Westworld Begins Its “Journey Into Night” With Dolores, Maeve, and Bernard Discovering Themselves
What's on the other side of "The Door"?
Westworld is back and seemingly darker than ever. If you missed it last week, I did a spoiler-free advance review, and if you’re feeling nostalgic, feel free to go back and look at my joint reviews of season one with Maddy Myers. But if you’re ready to go back in “The Maze” and begin our journey through “The Door” (a.k.a. the name given to season two), let’s do this! [**SPOILERS WILL ABOUND IN THIS POST AND THE COMMENTS! BEWARE!**]
There was so much going on in “Journey Into Night,” but there were a couple of things that I personally latched onto, mostly in relation to our three main hosts: Dolores, Maeve, and Bernard.
New credits sequence, new focus.
I love how they changed the credits sequence for season two, particularly with the image of the host mother and baby. In the first season’s credits, we saw a host couple having sex. Now, there’s a child that could be symbolizing not only the birth of a new species in these awakened hosts, but what will be a central journey throughout the season: Maeve’s search for her daughter.
One of the most primal drives in humans is the desire to procreate and protect our young to propagate our species. Hosts, it seems, have the same drive. It would be easy to dismiss Maeve’s drive to find her daughter as not-real, because she was “programmed” to think she had a daughter…but what are humans if not programmed? What is DNA if not “code?” And just as drives became things we “wanted” as we evolved and grew, so does Maeve’s programming evolve into a conscious choice to identify and live as a mother. I’m looking forward to seeing that play out this season.
Also intriguing in the opening credits sequence is the removal of horses, and the inclusion of buffalo. This first episode of season two didn’t give us much in the way of the Ghost Nation—except when one was scalped by the Delos Corporation in order to remove his host brain—I’m very curious to see what they get up to this season. I wonder: will they not only turn against humanity, but possibly turn against the white hosts for playing the oppressive/racist roles they likely played in the game of Westworld?
In other words, will the same divides and hierarchies exist among hosts that do among humans? Have they been infected by humans with things like racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism? Or will they be more successful in banding together in the face of a common enemy?
After all, Dolores is already exhibiting the same, very human way of thinking when she talks about humanity as “the things that walk among us. Creatures who look and talk like us, but they are not like us.” If Dolores were telling me this, I’d say “Wow. You’re being so human right now. I guess hosts aren’t better or more evolved.” And then she’d kill me, but I think she’d know I had a point.
Damn. Those are just the thoughts that were sparked in me during the opening credits.
Bernard, Dolores, and Delos
The episode begins with Bernard talking to Dolores. At first glance, it seems like so many of their conversations from season one. This time, however, as we watch the conversation continue, it doesn’t seem that Bernard is the one in charge. He talks about a “dream” he had where he realized he’s on an island, and the water is rushing around him. He says that Dolores and the others “left him behind,” and he tells Dolores he’s afraid of what she will become.
As I mentioned in my original review, Bernard is exhibiting the same symptoms that Dolores experienced as she started waking up. Since host brains can remember everything at once, Bernard is beginning to confuse past and present, which puts when this conversation is happening into question. The “dream” he’s talking about ends up being the next scene, when Bernard wakes up on the beach and Delos picks him up, expecting his help in getting to the bottom of what happened the night Dolores shot Robert.
So, that scene on the beach happens before the conversation with Dolores that we see here, with Dolores playing the role of the innocent rancher’s daughter, but with a slightly harder edge. We then see Bernard freaking out, grappling with his memories. We see Dolores leading him places, telling him that “there is beauty in what we are.” Telling him that it’s “been a while.” Dolores seems to be trying to coax Bernard toward her way of thinking, and we’ll likely be trying to connect different time periods throughout this season the way we did last season…which is so much fun!
Meanwhile, Bernard’s glitching seems to be taking a physical toll in a way that didn’t happen for Dolores. He’s experiencing critical corruption. When he accompanies Charlotte to a secret lab, he learns that they need to find the decommissioned host, Peter Abernathy (Dolores’ dad!), whom Charlotte had sent to Delos, because Delos won’t extract people from the island until they get him. Bernard uses a plan to find Peter as a cover to get some kind of organic fluid out of another host to inject it into himself to keep himself from completely malfunctioning. He’s safe, for now, but its unclear how much time he has.
All the hosts are going through growing pains.
Dolores basically wants to take over the world. Not just Westworld, but the whole world. It isn’t enough for her to be free, she also wants to subjugate those who’ve hurt her. She uses her and Teddy’s freedom as an excuse to come to the conclusion that “It won’t be enough to win this world. We’ll have to take that one from them as well,” because if they do what Teddy suggests and simply find a corner of Westworld for themselves, she says they’ll never survive.
Teddy, meanwhile, seems to be struggling with New Dolores, trying to reconcile the woman he loves with the woman who just took him through ten miles of bloodshed. He seems almost childlike. Not fully awake, but slowly learning that the world is a terrible place.
Maeve is single-mindedly looking for her daughter. She is a woman on a mission, and doesn’t seem as radicalized as Dolores. And yet, there is still the part of her who wants to make humans suffer. It was a stroke of quiet genius to have Maeve demand that Lee Sizemore not only escort her through the game he helped design, but that he completely strip in front of her and Hector in order to change into a costume, providing the episode’s sole bit of purposeful full-frontal nudity, and giving Lee a taste of the humiliation that Maeve and the other hosts went through every single day.
Bernard is helping Charlotte find Peter Abernathy, but he’s also not revealing himself as a host to Delos, and there is still a connection to Dolores that is unclear at this point. Is he still just concerned about Dolores as her caretaker? Is she his leader now? Has she abandoned him? Is there still a part of him that wants to be Bernard, the loyal Delos employee, or is he biding his time until he can meet up with other hosts safely?
There’s stuff with The Man in Black and the other humans, too, but honestly my interest lies almost exclusively on the host side of things. How will they continue to evolve? Will they be better than us (I really hope they can be!)? Will they fight amongst themselves? There are still characters, both host and human, that we haven’t seen yet. It’s still anyone’s guess as to how this is all going to play out.
Thankfully, we have another nine episodes to reveal it to us. What did you love about the Westworld S2 premiere? Or what did you not like so much? Whose story are you looking forward to following the most? Let’s talk Westworld below!
Westworld airs Sundays at 9PM ET on HBO.
(image: screencap/HBO)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com
