Westworld - 'Contrapasso'

I have a sneaking suspicion that this kid is behind everything.

As the theories fly thick and fast, Westworld continues to load us down with characters and plots that presumably are all going to meet up somewhere.

The Man in Black comes across the slightly creepy little boy with a stick while transporting the injured Teddy. He decides that, as Teddy seems most likely to lead him to Wyatt, he'd better drain Lawrence's blood into a bag and decant it into the desperately wounded gunslinger. I'm not sure this procedure would have the seal of approval from any respectable phlebotomic body, but it seems to do the trick. The Man in Black laments the fact that the hosts, once beautiful machines are now a mess of bone and flesh, because it is cheaper to produce these almost-humans. They continue to another town, with Teddy having been told that Wyatt took Dolores, where they encounter Ford.

I was going to insert a joke about the Man in Black being a licensed medical
practitioner, but then I realised that there's a very good chance that he might
be. Certainly he seems to run a foundation, likely medical in nature, and may
have been part of covering up Arnold's suicide.

In another fascinating exchange, the Man in Black admits that he does what he does because he feels that the park lacks villains of substance. He ponders cutting Ford open, but Teddy suddenly shakes off his hurt and pins the Man's knife arm. This is just one piece of evidence that the hosts can hurt the guests, just not shoot them. Ford leaves, and as he goes does something that shuts down Teddy's 'horribly injured' status effect.

Logan leads William and Dolores to the town of Pariah, in the wilder stretches of the park. Loosely deemed 'south of the border', Pariah is run by a gangster who turns out to be none other than Lawrence. As they arrive they encounter a Day of the Dead style parade(1) and Dolores sees herself. Following, she is put into sleep mode and seemingly taken to be analysed by Ford, who is concerned by her breaking out of her loop. If these scenes are as connected as they seem, then that puts the mockers on the William/Man in Black theory(2), as Ford is clearly the same age and not forty years older. Dolores is also hearing voices giving her directions, although she denies this in conversation with Ford, insists that she hasn't interacted with Arnold in almost 35 years, and then tells someone we can't see that she has deceived him.

Logan reveals that his family business wants to move in on the park, which is having some financial difficulties. Tensions rise with William after Logan's need for violence sends a heist spiraling into bloodshed and William finds himself forced to shoot several unarmed hosts. Lawrence then sells the nitro-glycerin they have stolen to a rogue Confederate unit, before stealing the actual nitro and making a run for it, leaving Logan and William to face the wrath of the Confederates. William escapes, thanks to a sudden shift into badass gunslinger from Dolores, and they abandon Logan to follow Lawrence to his destination, accompanying a stack of nitro-filled coffins marked with the maze.

Behind the scenes, Felix, one of the 'butchers' who work on mechanical repair, is starting to get creeped out about Maeve's constant appearance in his workspace following her failure to sleep a couple of episodes ago. Felix is working on trying to reprogramme a broken bird to function again, which his partner Sylvester sees as a brazen and futile attempt to get promoted to the behaviour team. Ellie meanwhile discovers that the stray had a signalling device in his arm; someone was using him to smuggle data out of the park. Felix seems to get his bird working, but at that moment Maeve sits up, addresses him by name and suggests that they need to talk.

This tender moment? Actually super creepy.

So, even if the two time frames theory takes a hit this week - albeit not a terminal one - there's lots to think about. Maeve's path to self-awareness is apparently the more organic, and this week it's Dolores hearing voices, suggesting that 'the original' continues to be subject to some aspect of Arnold's bicameral mind experiments. William, interestingly, remains largely unimportant. Abandoning Logan was a clear and personally relevant choice, but he's basically switched from following Logan to following Dolores as she transitions from her placid, accepting persona to imagine 'a story in which I don't have to be the damsel.' Created as an adult and at least 40 years old, Ford describes her mind as a closed system, from which no memory ever truly escapes. Somewhere inside she knows everything she has ever seen, done, suffered or been programmed to do, and that makes her very, very dangerous. The moment when she kisses William is pure power play, and blows the innocent rancher's daughter completely out of the water.

Initially introduced as an almost avuncular figure, Ford continues to get more and more creepy, with his cautionary tale likening the Man in Black's quest for the centre to a greyhound that didn't know what to do once it had caught the 'hare'(3). This is another recurring theme, of course, and by now most of the hosts have been told at one point or other that that thing that they want so much, they will never get. Coupled with Ford allowing that the Man is the park's greatest villain, this binds the Man ever closer to the hosts that he terrorises.

Regarding the nature of the park, Pariah is an oddity. Creepy narrative director was fighting to get 30 new hosts activated, but apparently Pariah has a thriving population just on the off chance that someone comes across one of the Easter eggs which lead there, and thence to the presumably also heavily-staffed war plots. We also saw that hosts can really lay into the guests, even if they can't shoot or actually kill them.

(1) It's very Spectre, but then Westworld is more brazen even than Mexico City.
(2) As does the fact that Logan refers to the disappearance of a funding partner way back in the early days while the Man in Black seems to have been around at the time.
(3) Bonus creepy marks for the fact that in the actual story, the 'hare' was someone's pet cat that the hound mistook for its racing mark.