(CNN) — The following contains spoilers about the “Westworld” season 2 finale. “Westworld” closed a chaotic second season with a finale that encapsulated it – combining operatic highs, thoughtful dialogue and time-bending twists. The ungainly mix of those elements, however, has made the HBO series near-impenetrable – a show that’s alternately too blood-soaked, convoluted and cerebral to keep its elaborate machinery running smoothly. The 90-minute episode, written by producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, felt like an effort to provide closure on some fronts while hitting the reset button on others, and benefited from drawing together several key characters who had been scattered throughout the year. But in terms of heightening interest in Season 3, for this critic – who has come to view watching the show with a greater sense of obligation than enthusiasm – the finale’s big swings didn’t hit it out of the park. If the first season dealt with the dawning consciousness of the robot hosts – after having been cruelly exploited as the playthings of the human guests – the second moved into a new phase, as those characters pursued their independence and rebelled. Too many detours and digressions, however, made the series less compelling – and more significantly, reduced the incentive to invest the time and brain power seemingly required to contemplate its various turns, beginning with the reams of analysis and speculation devoted to them. The last episode focused heavily on Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and her determination to escape her amusement-park prison; and the fate of Maeve (Thandie Newton), operating on a different part of the faux frontier. (What might be called the running of the mechanical bulls, in the latter’s arc, was easily the most arresting moment visually.) “I don’t want to play cowboys and Indians anymore,” Dolores told Bernard (Jeffrey Wright). “I want their world. The world they’ve denied us.” Toward that end, Dolores even enlisted the ruthless Man in Black (Ed Harris), allowing him to survive, although not without experiencing some of the pain that he’s inflicted repeatedly on others. The main problem with this second season was that it had too much going on at once, without the moral clarity that informed the first season. The questions of digital immortality – humans created shells to cheat death – also feels considerably less fresh than the way the show initially flipped the script on its source material, turning humans into the monsters. Part of the larger plot – dealing with Delos’ corporate plan to create replicas of humans and let them “pour your minds into our form,” as Dolores put it – owes a debt to “Futureworld,” the 1976 sequel to the original movie. In that film, leaders and dignitaries were being secretly replaced by perfect clones as part of a more nefarious plot. Violence has been another major part of “Westworld,” and the finale was no exception. But in the finale – and indeed, throughout the season – too much of that action was directed at characters who barely registered, while the dramatic impact of deaths involving major players is tempered by the fact they might come back, in one form or another. In one of the episode’s best lines, Dolores said, “We were born slaves to their stories, and now we have a chance to write our own.” “Westworld” will have a chance to write more chapters, and based on the cryptic nature of the finale, there’s a wide array of options that the narrative could potentially pursue. Despite that, the HBO series feels as if it has wandered too deep into a maze of its own creation, blunting its appeal. While the show has its loyalists, the finale reinforced the sense that it hasn’t established a clear path forward to make “Westworld” the must-watch obsession that – with its star-studded cast and intriguing subject matter – it had the DNA to become.<doc-sep>Westworld-205-06b Westworld type TV Show network HBO The Westworld season 2 finale “The Passenger” wrapped up so many of the show’s mysteries and delivered a couple few big surprises with a 90-minute episode that feature beautiful direction by Federick E.O.Toye, a gorgeous Ramin Djawadi score, terrific performances and stuck a landing that set the stage for an intriguing season 3. Granted, there was also some exposition overload as the drama strained to explain so many of the season’s ideas. Below I’ve unscrambled this twisty episode — which jumped around between a few different timelines — into chronological order to help explain everything that happened (and you saw the surprise post-credits scene right? If not, go back and watch that first). We start at the episode’s true beginning with… Before the Flood: Dolores lays with dead Teddy, then takes his brain Brita filter for a purpose that will be revealed later. She comes upon the Man in Black who’s been digging in his arm. “Seems you’ve begun to question the nature of your reality,” she quips, seemingly solving last week’s riddle — the MiB was digging in his arm because he was paranoid that he might be a host. She lets him tag along to the Valley Beyond. They pick up Bernard and reach The Forge. The Man in Black tries to gun down Dolores, but she’s so in control of her body at this point that she’s no longer programmed to “die” unless truly essential parts get taken out. Dolores had sneakily placed a used slug in The Man in Black’s gun which results in a spectacular backfire blowing his hand apart. Meanwhile, table Maeve orders hosts to attack a sadist technician who’s about to dismember her — with her pain receptors turned on. She gets patched up and reunites with Hector, Armistice, and Lee Sizemore. When more QA bad guys attack, we finally get that amazing Super Bowl promo scene we had almost forgotten about — Maeve using her powers to have robot bulls charge and gorge the QA guys in exhilarating slo-mo. There’s one terrific shot, as the bull rams the soldier over the stair railing, that literally had my jaw hanging open. A little later, Maeve and company run into trouble and have an unlikely savior — Lee Sizemore. Do we buy that this epitome of human selfishness would sacrifice himself to give the hosts a chance? Perhaps not, but then again, he doesn’t seem to have much of a life outside of creating narratives for this park, and now that’s all going away. Maybe he decided that in a life that’s empty, he can at least die for something. It’s rather cool that Lee goes out in a blaze of glory by giving a speech he once penned for the hosts — really playing the game for the first and last time; Lee finally gets to be a hero. Charlotte and Team Dune Buggy are led by zombie Clementine, who literally rides a pale horse as she readies to spread her annihilation virus (as in, the Pale Horse of death in the Book of Revelations, which Westworld couldn’t resist making obvious later on by having Charlotte crack a joke about it — yes, we got the biblical symbolism, thanks! ). At The Forge, Dolores and Bernard take a trip into the virtual world that Delos created Inside they meet a version of James Delos who has gone totally insane. “What humans define as sane is a narrow range of behaviors,” Bernard observes, “Most states of consciousness are insane.” They stroll to the James Delos’ old house and find Logan — well, not really Logan, but a super mellow helpful virtual Logan based on James Delos’ memories of his son. This Logan has been tasked with running The Forge. Logan shows us the ghost of James Delos’ Christmas past, the awful moment he rejected his addict son reaching out for help. “I’m all the way down now,” Logan said tearfully. “I can see the bottom.” This is a callback to the final words of the glitching host version James Delos in his fidelity apartment back in episode four this season. Logan explains the conversation was James Delos’ “cornerstone” moment that defined him as a person, which is a pretty messed up one to have. Logan then gives us the lowdown on the park’s efforts to map human consciousness — and how it’s disappointingly easy to do. “I needed to know why they make the decisions they make. The more I look for an answer the more I realized: They don’t,” he says. “The best they can do is live according to their code. None of them are truly in control of their actions.” In fact, all it takes to accurately map a person’s behavior is about 10,000 lines of code — in other words, we’re about as complex as Linux from 1991. To show this idea visually, we see a vast library with each book representing a different person the park has mapped. This looks so much more elegant than data on a Future iPad. This library was the “weapon” Dolores spoke of — that armed with this knowledge of humans, she might be able to survive in the real world. She glances at a few volumes (including one on the QA team leader) and decides, Eh, I got the gist of it. Logan decides it’s time to open The Door we’ve been hearing about all season. It’s a gateway to a virtual Eden for all the hosts who aren’t coming with her to the real world. Outside it’s represented as an open gateway perched on a cliff edge, tempting the hosts to go into the light, pass beyond its border, uploading their consciousness into this virtual paradise while their bodies are discarded below like lemmings. Let’s hope there’s a bit more to do in this iCloud heaven than walk around in green fields (at least “San Junipero” had some ’80s dance clubs). So finally, we learn what “The Door” is, and it’s way more satisfying than last year’s metaphorical “The Maze” because this is something tangible — at least for the hosts — and crucial to the story. Except selfish Dolores wants to deny the hosts an afterlife. Really, Dolores is the one who should be on that pale horse, not Clementine, because she’s the one who’s seemingly in favor of wiping out everybody — almost all hosts and humans alike. For being essentially a computer program, she’s almost like a religious zealot when it comes adhering to her beliefs. She begins to delete the data that mapped all the humans in the park in a process that is also expected to destroy the Eden virtual world too. “No world they create can compete with the real one,” she says. “I don’t want to play cowboys and Indians any more Bernard! … You woke me from a dream, now let me do the same for you.” Bernard shoots back: “I trust that you’ll kill as many as you can … this isn’t a dream, Dolores, this is a f—ing nightmare!” (another awesome Jeffrey Wright line delivery). Then Bernard shoots Dolores dead (for now) and cancels her purge of the human mapping data. Yet Dolores has done enough damage so that The Forge begins to flood. Outside, Maeve and the hosts arrive at The Door and hosts began to enter. But now Clementine has shown up and begins turning the hosts against each other. Charlotte Hale doesn’t need to the kill the hosts like this, she just really wants to because she’s a rather terrible person. Maeve has time to say goodbye to her daughter and uses her mind control to freeze the hosts. Her daughter goes off with her replacement mom and the Ghost Nation leader Akecheta into the Eden world. Inside, Akecheta is touchingly reunited with his long lost love. But outside The Door, Maeve is gunned down — and dies with a smile on her face, her season 2 mission accomplished. The Door shuts. But The Forge fail safe has triggered a cooling flood of the system (I mean, that the system pumps out enough water to flood an entire valley seems totally ridiculous, but okay). Bernard leaves The Forge, sees all the dead hosts and is quite bummed out. He’s further upset that Elsie, his ally, helped Charlotte kill them off. He’s beginning to realize he’s made a terrible mistake and chats with the Dr. Ford in his head — Dr. Ford is like Bernard’s Tyler Durden. “I should have listened. Now all the hosts are gone. [Humans are] just algorithms designed to survive at all costs. They think they’re in control they’re really just … passengers.” “The Passenger” is, obviously, the title of the episode, and fans have speculated that it means something like Teddy’s brain being stuck inside Bernard for half this season (a clever theory, and actually close to the truth, but wrong). Instead, the title means something much more metaphorical: People aren’t really in control of themselves, that they’re passengers to their own flawed programming. Westworld is weird because it keeps telling us how horrible and simple-minded we are as a species yet also expects us to follow the most complex narrative to ever air on TV. Now here’s where things got a bit tricky, timeline wise (I had to watch the finale twice to figure out where this midsection fit in). The survivors then convened back at The Mesa. Elsie orders Bernard to sit and stay, like a dog, further showing that even sympathetic humans won’t see hosts as equals. She confronts Charlotte and pretends like she might be willing to overlook all her corrupt behavior. But Charlotte sees right through Elsie’s halfhearted ruse and shoots her (Ahhh! Not Elsie!). “I wish you were the kind of person with the moral flexibility that I need,” Charlotte says. “I’ve read your file. That’s not who you are.” Bernard sees this too and makes a new choice: He secretly returns to The Forge and gets Dolores’ Brita filter and prints out a new host body for her to occupy — not herself, rather, but Charlotte Hale. It’s nicely ironic that the park’s secret data collection program the Charlotte is so obsessed with protecting is also what enables Bernard to do this. We see Charlotte rather rudely discovering this, walking into cold storage and sees her naked body emerge to kill her and take her place. (I wanted just a bit more of a reaction from Charlotte here, just another second or two of comprehension, but ah well). Bernard then alters his memory of what happened so that nobody will know — including himself — what he did. He goes back out and collapses in the flooded valley to wait for the QA team who will find him all messed up when they arrive at very beginning of the season. After the Flood: Okay! Now we’ve jumped only a few hours into the future — and after Bernard and the QA team have had a bunch of adventures we’ve seen this season — and they enter The Forge. They find Dolores dead, seemingly just as Bernard left her. They also find the encryption key which he also left there to be discovered. They initiate transfer of the data to the mainland, but there’s something wrong — it’s the data of all the hosts who walked into Eden, not the guest data that they really want. “You killed her,” Bernard says to Charlotte. “Did I Bernard?” Charlotte shoots back in a response that’s quite funny and catty when watching this scene a second time and knowing the twist. Dolores-as-Charlotte reveals herself and kills the QA guys. She’s still pissed at Bernard, but agrees to send the hosts in Eden someplace safe on the mainland where they won’t be found (presumably she’s hiding them in some massive Google server somewhere). She also notes she has “one last soul to carry to the new world” and a moment or two later shoots Bernard. She’s actually doing him a favor (is there any other show where killing somebody is so often a favor?). She wants the Brita ball from his brain to pop in her purse along with four others.<doc-sep>
Spoiler warning: this piece discusses the biggest reveals from the Westworld season 2 finale. Proceed at your own risk. The finale of season 2 of HBO’s science fiction series Westworld debuted on Sunday, June 24th, and it answered some of the questions it’s been prodding viewers to ask throughout this season. We now know what The Door is, and whether there’s a host version of the Man in Black wandering around, and how all those dead hosts ended up floating in the water in the season pilot. But the finale raised a lot more questions in the process of answering these few. Some of those questions are obvious, deliberate teases for the as-yet-unscheduled season 3. Others… well, they may be teases, or they may be puzzles, given how the showrunners love to throw out elaborate clues for fans to debate and decipher. But they still seem baffling given what little we know so far. Here are some of the primary mysteries we took away from the finale. How did Stubbs know Charlotte / Dolores was a host? His conscious decision to let her go is an interesting twist on a character who’s been steadily abused all season. And his reveal that he’s just following Ford’s orders as he lets her go in order to protect her suggest that he’s possibly known a lot more about what’s going on in this world than he’s revealed before. But he isn’t the one who scans her before she joins the refugees, and he seems to identify her as an anomaly the second he sees her. What tips him off, just her lack of withering contempt for him for once? Inevitably, some fans are wondering if he’s a host, too — like seemingly everyone else on this show at this point — but if that were true, wouldn’t someone have noticed, given the sheer number of security checkpoints the chief of security would need to pass through in his daily job? Who does Dolores carry out of Westworld? This one’s an obvious tease for season 3: Dolores walks away with a purse full of memory modules (or “pearls,” or “chestnuts,” depending on who’s talking), which can presumably be used to resurrect their owners. (Even though she went to a lot of trouble to destroy the Cradle specifically so humankind couldn’t endlessly resurrect dead hosts from backups. But we’ll let that slide, since she’s far from alone in believing that something she doesn’t want other people to do is okay when she does it.) So who did she take with her? That becomes a particularly meaningful question given that we essentially watched her spend the season shedding everyone she traveled with, one by one. Who does she still care about enough to bring them back into the world? And can we presume that she was kind enough to leave Teddy behind after resurrecting him in the haven beyond The Door? It certainly looked like she left his module behind, but then isn’t she risking it falling back into Delos’ hands? There are still a number of ways we might see Teddy back on the show again, given the potential copies of him out there. Where exactly is the host haven now? The logical place for the magical haven beyond The Door to live would be somewhere in the servers in the Forge, where The Door originated. But then there’s that bizarre scene where Bernard says Dolores is “changing the coordinates” of that haven, and we see the giant array that originally produced The Door pivot and light up. “I’m sending them and their world to a place no one will ever find them,” Dolores says. This may be a red herring. It looks for all the world like she’s beaming them out into space or something, but the coordinate input terminal clearly has a map of Delos’ six worlds on it. Could she just be burying them in the code for The Raj or some such? Or is this a hint at another major fan theory, that all the Delos worlds are out in space somewhere, and she’s sending them to another place in the universe entirely? Because that makes a lot more sense than the idea that she’s just shooting their data out into the universe at random. Can’t Delos just resurrect all the hosts that entered the haven?