SUMMARY
This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.
** SPOILERS AHEAD **
MANILA, Philippines – “Reunion” is one of the more straightforward episodes of Westworld. The timeline jumps are relatively easy to catch, and the flashbacks reveal a great deal, especially where William is concerned. Here, we learn how he convinced James Delos to invest in the theme park, and get some clues as to how he gained control of it later on.
The episode also takes us back to the paths of the 3 main characters: Dolores with her uprising; Maeve with her quest to find her daughter; and the older William with his desire to dig deeper into this game. “Digging deeper” now means actually destroying the park. “This whole enterprise is goin’ down in flames,” he tells Lawrence, his hapless companion.
Even with the forthright structure of “Reunion,” there are still a lot of themes and questions to sink our teeth into:
Judgment
Park co-creators Robert Ford and Arnold Weber envisioned Westworld to be a path that would lead guests to self-discovery (although the way things are playing out, it is instead becoming a path for Hosts to discover themselves).
The young William, on the other hand, saw the less-altruistic potential of the park. “They wanted a place hidden from God,” he later says. “A place they could sin in peace.”
For 30 years, this Garden of Earthly Delights saw guests indulge in their basest desires. They screwed, murdered – all while Delos gathered their DNA in secret.
“We were tallying up their sins. All their choices,” William says.
You can look at Delos collecting guests’ DNA as a sort of punishment, but it is Dolores who truly represents karmic payback. In Dolores’ burgeoning rebellion, judgment finally catches up with Westworld. She’s an avenging angel hellbent on burning Sodom and Gomorrah to the ground.
Resurrection
To achieve her goal, Dolores will seek out a “weapon” located in the Valley Beyond (otherwise known as “Glory”), but first she needs an army. She makes a Delos technician revive a dead Confederado and presents the resurrected soldier to Major Craddock. When the officer refuses to join Dolores, she, Teddy, and Angela gun down Craddock and his men.
The technician revives the men and programs them to be loyal to Dolores. She then marches to the valley, accompanied by her undead army. We’ve always known that Hosts could be revived, but the scenes with the Confederados show that Dolores potentially has a supply of relentless, easily repaired, fighters at her disposal.
Contrast
Comparing Dolores with Maeve is one of the more enjoyable aspects of watching the series. If Dolores is Joan of Arc, Maeve is Job. Maeve attained self-awareness by experiencing impossible pain and having her life stripped from her. She literally had to die repeated deaths to understand who (or rather, what) she was, and how the park operated. The fact that all this was pre-programmed by Ford only makes her journey more harrowing. Contrast this to Dolores’s relatively peaceful awakening, which came when Ford activated her latent consciousness.
Dolores is using violence to cleans the park. Maeve, on the other hand, used self-inflicted violence to cleans herself. Maeve is already pure.
Questions we want answered
What is the weapon Dolores is looking for?
No concrete details were given about this weapon just yet. Is it the DNA database Delos is keeping? Is it a stockpile of explosives? Could the weapon be the giant terraforming equipment used to create the park?
Either way, the cost of this journey will be high – in the first episode of the season, we see Dolores’s presumably dead companions floating in a lake.
Is Ford still around?
When William tries to recruit El Lazo’s bandits, the criminals point their guns to their own heads and commit suicide. We then learn that Ford programmed most of the Hosts to refrain from assisting William. While it’s possible that the code was added prior to Ford’s death, it makes me wonder if he’s still around pulling strings (and trolling William). The whole DNA aspect can set the stage for some mind-bending Ford-related reveals later on.
What happens to Logan and his father?
Since Logan and the young William were introduced last season, Logan was portrayed as the more carnal of the pair. Fast-forward to the retirement party of his father James, and Logan is jaded and drug-addled. He tells William that the park will be the end of their species. What happened in the interim?
During the party, James, who appears to be sick, confronts William, telling him that he’s running out of patience. Is James waiting for William to produce a replacement Host body? And is this somehow tied to the company’s DNA shenanigans?
Will Teddy ever wake up?
Poor Teddy. The only thing stopping him from having a complete meltdown is the fact that he has no idea what the hell is happening around him – he’s only in it for the ride and some vague obedience towards Dolores. We saw him floating in the lake at the end of episode one, but I hope he had a moment of clarity before checking out. — Rappler.com
Read more about Westworld on Rappler here:
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