but the rest of their group is too far ahead to save.
  • Made of Iron: As opposed to every other host who is shot in this episode and dies nearly instantly, Hector is shown to have taken at least four direct shots to the chest and is calmly having a drink when Maeve and Sizemore find him. The implication is that Maeve gave him the ability to at least partially ignore his wounds, just as Ford gave to Teddy.
  • Irony: Lee Sizemore offhandedly remarks that Maeve “clearly didn’t take” to motherhood as Maeve is on the verge of tears remembering her daughter.
  • Misplaced Wildlife: A dead Bengal tiger is found in Westworld, meaning it must have crossed park boundaries. This is supposed to be impossible.
  • Remember the New Guy?: Costa, a Westworld tech saved by the Delos Security Team, makes his first appearance, but Stubbs and Bernard know him already.
  • The Reveal:
    • There are at least four other parks besides Westworld and Shogun World.
    • Westworld, and the other parks, are located on an island.
    • In the days following the Host uprising, Bernard flooded an entire portion of the park, killing hundreds of Hosts. Seems he doesn't remember why.
      • Which gives us a Visual Pun: One of the Hosts that he sees is Teddy, in the Flood.
  • Self-Surgery: Two examples:
    • William calmly treats his arm wound with alcohol before wrapping it up in a makeshift bandage.
    • Bernard is forced to harvest the cerebral fluid of an inactive host and inject it into his own brain when he starts shutting down. To make matters worse, his vision is blurring, his hand has a tremor, and he has to do it quickly enough that Charlotte doesn't notice. He manages it just in time.
  • Shameful Strip: Maeve forces Sizemore to strip naked, fully naked, so Hector can wear his clothes.
  • Significant Wardrobe Shift: Dolores has removed the top half of her sky-blue signature dress, showcasing how she's now free of the character she was forced to play, but still keeping some part of it, such as the memories and her feelings for Teddy.
  • Split-Personality Merge: Dolores implies her actions are the product of the memories and impulses of both "the rancher's daughter" and of Wyatt.
  • Symbolic Mutilation: The Ghost Nation Host whose memory core is taken at the beginning of the episode, is scalped by his human oppressors in order to extract it - scalping is something European settlers did to the native Americans far more than the natives did to them.
  • Today, X. Tomorrow, the World!: Dolores tells Teddy that taking over Westworld isn't enough. Their little park is part of a much larger world that humans control, so they'll have to take that, too.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Several of the guests at the gala that survived the initial onslaught make some pretty stupid decisions that cost them dearly.
    • The group with Bernard and Charlotte fall for an obvious trap just because it's the first chance for a rescue they saw.
    • A guest that is still at the site of the massacre starts yelling at William that he's going to sue Delos for what happened and gets shot.
  • The Voiceless: Drone Hosts are incapable of speaking due to having no mouths.
  • Wham Line: An unusually subtle one, as the Bengal tiger is said to be from Park 6, indicating there's at least four others besides Westworld and Shogun World.
  • Wham Shot: The flooded plain with the floating bodies of hundreds of Hosts, Teddy among them.
  • You Have Failed Me: Delos refuses to extract Charlotte Hale from the park until she succeeds in delivering the decomissioned Peter Abernathy.
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: William kills Ford's child Host once he told William everything he needs to hear (likely a piece of Real Life Writes the Plot as it would be impossible for the child actor to play an ageless robot much longer).

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