Westworld – Dissonance Theory

By starrymag | October 25, 2016

By: Kathryn Trammell

 

In the previous episode of Westworld, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) continued her steady descent into defiance when a programming limitation imposed on the park authorizing only specific hosts with the ability to use weapons seemed to not apply to her – or at least, her synthetic brain found a way to override it. We aren’t sure how many times she’s watched her parents die, but when she kills one of the men responsible for their deaths and rewinds time long enough to reverse being shot by another one of her parents’ attackers, we get the feeling she’ll do anything to prevent seeing them die ever again.

 

Dolores, William, and Logan

 

“Dissonance Theory” begins shortly after Dolores walks out of the forest. She is stunned by what she’s just seen and done and falls into the arms of an unsuspecting William (Jimmi Simpson), who has gone on a bounty hunt with his friend Logan (Ben Barnes) and a guide. Although she passes out at William’s camp inside the park, she is woken up inside one of the examination rooms where Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) begins questioning her yet again. As always, she believes herself to be in a dream when speaking to him, but when he asks her to limit her emotional affect while telling him what happened to her parents, she is able to keep the emotion only slightly hidden from her voice. Her eyes; however, continue to well with tears.

 

Bernard says to her that he can take away the pain that the death of her parents is causing her, but she asks him, “Why would I want that?” For Dolores, that pain she feels for them, the memory of their loss, is all she has left of them. Even if it hurts to carry that memory with her, Dolores isn’t the kind of person who would choose to give it up. What we can’t know for sure just yet is if whether or not Dolores was written to be this way or if this is this something she has become – something that has evolved to know that these are the memories that will keep her strong and keep her motivated in her desire to find the truth and possibly even her revenge.

 

Maybe it’s this uncertainty that has allowed the obvious errors within her code to go unreported for so long. There is an element of curiosity to what motivates Bernard and while he wants to see how far Dolores’ code will evolve while she is outside of her loop, we can’t help but think that the part of him that wants to help set her free has some ulterior motive. So, before he sends her back to the park to wake up at William’s camp, he tells her about the maze. That’s the same maze The Man in Black is searching for and tells her that if she can find its “center” then she can be free.

 

After the most recent incident with “the stray” in Episode Three, the Operations Team has decided to takeover all investigations that Programming is currently overseeing. Their first goal is to track down Dolores, who has strayed exceptionally far from her story. The longer she stays off track, the longer the end of her loop and her subsequent memory wipe will be delayed. So, someone is sent to investigate and possibly retrieve her. The investigator arrives just as Dolores rides into the same town where Lawrence’s family lives and when she sees Lawrence’s daughter (Izabella Alvarez) sitting by a fountain, she is instantly drawn to her. In the sand the girl has drawn a map, the same map we’ve seen on the scalp that The Man in Black (Ed Harris) carries with him. But when their conversation is interrupted by the investigator, the girl disappears as if she was never there in the first place.

 

The investigator asks Dolores if she is lost and if she’s supposed to be at the Abernathy Ranch. She tells him she won’t go back there because her father is dead. He grabs her arm with the intent to remove her with force, but she grabs his arm back and looks into his eyes with the kind of scorn that Shakespeare once warned people women were capable of.

 

Before either has the chance to make another move, William walks out of a store to let the investigator know that Dolores is not lost and that she is with him. Knowing there is little he can do to remove a host from the guest who is using her (or him) for fun within the park, the investigator leaves and Dolores continues on her path with William.

 

Later that night, when they stop to set up camp, William admits to being concerned about if whether or not he’s taken her from her too far from her “zone” as he calls it. The word confuses Dolores, whose programming (and perhaps a little bit of her own genius) allows her to attempt to relate to his concern by explaining a story about their ranch and what her father used to tell her when a steer would go missing. Her dad always comforted her with the fact that the steers would somehow find their way home, but it never occurred to her until now that they were only returning home on to be slaughtered.

 

Above her, the moon suddenly reminds Dolores of an exam light and like Maeve, she begins to remember being retrieved post-death by Westworld staff members. She also has flashes of images that seem to be located in a city that Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) is constructing for a new Westworld storyline, which would also imply that she is either a prophet or that she has access to Dr. Ford’s construction plans. The images and memory leave her shaken, but when William asks her if she’s okay she says she’s only shivering because of the cold.

 

The next morning, William, Logan and their guide find the ranch where their bounty is known to be hiding and storm the house on the property killing everyone except the bounty. Their guide wants to take him back to Sweetwater to claim the money and put him in jail, but the bounty says his relatives will pay twice the amount that the marshal is willing to offer. Hearing this, Logan quickly kills the guide, reasoning that he was robot just like Dolores. When William becomes upset over the guide’s senseless death, he calls Logan evil. But Logan says he is only playing the game and that he should begin playing it, too.

 

Dolores asks William what Logan means, but neither of them answer her.

 

The Man in Black, Lawrence, Armistice and Hector

 

The Man in Black continues on his journey with Lawrence (Clifton Collins Jr.) at his side to find the gate that leads to the maze. This time he is looking for a snake to give him his next clue and after killing a few literal snakes with no reward, he finally comes across a woman bathing in a lake who has a red snake tattoo winding up her back and over her right eye. It is the same woman we saw fighting alongside Hector (Rodrigo Santoro) before he and she were both shot in the pilot episode.

 

Her name is Armistice (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) and she too is on the hunt for something not yet specified, but The Man in Black decides to follow her hoping it is the next step in his journey to finding the gate. After Armistice receives information that the thing she’s looking for is being held inside a prison, The Man offers to retrieve it for her with the use of one pistol, one match and one man (Lawrence). She asks him why he is so willing to help her and he tells her about a man named Arnold who was able to die inside “the game” that he is trying to play. Being a Westworld host, she is not able to follow most of what he says about people like him not being able to die while inside the park, but he thinks that her tattoo is a key in his journey and hopes that if he gets what she wants, she will agree to help him “honor Arnold’s legacy.” She agrees.

 

Once inside the jail, The Man in Black quickly identifies Hector Escaton as one of the jail’s inhabitants and knows he is the thing, or the person rather, that Armistace wants. So, he breaks Hector out of jail and brings him back to her. Per their agreement, he asks Armistace about her tattoo. She tells him that when she seven, a group of men rode into her town and slaughtered every living thing in their sight. She escaped only because she covered herself in her mother’s blood and pretended to be dead.

 

She spent her life after that hunting down the men who killed her family and every time she killed them, she used their blood to color a segment of the snake that covers her back. The only segment that has yet to be filled in is the snake’s head, which is posed over her right eye as if it is ready to strike. The head is empty because she has yet to find the last man guilty of killing her family. That man is Wyatt – the same Wyatt that is the villain of Teddy’s new backstory.

 

From here, The Man in Black parts ways with Armistace and Hector, who go into Sweetwater to begin the end of their story’s loop. The Man and Lawrence soon find Teddy (James Marsden) strung up in a tree and left for dead. He asks The Man to end his suffering. Unfortunately, The Man in Black says to Teddy that suffering is what he is meant to do.

 

Maeve and Clementine

 

Maeve (Thandie Newton) and Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) stand by the bar discussing their past clients. Maeve becomes distracted by the sound of some men laughing at a poker table when suddenly her hearing becomes similar to that of an audio broadcast of astronauts preparing to launch inside a shuttle. When Clementine turns to ask Maeve if she’s okay, her voice is stripped down, small – the purest form of Angela Sarafyan’s voice without the player piano, the laughter of the men or any other sound to mar it. As Maeve focuses more intently on her face, she notices the corner of one of Clementine’s eyes fill with blood. The blood then runs in ribbons across Clementine’s forehead and tracing an outline of her bottom eyelid as her body becomes horizontal. It isn’t until the camera pulls back that we realize they are both now lying on the ground facing each other and that Clementine has been shot in the head. Seconds later, the man who shot Clementine shoots Maeve, too. But Maeve doesn’t die. She is awake when park staff members come into the saloon to retrieve the bodies of the dead hosts and she is awake when they attempt to repair the damage done to her abdomen where she was shot. Whether this is a memory or not, I am honestly not sure, because moments later Maeve is returned to the same spot beside the bar and begins all over again the same conversation with Clementine before the memory/attack ever happened.

 

Maeve goes home to check the skin over her stomach for any indication of a scar a bullet might make, but there is none. She also draws from her memory an image of the staff members who came to take her body from the saloon – people in white hazmat-looking suits with cylindrical red robot ear pieces – and decides to hide it under a loose floorboard inside her home. But when she lifts the floorboard to find a stack of drawings like the one she just made she begins to panic even more. The next day, Maeve watches a procession of indigenous people pass through Sweetwater. One of them, a little girl, drops a wooden figurine that looks like the people she’s been drawing. When she picks up the figurine and approaches the girl to ask her what it is, the little girl takes it from her and turns back around unable to communicate with her in English. Lucky for her, Hector soon shows up with Armistace and her men. Because she knows he used to live among the indigenous people, she takes him into the room with the safe to ask him a few questions. For each answer he gives her, she will give him a number to the safe’s combination. He agrees and for her first question Maeve holds up one of her drawings and asks Hector what it is. He tells her that the indigenous people call them “Shades” and that they are a part of their sacred folklore. When she next asks him what they do, Hector says that the native people believe they “walk between worlds . . . they were sent from hell to oversee our world.” She gives him the second number in the combination and then asks of him one more thing: to cut open her abdomen where she was shot just before one of the Shades came to retrieve her not-so-unconscious body. He cannot do it so she takes a swig of whiskey, sterilizes the edge of his blade with the cherry of her cigar and slices into her own skin before asking him to dig out the bullet she knows is still inside. When he does, when he pulls the slug from her stomach, he asks her what it means. She smiles and says, “That I’m not crazy after all and that none of this matters.”