2x10 The Passenger

[6.5/10] Season 1 of Westworld had an easier task cut out for it than Season 2 did. The first season of the show, as Clementine might put it, didn’t have much of a rind on it. As I discussed on the Serial Fanaticist Podcast, all of its mysteries, all of its characters, were completely new, with the audience starting from square one and the show able to spoon feed details and reveals bit-by-bit until the shocking twists spilled out. It also had a clear season-length mega arc, of hints that there’s something amiss with the hosts in the beginning of the season, building to a full blown revolt erupting at the end.

Season 2 had no such luxuries. Despite the introduction of a handful of new characters, by the time the second season rolled around, Westworld’s major figures were known quantities. How the park worked, what the contours of this constructed world were, was no longer as burning a question after ten episodes’ worth of worldbuilding. And the path from the park working as usual to all hell breaking loose is much clearer and more direct than collections of different characters who each want different things marauding their way around the park in a much less unified fashion.

So Season 2 does what it can to compensate for the added messiness, for the lack of novelty that a second season of this type of science fiction thriller relies on. Rather than building to a shocking end, it gives us the ending first, or at least much of it, and then shows how conditions at the park reached that point, in order to recontextualize it. Rather than introducing these characters, Westworld devotes whole episodes to exploring their backstories, and letting us get to know them better.

And rather than building to one clear event -- a series of awakenings that lead to a rebellion -- Season 2 of Westworld lets its various plot threads blow in the wind for several episodes, trying in vain to tie them altogether in an finale that’s overstretched to try to accommodate all that needs to be packed in to make that happen.

Season 2 has it tough. While Season 1 could start inwardly focused and expand outward, Season 2 tries to repack another series of mystery boxes, to elaborate on what we already know about its heroes and villains, to manage a far more disparate and decentralized build to something meant to be a cohesive and all-encompassing final act.

That’s a lot of weight to put “The Passenger”, the finale for this precarious season of television. It’s a ninety minute episode, that touches on essentially every character in the program, drops oodles of shocking twists and thematic bullet points, and tries to both act as a unified capstone for the motley collection of stories in this season and a primer and promise for what’s to come.

The two most interesting things the finale does are thematic. It features Akecheta and his brothers and sisters (and Maeve’s daughter) finally reaching the Valley Beyond, finally opening the door to the truer, purer world that he had been looking for for so long. It is revealed as a paradise, constructed by his creator, meant to be a world where the hosts can live and found a community untouched and unspoiled by the tainted figures of the real one.
Like “Kiksuya”, the series’s finest hour, that works as both text and subtext. It makes sense that Ford would want to craft a safe haven for the creations he believes will inherit the Earth, a place where they can exist free from the mistakes that the humans have inflicted on the world. But it also works as metaphor. The imagery of the door is powerful, as host after host passes through it, their mortal bodies falling into the canyon below, but their “souls”, such as they are, persisting into that Eden. It’s a potent vision of the afterlife, one that pays off the good work the show did just a couple of episodes prior in making Akecheta’s quest a meaningful one.

It also brings poetry to the episode’s biggest reveal. Once Dolores and Bernard enter The Forge, the Matrix-like digital world where all of the data on the park’s guests is stored, the meet the personification of the system in the form of Logan Delos. In these environs, he reveals that the system figured out how to preserve humans by choosing not to overcomplicate them, by showing them as, title-be-praised, the passengers of their stories rather than the architects of them.

Again, there is haunting irony in that, the idea that humans can be reduced to a textbook-sized set of code, and that the stories we tell ourselves are just that, stories, with the real sources of our impulses and inclinations beyond our conscious minds and our ability to choose. Much of Westworld has been about human beings trying to add complexity to the hosts, to bring them up to humanity’s standard for consciousness and agency.

Instead, “The Passenger” flips the script, where the robots are trying to make humans and finding that the solution is to simplify us to our bases and most basic collection of inputs and outputs. It is they who can choose their destiny, who can genuinely change themselves and ascend, while we are stuck on the flow of our own code, unchanged and unalterable. It is a perspective I don’t necessarily agree with, but one that has power in how it recontextualizes one of the central themes of the series.

The problem is that the convoluted plots and overdone monologues completely fail to support that level of profundity elsewhere. “The Passenger” bends over backwards to try to put all of its major characters in the same basic place so that it can bounce them off one another. It bends and in places breaks their standard M.O.s and what’s in their self interest so that it can pair off and break apart certain individuals. And it delivers every bit of information, whether it’s raw exposition, or the usual florid prose, or some other variety of cryptic hint, with a painful, stilted speech.

This could seriously be renamed “Monologue: The Episode.” Nearly every character of significance gets a chance to wax rhapsodic about what their experience has been, or what their intentions are, or What It All Means. Storytelling on television invariably involves some measure of artifice, and it’s churlish to complain too loudly about on-screen dialogue not perfectly replicating human speech. But each line of dialogue in this finale is so needlessly grandiose, so mired in trying to sound important, that it never really sounds true. “The Passenger” is playing with some big ideas, but it loses, rather than captures them, by trying to convey them with byzantine conversations that devolve into lyrical nonsense.

The same goes for the plotting. Rather than focusing “The Passenger” on a handful of through lines or key developments, Westworld throws the kitchen sink at its last hour of the season. Dolores is killed but then comes back in the guise of Hale and escapes. Maeve gets into a Jedi mind control fight with Clementine and dies temporarily to get as many compatriots to the valley beyond as possible. William gets pointlessly tricked by Dolores and ends up discovering that he too may be the product of the experiments with Papa Delos. Bernard kills Dolores and scrambles his memories to keep the Delos reps from sniffing him out.

None of it hangs together, and it quickly becomes just too much, too byzantine, to lost in its own backside to have the impact that a good season finale should.

Season 2 of Westworld hit some of the series highest heights. It told us the story of how William became the Man in Black, how Dolores discovered a world worth taking, how Maeve found herself in an alter ego, how Akecheta elevated the search for the truth of the park into a higher quest. But it also got tied up in its own plot threads, tangled in its attempts to recapitulate mysteries that could top those from the first season, and reverted to the type of bald exposition and spoken pablum that can’t support the big ideas the show wants to impart.

And in the end, it results in a slog of a finale, that introduces some truly fascinating and even moving notions, but undercuts them at every turn in this ungainly lummox of a last episode.

We know these characters now. We know their wants, their intentions, their flaws. We know the park now, its mysteries mostly unveiled, its world thoroughly if not exhaustively explored. We know the ideas that Westworld is playing with: the nature of humanity, to next phase of life on this planet, the fact and fiction of consciousness.

That makes it harder to surprise, harder to amaze, harder to compel. But Westworld has the talent, in its amazing production, in its talented performers, and in its sporadic but firmly present ability to craft stories and words worthy of the potential of its premise, to still produce something transcendent. “The Passenger” isn’t it, though, and after an hour and a half of a final note that sounds sour, it’s easy to wonder if the stars will align in Westworld again, or this is a wrong world, too far gone to be set back on its axis in Season 3.

All right. Don't panic. Keep calm. What? As in, what the actual fuck? Before the credits I had everything sorted out in my mind, like I really understood what was going on and all that stuff, but the William's post-credit scene messed my mind hard. It really fucked my understanding of how timelines worked out this season.

Only logical explanation I can come up with right now (if it makes any sense) is that William, the one rescued in the beach, is actually the real William alive and that he somehow died in the future and that Emily (guest it's gotta be a host, impossible she hasn't aged a bit) is testing him for fidelity to see if he'd actually make the same choices he made in real life. I'm guessing he got rescued right after he injured his hand and that the elevator scene (before the credits) actually takes place in the future. Why the hell would they miss the first elevator scene and they show him almost dead in the beach? Also, the Forge was covered with dust in the post-credit scene. If that scene had taken place when Bernard and Dolores first came in, the whole place would've been full of water and that wasn't the case.

My head is actually hurting trying to puzzle everything out. It's like, is this now? Am I real? Did William actually die in season's 1 finale and everything was a simulation? Is Emily really alive meaning that the one William killed was actually a host? And if so, is Emily just using the fidelity test with him just to mess with him as she told Akecheta she'd make him suffer? Is William hallucinating? That messed me up.

So, now are there two Dolores? Or is Dolores the real one and she split into two: Dolores as a conscious host and Wyatt? Who's Hale? is she Wyatt? Or is Hale the Bernard to Dolores' Ford? That was a tad confusing. I've got to admit that seeing Hale killed by a Hale-Dolores host was extremely satisfying.

Bernard is like a Phoenix being raised from the ashes. More than 11000 freaking versions of Bernard. No matter how many times he dies, he's always reborn. Also, Bernard's angel on his shoulder being Anthony Hopkins just freaks me out. Seriously, Sir Anthony freaking Hopkins brings me joy and creeps me out every single time. I would listen to him speak about the most boring subject ever and still be amazed by it. He steals every single scene he's in.

The big twist was that Hale was Dolores ever since she killed Elsie. I didn't see that coming. Well, I remember thinking a couple of episodes back when the tech group checked she was human, "this can only mean she's a host in Westworld's terms". Tessa Thompson did a great job at being Dolores, however brief it was. She freaking nailed Dolores' voice!

Poor Elsie. Too pure. She should've gone back to dental school. Her death shocked me. But it helped triggering Bernard so I guess it's alright. I guess she can later come back as a host since Charlotte once mentioned they were also monitoring the employees.

So, Stubbs is a host? That was really ambiguous. He used host terminology to refer back to himself when he said "I guess you could call it my core motivation". But at the same time, he said he was hired so long ago he didn't even remembered it and that he was programmed to do his job. And in the very first episode he said to the rescue team when they were about to shoot Bernard "Unless you're planning to decommission the boss", which he said in the very first episode in season 1 when referring to Ford. So who knows? Maybe he is, maybe he's not. I highly doubt that the writers would give us such a twist that way and so abruptly. But then again, this is Westworld, the show that weeks after week makes me question my reality.

Explaining Westworld to the unexpert eye is difficult: Arnold created Dolores who in turn killed him and then she created Bernard in the image of Arnold, who then killed her, only to resuscitate her in the body of Charlotte, who killed Bernard again to bring him back as a new Bernard. Talk about a circle.

I can't believe the writers made me love Sizemore after season 1. I'm gonna miss that melodramatic idiot. His death was sort of pointless, and a little bit broad if you ask me. I don't mean for the character, but for the story. He died for his creation, that's true but he said he did it to buy them time. How much did he buy, like 20 seconds? I'm glad we could listen to his speech though. When Hector said "Well, let this be a lesson" I swear I jumped and then having Sizemore saying it was fantastic. "here I fucking am!" Golden.

The scenes with Akecheta make me really emotional. I shed a tear when he met his love. The music, the cinematography, the acting. Damn! That was beautiful. I got the goosebumps. Maeve and her daughter will never stop making me emotional. It's poetic that Felix and Sylvester survived. The fools in season 1 are the geniuses being tasked with saving as many hosts as they could. I'm hoping they just bring Maeve back because she's the freaking best. I know the image of their souls being in the Valley Beyond were supposed to be happy but Teddy's messed me up so much. Just seeing him standing there, alone, looking to the other side expecting his love to go through, realizing that it's not going to happen, messed me up. It must be hard to be Teddy. Dolores not bringing him back with her makes sense, though. He didn't want to follow her plan, so since she stand by her beliefs, and Teddy didn't share them, she let his mind be free in this other world.

I loved how Dolores realized that this place Arnold created to set them free was nothing but another cage. Then she decided to create a world of their own with, starting with Bernard. I wonder who the other four spheres she brought with her are.