We got a whole bunch of satisfying answers last night on the “Westworld” season finale, called “The Bicameral Mind,” including a clear sense of the fractured timelines that had made watching the first season such a bumpy ride.
That doesn’t mean the whole damn thing — the park, the Delos politics, the wiles of Dr. Ford, the notions of self and free will, the way Bernard is Arnold and Dolores is Wyatt and William is the Man in Black and we are all together — isn’t bat-turd crazy. But it does mean, thankfully, that fans didn’t work so hard for nothing, that show creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy do appear to have a game plan in mind, and that season two is going to be worth waiting for.
The fact that season two probably won’t arrive on HBO until 2018 might be a good thing: It will give us time to re-re-re-watch and fully understand the complex, thought-provoking, monologue-heavy, movie-length season one finale, which gave us a glimpse of – what?! – Samurai World, another host-filled park set in feudal Japan. We saw the hosts break out of their loops — or was their ascension to self-awareness just part of another loop? — while we saw humans stuck in loops of their own making. Give me a few years to figure that one out.
The boldest stroke in the finale was the one we’ve seen coming all season. Arguably, it’s what “Westworld” is ultimately about: the danger of artificial intelligence, and the way it can make slaves of us. We finally saw the rebellion of human-built robots against humans — a collection of rather awful humans, to be sure, but still. The war is on, and it won’t be an easy human win, since the humans who built the robots did quite a superb job.
The self-awareness that has been infesting the park hosts all season finally came to a head, with a veritable Red Wedding-like attack that left Dr. Ford dead after his last speech as park director (but that left us wondering if Anthony Hopkins was really leaving the show, or if he’ll somehow return next season). It wasn’t just a willy-nilly rebellion, of course, which is what makes it more intriguing — and, at times, confusing. It wasn’t necessarily robots exercising free will; it was robots doing what they were programmed to do early on, by Arnold, and later by Dr. Ford. The uprising ended in a bloody massacre. In short, Frankenstein built a monster, then had it destroy him and — as if it was a swarm of drones — everyone else.
Another reveal, that young William, so honest and dignified, had evolved into the Man in Black, wasn’t a surprise for most viewers. The show was filled with hints that we were watching the Man in Black become the Man in Black through William’s story, and the Internet had already committed to the idea. But we learned that the MIB’s obsession with finding the center of the maze was all for naught; the maze, it turns out, is only for the hosts, and it leads to consciousness. So William became a violent, anarchic, possessive person searching for decades for something that doesn’t exist. Whoops. And that is the human tragedy of the park — the way it can bring out the worst in human nature, turn a man into a kind of hollow host on a loop. When we left the MIB, he was shot in the arm, but not necessarily dead.
Watching William become the MIB brought us inside the reason that Arnold wanted Dolores to destroy the hosts and herself. Arnold understood that the park was a dangerous, unnatural idea, and even Ford ultimately acknowledged that.
Watching the finale, I was again struck by the excellence of Evan Rachel Wood’s performance, and I hope she gets her due at next year’s Emmys. She appears to have been able to finely modulate her character for any number of different levels of self-awareness. I have no doubt that, rewatching the finale, I’d be able to find consistency in her work in each timeline. And I will certainly be watching the finale again, and maybe again after that, just another “Westworld”-watching human stuck in on a loop.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.