Westworld – The Stray

By starrymag | October 18, 2016

By: Kathryn Trammell

 

In this week’s episode, the Westworld staff continue to deal with issues surrounding a code update that has allowed some of the park’s hosts to retain memories from previous days and past lives (some even seem to be using their minds to speak to someone named “Arnold”). While some staff members like Elsie (Shannon Woodward) and Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) take these issues more seriously than others, characters like Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) and Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) believe them to be manageable. They are in charge, after all, and none of the hosts “feel a solitary thing that we haven’t told them to.”

 

Elsie and Stubbs

 

When the staff receive an alert that one the hosts has strayed from his “loop” – his scripted storyline – both Stubbs and Elsie head into the park to find him. They track his path first to the scene of a small campsite where a group of men discuss whose turn it is to build a fire. It seems that the only one among the men who can who can chop the wood to build a fire has gone missing. This prompts Elsie to explain to Stubbs that new restrictions have been imposed on the park’s hosts in response to last week’s accidental massacre in Sweetwater. So, this will be giving only certain hosts authorization to handle weapons, the axe being one of them. Because of that, this one particular narrative seems to have become stuck with no one able to chop wood to build a fire.

 

After freezing the campsite narrative in place, Elsie and Stubbs walk among the men and through their tents looking for clues as to where The Stray might have gone. They both stumble across a collection whittled figurines inside the tent that The Stray occupied and discover markings carved into each. The markings are a map of the constellation Orion and while Elsie continues to believe it might help lead them to The Stray, Stubbs continues to use surveillance images of his movements through the park to track him.

 

When Elsie takes a break from the hunt to relieve herself, she hears the sound of something moving around in the ravine below her. She climbs up to the edge of the ravine and shines her flashlight over the edge to discover The Stray stranded at the bottom. Elsie puts The Stray in sleep mode as Stubbs repels down into the ravine to retrieve him. Once on the ground, Stubbs takes a bone saw from his pack and begins to cut through the host’s neck in an attempt to decapitate him, but The Stray wakes up and knocks him out.

 

Elsie tries to put the host back in sleep mode but fails. He scales the wall of the ravine and reaches the top only to lift a boulder in the air and smash it over his own head. By the time Stubbs reaches the top of the ravine, Elsie is in shock and covered in the host’s blood. The host is also dead – at least until he is repaired again.

 

William and Logan

 

William (Jimmi Simpson) continues to be the archetypical “good guy” to Logan’s (Ben Barnes) “bad boy” choosing to spend his time in Westworld chasing stories of honor and courage where Logan would rather spend his drinking and having sex. The inspiration to play the game this way is promoted by saving (Angela Sarafyan) from near death when she gets caught in the cross hairs of gun battle. Maybe it’s the feeling of invincibility he gets from not dying or even bleeding when he shot, or maybe it’s the way Clementine offers to show him her appreciation for saving her life, but William is emboldened by it all. He rips a wanted poster off a wall ready to chase the next rush of adrenaline.

 

Teddy, Dolores, Bernard

 

Just as he did in the two previous episodes, Bernard meets with Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) to ask her if she’s told anyone about their conversations and just as she’s done before she tells him she hasn’t because he asked her not to. He tells her he has brought her a gift and when he hands it to her, we see that it is a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He tells her it was a story he used to read to his son and then asks her to read a passage from a specific page: “Dear, dear! How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night?”

 

Bernard asks Dolores if the passage makes her think of anything. We know it does because we’ve seen her waking up in the middle of the night to walk alone in a field – a field where a voice inside her head told her she would find a gun buried in the dirt. She only tells Bernard that it’s like all the other books she’s ever read, which have a similar theme of change. Bernard assumes she might like it because people “like to read about the things they want most and experience least.” He has no idea.

 

Dolores skips to the bottom of the page and continues to read from the page unprovoked, “I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’” She is no closer to answering this question when she wakes up the next morning to find the gun from the field wrapped in linen and tucked away in her drawer. It seems to be a mystery to her until the voice inside her mind asks her, “Do you remember?” making the memory of her rape by the Man in Black (Ed Harris) flood her thoughts. When the memory ends, Dolores puts the gun back in the drawer and closes it before heading into town for the day.

 

In Sweetwater, Teddy (James Marsden) shows Marti (Bojana Novakovic), a new guest, to a simple gun battle in which she kills two men with a shotgun. To celebrate her victory, he then takes Marti to the saloon where Clementine ushers her upstairs while he stays at the bar to speak to Maeve (Thandie Newton). Maeve has difficulty speaking to him because his faces conjures up memories from the last time she saw him after waking up during her recall. He was one of the hosts she saw piled atop each other and getting hosed off at the end of the end of the day just before two technicians injected her with a sedative.

 

Before she has time to ask him about it, he sees Dolores through window of the saloon, the way his story is scripted to, and follows her into the street where he picks up the tin of sweetened condensed milk that falls from her saddlebag. He escorts her home and they stop on the way in a nearby field where she first told him about the Judas Steer in the pilot episode. But today the script has changed and they don’t talk about cattle. Instead, Dolores asks him if they could ever leave town together. He says, “some day” making Dolores scoff at the word, which she translates to “never.” But Teddy isn’t awake yet – not like Dolores is – and his story won’t allow him to believe something outside of his script just yet. So, they both go to Dolores’ house as they’re scripted to. They hear the shotgun blasts as they’re scripted to. Dolores watches her family and Teddy die as she’s scripted to.

 

In a room inside Westworld’s staffing quarters, Dr. Ford speaks to Teddy about his backstory, which Ford says was never fully developed. He uploads a backstory into Teddy’s program that involves an antagonist named Wyatt (Sorin Brouwers). The new story gives him a slightly more dangerous edge than he’s had before and we see this edge the next day when he confronts a group of men who approach Dolores with the intent of using her the way guests do some hosts. The guests leave Dolores alone, choosing not to test Teddy.

 

On their way to Dolores’ house, they stop in the field not to watch cattle or to discuss their future, but to teach Dolores how to aim and shoot a gun. When the moment comes for her to squeeze the trigger, Dolores cannot physically do it proving she did not escape Westworld’s newly imposed limits on who can handle weapons.   It’s at this moment that the sheriff and Marti show up saying they have found a lead on Teddy’s nemesis, Wyatt, making Teddy’s newly scripted backstory fire up. He follows them without question, unknowingly leaving Dolores alone to deal with the bandits who will eventually invade her home later that night.

 

Teddy and his team track Wyatt to a tree where his victims have been strung up to die. Bullets are shot in their direction from above and they flee the area and into the woods to take cover. As night falls, the only two who remain are Teddy and Marti and when they come under attack by Wyatt’s men Teddy sends Marti off towards town offering to draw attention away from her. Wyatt’s men surround him and Teddy rapid fires a hail of bullets into each of them, but none go down implying they are either heavily armored or are all guests of the park.

 

In Dr. Ford’s office, Bernard asks about the possible likelihood that hosts could remember their pasts. He tells Bernard that when they began programming hosts with consciousness, one of two things happened: they began to hear their scripted stories as inner monologues inside their minds until their voices took over or the hosts believed the scripted stories inside their minds to be the voice of God turning them into lunatics. The name of the man who created the code for this synthetic consciousness was a man named “Arnold” and because his program failed at providing hosts with safe levels of consciousness, the code was removed from the Westworld program. Bernard speculates that it is Bernard’s code the hosts could be tapping into to awaken their own consciousness. Dr. Ford disagrees.

 

Bernard meets with Dolores one last time to discuss with her a mistake he thinks he’s made: that he should’ve restored her to her original settings instead of letting her programming go unchanged. Delores asks again if she done something wrong and Bernard says that she hasn’t. He explains that it’s only that she lives in an ugly world and he wants to be able to protect her from it by having the ability to erase from her memory all of the ugliness. He doesn’t say this to her exactly, but he does ask her if she rather be a version of herself that is able to question things or a version of herself that is safe. Dolores doesn’t understand. The only version of herself she wants to be is the version she has yet to find — “and when I discover who I am I’ll be free,” she says. Hearing her say this prompts Bernard to let Dolores go back to Westworld with her current programming intact. He wants to see who she becomes as well.

 

It turns out, the girl Dolores is and the girl she becomes is someone who can defy yet another code and when she returns back home later that night to her house being invaded by the bandits who kill her parents and plan to rape her, Dolores is not only able to aim a gun to defend herself she’s able to pull the trigger, too. She runs back to her house to defend her parents only to be shot in the stomach by one of the bandits. She bleeds, but only for an instant as time seems to repeat itself to the seconds prior to her being shot. She jumps on a horse and rides into the darkness dodging bullets as she goes. If a bullet strikes her, it does not affect her.

 

It isn’t until later that night while William and Logan are sitting by a fire in the woods that Dolores stumbles upon their camp and collapses into William’s arms.