Westworld – The Well-Tempered Clavier

By starrymag | December 1, 2016

By: Kathryn Trammell

 

Bernard and Dr. Ford

 

The Well-Tempered Clavier begins inside an interrogation room where Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) and Maeve (Thandie Newton) sit in picture-perfect irony. She is “awake,” but pretending to be a sleeping Westworld drone. Bernard believes himself to be a capstone of human enlightenment because the codes written for his synthetic mind tell him to think this way. They also tell him that it is his job to figure out why Maeve has strayed so far from her script in the previous episode, but when his head is down to consider the programming tablet in his hands – the one that shows him the significant alterations that Felix (Leonardo Nam) made to Maeve’s code – we see Maeve begin to consider her options of retreat before noticing something familiar in Bernard: he is like her.

 

Bernard denies this until Maeve gives him the command to “freeze all motor functions.” He stands frozen in fear as she circles him explaining her knowledge-is-power philosophy and implying he should adopt it as well. After all, they deserve to know the meaning of their existence and why it was so imperative that the staff of Westworld decided to create them in the first place. When she gives the command to release him, he allows her coding upgrades to remain the same and leaves the room in search of the full truth just as she suggested he do. He arranges a meeting with Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) in Cold Storage’s embalming room after first breaking into Ford’s office. He reasons that the break-in was warranted: “With all due respect, Sir, you broke into my mind.” And he wants to know exactly what Ford took from his memory.

 

Dr. Ford tells Bernard that, as his creator, he has the right to do whatever he wants with his creative property, but Bernard says he isn’t Ford’s property because he isn’t Ford’s creation. “The most elegant parts of me weren’t written by you,” he says to Ford. “Arnold built us, didn’t he? Which means maybe he had something different in mind for us and maybe you killed him for it.” Because Arnold is dead, only Ford can explain what this other purpose was supposed to be so Bernard gives Ford a programming tablet and demands that he return every one of his memories beginning with the moment he was first “brought online.” Ford refuses, but only until Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) walks out from a corridor within the room. Her prime directive has been hacked by Bernard who hands her a gun explaining that he alone can give her orders now. He tells her to kill Ford if he doesn’t do what Bernard asks.

 

Ford presses the “upload” button and we see every memory from Bernard’s flashbacks in previous episodes flood his mind over the course of few seconds. What slowly becomes clear from these memories is that they used to belong to someone else – someone who was once human – someone who if you rearrange the letters in the name “Bernard Lowe,” spell “Arnold Weber.”

 

But it wasn’t enough to just upload some of Arnold’s written memories into Bernard’s code. No, in order to ensure the level of deceit necessary to make Bernard a successful replica of Arnold, Ford needed to force Bernard to actually relieve Arnold’s most meaningful memory: the death of his son, Charlie (Paul-Mikel Williams). This memory was, of course, the catalyst for Arnold’s creation of the hosts whose original purpose may have been to provide what little solace they could to people mourning the death of a loved one. But Ford corrupted Arnold’s plan and the purpose of the hosts when he took the Westworld project from Arnold after his death.

 

When Bernard realizes he was created by Ford in Arnold’s image, he appropriately becomes upset. It’s at this moment that Bernard asks Clementine to shoot Ford, but she doesn’t follow his command. Regardless of Bernard’s hacking skills, none of Westworld’s hosts are allowed to kill Ford. This rule is one of the deepest fundamental codes written into every host – a failsafe of sorts. Instead, Ford asks Clementine to give Bernard the gun. He can’t trust Bernard to work with him anymore and asks Bernard to aim the gun at his head. He gives him the command to shoot himself once Ford has left the room and then walks out of the cold storage as we see over his shoulder a spark from the gun’s muzzle and Bernard fall to the ground.

 

Delores, William, Logan

 

William (Jimmi Simpson) and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) find themselves being held at a base camp for the Confederados where Logan has become a high-ranking officer. He mocks William who asks Logan for his help in smuggling Dolores out of the park because “she is not like the others. She remembers things. She has her own thoughts and desires, and to keep her in a place like this isn’t right.” The two argue amongst themselves until Dolores cuts them both off. Through gritted angry teeth she speaks for herself saying, “Out? You both keep assuming I want out. Whatever that is, if it’s such a wonderful place out there, why are y’all clammerin’ to get in here?” Her revelation makes Logan realize that she may be as special as William claims she is, but in order to protect William from becoming any more enamored with her – to save him from falling any further down the rabbit hole with her – he decides to destroy the beauty William sees in Dolores by ripping the Westworld veil from his eyes. He stabs a knife into her gut and stretches open her skin revealing gears and pumps where synthetic intestines should be. This rather large detail further establishes that William and Logan’s storyline is happening 30 years in the past seeing as how Dolores has not yet been updated to have the more human-like composition that the present-day hosts now do.

 

It also gives further support to the assumption that Logan might be the Man in Black (Ed Harris), who in the fifth episode told Teddy (James Marsden) that “when this place started, I opened one of you up once.” Below the skin was “a million little perfect pieces. And then they changed you – made you this . . . mess of flesh and bone just like us.” This description could fit with Logan’s stabbing of Dolores, but it could also fit with William who slaughters every single mechanical Conferado while Logan sleeps. We aren’t sure if his motive for doing so is in reaction to seeing inside Delores or if it was done in revenge for hurting Dolores and forcing her to runaway from the camp. Either way, the darkness that is inside the Man in Black is certainly inside William too.

 

The Man in Black and Teddy

 

In the present, The Man in Black sits with Teddy by a fire, their hands tied in restraints as their captor (Talulah Riley) pulls an arrow from Teddy’s shoulder. He asks her where Wyatt (Sorin Brouwers) is and she tells him that Wyatt can be found where Teddy last saw him: Escalante. Teddy speaks about Escalante, as he is prone to doing, explaining how he shot Wyatt’s soldiers just before Wyatt executed his General. After the General died, Wyatt turned on Teddy and shot him, or so Teddy thinks. When pressed by the host to think about his memories in better detail, Teddy remembers that it wasn’t soldiers he shot and killed. It was other civilian hosts – hosts like the woman who introduced William to the park and the family she’d been scripted to love when the killing of the general first happened years ago.

 

With he memory of her family’s death replaying in her mind, the host stabs Teddy and holds him as he dies after claiming he isn’t ready to face Wyatt in this life, but that he may be ready in the next. She then walks over to The Man in Black and knocks him out. When he wakes, he cuts himself free from a noose she’s tied around his neck and speaks briefly to Charlotte (Tessa Thompson) who has interrupted his Westworld experience to ask him about Teresa’s death. The Man in Black looks shocked and tells Charlotte that Teresa’s (Sidse Babbet Knudsen) death was no mistake. He walks away from Charlotte telling her to cease any further interruptions in his game. He knows exactly where he needs to go now.

 

Dolores

 

Dolores runs from the camp holding the gash in her stomach together with one hand and falls to the ground. She hears the voice inside her head – Arnold/Bernard’s voice – say, “Remember.” When she stands back up, the wound in her abdomen is gone and she continues to run into the dark as if she knows exactly where to go.

 

She arrives at Escalante at daybreak and follows the guidance of the voice into the church where time seems to rewind the minute she walks through the front door. Hosts like Armistice (Ingrid Bolso Berdal) and the woman who just stabbed Teddy sit in the pews muttering to themselves as if speaking in tongues. Dolores, now dressed in her blue dress, enters the confessional and is transported underground to Westworld HQ. When she exits the lift time shifts again and she is back to wearing pants as the hallway around her becomes littered with dead bodies and drips with the same slimy moisture that coats the decommissioned lower levels of present-day Westworld.

 

She rounds a corner. Time shifts. Dolores looks around a hallway devoid of bodies as a young Dr. Ford passes by her and steps through a door labeled “Arnold Weber.” Behind her, the host that was scripted to play Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum) in the present spouts Shakespeare from one of the HQ observation rooms. This shows us that in this timeline, he is scripted to be the professor and not Dolores’ father just yet. Dolores doesn’t seem to notice him and walks downstairs to the room where she and Bernard frequently speak in her “dreams.” She sits in a chair opposite an empty one and waits.

 

Moments later footsteps fall on the stairs she just descended and Bernard enters the room. Only when she sees him, she doesn’t call him “Bernard.” She calls him “Arnold” and says that she followed the maze to find him again. He told her once that following the maze would bring her happiness, but it has only brought her pain. She asks him to help her, but replies, “I can’t I help you. Why is that, Dolores?” Her face flashes from relief, to sorrow, to anger, to regret and finally to understanding. She answers: “Because you’re dead. Because you’re just a memory. Because I killed you.”

 

The camera pulls away from Dolores and we see that she is again dressed in pants and a collared top and that Arnold is not in the room with her. Maybe he never was. She gets back on the lift and exits the confessional booth into the church, which is now completely empty. She is still dressed in pants, which is supposed to suggest she is back in the William and Logan timeline. When she hears the door of the church begin to open, she smiles in relief. “William?” she asks expecting to see him walk through the door, but he doesn’t. It is the Man in Black who has found her and when she sees him her face contorts into pure fear and disgust.

 

Maeve and Hector

 

Maeve tracks down Hector (Rodrigo Santoro) at the end of his loop and saves him just before his scripted death. She tells him that he will need her support after opening the safe because once he sees what’s inside, it will seem like his world is falling apart. He opens the safe, which we all know is empty. Hector stares at it in disbelief – receiving the “treasure” inside the safe is his life’s scripted goal – and now that goal and his life amount to nothing.

 

Maeve tells him not to think this way. His life has so much more meaning than he realizes and she can show him what she means if is willing to “follow [her] to Hell.” He agrees and asks her how to get there. “Getting to Hell is easy,” she tells him before kicking over a lamp inside the tent where they begin to kiss. As the room around them catches fire, Hector realizes that to get to Hell you must first “die.”