I completely disagree with this. The male host (“Wyatt”) that we kept seeing flashbacks of (the one shooting all the townspeople) never existed, not 35 years ago, and not in the present time of the show.
“Wyatt” was first mentioned in the series (by Ford) as a new invented (i.e. fictional) character intended to flesh out Teddy’s backstory. This purported reason for this was so that Teddy could be a central character in Ford’s new narrative.
Again, “Wyatt” was first an alternate personality for Dolores, and later a fictional host that Teddy envisioned as the one responsible for the massacre (who never actually existed).
They specifically show Arnold merging Wyatt’s code with “Dolores”. Ford’s voice over was saying that they were designing Wyatt as a new character…so Arnold used that code and put it in Dolores.
When “Wyatt” was first stated to “Teddy” as his backstory…that was Ford kicking off his new storyline. So Ford still had the code for Wyatt that Arnold used to merge with Dolores.
The woman with the snake tattoo is related to the new storyline, and that’s why MIB never encountered her before.
I’m kinda thinking MIB’s whole adventure this season was the first person to use the new narrative (which explains why he never knew Lawrence had a wife and daughter)
At one point I thought Dolores, Wyatt and Teddy each occupied the same role in different versions of the shootout.
Then, I think I realized that Dolores (with Wyatt s/w installed) did the shootout and Teddy helped her. Then, when Ford gave Teddy a new backstory in the present day, he included an isolated version of the Wyatt program, carrying out the Dolores/Wyatt shootout from long ago. I believe that by Ford filling in the backstory for Teddy, that is the first time an individual Wyatt character was established as a memory - a reverie - of Teddy’s.
Teddy never occupied the same role as Dolores/Wyatt, but was present and in some versions, including the real one that led to the death of Arnold, helped with the killing of hosts.
Dolores shooting Arnold: not only did a host kill all the other hosts, but also killed a human. This should’ve forced Ford to shut down the park but he covered it up. It also served as another element of suffering to work Dolores “through the maze” of awakening consciousness.
Interesting that Buddha teaches Life is Suffering. In this story, Life Emerges Through Suffering.
I realize I’m probably over thinking this, but Dolores killed Arnold because he made her do it. She didn’t malfunction, she was following programming. It’d be like if someone at Six Flags laid down in front of a roller coaster before the park opened, it should make them increase security measures so no one can do that, but otherwise probably wouldn’t stop the opening.
Also, it is interesting to compare the show to the movie, because in the movie the hosts are being glitchy, while in the show all the weirdness is because of human interference.
When Arnold told Dolores that she would have to kill him, he said something along the lines of, “He can replace all of you, but he can’t replace me.” I think his idea was that without his expertise, Ford would never be able to get the park running again once all the hosts were dead. So Ford built a new Arnold. (How he had the ability to do that, if he couldn’t build the other hosts himself, I have no idea.)
Yes, Dolores did the shooting, and Teddy helped (even though he wasn’t sure why he was helping) I don’t remember Teddy ever being shown as the only shooter…just that he participated.
There is a host character named Wyatt that Arnold and Ford were both working on, whose s/w Arnold merged into Dolores…
As stated above, I think part of MIB’s storyline was him being the first character to experience the new Wyatt narrative. Note…Teddy always arrived on the train…but then MIB and Lawrence found him beaten and tied to a tree. (Note all of the new things MIB is discovering, even though he states he read everything in the park…except the last page)
The only thing I can’t quite grasp is…if MIB was surprised to find Teddy…and this was the new narrative, how did he know to drain the blood from the dealer, and from Lawrence to heal Teddy.
I believe there is a line when Ford is cleaning Dolores up so that she can kill him at the reception, that he purposely kept Dolores and Bernard separated from each other. Other than hosts, we don’t know who worked with them Pre-Arnold shooting. They do show MIB and Bernard taking second looks at each other just before Ford’s final speech.
Except we saw scenes with Logan & William where Dolores wasn’t present, so they could not have been in her memory. So we weren’t just seeing Dolores’ flashbacks, we really were seeing scenes taking place in an earlier timeframe.
They could have used early versions of the hosts to do a lot of the gruntwork. It would still have been ungodly expensive, but that would have made things somewhat more affordable.
Another possibility I just thought of – Bernard is “programmed” never to leave the facility, and Ford made sure that no one at the facility worked there when Arnold was alive.
Entirely possible. What’s confusing is, they show scenes supposedly at Bernard’s place, when he is with his lover (who’s name is escaping me right now) BUT, we don’t know if it is off the facility, or in the higher portion where people seem to stay when not “IN” the park. (Ex…the female board member that had Hector as her sex slave)
I have assumed that most (if not all) employees live on-site. From what people who have spent time talking to Aeden have said, the park is not easy to get to, and given the 24/7 nature of the place, at least the higher-ups are probably wanted close by. Keeping all staff close also helps to ensure that none of Ford’s information leaves the Mesa.
I agree with this statement, but am not sure I understand the implications you want me to see. To me, yes, Dolores, with an influx of Wyatt code, was programmed to shoot Arnold. She did. The point is that this act, once committed and then accessed in the form of a Reverie, is now lodged into Dolores with a dark Wyatt side, and over many iterations, that grain of sand leads to a pearl of consciousness.
Interesting that her shooting of Arnold, in effect, becomes the Hosts’ Original Sin. And it is through that Original Sin that the Hosts’ Consciousness is Born.
…and shit. Man, Nolan and Joy must smoke a lot of weed.
So was anyone else as disappointed by the resolution of the William/MiB–Dolores story as I was? Not just the maze, but the whole plot was just a red herring. I thought that he had discovered something important about the park or its hosts. I thought he had an agenda that was as big as Fords that would eventually lead to conflict about the future of the park and the development of the hosts’ consciousness.
But none of that was true, and it didn’t pay off in any way whatsoever. He was on a wild goose chase. He was crazy and stupid and unsympathetic as a young man, and crazy and stupid and unsympathetic as an old man. The story would have played out exactly the same without him. Someone else would have been with Dolores when she began her reveries, and she would have wandered off to the old town eventually, and even that wouldn’t have mattered because Ford was going to reprogram her to “kill” him either way. It was all just filler to keep us distracted and entertained as they doled out the 75 minutes or so of real story they had over ten weeks.
True, without William, Dolores might never have gone out to the valley where the old town was, but she probably would have. I imagine a lot of guests take her on whatever adventure they go on, and some of them must end up on that train (or why would it be there?). And she wouldn’t have found the photograph without William to leave it, but again, so what? She was programmed to ignore anything about the outside world until she heard the magic get-woke phrase, at which point any comment by a guest about the outside world might have triggered her reveries. And again, it doesn’t matter, because even if she never left the loop of going to town, meeting Teddy or a guest, going home, and getting raped and/or rescued every day, she still would have been reprogrammed by Ford for his little performance of the Delos’s Restaurant Masscaree. The whole story line was for nothing. Just like Lost.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was like Lost, which in the end just became incoherent and stupid, but I take your point about the way that story was resolved.
To be honest, I thought it was going to be a love story. I thought MiB had spent 30 years trying to regain the magic sauce that brought Dolores to life the first time around. He knew trauma was required, so he was inflicting trauma on Dolores to try to reboot her soul. The tragedy could have been that once she remembered all the trauma inflicted on her by William, she would hate him once she ‘woke up’, and perhaps even kill him. He could have died loving her, glad that she was awake again, and fully accepting that if he had to die to allow her to live, that was okay. Classic romantic tragedy. It would have been even more tragic if he never got the chance to explain to her why he did those things, and she discovered it after she had already killed him.
Instead, we just got a guy trying to find a maze, and being disappointed to find that the maze didn’t exist. Kind of a boring end to a fascinating mystery.
William effectively owns the park. If he want to chase a riddle that he has been told multiple times “is not for him” so be it. For his trouble he got to be present for the singularity. He looked pretty satisfied if you ask me.