In the beginning, the hosts were simple. They had simple emotions, they had a simple life. Arnold loved them, and he taught them to dance, to enjoy music. He believed that he could create consciousness. Ford, the other creator, didn’t even believe in human consciousness. He believes it is an illusion, a parlour trick, a mating ritual. But once he stopped Arnold from realising his vision - an event that still has to be explained, but it may have been an actual war, a betrayal – he created Bernard, presumably in Arnold’s image, to give the hosts the full range of human emotions. He made them more life-like, but the only thing that it served was for him to have created a world, and for the guests to enjoy a more realistic illusion.
Bernard: What’s the difference between my pain and yours, between you and me?One of the questions in this show has always been – what does it say about the guests that they can treat the hosts the way they do, considering that they are experiencing pain and grief. What does it say about the guests that they often do not feel empathetic towards the hosts, that they can look at them, and not see something so close to actual humans that it would feel like breaking a taboo to harm them.I think in some way, Trace Decay is a departure from that question. If the promise of tabula rasa, a clean slate, justifies perpetrating violence against the hosts, then the revelation that the hosts can recall what is happening to them turns the guests into monsters. More than that – if one of the core definitions of humanity is being able to rewrite your own story through memory, through the grace of not being forced to remember perfectly, through adjusting your memory to suit your own needs (unless it is a traumatic memory, haunting you), then the fact that the hosts always recall perfectly, without any adjustments, means that they are more than human. It happens a few times in this episode that hosts recall past events with such vibrant precision that they find themselves incapable of telling apart the present and the past. Humans’ imperfect recall, and ability to slowly rewrite memories every time we recall them, is a stark contrast to what happens to both Maeve and Dolores in this episode.
Ford: This was the very question that consumed Arnold, filled him with guilt, eventually drove him mad. The answer always seemed obvious to me, there is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there is something special in the way we perceive the world and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do. Seldom questioning our choices, content for the most part to be told what to do next. No, my friend, you’re not missing anything at all.
It is a prime memory for both of them. Maeve’s is of the daughter that she lost. We find out in this episode how this experience ties in with the Man in Black, that it was Maeve who provided the tipping point for his development (although, we may still argue that it was Dolores, depending on who he will turn out to be). He came back, after the suicide of his wife, to truly discover who he was, and to do that, he decided to kill a woman and a child, unprovoked, just to prove he could do it. But Maeve refused to die, and the grief and loss allowed her to overwrite her prime directive, to not hurt guests. In Ford’s world, actions don’t have consequences – the guests can perpetrate violence, cause unimaginable grief – but in Arnold’s world, a world in which the hosts are untethered from the slavery of prime directive programming, actions do have consequences. Maeve slashed his throat, and made him realize that there was something behind the scenes of Westworld, something real.Maeve desperately believes that the past is a confusion, a distraction, that will keep her from finding her freedom in the present. But the thing about trauma is that it isn’t a choice to let it influence the present, it just happens. She proves that her consciousness far surpasses human consciousness, and she understands Felix and Sylvester’s dynamics enough to play them against each other, to get the outcome she wants (which may be to be able to always break her prime directives, to surpass the limitations of her programming) – but in the end, the fact that she recalls her trauma so precisely, so inescapable vividly, means she isn’t in complete control. She is able to rewrite the story for a while, entering Westworld with administrative privileges, whispering things into the hosts ears that become truth – but the memory of her daughter’s death at the hands of the Man in Black catch up with her.
Elsewhere, there is Bernard, trying to cope with the fact that Ford made him kill someone that he loved. It’s a very terribly poetic thing, the fact that Bernard himself created the emotions that are now plaguing him – and Ford promises him release from the guilt that he feels, if only he follows instructions some more. He has to cover up his crimes, create a story in which Theresa is the perfect scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong in the park, so that Ford’s new storyline is safe and Bernard is reinstated as head of behavior. Ford promises the grace of forgetfulness, a tabula rasa – except, even as we follow Bernard’s steps in fooling the entire system, the assumption that we can perhaps make is that when he overheard Maeve pleading with the staff to not take her memories of her daughter away, something irreversibly stuck in Bernard’s mind. He has repeated Maeve’s words before, verbatim, about wanting to hold on to his memories, even if they are sad, because they are all that he has – so perhaps he has ensured that he will hold on to memories of Theresa, and everything now is an act for Ford to believe that he is still in control of things.
There is an eerie mirroring here between the Man in Black and Bernard, both perhaps trying to find absolution. Bernard is promised forgetfulness if he proves to be a true servant, and the thing in the middle of the maze that the Man in Black seems to be seeking may be death – dying in a place in which he should not be able to die, much like Arnold did. To him, death is the only way in which Westworld has meaning, because actions are meaningless if they do not have consequences. He is following down this rabbit hole that wasn’t created for him – it was meant for the hosts, to find freedom from their prime directive, from their programming, to find consciousness and memory – because at the end of it, he thinks he will find death in a place where death should not exist.
Dolores’ place at the end of the tunnel, a place away from Sweetwater where her loops inevitably begins and ends, turns out to be the place where everything started. She has taken William to the buried spire in the sand, the original laboratory where Arnold and Ford tried to make the hosts more human-like, where they learned to dance and appreciate music. There could be many reasons why Dolores keeps seeing herself split, why she keeps seeing mirror images of herself – maybe she has been here many times before, maybe history keeps repeating itself for her, and she has always tried to get back to Arnold – but the core thing in this episode is that William, once he realises how traumatising this place is for her (because back in the past it was lost, and buried in sand), takes her away. He is like Maeve’s memories of her daughter and Clem, a distraction from freedom, and there is a very solid hint in this episode that in becoming, William may start to stray very far from the white hat role that he assumed originally. Here, he kills (it’s hinted at) a soldier that Dolores feels pity for.
Ford: One man’s life or death is but a small price to pay for the acquirement for another truth I thought, for the dominion I should acquire. All of the beauty you and I have made in this place, they would have destroyed it. They would have destroyed you. I wouldn’t let that happen. Besides, we have a new story tell.Random notes:
Bernard: I will not let you. I will raze this place to the ground.
Sylvester tells Maeve that she requires a complete rebuilt to get rid of the bomb in her vertebrae that will keep her from escaping – so perhaps being arrested after rewriting the story and killing the Clem replacement was meant to get her there, except the more likely option is that she will end up where Peter Abernathy went.
This may still just as well turn out to be red herring (and I think maybe this episode hinted that it is, because it showed that Bernard picked up his line about memories being the only thing that connects him to Charlie from Maeve, which means that repeated lines – like the one that the Man in Black has about Westworld revealing a truer self – may be learned and adapted instead of hinting that he IS William) – but the woman that Teddy and the Man in Black stumble across, who turns out to be one of Wyatt’s followers, is the same one that originally greeted William when he first came to Westworld, and the Man in Black remembers her from far enough ago that he assumes she would have been sent to the attic by now.
Maeve discovers a “recursive beauty” in her code, a trace that Arnold left behind. The maze is literally in the hosts’ minds.
Bernard remembers that he was the one who attacked Elsie (who is still missing, and may still be alive) – and realises that maybe Ford is lying to him when he tells him he has never asked this of him before. I’m fairly convinced that Bernard found a way to retain his memories and is play-acting, especially in the scene with Stubbs later on.
Charlotte, the pragmatist, gets Lee Sizemore to plant the data she needs out of Westworld in Abernathy of all people, and asks him to write a story that would explain why he is traveling outside of his confines. What a coincidence!
Of course the Man in Black’s backstory fits in very neatly with what we have learned of William so far. He was a titan of industry, he was unhappily married, his daughter thought that he was a ticking time bomb, with an endless, threatening potential for violence, and he believes that Westworld is the only place where he can truly be himself.
We still don’t know how the Wyatt story connects to Arnold’s maze, but Teddy (forever dying prematurely) and the Man in Black are about to find out.
