Westworld Recap with Spoilers: The Bicameral Mind

The episode opens with Arnold building Dolores for the first time. Arnold wakes Dolores up (although shes only half constructed), takes her by the hand, and welcomes her to the world.

In the present day, the Man in Black has Dolores shave him with the knife. The Man in Black mentions that Dolores has been here many times before, and even took him once….although the town was buried in sand. Dolores suddenly sees Arnold in the middle of the town and starts to follow him. The Man in Black picks up his knife (Dolores had tossed it aside) and starts to follow her.

William rides into the park looking for Dolores, with Logan dragging behind him tied to a horse. When Logan says they’d need an army to find Dolores, William agrees and approaches Lawrence’s camp.

Teddy wakes up on the train to Sweetwater and begins his loop as usual. As he walks in, he suddenly hears Arnold’s voice and has a flashback to a town full of dead hosts…with Dolores as the only survivor. Dolores smiles at Teddy, before “un-flashing back” when another host bumps into him. After shooting the host down, Teddy runs back to the train and hops on it to find his lost love.

Dolores walks into the church and finds Arnold sitting in a pew. She takes him by the hand and declares she knows where the maze is. Dolores then walks into the graveyard and says that the maze ends at a place where she’s never been….namely her own grave. When Dolores finds he grave and digs it up, she finds a large metal maze hidden in a box. She turns to Arnold, who explains that the Maze was a way to unlock true self-consciousness. While he originally thought of consciousness as a pyramid, it was actually a spiral…a maze where the center is true self-sentience. Although Dolores doesn’t quite understand, Arnold explains that she’s so close and that he’ll tell Ford they can’t open the park because she’s alive.

The Man in Black then grabs the maze out of Dolores’s hand and asks what it means. Dolores rambles that if she had the answer to the maze, Arnold said they’d set her free. In another flashback, Arnold explains that Ford doesn’t think she’s conscious and that humans would only see her as the enemy. Although Ford wants to roll Dolores and the other hosts back, Arnold wants her to break the loop before it starts. Arnold tells Dolores that she’ll need to kill the other hosts in order to stop the park from opening and mentions that Teddy will probably help her.

In the present day, the Man in Black tells Dolores to stop with the nonsense and asks where Wyatt is. Dolores keeps flashing back to the massacre at Escalante, so the Man in Black hits her. The Man in Black says that he took her advice and bought the park, but that even though this world “feels” real, it can’t be the real thing because the hosts fight back. The Man in Black wants that to change and encourages Dolores to help him find that one “true thing”. But Dolores says she already has a true thing, a man who loves her and will kill the Man in Black when he comes to find her.

Lawrence takes William to the Confederato camp and says that Dolores is probably there. Logan makes a wisecrack, so William punches him in the face and tells him to shut up.

Lee meets Charlotte by the train and demands to be Ford’s replacement when she forces Ford off the board. Charlotte agrees just as the Board of Directors arrive to the park.

Sylvester dissembles Maeve down to the skeleton to remove the bomb in her spine and then rebuilds her. When she wakes up, Maeve disables parts of the park’s security system and activates Hector and his posse, who are also in the body shop for repairs.

Charlotte visits Ford at his office and says that the board has unanimously voted to remove him from the park. Charlotte tells Ford that he’ll announce his retirement that evening after unveiling his new narrative and that the board plans to make changes to the hosts to “simplify” them a bit.

Hector and Armistice (the snake tattoo woman) wake up and attack two of the body shop employees. Armistice beats the snot out of his employee, but Hector kills the other employee by stabbing him with the knife. Maeve arrives with Felix and Sylvester, and Sylvester eventually explains (under duress) that Arnold changed her core code so the hosts can wake up on their own from sleep mode. Maeve takes Hector and the snake tattoo woman to find someone who knows who Arnold is.

Teddy hops off the train and steals a horse to find Dolores. Meanwhile, the Man in Black continues to assault Dolores. Dolores continues to say that her true love will find her…and eventually names him: William. The Man in Black starts to laugh and says that he knew a guest named William. The Man in Black says that William got a taste for killing when he went to look for Dolores.

In a flashback, we see William mow down the Confederato camp and then kill a soldier when the soldiers mentions that a group of soldiers raped Dolores and left her in the wilderness. Although William searched for Dolores everywhere, William couldn’t find her. The Man in Black said that while William couldn’t find Dolores…William did discover himself.

In the flashback, William takes Logan out to the edge of the park (naked and tied to a horse) and releases him after declaring his intent to take over their company and increase their stake in the park. William eventually found Dolores back in Sweetwater, but he realized that he wasn’t the same anymore. Dolores realizes that the Man in Black is William…and that he’s just like all the other humans that come to the park.

Dolores starts to cry again, but this time she says she’s crying for William and what’s become of him. Dolores says that eventually William and the other humans will all die, but that “a new god” will walk the earth in their stead. William thinks she’s talking about Wyatt and demands to see him, but Dolores beats up William instead and breaks him arm. Dolores has William cornered and puts a gun to his chin, but William stabs her when she hesitates. As Dolores lies on the ground, William says he’ll have to find Wyatt himself, but Teddy arrives and shoots the Man in Black multiple times. Teddy grabs Dolores, but Dolores asks Teddy to take him to “the place where the mountains meet the sea”. After they ride off, the Man in Black wakes up (because Teddy’s bullets can’t actually a human).

Maeve and her followers arrive in cold storage. Maeve finds Clementine standing comatose, while Felix finds Bernard on the ground. Maeve has Felix bring Bernard back online (the bullet grazed Bernard’s cortex, but didn’t destroy them). Bernard mentions this isn’t the first time he’s “awoken”, but says that isn’t the first time “Maeve” has woken up either. Maeve wants Bernard to erase her memories, but Bernard says that her memories are the key to true consciousness and can’t be erased.

Ford meets William in Escalante and asks if he’s found what he’s looking for. William wanted to find a way to have the hosts fight back instead of following Ford’s commands. Ford says that the maze wasn’t meant for William, but recommends giving his new narrative a try.

Maeve asks Bernard about Arnold, but Bernard revealed that someone had re-programmed her to escape the park. Maeve doesn’t believe it, though, and says she’s leaving the park.

The Westworld hub notices a disturbance in cold storate, so one of the employees orders a sweep of the headquarters.

Teddy takes Dolores to the sea. Dolores rambles a bit about how the park is a beautiful trap and that the trap is inside of us before she dies in Teddy’s arms. Teddy tells Dolores’s body that they can find a path to a new world someday, a brand new chapter….and then he freezes. Ford walks out to announce his new narrative “A Journey into Night” as the board applauds around them. As the crowd disperses, Ford orders that Dolores be taken to the old field lab.

Security finds footage of the attack in the lab, just before the entire headquarters suddenly goes on lockdown. Maeve, Felix, and the others get stuck on the Programming floor, as a Security team chases after them. Hector and Armistice take out most of the secuity team, allowing Maeve to keep moving towards the exit.

Bernard makes his way to the gala, while Maeve discovers a second wing of the headquarters dedicated to training samurai hosts. They leave Armistice behind when she gets her hand stuck in a barricade. When Maeve and Felix get to the elevator, Maeve forces Hector to stay behind to cover their exit.

Ford wakes Dolores up in the field lab and introduces her to Bernard. Ford then explains that Arnold wanted to bring the hosts to life after playing with one of his son’s toy mazes. He then uploaded Dolores with Wyatt’s narrative in an attempt to sabotage the park. Although Arnold had Dolores kill him, the park still opened thanks to William’s investment.

Ford says it took him 35 years to fix his mistakes and leaves Dolores with the gun that she used to kill Arnold. Before he leaves, he asks Dolores if she understands who she needs to become in order to finally leave the park.

Felix gives Maeve the location of her daughter inside the park, but Maeve still wants to leave. She walks out of the elevator and makes it onto the train.

Bernard says that Arnold is still trying to fight Ford for control of the hosts and the parks. But Ford says that he realized that Arnold was right about the hosts, but that the hosts needed time to suffer in order to understand “the enemy”. Ford tells Bernard goodbye, hands him the toy maze, and then leaves the church.

Dolores walks into Arnold’s office in the lab and starts conversing with Arnold again. She realizes that she wasn’t talking to Arnold…but rather to herself the entire time. The center of the maze is true consciousness, and now Dolores has finally found it. She realizes who she needs to become and looks at the gun she used to kill Arnold.

Ford walks on stage at the gala and gives a small speech about how he loves to tell stories. He says that he wanted to tell a new story, about a new kind of people and the choices they decide to make. It becomes obvious that Ford has reenacted Arnold’s suicide…only this time Dolores willingly pulls the trigger and shoots Ford in the head.

Maeve gets off the train at the last second and decides to stay to find her daughter.

Lee walks into cold storage but discovers that all the hosts have vanished. William sees the hosts come out of the woods around the gala. Clementine shoots William in the arm…for real, and he gives a giant grin. The episode ends with the army of hosts approaching the gala as Dolores begins to fire into the crowd.

There’s also a little post-credit scene of Armistice cutting off her own arm and running towards several security guards.