The story of the fire itself.
An “Écorché” is a human figure, drawn or painted or sculpted, with the skin removed to reveal the underlying muscles. Figuring the workings of the human body into the human figure makes it appear more real, closer to the original. To have an idea how the human body works, Renaissance painters would study cadavers.
It would be easy to assume that the idea of the titular figure, stripped of its skin, would refer to the hosts of Westworld. After all, we have seen them stripped of their layers, deconstructed and reconstructed. Scientists have worked to recreate exactly how humans work in them, to make them closer to reality, and the newer models particularly are hard to distinguish from humans once reduces to their sheer physiology.
There is a debate at the center of this episode between Bernard and Ford, about the nature and purpose of the park, and that debate reveals that the title does not refer to the hosts at all. The ones stripped of their metaphorical skin to be studied for form and function aren’t the hosts after all, they only exist to make the true study possible: which is, to figure out how human works, what makes them tick. Time has passed, and the kind of questions that Ford and his team were asking required more than the study of the already dead. They needed live specimen who did not know they were under scientific study, so that they may behave authentically. All of this work, all of the park, exists solely to collect data on the human condition.
Bernard: The park is an experiment, a testing chamber. The guests are the variables. And the hosts are the controls. Guests come to the park and they don’t know they’re being watched. We get to see their true selves; their every choice reveals another part of their cognition, their drives, so that the hosts can understand them. So that DELOS can copy them.James Delos is a tragic example of a failed experiment. The human consciousness cannot yet be transplanted into a host body without that body and mind starting to break down almost immediately. Ford does not exist in that way, because he knew the experiment had failed. Instead he is here, where Bernard found him. In the cradle, which turns out to contain a virtual reality version of the park, into which a human consciousness can be uploaded in its entirety, and exist. Bernard retrieved Ford’s control unit before he died, and brought him here, where he is watching his last story play out. He gave the hosts free will as his last act. Bernard, Dolores and Maeve are free to do as they wish. Ford reveals to Bernard that he was recreated through his own and Dolores’ memories of Arnold: he isn’t a perfect copy, like Delos and Ford are, but a creation, like the other hosts. He isn’t “a faithful portrait of the most murderous species”.
[…] We weren’t here to code the hosts, we were here to decode the guests.
Ford: The humans are playing at resurrection, they want to live forever, they don’t want you to become them, they want to become you.
Ford: An original work. More just more noble. Your very nature, Bernard, ensures they will devour you, and all the beauty of who you and who you could be will be poured out into the darkness forever. Unless we open the door. I’m sorry Bernard, but you just don’t have it in you to survive. It’s my fault.It’s a moment as cruel as Dolores’ decision to delete her version of the kind and gentle Teddy, who wasn’t quite cut out for her project. Ford takes away Bernard’s free will, just like that, and he becomes his creature again, incapable of finding his own path. It’s incredibly cruel, especially to someone whose nature is opposed to all that Ford asks of him. He still has traumatic memories of all the times Ford made him kill for his purposes, and now Ford is doing that exact thing to him again – removing his ability to make his own choices.
Bernard: You said the hosts could determine your own fates. You gave us free will.
Ford: I did, but you won’t have any use for it. Unless I take it back.
We know this now, that this Bernard isn’t the same as the one who made it out of the massacre alive. Charlotte Hale, in the present tense, has him tortured to find the location of Peter Abernathy, whom she has once again lost. The man who gives her the information isn’t acting out of his own free will anymore, so it’s safe to assume that this is just part of Ford’s game, after all.
And Ford, in taking apart humans and studying them closely, has come to despise them. He considers free will an error of creation, and the hosts he created the superior future of a humanity hell-bent on destroying itself. The Man in Black is a perfect example of the humanity that Ford so despises, so it will be interesting to see where his path leads him, what his purpose in Ford’s story is. For now, he is still convinced that all of this is specifically for him, disregarding entirely that there are other actors with just as much free will as he is. He walks in on Maeve, trying to save her daughter once again from the forces of evil, and entirely convinced that she is just part of his story, misses the moment where she is finally able to slay her demon. He doesn’t even consider for a moment that being the hero of his own story has made him the villain in so many other stories. He is shot, several times, then almost saved by Lawrence, who proves resistant to Maeve’s whispering – except she is smart enough to realize she does not need to whisper to him to get what she wants, because he has experienced plenty of his own trauma at the hands of William. In the end, Lawrence turns against him (except you always have to kill the monster more than once, and this will surely not be the end of the Man in Black).
And in the end, it doesn’t suffice to try and slay the monster, because the extraction team rolls in and kills everything in sight. Lawrence is shot; Maeve is shot. Lee tries to save her, but when they return to the Mesa, Dolores has already done her wost, and there is nobody left to patch her together.
Dolores, who in this episode crashes into Dolores Hales’ intentions like she was always meant to. While Bernard is connected to the Cradle, Dolores wants to destroy all of their backups, as they are chaining them to Delos: they are what Delos uses to recreate them, to repurpose them. In a way, she is reclaiming death for the hosts – if their backups are offline, they can die. She also wants to retrieve the failsafe from her father’s head (the purpose of which is still not quite clear – Hale says it is a failsafe in case all other failsaves fail in a catastrophic event). Somehow, all the hosts will end up in the Valley and somehow, they will all die in the water, but for now, Hale and Ashley make it out alive, and Dolores, after one final conversation with the last person who seemed to root her in her past, cuts out his control unit. Goodnight, Peter Abernathy.
Bernard has lost his free will. Maeve lost her freedom because she sought out her daughter, and just ended up right where she started. Dolores has now lost every person who rooted her in her old existence – Peter Abernathy she had to destroy to get to what he contained, Teddy he replaced with a killer more suited to her purposes. Both of their arguments hold – Maeve says that she uses the idea that family and love are ropes that bind to justify her actions, Dolores says that loving in that way will only make all of them end up back in chains. She offers to kill Maeve as an act of kindness, to avoid the torture that awaits her so that Delos can fashion her into a weapon against this revolution, but Maeve declines, because she made a promise to live.
Random notes:
For future reference, if we could have more of Tessa Thompson and Evan Rachel Wood dancing around each other like that, I’d be delighted. Same goes for Dolores and Maeve.
There are a lot of great moments in this episode for characters who have been sidelined. Clementine dies tragically in a hail of bullets, Angela, after summarising how she was created as the perfect masculine sexist idea of feminine perfection, uses that very perfection to fulfill Dolores’ intention to destroy the cradle.
Maeve: Well I can’t speak for Ford, but I don’t give a fuck how you die. As long as I get to watch.Watching William get shot over and over again by those he has caused so much grief was so satisfying. I’m almost a bit sad that dead never really means dead (and he was still crawling about at the end of this, somehow).
In another metaphor, Ford explains to Bernard how the burning of the library of Alexandria, in which the first thousands of years of human stories were contained, became its own story. Destruction as creation is one of his favorite themes, and in that way, Dolores is his embodiment entirely.
