The finale of Westworld Season One aired a year and four months ago. Since then, there’s been an entire Game of Thrones season, about 450 political scandals, and dozens of new shows to occupy your viewing time. No one would blame you if you’d forgotten the basic plot to Westworld—let alone its multiple timelines, the people who look like people but are actually robots who think they’re people, the people who are people who think they’re people but are actually robots made to look like dead people, and how many times Teddy died. (Five.)
So for a quick recap before Season Two, we’ll briefly run down what happened in each episode to give you all the details you need. You can click on each title to read our original recap for more information, too.
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Here we go! In its premiere, Westworld establishes the basic rules that govern the park. The robots (hosts) can’t hurt human guests, but human guests can do whatever horrible things they want to hosts. There’s also a behind the scenes staging area to Westworld where park workers are busy keeping everything up and running—doing maintenance on the hosts, getting guests ready, writing and designing new storylines, characters, and areas.
On the host side: There’s Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood), a host who plays the damsel in distress, and Teddy Flood (James Marsden), the handsome hero. There’s Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton), who runs the brothel, and the outlaw Hector Escaton (Rodrigo Santoro). These hosts are stuck in an endless loop and are reset whenever they’re killed or their storylines end.
On the human side, there’s Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the creator of the park and the eccentric god of Westworld. There’s Ed Harris, the mysterious obsessed gamer known as The Man in Black. And there's Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), who is the kind head of programming with a loving curiosity toward the hosts, whom he senses might have more inside them than just wires. At the end of this episode, we learn that there’s been some sort of unexplained update to the hosts that is causing them to go rogue—specifically Dolores’s dad, who is decommissioned after an existential freak out.
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We meet our dude William (Jimmi Simpson), who is a first timer to the park escorted by his dickish business partner Logan. "No orientation, no guidebook—figuring out how it works is half the fun," Westworld greeter Angela (Talulah Riley) tells William as he enters the park. Guests start in the town where it’s safe and easy, but things get more intense and difficult further out from town.
Maeve, meanwhile, is showing some sort of post-traumatic stress from a storyline that involves in which she and her child were attacked. All hosts are supposed to have their memories scrubbed, but this is manifesting itself into what she perceives as nightmares. The Man in Black is some sort of VIP guest who has been coming to the park for 30 years, and is searching for some deeper mystery he calls “the maze” hidden in the park. Bernard is trying to figure out what’s behind the host malfunctions and is also having an affair with Quality Assurance Head Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen).
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Awww, sweet little William makes his first kill to save Clementine Pennyfeather (Angela Sarafyan). They grow up so fast. Okay, so we learn a few things: The hosts can’t harm humans, to the point where one of them won’t even pick up an axe to cut firewood. But, these rules are immediately broken when Elsie Hughes (Shannon Woodward) searches for a rogue host with Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth). A host attacks Stubbs and at the end of the episode, and Dolores fires a weapon to defend herself from the horrifying attack on her house. This bug is still causing the hosts to have an existential crisis.
We also learn that Dolores is the oldest host in the park, created by Ford and his partner Arnold. This mysterious partner wanted to create consciousness, but he died in the park. This is the same person that all the crazed hosts are talking to. Also, local Ken doll Teddy is hunting for someone named Wyatt as his backstory. Meanwhile, there’s a power struggle going on between Ford and the Westworld board, which is trying to force him out.
This episode also introduces the Bicameral Mind, which is the idea that primitive man believed his thoughts to be the voice of the gods. It’s a theory first introduced in the mid-1970s, which posits that the human mind evolved into its present state of consciousness. As early as 3,000 years ago, humans experienced the world closer to a schizophrenic where the voice of god would give commands they obeyed without question. Remember this, because it’s important to the hosts' conscious awakening.
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Maeve is freaking out. She keeps having manifestations of her past that include men in hazmat suits cleaning the park and doing maintenance on her. She confides her memories in Hector, and she then cuts a bullet out of her own stomach. At the end of the episode, she lets herself die in hopes of waking up in the Westworld lab.
Dolores is on an adventure with William and his idiot friend Logan. The two end up getting in a fight as Logan betrays their guide through the outlaw narrative. Most importantly, we get a little insight into The Man in Black. He’s busy hunting down this maze with the help from Lawrence, who he has kept as prisoner. His search takes him to the outlaw Armistice, who tells him she’s searching for the same Wyatt who was written into Teddy’s backstory. In one important moment, another guest recognizes The Man in Black and thanks him for his company saving his sister’s life. The Man in Black tells him to shut the fuck up.
The tension between Ford and Theresa comes to a head when he informs her that the board approved of his new narrative, and that he knows about her affair with Bernard.
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Things start finally falling into place midway through the season. Maeve has awakened and has begun manipulating those dingus maintenance guys. Dolores reveals that she was there for Arnold’s mysterious death 34 years, 42 days, and 7 hours prior when he asked her to help him destroy Westworld. Elise learns that someone has been smuggling proprietary data out of the park. The company that Logan and William own are planning on buying the park, as it is experiencing financial troubles after Arnold’s death. There’s also a giant orgy!
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Time for Maeve’s great awakening. By Episode Six, she’s learned from Lutz (Leonardo Nam) that everything she does or think is preprogrammed. After threatening another programmer with a knife, she gets them to amp up all her stats to make her the ultimate badass.
We’re also introduced to Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), who is a representative of the Westworld board. Bernard, who goes through a nasty breakup with Theresa, stumbles across Ford’s sad, creepy robot family. Elise learns that the hosts are breaking their core directives thanks to coding placed into the first generation units by Arnold.
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Bernard is a robot! He’s been controlled by Ford this whole time to do the crazy, lonely old man’s bidding. Somewhere outside of this park is the amorphous “board” that is trying to get rid of Ford so it can take control of the intellectual property of the hosts. They don’t care about the hosts or the place where tourists play dress up—they want access to the coding and machinery inside the hosts. To get what they want, the board has reprogrammed Clementine to attack one of the hosts disguised as a human.
When Maeve watches them decommission Clementine, she decides to escape the park, and has this excellent line: “At first I thought you and the others were gods, then I realized you're just men. And I know men. You think I'm scared of death. I've done it a million times. I'm fucking great at it. How many times have you died?” Ford was hip to all this the whole time, though, and has robot Bernard kill Theresa.
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Okay, so: Bernard is a good robot boy and cleans up after Theresa's murder, and Ford erases his memory of it all. Everything more or less goes back to normal for Ford and Bernard. Meanwhile, Charlotte is continuing to smuggle data out of the park.
Maeve is continuously getting more and more badass. In this episode, she convinces those two idiot programmers to grant her administrative privileges so she can control other hosts. While hunting for Wyatt, The Man in Black comes across Angela, the woman William met in Episode Two, who has been working with Wyatt. Teddy turns on The Man in Black when he has a memory of him killing Dolores. While in Teddy’s custody, The Man in Black says that after his wife committed suicide, he no longer believed in his philanthropic business and decided to find himself in the park, where he killed Maeve and her daughter just to see what he would feel.
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Maeve’s revolution begins. After realizing Bernard is a host (whose memories were wiped after killing Theresa), she convinces him to let her back into the park where she assembles her team to escape. We learn that The Man in Black is a longtime board member, who agrees to help Charlotte by voting against Ford.
William’s asshole friend Logan has them captured and cuts Dolores’s stomach open. William goes kind of nuts and forces Logan to help him find Dolores. And Dolores learns that she’s the one who killed Arnold. Once Bernard learns what he is from Maeve, he confronts Ford. Here, Bernard learns that he was made in Arnold’s image and Ford instructs him to kill himself.
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FINALLY, we learn what we’ve known all along: that William and The Man in Black are the same dude. In the past, William tells Logan he’s going to take control of their company called Delos, which he will use to buy the park and find the center of the maze.
We also learn that, prior to the park's opening day, Arnold was attempting to stall the opening because he believed the hosts could attain consciousness. In order to stop the park from opening, Arnold ordered Dolores to kill him along with the rest of the hosts. It didn’t work, of course, and 30 years in the future, Old William is invited to the opening of Ford’s new narrative.
After debuting the narrative to the board, Dolores wakes up in the lab with Arnold and Ford. There, Ford reveals that he’s spent the last 30 years trying to help the hosts attain consciousness, driven by the guilt of what happened to Arnold. Dolores learns she has the ability to destroy the park and that the person speaking into her mind has been herself all along (basically, the bicameral mind becoming one).
At the party for Delos, Dolores emerges and kills Ford and starts slaughtering the guests, and William gets ambushed by a group of hosts led by Clementine, who shoots him in the arm. Meanwhile, Maeve and her group of rebels have started an uprising in the labs, where they have discovered another sector filled with hosts from Shogun World. Instead of leaving the park on her own will, Maeve makes the decision to go back, find her daughter, and continue their uprising.
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