‘Westworld’ Recap: Time for a Status Update

Warning: This recap contains spoilers for the “Trompe L’Oeil” episode of Westworld.

Westworld has been playing its cards close to its vest since it launched seven episodes ago, which, in turn, has prodded audiences to try and actively decode what’s going on behind the show’s poker face. With Sunday’s episode, “Trompe L’Oeil,” the series finally flips over a narrative card, and it’s a doozy: Bernard Lowe, Westworld’s stalwart head of programming, is as artificial as the hosts he’s tasked with overseeing. Now that’s a twist that seriously attentive fans probably saw coming: It’s certainly been discussed with great frequency online. But to have it confirmed is still a pretty big deal, especially as it potentially holds the key to unknotting other plot threads as the freshman season heads into the homestretch. Here’s our update on five of Westworld’s big storylines in the wake of Sunday’s revelation.

Related: Our Westworld Recaps and Postmortems

The Hunt for the Maze
As we learned back in the pilot, the Man in Black has been a fixture in Westworld for three decades. And during that time, he’s explored virtually every nook and cranny of this simulated world, save one: a Maze, whose entrance is presumably buried somewhere amid the yawning canyons and rugged mountains that dot the landscape of a re-created American frontier. He’s embarked on this mission under the impression that the Maze is a physical thing — yet another level of Westworld’s open-world gameplay that had previously been known only to the hosts. And that’s why he’s conscripted various hosts to assist him in his progress, from outlaw Lawrence to lovestruck cowboy Teddy, discarding them when they’ve outlived their usefulness.

But as the series has progressed, we’ve been receiving signals suggesting that we’re dealing with a metaphorical Maze — one that might describe a host’s journey from programmed automaton to genuine consciousness. That’s the path that the show’s other Maze-hunter, Dolores, has been walking ever since she fully abandoned her predetermined loop and accompanied new guest William on his own adventure. Dolores first became aware of the Maze in the fifth episode, when Bernard implanted the idea in her artificial mind during one of their face-to-face counseling sessions. Early on, these meetings appeared to be happening in the physical world; but now that we know that Bernard is a fellow ‘bot, it seems more likely that they’re engaging with each other in some kind of shared consciousness, as he guides her through a mental maze where self-awareness waits at the center.

Arnold: Lost and Found
Stay with us while we take Bernard’s role in Dolores’s journey a step further. It’s been pointed out that “Bernard Lowe” is an anagram for “Arnold Weber,” the man who co-created Westworld with Robert Ford some three decades ago. But Arnold didn’t survive to see the park become the wealthy tourist destination it is today, opting instead to vanish into his creation under still-mysterious circumstances. As Robert himself has implied, though, Arnold undoubtedly left a small piece of himself behind in the robots he had a direct hand in creating — robots like Dolores, who is one of the park’s longest-serving hosts. In that case, the “Bernard” she sees in her mind might actually be Arnold’s way of informing her that she’s on the right track to completing their original mission: destroying Westworld.

Why destroy Westworld? Because Arnold viewed the entire place as a corruption of his chief interest: creating artificial life. The thought that his “children” were to become mere sport for flesh-and-blood humans no doubt pushed him to lead the near-cataclysmic charge that resulted in the destroyed offices Bernard visited in last week’s episode and the fragments of horrifying memory — specifically something involving a church — that float through Dolores’s mind. Even if Arnold is dead in body as Robert presumes, his ghost is still very much present in his machines.

Whose Timeline Is It Anyway?
When William and his soon-to-be brother-in-law, Logan, first disembarked in Westworld back in the second episode, sharp-eyed viewers noted a discrepancy between the clunky park logo the new arrivals saw versus the sleeker one present throughout the premiere. That spawned the hotly debated theory that young William would grow up to become the grizzled Man in Black, and that each episode thus straddles the present and the past. We still don’t have confirmation one way or the other, but Bernard’s awakening, at least, is very much happening in the present day, with the future of the park on the line.

You Say Maeve Wants a Revolution
Independently of Dolores, bordello madam Maeve is also approaching heightened consciousness, albeit with the help of two hapless park employees rather than a mythical maze. The discrepancy between their two approaches is most likely rooted in the fact that Maeve appears to be a more recent model, created after Arthur’s heyday when metal faces still hid underneath fleshlike exteriors. It’s worth noting that Dolores did trigger Maeve’s awakening in the second episode via the words, “These violent delights have violent ends.” But that never led to visions of Bernard dancing in her head. Instead, Maeve has used Westworld’s laboratories as her school, retaining the memories of what she sees.

And in this episode, what she sees is the casual murder of Clementine, her friend and employee, who was pulled out of the bordello on the orders of Theresa and Charlotte Hale, the board director of Delos, the corporation that has a controlling interest in Westworld. They want to illustrate to Robert and Bernard that the most recent code update has left the robots capable of remembering the violence visited upon them and responding in kind. Having served her purpose, Clementine is then lobotomized and permanently retired, remembered by no one except Maeve, who now has a very personal reason for vengeance.

The Deal With Delos
Tensions between Robert and the Delos board have been lightly simmering for some time, escalating after he seized back control of the park’s creative direction from self-aggrandizing “Narrative Director” Lee Sizemore. With Ford literally moving mountains to make his grand new idea a reality, the corporation is understandably a bit concerned about its real interests in Westworld: the intellectual property that makes the park run. Firing Bernard over the code mishap was intended to help ease Robert out the door, but Theresa’s subsequent death at Bernard’s hands — which Ford chillingly calls a “blood sacrifice” — shows that he’s instead choosing to view this as a test of his authority … one that he plans on passing.

Westworld airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.