April 27, 2018

Westworld S2E01 - Journey Into Night

I’ve debated on posting about Westworld. There is a ton of good writing on the show. I am not going to add anything different to the conversation that hasn’t already been said. Still, I think it might be fun to write out what I think and see how wrong I am as Season 2 progresses. I will plan to write a weekly series about the show for the next 10 weeks.

I wish I had started by posting my thoughts before the first episode even aired. It feels like a long time since season 1 wrapped up, but I thought I would better remember everything that was going on. From the first few minutes of Journey Into Night I felt disoriented just like Bernard. The longer it went the more confused I got. This is why I want to work out my thoughts via this blog, and see what comes of it.

What interests me most about the show is the mystery of the maze and the game William (The Man in Black) is playing. I find very little attachment to Maeve’s story. I haven’t from the beginning, and I don’t this season either.

It is clear Maeve is the most woke of the hosts. She seems to be completely doing her own thing. I’m sure she will be key to the robot uprising once she has her daughter by her side. Conversely, I think Dolores is still following a storyline that Ford set in motion. I am not convinced of her total enlightenment.

Teddy is a wildcard. Dolores is Teddy’s girl. Teddy has been on a mission to get Wyatt. Dolores is also Wyatt. I have a feeling that Teddy is going to be conflicted this season. And was that Teddy they rolled over in the water at the very end of the episode? What’s up with that?

The biggest things I took away from Journey Into Night is that all of the hosts have an egg inside their heads that records all of the things they see. Delos also has drone hosts that collect DNA off of the hosts after the guests are finished with them. This means Delos has a ton of data about the rich and powerful people that may have visited Westworld at some point in the last 32 years. For some reason Delos has not been able to get this data out of the park… and they want to badly. They jammed it all into Delores’s dad, but nobody knows where he is at right now. Presumably they won’t send help for the people stranded in the park with killer robots until the “package is delivered”.

That all feels too basic. I am sure there is much more to the story that I am not picking up on. I don’t know if any time tricks are going on this season, but I don’t think so. We just see events from right after the massacre, and then 2 weeks in the future.[1] I will always be on the lookout for more time trickery.

Overall I enjoyed the first episode quite a bit. When we saw the beginnings of the robot uprising and the possibility of other parks at the end of season 1 I was worried that the series would go off the rails. However, it is still as weird and beautiful as ever.

I’d forgotten how brutal the show can be, but they were sure to remind us plenty of times in this first episode. I think I will be more prepared for the episode this week.

We’ve seen a lot of this show through Bernard’s eyes. It is clear that he is a completely unreliable narrator with his brain fluid leaks and all. I don’t think we can trust anything he says or does… which is going to keep us on our toes.

Some questions I am asking after episode one…

  • What is Dolores going to show Teddy?
  • Why did Bernard kill all the hosts? Or did he?
  • Why was a host (Rebus?) killing people at one point, but seemingly reverted back to his story character later on the beach when he is executed? 
  • Did Ford know about the secret bunkers? Does it matter? 
  • What is William’s game going to consist of? Just getting out of the park alive? “It ends with how it started”… that is Delores right?


  1. Except for the very beginning with Delores and Bernard. Who knows when that all happened.  ↩