S01.E08: Trace Decay

[Gobi]

4 hours ago, feverfew said:

If you're right (and I really hope your are - I simply cannot connect William-in-the-past with the MIB as he plays out now. Also, I need someone good in this story, because frankly, Ford scares the crap out of me) perhaps the reason Maeve, not Dolores was the MIB's trigger is because whatever happens at the end of their journey breaks William. If Dolores doesn't manage to break free, but instead reverts to her robot self (either by never finding the maze or outside forces like Ford 'opening her up' to show William that she's only a robot) I can see William getting completely dillusioned. That he continues to go to the park is like an addict chasing that elusive first high.

Didn't MIB refer to his daughter as "Emily"? I mean, Charlotte Hale can be "Emily Chalotte Hale", but that would be cheating, I think...

From the quote, it's not clear whether Emily is his wife or his daughter. While I'm an early proponent of the Charlotte is TMIB's daughter, I think it would have to mean that William didn't marry Logan's sister ( for obvious reasons), which assumes William=TMIB. If William is not TMIB, it becomes more plausible. 

[dr pepper]

Anyone got an idea what Maeve's plan is? At first i thought she was going to look for an exit during the confusion but she hesitated. So now i'm thinking she hopes to be declared dead and somehow escape from cold storage. It doesn't seem very well thought out.

[dr pepper]

Also, notice how Snake Chaser seemed a little thrown off by Maeve's manipulations. I think she might be the next to achieve sentience.

[Gobi]

7 minutes ago, dr pepper said:

It appears that the two time periods theory is sort of right, but mostly wrong. Robots gets reassigned a lot more quickly then we had thought so their flashbacks are only measured in months. Ed Harris has been coming for 30 years, but he only became the Man in Black recently.

I disagree that he only became TMIB recently. He had always been wearing the  black hat. After his wife died, he wanted to prove that she was wrong about his true nature. "I wanted to see if I had it in me to do something truly evil." So, he shot and killed the girl, to see what his reaction would be. This was beyond anything he might have done earlier as a villain.

[sony-b]

A friend pointed out that Arnold Weber is an anagram of Bernard Lowe, which I cannot imagine is an accident.  

I think Arnold wore more old timey-ish clothes, kind of like Ford and his pocket watch, but I haven't rewatched to confirm it.  

On Felix and Sylvester - one or the other might be a host.  I could actually see Felix as a host and despite all of their high end programming neither he nor Maeve would have true human medical knowledge, and wouldn't know that a human cut to the jugular couldn't be fixed by being cauterized.  A host can survive with bullet holes (we saw that with the guy leaking milk from his gut), and it would be good design for them to be self healing or to allow temporary reroutes around major injuries so they get back out in the field faster.  

I can also buy Felix as a human who gets sucked into the ethical quandary that the show is laying out as a whole - do the hosts feel real pain and deserve better than torture?  Or is their emotional and physical pain temporary enough that it doesn't matter to us ethically because they were born in a vat?  

[numbnut]

6 hours ago, Jack Shaftoe said:

New Clementine is even prettier than the old one.

Sacrilege! No one can replace Clem! I hope the real Clem winds up in Maeve's army in season 2.

1 hour ago, dr pepper said:

Anyone got an idea what Maeve's plan is? At first i thought she was going to look for an exit during the confusion but she hesitated. So now i'm thinking she hopes to be declared dead and somehow escape from cold storage. It doesn't seem very well thought out.

Her plan was derailed by her flashback and now she seems kind of screwed. I don't think she'll attack the hazmat team. She'll go with them and try to hatch a plan en route. We'll probably see a scene that mirrors her flashback with Ford and Bernard, only she won't commit suicide this time. If she gets lobotomized and winds up in storage, it will be a sad/ironic moment because she'll be with an army of robots but unable to do anything about it.

Edited November 22, 2016 by numbnut

[Ellaria]

Maybe someone that is more observant than I can answer this question: when did William lose his white hat? He had it when they were tending to the wounded man by the river. Yet, when Logan comes upon them, he isn't wearing or carrying the hat. Is the disappearance of the white hat symbolic of his turn to the dark side?

Is this the first time that Teddy has memories of MIB hurting Dolores?

Sizemore is a terrible story writer. 

[Teitr Styrr]

2 hours ago, numbnut said:

Sacrilege! No one can replace Clem! I hope the real Clem winds up in Maeve's army in season 2.

Her plan was derailed by her flashback and now she seems kind of screwed. I don't think she'll attack the hazmat team. She'll go with them and try to hatch a plan en route. We'll probably see a scene that mirrors her flashback with Ford and Bernard, only she won't commit suicide this time. If she gets lobotomized and winds up in storage, it will be a sad/ironic moment because she'll be with an army of robots but unable to do anything about it.

I don't think so. I think all is going according to her plan. For some reason her plan includes getting caught. She's too smart to not know that the folks in charge would not see her manipulations of the hosts.

[Quilt Fairy]

2 hours ago, sony-b said:

I think Arnold wore more old timey-ish clothes, kind of like Ford and his pocket watch, but I haven't rewatched to confirm it.  

You're going to have to re-watch pretty hard.  We've never seen Arnold.

[DarkRaichu]

1 hour ago, Ellaria Sand said:

Maybe someone that is more observant than I can answer this question: when did William lose his white hat? He had it when they were tending to the wounded man by the river. Yet, when Logan comes upon them, he isn't wearing or carrying the hat. Is the disappearance of the white hat symbolic of his turn to the dark side?

 

We learned that hosts made terrible narrator, cf Bernard.  Did William really lost the white hat OR he became less of a good guy from Dolores' point of view? ie. he might as well be wearing white hat but Dolores could no longer see that.

 

2 hours ago, numbnut said:

Her plan was derailed by her flashback and now she seems kind of screwed. I don't think she'll attack the hazmat team. She'll go with them and try to hatch a plan en route. We'll probably see a scene that mirrors her flashback with Ford and Bernard, only she won't commit suicide this time. If she gets lobotomized and winds up in storage, it will be a sad/ironic moment because she'll be with an army of robots but unable to do anything about it.

I am thinking her plan involved getting captured. Slitting Clementine2 was not intentional but it hastened her capture / her plan

[Quilt Fairy]

2 hours ago, numbnut said:

Sacrilege! No one can replace Clem! I hope the real Clem winds up in Maeve's army in season 2.

I think the original Clem fit with the era more than Clem 2.0.  The new one looks too modern.

[sony-b]

1 minute ago, Quilt Fairy said:

You're going to have to re-watch pretty hard.  We've never seen Arnold.

I think we have.  I think it's Arnold interviewing Dolores in the basement.  

[DarkRaichu]

6 hours ago, dgpolo said:

That would be interesting, seeing as how the Minotaur lived in a labyrinth.

Speaking of Minotaur and labyrinth / maze, it could be said that Dolores and Maeve are using threads of their memories to get back to the center of the maze / their consciousness. ;) 

[numbnut]

5 minutes ago, DarkRaichu said:

I am thinking her plan involved getting captured. Slitting Clementine2 was not intentional but it hastened her capture / her plan

Before her flashback, she was killing off the lawmen so she could talk to Hector without getting shot up. Didn't her plan involve recruiting Hector and Armistice?

[Accidental Martyr]

15 hours ago, Chris24601 said:

As Felix and Sylvester explained to Maeve a few episodes back, there's not actually all that much difference anymore between a human body and a host body and its mainly the AI processor that sets hosts apart from humans. If they're made from the same stuff then it stands to reason that the same equipment that could fix a host could fix a human.

Which actually brings up an interesting point about the larger world that Westworld resides in... medicine is clearly advanced enough that significant trauma can be patched up with a "magic" torch. What else can future medicine do? Is cancer a thing of the past? (and if it is, what does that say about "Bernard's" memories of his son in the hospital... could they have based on Arnold's experiences 35 years earlier when such things had not yet be easily curable?)

It was mentioned earlier in the series that all diseases had been cured.

[jeansheridan]

5 hours ago, dr pepper said:

That is, assuming he really has been coming for 30 years. Because, it appears that he too may just be operating on a fictitious backstory.

It is now time to let go of the question of who turns out to really be a robot and start asking who *couldn't* possibly be a robot. And Ford is no longer in the No column. For all his certainties we see that the Arnold level of programming doesn't just go deeper than he can access, he seems incapable of speculating about it.

I believe the MIB has been referred to as a high level guest by most of the staff at West World and he was recognized by a guest just before or after they met the woman with the tattoo on her face.  Unless this ENTIRE world is set up like the bicameral brain they keep referencing (Maeve mentioned it again--a mind divided), I believe the bulk of the people we believe are humans are human and the rest are hosts.  

The stupidity of Sylvester and Felix baffles me if they are human, but given Ford's low opinion of most humans, maybe I'm thinking too highly of or species. People do stupid things every day to cover up screw ups at work.  They do stupid things to impress a desirable partner.  Can you imagine the thrill Felix must get every time Maeve trusts him to be her hero?  Sure he doesn't look like a hero because he looks scared to death most of the time, but that's how beaten down this company has made him.  I have no idea why Sylvester didn't rat them out except maybe if Felix goes down, he goes down.  Or he kept believing it could all be contained.  He just desperately wants to keep his life as it is before Maeve woke up.  Sylvester like his own loop.  

Of course she's stabbed him now.  Not sure how forgiving he will be.  It's one thing for her to be bossy and threaten  to leave WestWorld.  Quite another for her to full on stab him.  

[QuantumMechanic]

19 hours ago, Izeinwinter said:

.. I still am puzzled why on earth Ford would have him do that, however, as Elsie was inadvertently doing his bidding, and to boot had made it very clear to Bernard that she would have been trivial to buy off. Is the old man just that trigger happy with the murder orders? I guess that's possible.

Remember - two things were happening from the terminal Elsie found.  One was trying to smuggle out data.  The other was sending something to the Arnold-era hosts, changing their programming.

What if Theresa was only responsible for the first, but Ford for the second?

[Eneya]

Fun trivia. The blonde greeting bot (who stabbed Teddy with the arrow) is the wife of Elon Musk.
Fancy that...

[Netfoot]

1 hour ago, Eneya said:

Fun trivia. The blonde greeting bot (who stabbed Teddy with the arrow) is the wife of Elon Musk.
Fancy that...

The really fun part is that she married him twice!

[Eneya]

Wait, what?

[Gobi]

3 hours ago, Eneya said:

Fun trivia. The blonde greeting bot (who stabbed Teddy with the arrow) is the wife of Elon Musk.
Fancy that...

I think Musk must be the money man behind Westworld.

[ennui]

On 11/20/2016 at 11:25 PM, Lingo said:

I think the scene was intended to show him continuing to slowly lose his empathy for bots not named Dolores.

I got the feeling that William is getting bored with his mentally ill girlfriend, Dolores. She's running away from Sweetwater, only to loop around and joyously return to Sweetwater. 

2 hours ago, Netfoot said:

The really fun part is that she married him twice!

Does she have memory flashbacks?

23 hours ago, beeble said:

Just a whole lot of "What? Why? Who's that?"

Exactly. And I think someone said that season 2 won't air until 2018, so the writers are taking a big risk that anyone will remember this gibberish.

[dr pepper]

20 hours ago, maystone said:

They appear to me to be based on Hopi/Navajo Kachina spirit dolls. If you do an image search on them, you'll find a lot of similarities between them and Wyatt's groups' costumes. Also, Wyatt's philosophy reads like a corrupt version of the Kachina mythology.

I think they're based on a plains indian concept of sacred warriors, possibly drugged or berserk to reduce their sensitivity to pain, with their buffalo outfits intended to intimidate the enemy.

[dr pepper]

20 hours ago, Lebanna said:

Now that we know that the MIB has a daughter, I'm assuming that's the young woman who was in the photo that drove Abernathy crazy in the first episode. I think he planted it there on purpose. I wonder if he wanted Abernathy out of the park for a reason.

Why did Charlotte pick Abernathy? With a hall full of equally capable dead robots, she leads the idiot writer straight for him. As if she knew there was something special about him. There's an interesting difference in the treatment of the malfunctioning robots - Clementine mk1 we see being lobotomised, while Abernathy was just lined up in the basement and his body decommissioned. He was still completely compos mentis at the time, because Bernard whispers a message to him and he seems to understand.

Is this discrepancy in treatment because Clementine's body is to be repurposed with a different brain, while Abernathy was to be physically decommissioned? Or was Abernathy decommissioned at a different moment from Clementine? Or was Abernathy specifically put in the basement with his brain intact on purpose? Perhaps to be waiting there, for Charlotte. 

I really liked the old Clementine and wished she had more scenes. Maybe there'll be something that brings her back.

[huahaha]

12 minutes ago, dr pepper said:

I really liked the old Clementine and wished she had more scenes. Maybe there'll be something that brings her back.

Agreed. She had a sympathetic, unusual beauty, and I thought the actress (Angela Sarafyan) brought a lot of nuance and likability to what could have been a stock character (like the new Clementine seems to be).

On a side note, I had to Google to get the original actress's name, and it made me realize that we've now lost three of the show's leading ladies (Clementine 1.0, Elsie, and Theresa).

[Netfoot]

1 hour ago, Eneya said:

Wait, what?

It's because there are two timelines!  One wherein William is TMIB, and the other in which TMIB is William!

1 hour ago, ennui said:

3 hours ago, Netfoot said:

The really fun part is that she married him twice!

Does she have memory flashbacks?

She married Elon Musk in 2010, and in 2013.  They are now divorced...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talulah_Riley#Personal_life

[ennui]

44 minutes ago, dr pepper said:

I really liked the old Clementine and wished she had more scenes. Maybe there'll be something that brings her back.

Me, too. I really like Hector, as well, but I think his scenes could have been filmed over two or three days, they were so brief.

[iMonrey]

See, I thought "new Clementine" was the same actress as the host MIB and Teddy found. They look very similar. If they aren't supposed to be the same people/hosts, then I'd call that a casting fail. 

[paigow]

4 hours ago, Netfoot said:

The really fun part is that she married him twice!

The human version married him once, then the bot version married him....

1 hour ago, ennui said:

Me, too. I really like Hector, as well, but I think his scenes could have been filmed over two or three days, they were so brief.

Director: OK. Hector robbing brothel...take 32...ACTION!

[arc]

Angela has vibrant red hair when she greeted William. Now she has blonde (or very faded red) hair. I'd suggest this as a two timelines clue, except she had blonde hair in the pre-opening "teaching hosts to dance" scene, so who knows. <shrug>

[LilaFowler]

7 hours ago, Eneya said:

Fun trivia. The blonde greeting bot (who stabbed Teddy with the arrow) is the wife of Elon Musk.
Fancy that...

And she had a small part in Inception.

[sony-b]

Angela has vibrant red hair when she greeted William. Now she has blonde (or very faded red) hair. I'd suggest this as a two timelines clue, except she had blonde hair in the pre-opening "teaching hosts to dance" scene, so who knows. <shrug>

She wasn't red - https://goo.gl/images/aU99gF

[sony-b]

  1 hour ago, arc said:

Angela has vibrant red hair when she greeted William. Now she has blonde (or very faded red) hair. I'd suggest this as a two timelines clue, except she had blonde hair in the pre-opening "teaching hosts to dance" scene, so who knows. <shrug>

She wasn't red - https://goo.gl/images/aU99gF

And I fail at internets. That's a link to an image of her and William.

[CouchTater]

23 hours ago, Hootis said:

On a completely unrelated note - where are these robots getting the programming for hand to hand combat?  Clementine didn't just haymaker that securitybot during the demonstration, she whupped his ass.  And Bernard seemed plenty sure of his one-punch kill on Theresa.

I'm watching under the assumption that a skilled tech can program a host to do practically anything.  For instance, if Teddy received uploaded instructions on how to perform open heart surgery, would he then be able to successfully perform the surgery?  I say yes.

So I don't find it hard to believe that Clementine briefly became an MMA fighter, per her coding.

[arc]

33 minutes ago, sony-b said:

She wasn't red - https://goo.gl/images/aU99gF

Welp, wonder how I misremembered that. =P

[Lingo]

On 11/21/2016 at 4:29 PM, Lebanna said:

Why did Charlotte pick Abernathy? With a hall full of equally capable dead robots, she leads the idiot writer straight for him. As if she knew there was something special about him. There's an interesting difference in the treatment of the malfunctioning robots - Clementine mk1 we see being lobotomised, while Abernathy was just lined up in the basement and his body decommissioned. He was still completely compos mentis at the time, because Bernard whispers a message to him and he seems to understand.

Is this discrepancy in treatment because Clementine's body is to be repurposed with a different brain, while Abernathy was to be physically decommissioned? Or was Abernathy decommissioned at a different moment from Clementine? Or was Abernathy specifically put in the basement with his brain intact on purpose? Perhaps to be waiting there, for Charlotte. 

Actually, I thought Abernathy was lobotomized. I definitely recall seeing a robot getting lobotomized in the pilot episode; pretty sure it's Abernathy. BTW, something that was interesting about the pilot was that Bernard whispered something into Abernathy's ear as he was putting him away into cold storage, something we didn't get to hear. It may be nothing, it maybe coincidence, or it may be why Charlotte chose Abernathy ... although since Bernard is Ford's robot slave it's hard to imagine he and Charlotte being in the same conspiracy.

On 11/21/2016 at 4:36 PM, Avaleigh said:

I'd say because it adds up with everything that we've been shown and know about the characters so far. Ford has created host versions of all of the important people in his life including a young version of himself, so to me it makes perfect sense that he'd create a host version of Arnold that would be in his control. He talks about Arnold more than any other character and still seems to need him on some level. 

Ford was very evasive with his answers regarding how much truth is in Bernard's backstory. I also think that there's a reason Ford has asked Bernard more than once if something is before his time because the way he asks, it's like he's testing Bernard to make sure that he tells the truth. 

I also think it was telling that when Theresa is looking at the drawings and that the one of Bernard is the only one whose name is covered. 

I fully expect us to learn who Arnold was and think there has to be a reason that we haven't seen his picture or seen him in a flashback. 

I also don't see why the "big reveal" about Bernard has to be limited to one thing. 

I agree with all of this, except what was bolded. According to Ford, it was Arnold who built Ford's robot family, as a sort of creepy personal favor. But I imagine Ford amusing himself by "returning the favor" after Arnold's death.

Why did Ford (according to the theory) build a robot in Arnold's image? Perhaps because he is sentimental and misses his old friend. Or perhaps the sadistic fuck loves the idea of having his former rival now be his own personal slave. Perhaps a little bit of both.

On 11/21/2016 at 4:56 PM, blackwing said:

Still really confused as to what is ultimately going on.  The William / Man in Black theory might still hold true.  But it doesn't settle me with fully, because didn't we see her remembering the old Man in Black after she had set off on her journey with William?  I could have sworn we saw her remembering that scene at least once.  If William and Dolores are supposed to be in the 30 years ago timeline, when the park was new, then how come she is remembering something that wouldn't have happened for years?  

I'm pretty sure we haven't seen Dolores flash back to MIB when in William's presence. If we did, it's possible what you actually saw is present-day Dolores, retracing the steps of Past Dolores/William, and perhaps occasionally remembering MIB. I've rewatched all the episodes and I think all the scenes work with the "multiple-time" theory.

What you're probably remembering is Episode 3 (I think), wherein Dolores comes home alone, is about to be raped in the barn by another host, but sees MIB in a flashback and then shoots the host dead and escapes. If I'm correct, then this is all in the present. Then at the end of that episode (after other scenes) we see Dolores collapse in William's arms. That leads you to believe that the William storyline is also in the present. But what us "multiple-timeline" supporters believe is that the show is deliberately tricking you, and that final scene is actually 30 years ago.

In the present, the voice in her head and the gun someone buried on the farm for her to find allow her to escape her loop and then decide to retrace her past-self's journey. In the past, we don't see how/why she escaped her loop. Perhaps it was a very similar incident. Perhaps some guest kept her away from her home one night, so that by the time she got home, her parents were already dead and the bandits gone. Perhaps, like Logan suggested, the park operators reprogrammed Dolores to chase after William. Perhaps it's all Arnold's manipulations, because in the past timeline, she seems intent on following his instructions. (We do see a scene in which "Bernard" asks her how she feels about her parents' deaths and then suggests she go find the maze, though it's not clear when this scene is set. I want to think this is actually Arnold, but Arnold is supposed to already be dead by the time William and Logan show up.)

20 hours ago, dr pepper said:

It appears that the two time periods theory is sort of right, but mostly wrong. Robots gets reassigned a lot more quickly then we had thought so their flashbacks are only measured in months. Ed Harris has been coming for 30 years, but he only became the Man in Black recently.

I'm not sure where you're getting that first part. As for MIB, I disagree with that too. It sounds like he's been coming to the park for 30 years and that he's been doing terrible things to the hosts for most of that time, and all those "harmless" activities were slowing eroding away his soul. His efforts at being a philanthropist etc. were his way of hiding his true nature, that his wife could actually perceive. He came back again after she died to see if he'd feel anything after doing something particularly evil, but nothing says he wasn't doing terrible things in the park before then.

20 hours ago, Gobi said:

From the quote, it's not clear whether Emily is his wife or his daughter. While I'm an early proponent of the Charlotte is TMIB's daughter, I think it would have to mean that William didn't marry Logan's sister ( for obvious reasons), which assumes William=TMIB. If William is not TMIB, it becomes more plausible. 

It did sound ambiguous at first, but I think Emily had to be his daughter. Emily is the one who told him that living with him had been a hell. But the way MIB told it, this was a surprise to him until after his wife had already died, so I don't think his wife said that to him.

To me, Charlotte being MIB's daughter would be an example of an unmotivated, meaningless twist -- aside from shock value, there's no reason for it. Except I guess to explain away the actor's young age ... but then why is she black?? Like, if you're going to add a twist to the story just to explain away a bad casting, just cast someone different! Actually, her age doesn't even bother me (I think she's more just a representative of Delos, not the person in charge of the entire corporation) so I see no reason for this twist.

16 hours ago, Teitr Styrr said:

I don't think so. I think all is going according to her plan. For some reason her plan includes getting caught. She's too smart to not know that the folks in charge would not see her manipulations of the hosts.

But they didn't notice her manipulations of the hosts. The heist was in broad daylight. She didn't get the attention of Stubbs et al. until well after dark, when she slashed Clem's throat and caused a scene.

16 hours ago, numbnut said:

Before her flashback, she was killing off the lawmen so she could talk to Hector without getting shot up. Didn't her plan involve recruiting Hector and Armistice?

On first viewing, I felt like the point of that scene was just to show off Maeve's new abilities. (She didn't get the attention of the park operators because Hector and Armistice were always going to get away, she just hastened it.) Then someone on some other website that perhaps her plan involved stowing away something in that safe that would help her escape. Maybe her plan was to meet up with Hector and Armistice's gang that night to get away using the safe's contents. I didn't think that she intentionally got caught ... she looked too alarmed and frightened in those final scenes. She had some other plan going until the gunshots triggered her flashbacks.

[arc]

26 minutes ago, Lingo said:

Then someone on some other website that perhaps her plan involved stowing away something in that safe that would help her escape. 

Also me on this website! I said that! =)

[phoenyx]

Found a good article on this episode from Vanity Fair, thought I'd share :-)...

Decoding Westworld’s Most Confusing Episode Yet | Vanity Fair

Edited November 22, 2016 by phoenyx

[Lingo]

5 hours ago, arc said:

Also me on this website! I said that! =)

Oh. It was probably just you then, my mistake :)

Before I read phoenyx's link, I want to mention that I'm surprised that no one's commented that the town that Dolores discovers in the canyon, where it appears she is shooting everyone in her flashback, looks like the same one where Wyatt and Teddy were killing everyone in Teddy's own flashback. I can't be the only one who saw this? I mention this now because I have a feeling that's what the Vanity Fair article will say....

 

EDIT: Yep. I have to agree with everything in that article. I did suspect that "Wyatt" is actually based on Dolores after this ep, but that article goes far beyond the ideas I had. It pretty much lays out the story of the entire season. Good read!

Edited November 23, 2016 by Lingo

[Goatherd]

FYI the author of that article also has a podcast called Decoding Westworld. It's a good complement to this site for theories and deep dive speculations about the show.

[numbnut]

Is it me or did this ep have a lot of style callbacks to classic sci-fi? Charlotte's dress seemed inspired by Star Trek or Lost in Space, and they re-used that old Westworld score (from when we saw Yul's cowboy in the background). The music also mirrored The Twilight Zone theme (during a moment with Teddy and the MiB) and the score from Planet of the Apes (when Dolores and William fled the old church town).

[Gobi]

5 hours ago, Lingo said:

Oh. It was probably just you then, my mistake :)

Before I read phoenyx's link, I want to mention that I'm surprised that no one's commented that the town that Dolores discovers in the canyon, where it appears she is shooting everyone in her flashback, looks like the same one where Wyatt and Teddy were killing everyone in Teddy's own flashback. I can't be the only one who saw this? I mention this now because I have a feeling that's what the Vanity Fair article will say....

It is the same town, Ford rebuilt it. Charlotte mentions that to Sizemore in their scene together. It was the site of the original massacre that Dolores remembers and where the hosts were first trained, and Ford is using it as part of the back story for his new narrative.

[that one guy]

On 11/21/2016 at 11:14 PM, Quilt Fairy said:

You're going to have to re-watch pretty hard.  We've never seen Arnold.

As far as we know. There's a theory going around that "Bernard" talking to Dolores in the first episode was actually a flashback to Arnold. Bernard was dressed differently. Of course, that could also just be an artifact of the fact that the pilot was filmed about a year before the rest of the show, and there may bell be continuity glitches as a result.

[phoenyx]

1 hour ago, that one guy said:

As far as we know. There's a theory going around that "Bernard" talking to Dolores in the first episode was actually a flashback to Arnold. Bernard was dressed differently. Of course, that could also just be an artifact of the fact that the pilot was filmed about a year before the rest of the show, and there may bell be continuity glitches as a result.

There's a lot more evidence that suggests Bernard is a replicant of Arnold, but this isn't really the thread for it- we've been talking about it in the "Questions and Speculations" thread, particularly in the last few days, you may want to take a look...

http://forums.previously.tv/topic/49015-questions-and-speculations/?page=3

[Netfoot]

1 hour ago, that one guy said:

There's a theory going around that "Bernard" talking to Dolores in the first episode was actually a flashback to Arnold. Bernard was dressed differently.

William and TMIB wear similar clothing.  This is a clue!

Bernard and... Bernard wear dissimilar clothing.  And this is a clue!

[Wouldofshouldof]

On 11/20/2016 at 11:17 PM, charmed1 said:

Every time Delores appears, I have to tell myself she's not Chloe Sevigny in Big Love.

Every time Dolores appears, I am amazed how much better she is here than in True Blood.

[phoenyx]

40 minutes ago, Wouldofshouldof said:

Every time Dolores appears, I am amazed how much better she is here than in True Blood.

I only saw a small clip of Dolores in True Blood, but based on that one little clip, I'm inclined to agree. I think this is a role that really suits her. As to all the people who say that she's dull in Westworld, all I can say is that the eye of the storm can seem pretty dull too. Spoilers ahead...

Spoiler

I think there's a reason that even -Ford- is questioning Dolores, and Bernard or Arnold (depending on which theory you prefer) has questioned Dolores frequently. Contrast that with, say, Maeve- it looks like episode 9 will be the first time that Maeve is questioned by Bernard, and so far, no questioning at all by Ford. I'm not saying she's not going to have a bigger role in the last 2 episodes, it really looks like she will based on what we've seen in the "weeks ahead" preview, but she's an -emerging- issue, whereas it seems that Dolores has been important for a very long time.

Edited November 23, 2016 by phoenyx

[Gobi]

58 minutes ago, Wouldofshouldof said:

Every time Dolores appears, I am amazed how much better she is here than in True Blood.

The writing may have a lot to do with it; although, to be fair, I never saw True Blood. Plus, acting with people like Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris has to improve your game.

[beeble]

I rewatched the episode last night. Some things were a little clearer upon second viewing but I had to laugh when Dolores had her breakdown and said, "When are we? Is it now? I can't tell anymore!" I thought, Yup, right there with you sister.

Teddy is this show's version of South Park's Kenny.  

[Lingo]

7 hours ago, Gobi said:

It is the same town, Ford rebuilt it. Charlotte mentions that to Sizemore in their scene together. It was the site of the original massacre that Dolores remembers and where the hosts were first trained, and Ford is using it as part of the back story for his new narrative.

Thanks. I guess I never put it together before now that the town in Charlotte's flashbacks and the one Ford rebuilt would be the same one from the Wyatt/Teddy flashbacks. (For one, I don't think Dolores has ever mentioned "Escalante.")

2 minutes ago, beeble said:

I rewatched the episode last night. Some things were a little clearer upon second viewing but I had to laugh when Dolores had her breakdown and said, "When are we? Is it now? I can't tell anymore!" I thought, Yup, right there with you sister.

Teddy is this show's version of South Park's Kenny.  

I feel I should point out that Kenny Teddy is not dead yet! She stabbed him in the right chest, avoiding his heart (though probably puncturing his lung). From her speech it sounds like Wyatt wants Teddy to rejoin them.