Westworld Season 1 Episode 8 Review

Westworld (2016-)
Season 1 (2016)

Westworld - Season 1 Episode 8 - Trace Decay

Created by: Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy Nolan, Michael Crichton (1973 movie written by)
Starring:  Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden, Thandie Newton, Jeffrey Wright, Jimmi Simpson, Rodrigo Santoro
Rating: TV-MA 

Plot: 
A futuristic theme park recreates the wild west for visitors, but bliss doesn't last forever.

Verdict
This show is amazing. The disparate stories are coming together. Why does the Man in Black think there is a connection between Ford's grandiose story and Arnold's maze? The player piano metaphor is slowly becoming clearer. The buttons Ford presses to execute commands on hosts may not be doing anything.  He just thought they were.
Watch it.

Review
Westworld is a western theme parked stocked with androids, this show calls them hosts, that fully recreate the experience for visitors. The creator wants to make the most lifelike experience possible, continuing to perfect the core program even after thirty years. A recent software update has introduced a glitch. Read my previous episode reviews.

Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) is a host. I can still hardly believe it. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) is fascinated by Bernard's emotions over killing Theresa. Ford built Bernard to give hosts a wide range of emotions, those same emotions are on display in Bernard. As Ford says, no human could program what Bernard did.
Bernard wants to stop Ford, threatening to "raze this place to the ground." Ford admits that Arnold felt the same way, but failed to stop him. Ford wants to preserve his art.
Bernard, modeled after Arnold, has to be a trophy for Ford. He bested Arnold, and now he can do it time and again, ordering Bernard to do his dark bidding.

Once Bernard erases all traces of Theresa's murder, Ford will delete those memories of killing her.

Maeve (Thandie Newton) sees her world for what it is. It's routine. The person she knew as Clem is a new host running through the same dialog.
She doesn't want to know her past or the whys. She knows the stories were created to keep her in the park. That, and each host has a fail safe explosive in their vertebrae. Maeve demands administrator privileges to alter her design. She's going to create a host army to get her art and solve the explosive dilemma.
Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and William (Jimmi Simpson) are close to home, according to her. Is home the maze?
They discover the aftermath of a Ghost Nation attack against a detail sent specifically to kill he and Dolores. It was Logan (Ben Barnes) who informed on him, so they're told from a young man near death. Dolores wants to help the boy, but William states he's too far gone. William seems almost sinister, at least by the music. So far he's been amazed at the experience, the near reality of it. He's been a person of compassion. Why is he so indifferent now?
Security finds Theresa in the same ravine that the rogue host of episode three was found. They found a drive with proprietary data and evidence indicates she fell.
Charlotte (Tessa Thompson) indicates Ford could be a suspect in her death, but Ford counters that the demonstration with Clementine in episode 7 where she killed another host was obviously a manipulation from Theresa. Everything is coming up Ford in this episode. He's got Theresa out of the way and Bernard reinstated.

Sylvester is nervous about Maeve and the investigation into Theresa doesn't help. Maeve begins a soliloquy about the nature of her being, how she was designed to do things just out of her reach with abilities that lie dormant. She asks about Arnold, and tells them if they can get her to behavior she will be a problem for someone else.
Sylvester plans to wipe her brain once in behavior, while Felix is more concerned, I suspect Maeve has planned for that.
The Man in Black (Ed Harris) and Teddy Flood (James Marsden) are in Wyatt's territory, with the Man in Black claiming Wyatt has Flood's girl Dolores.
The Man in Black tells Teddy Ford only lets him remember a very little bit.
Teddy and Man in Black fight a man that's formidable, wearing a bull's head. They dispatch the beast man, but Teddy remember Man in Black taking Dolores in a previous episode. Teddy pistol whips the Man in Black.
The Man in Black is impressed that Teddy remembers. This should be a great game for him. The Man in Black tells Teddy the rules of Westworld prevent Teddy from killing him, but he can change that.
The Man in Black states he owns "not just this world."
If there's a wild west theme park, how many additional parks exist? I thought the rule wasn't that hosts can't kill, but they couldn't even harm them.
We have the Man in Black that claims to own the park, William and Logan that claim to be potential buyers, and Charlotte and the board of Delos. How do none of these three have a more direct connection?

Is it a metaphor that Maeve as at he center of the maze when Man in Black first saw it? Probably not.

The Man in Black jumped into the world after his wife's death two years ago, who killed herself rather than live with him. His daughter tells him that despite the fact he never harmed them, there was something dark in him.
The Man in Black entered the world to see if he could do something truly horrid. This world reveals your true self after all. He killed the host that is Maeve. Maeve cut his throat which explains the scarf he wears. He admits he felt nothing upon murdering, but he witnessed a host truly alive. That's when he first saw the maze.
That maze is the key to everything. While Ford's game has boundaries, Arnold's game is deeper, dangerous.The Man in Black believes Wyatt is the key to the maze, but why does he think that?
Wyatt is part of Ford's story, but the maze is Arnold's.

Of course at the same time we hear the Man in Black recount his story, which coincidentally is what set Maeve on her path indirectly, Maeve enters a trance and kills another host, which registers with security. She's now on the run.
After the Man in Black killed her child, she couldn't be shut down. Despite Ford shutting her down and erasing her memory, she still remembers, how? Is it Arnold? When Ford deletes her memory he specifically states he's using a trick from an old friend. That has to be Arnold. Ford also deleted Bernard's memory about Theresa. I'm willing to bet that comes back into play.

Felix and Sylvester get Maeve into the behavior department and shut her down. Multiple times they've thought she is asleep, only for her to awake. There is no way they get to reformat her. She's got a plan.
Maeve had recruited Felix to help her. She knew Sylvester was going to kill her. She slashes Sylvester's throat to the surprise of Felix. She shrugs, telling him he knew how duplicitous she is. She orders Felix to save Sylvester and he does. She might need him. What a show of power.
It's a new day for Maeve, and now she can influence other hosts. She tells both the bartender and Clem exactly what to do. They do it.
She's going to use Escaton (Rodrigo Santoro) and his outlaw gang to her advantage or is this just a display for the audience? Looks like she's just practicing her power of suggestion.

Charlotte visits Lee Sizemore, letting him know that Theresa wasn't a traitor. Everything she did was at the behest of Delos, at least that's what she tells him.
Lee thinks he is creating a villain for Ford, but Tessa reveals it's busy work. She has a job for him.
They go to the basement host storage area. Charlotte is uploading data to a host. She wants Lee to make a story that gets the host out of the park. Quite the coincidence that the host she picks was Dolores's dad in episode 1. Does Charlotte realize the hosts explode if they leave the park? Does Lee? Either way, that host is going to go off the rails.
I thought Maeve's army was going to come from inside the park, but is she going to intersect the dad, another host with an existential crisis, and get him to recruit hosts from storage?
The truth may be that Theresa was uploading data. If she does everything Delos ordered, I'm willing to bet they ordered that. Now Charlotte needs to finish getting the information out.

Bernard and Ford debate the difference between life like and alive. Pain is always imagined in the mind, what's the difference between a host and a human?
Ford reveals that is the question that plagued Arnold. Ford believes there is no threshold. You can't define consciousness. Bernard asks if he's ever been made to hurt someone before. Ford tells him no, but we see a flash back to Bernard choking Elsie.
All the while, Ford is planning this big story line. Does he just want free reign to create stories and experiment with his hosts? Is this going to be a grand finale for him? Does he just not like outside control?

Head of security Stubbs offers condolences to Bernard over the death of Theresa and is glad Bernard is back. He finds it weird that Bernard seems to not remember his relationship with Theresa. It's more than just being discrete, little does Stubbs know.
Stubbs has mentioned the Man in Black in a previous episode, but just said he was important. Though I get if you call out who he is, some employees will want to see what kind of depraved person the head is. Stubbs hasn't mentioned William and Logan, so he may just not know them.

Dolores is home, but what is home? It's abandoned, but she has a vision of it filled with people. This appears to be an exercise. If not the first hosts, they are early hosts. Dolores is going mad, and it turns out the town has been buried. We see just the steeple of a church. The same steeple from episode 2 when Ford revealed to Bernard he was working on a big story. Does this big story somehow tie back to the origins of the park? At the time that location just seemed relevant to Ford's new story.
Arnold wants Dolores to remember, but remember what. Somehow these reveries have allowed hosts to remember. Did Arnold implant a directive? Did he make it that it's impossible to truly delete host's minds?
Logan finds William and Dolores and he seems quite villainous. It's all just a game, even he said that. I wouldn't believe him now though.