There's a maze at the heart of Westworld, and we—like the show's characters—are stumbling toward its center. A few weeks ago, Lawrence's daughter warned "the maze isn't for you" to the mysterious and single-minded Gunslinger—and based on what we learn in this week's "Six Impossible Things," she might have been right. For the first time in the series, we hear someone else reference the maze that the Gunslinger so desperately seeks—but in Bernard Lowe's telling, it's the robots, not the humans, who are destined to navigate it. "The goal is to find the center of it," Bernard tells Dolores in the middle of one of their secret chats. "If you can do that… then maybe you can be free."
The line between the robotic hosts and the human guests just keeps getting thinner.
Is that the endgame of Westworld? A final test, in which a robot might gain freedom by escaping its pre-programmed loop and demonstrating its capacity to be more? If that's the case, Dolores—who, we should never forget, is the park’s oldest (and consequently most abused and experienced) model—seems to be on the right track. "I think there may be something wrong with this world. Something hiding underneath," hazards Dolores in her conversation with Bernard—a statement with implications both metaphorical and literal, since so much of Westworld is run from an underground control center immediately underneath the park.
Four episodes deep, it's still difficult to guess where all of this is going, because so many characters are playing their cards so close to their chests. Later in the episode, when Elsie feebly protests that the "glitches" plaguing the robots might actually be the spark of something like free will, Bernard immediately shuts her down. "The hosts don't imagine things," he chastises. "You do." But Bernard can't possibly believe that. If he does, why is he secretly spending so much time attempting to mold Dolores into something indistinguishable from a human?
Of course, the blurring of the lines between the humans and the machines is a two-way street. If the machines are capable of seeming (or even becoming) human, the actual humans are more predictable than they might like to believe. You can see it in the ongoing schism between William and Logan—two guests whose divergent interests in playing the white hat and the black hat seems embedded in their very DNA.
But it's not just morality that separates William and Logan; it's the fundamental nature of the way each man approaches the park. William is credulous, and deadly serious about every person or mission he encounters along the way. He might not literally believe that Westworld is real, but he's certainly treating it like it is. Logan, by contrast, takes pleasure in mocking and dismantling the artifice. When Logan blithely stabbed a host through the hand a few episodes ago, William responded with the shock and horror you'd expect from someone who just watched an innocent bystander get stabbed through the hand. Logan, practically yawning, responded with the petulant disinterest of a rich kid who isn't afraid to break a toy because he knows he still has so many more to choose from.
There’s a version of the same conflict running through this week's episode. William is gentle and slow in his courtship of Dolores; Logan, seeing a beautiful sex doll designed for the pleasure of the guests, threatens to have sex with her if William doesn’t pick up the pace. And after William snaps when his friend impulsively murders another host—"murder," to be fair, being a word that Logan would undoubtedly deem inapplicable to a robot—Logan, in turns, also snaps. "Evil?" he replies, incredulously. "It's a fucking game."
In principle, it's possible that the stakes at Westworld are just as high as you'd set for children on a playground: How much fun can you have before it's time to head back home? That's certainly the principle on which the vast majority of Westworld's employees seem to approach their work. When Logan suggests that Dolores' sudden appearance at their campsite might have been carefully engineered to loosen him up a little, William bristles. "I'm sure the people monitoring the controls are watching my every move," he says, rolling his eyes. "That's exactly what they’re doing," Logan replies.
And here's the trick: We already know Logan is right. When we were first introduced to the Gunslinger, he cut a mysterious and intimidating figure: dragging Dolores into a barn so he can rape her, or dragging a man to the top of a cliff so he can scalp him. But as we saw in the second episode, the Gunslinger hasn't bucked the conventions of the park at all. He's just playing the "game" in a totally different way, and the behind-the-scenes security team is watching his every move, opting not to intervene because he's not actually doing anything they're not prepared to handle.
Given his decades of experience as a Westworld devotee, the Gunslinger must know all of that by now. So what is he actually doing here? It's a stretch to describe the Gunslinger as likable, but he's clearly more complicated than he seems. The episode's most startling moment comes when a fellow guest nervously approaches the Gunslinger to thank him for starting a foundation that literally saved his sister's life. "One more word and I'll cut your throat, you understand?" the Gunslinger snarls back. "This is my fucking vacation." It's the first information we’ve been given about the Gunslinger's life outside of Westworld, but even that one tells us a lot: He's wealthy, he's famous, and he's philanthropic. In Westworld, he’s a merciless drifter; in the real world, he's Bill Gates.
And if the Gunslinger isn't actually a villain, what is he? A person throwing himself into the role of the villain, believing that all the violence he inflicts has no genuine, real-world consequences. "Choices. You tell yourself you've been at the mercy of mine because it spares you consideration of your own," says the Gunslinger to Lawrence, the robot he's been dragging around the park for the past few episodes. But the Gunslinger actually has the opposite problem: He obsessively considers all of his choices, refusing to acknowledge that his every experience actually comes due to the work and the whims of the people running the show. The big piece of information the Gunslinger works so hard to recover in this week's episode? The identity of Wyatt—a "fiction" (albeit "rooted in truth"), according to Dr. Ford—which was uploaded into Teddy's backstory just a single episode ago.
This week's episode is built around hammering home a simple concept: In the park, everything—no matter how dangerous or chaotic it seems—actually happens for a reason. It’s a lesson Dr. Ford forcefully imparts in the episode's most chilling moment, when he takes Theresa Cullen to the Westworld restaurant where she originally dined as a child, then casually brings the entire section of the park to a halt. "It's not a business venture. Not a theme park. But an entire world," he tells her as their robot waiter—suddenly frozen in time—pours blood-red wine into an overflowing glass. "We designed every inch of it. Every blade of grass. In here, we were gods. And you? Merely our guests."
The other half of the "we" in Dr. Ford's story is Arnold, his now-legendary (and now deceased) founding partner. And if we extrapolate Dr. Ford's monologue all the way to its logical conclusion, it leads to another important understanding: If the robots of Westworld have agency, it must be by design—perhaps a parting gift from Arnold, who treasured his creations so much more than the actual people around him.
And that, I suspect, is the root of the crisis looming on the horizon. According to Dr. Ford, the original design for Westworld hinged on a balance of storytelling: For every guest who pursued villainy, another would pursue hope. In practice, evil always won the day, and always at the robots' expense. Arnold—who seems to have consciously manufactured the glitch of free will that spreads, like a virus, from Abernathy to Dolores to Maeve to Hector—believed his creations could be more. He also presumably knew the horror that such a realization would undoubtedly awaken in them, and the violence that would inevitably ensue. Dr. Ford—if we take him at his word—aimed his sights a good deal lower, treating the robots as manufactured, malleable, and expendable cogs within the grander machine.
If you squint at Westworld the right way, you can see the truth in either perspective. But if you put aside the question of which founder was right and which was wrong, there’s another, bigger version of the question that lies at the foundation of Westworld: Which is the hero and which is the villain?
