amercer said:

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Champ Bailey said:

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So I'm assuming now that William has met up with his daughter he is going to be forced to go full white hat, right?

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For some reason I don't think his daughter is a white hat....

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Yeah, for some reason I'm expecting some real anti-hero type stuff out of the two of them.

I'm also expecting one hell of a gun fight too.

The guns are real, and when William dies she probably becomes the richest person in earth...

bobinator said:

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The daughter is an interesting wildcard since we basically have absolutely no idea what she's up to. We also don't really know anything about her personality other than she doesn't like hooking up with robots .

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you think she knows about delos' data/dna gathering?

Well yeah, she obviously knows what's going on. Or at least she knows a lot of it.

Sure seemed to me like her goal was to get into Westworld without anyone knowing she was in Westworld. She tried to get in from TheRaj, which I guess she ultimately did even if with a little less grace than she intended. (pun intended)

But what exactly she's there to do, we don't really know yet. And we don't even know her core motivations like we do a lot of the others.

If we assume from the drawing in her notebook that she's looking for a secret facility, she could have either been looking in Raj world or looking for a back door into Westworld

I wonder if the other parks are smaller. Westworld seems to go on forever, but the first time we see Raj World they are right at the edge of that park.

Yeah, the drawing in her notebook was of Westworld, and going on the tiger hunt at the edge of the park seems like it was cover. It's not an absolute, but I'm reasonably sure that was her intention.

It would make sense if The Raj were significantly smaller. You don't need as much jungle to create a sense of isolation like you do wide open range. Though I think she mentioned that the "tiger hunt" goes near the edge of the park, so it could be considerable distance from that hotel area to the area where they went on the tiger safari.

dlance said:

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PatAg said:

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dlance said:

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amercer said:

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bobinator said:

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He says last year to Teddy in S1E8 "Trace Decay"

"Last year my wife took the wrong pills..."

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Which is a little odd, since we saw the bathtub full of blood in this episode. Those are two pretty distinct ways of committing suicide....

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The tub itself was red. That wasn't blood. You can tell from the side shot where her hand is sticking up. The tub is red and the water is running clear.

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disagree

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Disagree all you want. It was a red tub.

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Not a red tub. If you pause at 48.01, you will notice the faucet is running into bloodied water, inside a white tub. The scene of her hand and the tub overflowing does appear to be a darker tub, but I think that's the lighting.

What's the main reddit theory these days? I'm assuming B=T is out the window?

I'm not all the way through the Ringer's theories podcast yet (it's usually a pretty good distillation of the best stuff on reddit each week)

But for as much as this episode had a lot of stuff going on, it didn't really move the needle on where this season is heading. We all basically already knew that they were going to try and clone/host people and that the girl from TheRaj was probably Williams' daughter. Both of those were confirmed this week, though the revelation that the clone/host project may not particularly well is interesting.

So apparently the rumor of the week is that the consciousness is Williams' and that the real William has basically been dead the entire time.

I should clarify this, that "the man in black" has been dead the whole time that we've known him.

Yeah, that's a terrible idea. Doesn't make any sense and I don't think it will go there.

Well, the theory posits that Ford figured out how to do it and prevented the other group from getting there. There's a lot of circumstantial stuff that makes a really strong case for this theory potentially being true.

The only real evidence against it at this point is the dead people in the lab, they didn't look anywhere near dead long enough, but that's not exactly strong evidence on this show.

DannyDuberstein said:

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Yeah, that's a terrible idea. Doesn't make any sense and I don't think it will go there.

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I'll be honest that's where I was until I heard the full explanation and now I'm in the "I can see it" camp.

Basically the gist of it is that Ford discovered the way across the 'cognitive plateau' is that the person had to discover for themselves that they where in a host body, they couldn't be told by someone else. This is basically exactly how Ford gets Dolores across the bridge to consciousness, ultimately she has to hear her own voice in her head.

So 'the maze' was built for the hosts, but Ford built a different path for Williams and that's what he's on this season.

bobinator said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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Yeah, that's a terrible idea. Doesn't make any sense and I don't think it will go there.

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I'll be honest that's where I was until I heard the full explanation and now I'm in the "I can see it" camp.

Basically the gist of it is that Ford discovered the way across the 'cognitive plateau' is that the person had to discover for themselves that they where in a host body, they couldn't be told by someone else. This is basically exactly how Ford gets Dolores across the bridge to consciousness, ultimately she has to hear her own voice in her head.

So 'the maze' was built for the hosts, but Ford built a different path for Williams and that's what he's on this season.

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Man in Black is a host and Ford is testing him to see if the Grand Experiment has finally worked

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I posted that after the episode on Sunday, you can definitely make the arguments to support it as a possibility. Ford built this entire game for William, why? Why is he trying to trigger things in William, to what end? Ford may have hated him and this is a devious game that ends in pain for William, thats a possibility - but I could argue the "he's a host and Ford is trying to awaken him" just as well. William has backstories he refers to and had a host like memory flashback of his wife in a tub.

If William is a host, what led to that and what is the motivation? Perhaps he was killed in the park early on and it was a cover up to save the viability of the investment? Perhaps Ford saw it as a way to get into a position of power within Delos and be left to do what he wants? William certainly grew in confidence back when pitching to Delos and gradually wresting control away from him, may have been maturing and growth in himself gained in the park, may have been Ford controlling him.

Why the daughter? Maybe the daughter has been searching for her "father" and has come to learn how to get to him as a host? Symbols she and Bernard have seen match, maybe it's all a map to William?

Have never seen any William copies. If he died a long time ago they had to gradually age his host body to keep it a secret? Seems like a stretch.

What is Bernard, really? Is he just a copy of Arnold as Ford saw him - looks like him, talks like him, shares same views as Arnold based on how Ford interpreted it and programmed it? He looks identical and seems to talk and behave in a similar fashion to Arnold, so what is the difference between Bernard and the Host Delos? Implanted consciousness vs programmed attempt to replicate behaviors?

Wait, is the theory that the MIB died sometime between when he last met with Delos in the chamber and when Season 1 started? And that the MIB that's in Westworld has been a host the entire time?

Complete Idiot said:

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bobinator said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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Yeah, that's a terrible idea. Doesn't make any sense and I don't think it will go there.

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I'll be honest that's where I was until I heard the full explanation and now I'm in the "I can see it" camp.

Basically the gist of it is that Ford discovered the way across the 'cognitive plateau' is that the person had to discover for themselves that they where in a host body, they couldn't be told by someone else. This is basically exactly how Ford gets Dolores across the bridge to consciousness, ultimately she has to hear her own voice in her head.

So 'the maze' was built for the hosts, but Ford built a different path for Williams and that's what he's on this season.

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Quote:

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Man in Black is a host and Ford is testing him to see if the Grand Experiment has finally worked

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Have never seen any William copies. If he died a long time ago they had to gradually age his host body to keep it a secret? Seems like a stretch.

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This is what I was getting at. It seems like if MIB is a host, then William had to die when he was the same age as the MIB.

If they somehow explain that William died a long time ago and that even younger versions of William that we have seen were actually all hosts, that will seem extremely cheap.

Yeah, I remember the post, which like other folks I basically dismissed outright. But the version they talked about in the podcast (and here's a link to it on Reddit although they sort of combined that theory with some others) is a lot more fleshed out and it actually makes some sense with the general themes of the show.

This theory isn't that William died a long time ago, it's that he died fairly recently. More specifically, that he killed himself because he couldn't deal with the fact that his wife killed herself.

There's still some pieces that would need to be filled in obviously, but I definitely this it's at least a plausible theory.

mavsfan4ever said:

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Wait, is the theory that the MIB died sometime between when he last met with Delos in the chamber and when Season 1 started? And that the MIB that's in Westworld has been a host the entire time?

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Yes. There's actually some decent narrative evidence here.

In the scene with Teddy in season one he said that his wife took the wrong pills but that the daughter said it was an accident, in the scene with Delos William says "she killed herself." Why would he be that specific in one scene and not in another.

In that last conversation with Delos he also says "The world is better off without you Jim, possibly without me" and "It took me a long time to learn this, but some men are better off dead."

bobinator said:

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mavsfan4ever said:

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Wait, is the theory that the MIB died sometime between when he last met with Delos in the chamber and when Season 1 started? And that the MIB that's in Westworld has been a host the entire time?

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Yes. There's actually some decent narrative evidence here.

In the scene with Teddy in season one he said that his wife took the wrong pills but that the daughter said it was an accident, in the scene with Delos William says "she killed herself." Why would he be that specific in one scene and not in another.

In that last conversation with Delos he also says "The world is better off without you Jim, possibly without me" and "It took me a long time to learn this, but some men are better off dead."

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With the implanting of the consciousness, are all memories intact? Did Delos remember all things from his life or only things selected by the programmers? Would William remember his grief, his suicidal thoughts, if he was implanted in a host? Was he the one preparing himself for the same thing as DElos or was that done without his awareness? When he killed himself, who would have triggered the implanting of the consciousness? Was Ford working on that with Bernard and of so, what was their motivation?

He was trying to hurt Delos in that last encounter, so "she killed herself" is technically correct, accidental or otherwise, and hurts Delos the most . So I can see how he might phrase it differently in those two situations.

There seems to be a lot of regret in William throughout his scenes as an older man, thinking about "the man I could have been". Definitely not too happy with himself.

bobinator said:

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mavsfan4ever said:

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Wait, is the theory that the MIB died sometime between when he last met with Delos in the chamber and when Season 1 started? And that the MIB that's in Westworld has been a host the entire time?

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Yes. There's actually some decent narrative evidence here.

In the scene with Teddy in season one he said that his wife took the wrong pills but that the daughter said it was an accident, in the scene with Delos William says "she killed herself." Why would he be that specific in one scene and not in another.

In that last conversation with Delos he also says "The world is better off without you Jim, possibly without me" and "It took me a long time to learn this, but some men are better off dead."

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Ya, those two comments could certainly be played either way. I tend to think (hope?) that isn't the true storyline.

Quote:

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With the implanting of the consciousness, are all memories intact? Did Delos remember all things from his life or only things selected by the programmers? Would William remember his grief, his suicidal thoughts, if he was implanted in a host? Was he the one preparing himself for the same thing as DElos or was that done without his awareness? When he killed himself, who would have triggered the implanting of the consciousness? Was Ford working on that with Bernard and of so, what was their motivation?

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I think that's a big question we don't know yet. Obviously Delos had some memories. If I had to guess though, I'd say that your memories are all there, but up to what point could be an interesting question.

To bring it back to Altered Carbon, in that show it worked like a computer backup. if you backed up at 8 AM today, and then died at 9:05, you'd only remember up to 8 AM when you came back.

I havent been studying hard, but just on memory it seems like a possibility (since Bernard is doing the dirty work like right before) that he also could have been a real human right up until Ford's death party and then a robot afterward.

Right. That's going to the same well twice. Again, hope they don't do something like this. I'm sure someone can come up with some plausible approach for it to happen that way, but hope it's wrong.

I've been going back and forth on that since I've heard it.

If season one is about an AI breaking free, and season two is about a character that thinks he's human realizing it's an AI, I could actually kind a see a sort of cool symmetry in that. Especially since one of the recurring sayings in the show is if "if you can't tell, does it matter."

Keep in mind that Bernard being a host wasn't the central plot of season one. It was part of the plot obviously, but it wasn't like the main point of the show or anything.

On other hand, I don't want this show to seemingly always be about trying to predict what the next big twist is and that would be a twist for the ages.

And I still don't really see what the point would be for Ford. If William wanted to kill himself, why would he bring him back? The best thing I've come up with there is that Ford knows that William's desire to see the hosts be free is still in there, and everything bad that happened in his life happened in part because of what happened in the park where he thought Dolores was free but she wasn't.

And know that they are, he's giving William a second chance? I dunno... there's a lot of loose ends there.

But to amercer's point, this was season 1 as well with Bernard.

Quote:

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season two is about a character that thinks he's human realizing it's an AI

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I edited my post a bit, because yeah, it is similar, but Bernard was never human, and also his realizing he was a host wasn't like the main plot of season one. It was part of it, but it wasn't as important to the story as what Dolores and Maeve were doing. So it's a parallel, but it's different.

I dunno, I'm just saying I can see a scenario where it plays out that way and it's still really cool.

I do think I'm mostly against the idea though.

amercer said:

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MiB as a host is a terrible idea.

The who's a robot who's not bernarnold thing was a great part of season one. Doing it again is not a good idea.

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I agree. Remember in BSG when the theme for awhile was "Am I a Cylon?!" when they were looking for the final five? Wasn't a great plot line then either imo, and I don't think I'd like to see something similar again since we had Bernarnold.

Complete Idiot said:

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"William has backstories he refers to and had a host like memory flashback of his wife in a tub."

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I immediately thought his memory flashbacks were extremely vague, like that of a host. Glad I wasn't the only one.

Yeah, I said on the season one thread that I hope this show didn't become a Battlestar Gallactica type show, that's why I didn't particularly love the theory at the time that Bernard was a host even though I agreed it was probably true.

I think that's basically unavoidable now though. We're already there as far as the web forums.

But like I said that "if you can't tell, does it matter" line which resurfaced this week sort of makes me think they might do one more, and then after that it's basically part of the fabric of the show. Whether a character was originally a host or a human doesn't matter and they aren't going to tell you.

Although the plotline is similar, Bernard would be different from William (if this were true).

Its the same from an audience perspective in that a character that thinks he is human, and who has been portrayed to the audience as human is actually mechanical, but Bernard is a host who simply looks like Arnold. He is not and has never been Arnold and had a completely different backstory written for him by Ford. His brain is "code." MIB would be a separate thing, a human mind put in a robot body.