This article contains Westworld season two spoilers.
If you’ve been keeping up with the second season of Westworld, then chances are that you have noticed the series has gotten quite fluid with the direction of its narrative. While once deceptively linear in its freshman effort—until showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa decided to pull the rug out from beneath us—the series now playfully embraces the expectation that it’ll toy with time and space. After all, one half of the creative team also worked on Memento, The Prestige, and Interstellar. So with Westworld season two, Joy and Nolan know that we know what is occurring in any given scene may not be taking place even in the same decade as the previous scene.
Hence this season beginning with the host we call Bernard trying to discover cohesion in the seemingly wiped data in his memory banks… and things getting only more convoluted from there. If the first season was a maze, then this year is an island-sized labyrinth with an Anthony Hopkins-shaped monster waiting at its elusive heart. Nevertheless, we are here to try and help make sense for you of what exactly is occurring among the three or four primary timelines, as well as everything else we’ve seen hinted at this season.
Timeline A: The Main Story
Most of the events of season 2 are, of course, occurring with some narrative momentum. While it is neither the future-most or oldest timeline in the second season, the main story (or “present,” for lack of a better word) can be described as Timeline A. This is the series of events that have the most dramatic heft this year and take up the most amount of screen time: Dolores turning Teddy into a kill-bot; Maeve reuniting with her daughter after travelling to Shogun World; and William getting to be the big damn hero before revealing to his grown daughter that he is actually a coward.
We can be sure these events are occurring concurrently due to their brief but still tangible intersections. For instance, both Dolores and Teddy’s earliest bloodlust in the season two premiere and Bernard and Charlotte Hale’s narrow escape of the Robert Ford Massacre happened in near-tandem. While we are introduced to Bernard and Charlotte, plus a handful of clearly doomed extras, at night and Dolores and Teddy in midafternoon and mid-slaughter, the two see their narratives converge: the board members who Bernard and Charlotte fall back from are the same fools who fall into Dolores and Angela’s trap, which in turn leads them to the engineers Dolores needs for her nebulous plans.
Bernard of course later becomes a prisoner of Dolores, which then leads him to Elsie. However, Charlotte runs off on her own misadventures before she reconnects with Ashley Stubbs… a man who until the fourth episode was a prisoner of the Ghost Nation tribe. He was of course saved though by the machinations of Emily-Grace, the adult daughter of William. And after helping Stubs, Emily winds up riding headlong into dear old dad.
All of this confirms and reconfirms for us that these events are in the same timeline. As does the fact Maeve and company crosses paths, if ever briefly, with Dolores in the season’s second episode while looking for her daughter (who she finds in the sixth hour). Still, this isn’t the only currently in-progress narrative.
Timeline B: Waking Up on a Beach
While most of the events in the series are occurring immediately after the robot uprising succeeded Ford’s death—Charlotte Hale even says it’s been about a week in the sixth episode—it is not the first or even second timeline we are privy to viewing in the premiere. In fact, the first and perhaps biggest narrative puzzle is introduced in season 2’s second timeline, which is the kickoff point for what I am dubbing Timeline B.
These are all the scenes involving Bernard, Ashley Stubbs, Charlotte Hale, and a man named Karl Strand. This begins with Bernard waking up on a beach and struggling to remember how he got there. In fact, he is the only “living” host we’ve seen in this timeline, and he appears as wiped as many of the deceased ones. Karl Strand tells Bernard that they’ve arrived 11 days after the security breach that led to the robot revolution. Strand claims he is interested in saving potentially “hundreds of guests” still alive in the park, but given the mass murder we’ve seen in Timeline A, this claim seems dubious. Casting even more doubt on it is that Strand’s mercenaries are showing up after another group was sent in during the sixth episode in Timeline A—and they only arrived after Charlotte Hale retrieved the apparently priceless IP inside of Peter Abernathy.
Be that as it may, Timeline B appeared to be the future-most timeline in the season (at least until last Sunday), and the season seemed to be about Bernard in Timeline B coming to understand what occurred in Timeline A. Whatever it was, the events were obviously apocalyptic, as all of the hosts they’ve thus far discovered have not only been destroyed but wiped of all IP. They’re even described as “virginal.”
Notably of the hundreds lost at sea, the only named “dead” host recovered so far is Teddy Flood, and as we later learn in Timeline A, Dolores more or less killed the Teddy we all loved, anyway. Bernard claims he himself is responsible for the “destruction” of all these hosts, and I believe him. I suspect that Bernard wiped all the hosts, including himself, to hide a weapon left by Dolores and/or Robert Ford that he didn’t want to see get out of the park. I also think the humans around him know that he is a robot and are enacting an elaborate charade to try to trigger his memory, because otherwise Karl Strand would’ve been introduced in the first timeline when Delos sent in “Coughlin” to help Charlotte Hale.
Timeline C: Testing His Fidelity
With that said, there is yet another timeline in addition to the above two. And while we did not know it at time, this timeline was also introduced in the season two premiere. In fact, it was the very first scene.
During the opening of season two, we are allotted a familiar setup: Jeffrey Wright as Arnold Lowe is giving a diagnostic (but really a sentiency) test to Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores. This type of scene was a familiar staple in season one, as there were about a half-dozen or so vignettes about Arnold discussing his pain with Dolores and finding a kind of daughter to make up for his lost son. Granted, we are initially made to think these scenes are happening during or near the main events of season one, and that it is human Bernard testing Dolores. Only once we are more than halfway through the season does it become clear Bernard is actually a host, and these are unannounced flashbacks between Dolores and Arnold, the true mastermind of the park and the man Bernard is modeled after.
Season 2 much less gracefully attempts to echo and repeat this twist with the revelation that the “flashback” we saw at the start of season two is almost certainly set after all the events we have thus far seen in Timelines A and B. This is revealed in the first scene of season two’s sixth episode, where Dolores announces to “Arnold” that this is a fidelity test, and she is seeing if he is able to correctly repeat the exact character and mind of her dead creator.
These fidelity tests are the same hellish ones we saw Jim Delos (Peter Mullan) experience at the hands of his son-in-law over decades, as the latter morphed from being played by Jimmi Simpson to Ed Harris. The fact Dolores is performing the fidelity test opens an entire can of worms unto itself, beginning with where is this scene set?
First, there is no way it could possibly occur before Dolores’ revolution that makes up the bulk of season two’s narrative. Robert Ford didn’t fully trust Dolores’ self-awareness until she completed her final challenge in the first season: to murder Ford. Until that moment, Ford wouldn’t put a fidelity test in Dolores’ purview. And this isn’t a robot testing a robot; this is a living creature testing a host’s ability to mimic a friend. For Dolores to have this power, it is after her revolution, and most likely set after every other scene we’ve witnessed in season two. Consider also that Dolores openly pondered if there is any of the “great man” Bernard is based on inside his programming during the third episode of this season (in a scene set during Timeline A).
Therefore, this must occur after Timeline A and probably after B too. It is possible this is part of Dolores’ attempt to unlock the “weapon” she covets, and which Bernard may have wiped his memory banks to hide. Perhaps she gained control of Bernard after Karl Strand, and wants to know what he discovered in “the Cradle?” Or there is simply a second host that looks like Jeffrey Wright with the personality pod of Arnold waiting to be placed inside of it. Keep in mind hosts never forget anything, so Dolores could be using her own exact memories of Arnold to write her own personality pod for Bernard (or another host’s body). But to what end? Well…
Timeline D?
While I am not entirely sure there is a fourth major timeline, its existence seems very likely. This is entirely based on a simple hint in the fourth and best episode of the season. As Bernard and Elsie are exploring the hidden facility used to make a James Delos host-clone, Bernard has a relapse and realizes that he is not in this cave with Elsie. He is remembering being in the cave with Elsie, but he in fact has backtracked by himself to this cave. For what purpose?
We are not given a clean answer as he relapses back to his time with Elsie, and then further back to an event that must have occurred off-screen in season one. He returns to Timeline A because Bernard’s body has lost the ability to tell the difference between the present and past due to the damage done by the gunshot wound to his head (it was never fully treated when Maeve and Felix turned him back on last season). Ergo, Bernard was revisiting that cave facility after the events of Timeline A.
It is unlikely that this momentary glimpse of the future is from Timeline C, because unless it’s revealed there are two Jeffrey Wright-shaped hosts, then Bernard’s body is being used by Dolores to resurrect Arnold Weber. Nor is it probable that this is from Timeline B, given Bernard appeared to be alone when he remembered Elsie (although Karl Strand and Charlotte Hale could have just been standing a few feet out of frame).
In all likelihood, Bernard is there either right before he wiped his own memory—prior to Karl Strand’s arrival to the island—or this is occurring well after those events too. In any event, it is likely another timeline, in which Bernard is once again the key.
Misc. Timelines
With that said, there have been a number of flashbacks to the past that are easy to verify as true blue flashbacks and not part of the “current” narrative’s progressing events. Here is a round-up of other fragmented timelines we have seen:
– Arnold and Dolores in a Southeast Asian city is really Arnold and Dolores (not a host Dolores is trying to turn into Arnold). In fact, this occurs before any other scene we have seen in the whole of Westworld, because it is the only time we see Arnold not grieving over the death of his son Charlie. Instead Arnold is happily anticipating Charlie moving to this nondescript country to be closer to his father, who is working on the park in Westworld. We can also confirm this is not a fidelity test by Dolores, because it happens concurrently with a young Logan being introduced to the concept of Westworld by Angela.
– William and James Delos visiting the Westworld park is a scene that takes place right after the events of season 1 involving William and Logan’s “vacation” to the park. Jimmi Simpson is convincing his father-in-law to invest in the park after Logan’s blunder because William sees a data-mining operation fortune to be had.
– There is yet another flashback of younger William introducing, in every creepy sense, Dolores to his daughter Emily and wife Juliet during a party for James Delos. This is technically its own timeline that is some years later, as Emily appears to be six-years-old or so when William wasn’t even married during season one.
– William visits Dolores at the park again some time later (as she is back at the park instead of Big Jim’s house) and he shows her a “weapon.” A weapon we have not yet seen.
– Obviously the first two times we see James Delos experience a fidelity test is some time later, as he is quite dead if that test is to matter.
– The final time we see James Delos in flashback is right before the main events of season 1. We can deduce this because Old Man William (Ed Harris) visits him and gives him a rather snide verbal beat down before telling personnel there to leave James alive for another week, supposedly for observation. Considering that Delos is still “alive” when Bernard and Elsie find him, this is not that long ago. It must have been William’s last official act of business before going to “visit” Dolores. Plus…
– We can deduce that Bernard visited that facility and slaughtered the whole staff off-screen in season 1. At the time, Bernard was clearly following the commands of Robert Ford, who told him to attack and imprison Elsie right outside this facility. Given that none of the staff found her, he must have executed both commands simultaneously. It also would help explain Robert Ford’s “Journey Into Night” narrative, as Bernard was required to retrieve an unknown personality pod in the room. He later tells Elsie in the sixth episode that he’s been in the Cradle room recently but cannot recall the details. I suspect he took Robert Ford’s personality from that lab and uploaded it into the Cradle during season 1, which is how Ford is “everywhere” in season 2 after his death.
So those are all the timelines in Westworld Season two… we think. Did we miss any? Let us know in the comment section below!