This show makes my head hurt.
I almost posted in this thread a few minutes ago that I think Dolores = Wyatt. Then I deleted what I had written because, no, that’s too crazy. But the author of the article makes the same prediction, so let’s pretend I said it here first.
Intriguing juxtaposition of shots over at Reddit. Dolores is shown outside a saloon pointing a gun at her head. It’s exactly the same saloon outside which “Wyatt” shoots the General. I’m convinced now that Dolores is Wyatt, she killed the General (Arnold) and then shot herself in the head. Her reason? I think that, like the other robots in the pews of the church, she had been driven insane by Arnold’s attempts to lead the robots to sentience.
I am coming to the conclusion that Arnold is or was the villain in this show and that Ford is the good guy trying to prevent the terrifying prospect of sentient machines who could and probably would wipe humanity from the face of the Earth. The show’s writers have done an incredibly good job making us feel sympathy for the robots but the truth is they have no more real humanity than a toaster. I think William came to realize this which is why as the MIB he has no hesitation in abusing Dolores. No matter how artfully it mimics a human (and ‘it’ is the appropriate pronoun here) it is as cold, lifeless and unfeeling as a computer and can be repaired and rebooted just as easily.
Well, now wait a sec… if Delores is Wyatt, then why has Robert always referred to Wyatt as a “he” ? I’d have to go back and check, because maybe Robert was playing some version of the pronoun game…
We’ve seen that the bots (Teddy, anyway) will act immediately to defend Robert if someone threatens him. I could see Delores killing Wyatt if Wyatt was attacking Robert. In this last episode, isn’t she wandering through the secret lab under the church and about to walk into an office where Robert is having an argument with someone, probably Wyatt? When Robert reflected on how Wyatt’s death couldn’t be accidental because “he was very very careful”, maybe he suspects Wyatt deliberately pulled a suicide-by-bot by attacking Robert in the presence of Delores, knowing she would intervene with deadly force.
Are you referring to Arnold here? Wyatt is the made up villain for the new narrative. I believe folks here are speculating that the new narrative is based on the real life revolt and murder of Arnold that is alluded to and that the actions that were taken by Delores in that incident are attributed to Wyatt in this new narrative.
Ahem.
But I actually got the idea reading the internets ;). I assumed others had already run across the theory, hence my asking about speculation on it. I rather like the idea myself, but I think Teddy himself being Wyatt ( who is then killed by Dolores ) is another outside possibility.
But weren’t Teddy’s memories of Wyatt and the massacre implanted as a backstory for him by Ford, who clearly used real events as a backdrop? I’m not even sure that Teddy was there at all. But then I’m often sure of nothing in this show!
nm
Yes and clearly I was operating under a gross misapprehension.
Humans have an amazing ability to anthropomorphize: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU-cori12KU
Boy, the characters played by James Marsden just can’t catch a break.
I love that ad.
I’ve come around to believing that Dolores is Wyatt; she shot up the town including Arnold, then turned the gun on herself. This was after Arnold had been putting his voice in the host’s heads, driving them mad. She’d have conversations with Arnold by taking the elevator from the church. Teddy may or may not have participated in the massacre; or Ford may have just patterned the backstory in his memory as having participated in the event with Wyatt/Dolores.
After the massacre, the town is buried and Dolores is put in her loop at the homestead with Abernathy as her father. One day (or maybe more than once) she gets hold of a gun and kills the bandit trying to rape her, runs away and falls into William/Logan’s campsite where she leads William back to the now-buried village and then to the frontier town where Logan stabs her and William freaks the fuck out, killing all the robots.
30 years later, she is attacked at the homestead again but this time by an older William/MiB. This breaks her loop again, and she follows the route she took with young William but now the town has been excavated/rebuilt. She takes the confessional elevator down to the labyrinth but Arnold isn’t there “because I killed you.” Meanwhile, the MiB is using her to lead him (bringing Teddy along) to the maze, hoping to discover the secret of the hosts self-awareness that he saw long ago in Dolores and more recently in Maeve.
Without digging into details, conceptually something like this is interesting. So, it the ongoing cycle a “layering on” of sentience - trying to break the barrier to it more often?
Or, put it a different way: the hosts have been dismissed by the Delos board member Charlotte as toys for Ford - they want the AI for a larger/other purpose. How is this set of WW timelines part of that other purpose? And will that be how the series evolves, or will it remain largely contained within the park?
ETA: if “Dolores is Wyatt” how would that work? Does it mean that the Dolores-bot killed a bunch of humans and hosts as she acquired sentience, and that set of software “memories” were repurposed for use with Teddy? So, they put a thin layer of newidentity over the acts but try to keep the acts in the host’s mind as a Revery?
Sorry if I am missing something. Lots of stuff going on!
For some reason I want to argue against this explanation, but it fits and makes good sense. Well articulated Skammer.
Did anyone predict that Dolores killed Arnold? Was that alluded to and I just forgot?
Because of all the reveals, this is the first one that (mostly due to my own fault) actually surprised me and I felt came out of nowhere.
FTR, I think is Dolores=Wyatt is true but misleading. Wyatt is a host, a distinct character, and we will likely meet him at some point.
However, everything that Wyatt is doing is based directly on actions Dolores took ~35 years ago, and those events were the catastrophe reference several times. In Teddy’s new backstory, Wyatt is doing what Dolores did, and Teddy is filling Arnold’s shoes. Dolores massacred the town and killed Arnold.
That’s my best guess right now.
Agreed. Mind-bending but not implausible.
It was definitely “predicted,” IIRC mostly just because of the setup that we knew something bad had happened 30+ years ago, Arnold died somehow 30+years ago, and via flashbacks/multitimeframe evidence it was increasingly apparent that Dolores played a major role in whatever that bad event was. So it was speculated for a long time, almost since the beginning, that Dolores killing Arnold was possibly the “critical failure” 30+ years ago that was mentioned in Episode 1 or 2.
He made out all right as Corny Collins (good dancer!)
Makes sense to me.
We are left with the situation: a robot malfunctioned and killed at least one human (Arnold)—and the park kept going and the malfunctioning robot is still in service.
Tough to believe that could happen unless the guy in charge (Ford) had been able to quiet all the human witnesses who survived the massacre.
For all we know Dolores malfunctioned when no guests were present–but the human Westworld employees would surely have represented a problem for Ford. They would have talked, and his park would, at the very least, have been taken away from him (and possibly shut down altogether).
So I’m thinking we will find out that Ford did something to those employees along the lines of what happened to Theresa. (Of course I’ve been supporting the theory that all the present-day Westworld employees are artificial persons, most of whom have no idea that they are not human and that their memories are mere implants.)