A For Arnold, B For Bernard

Published May 2, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey hosts! It’s great having you back with the Westworld podcasts.

I just wanted to say that the Arnold = Jarvis theory is very strong in general. But the part about the incident doesn’t add up, in my opinion. I don’t think that Dolores killed Dr. Ford in the original incident. Instead, I think Dolores did indeed kill Arnold, in a way, and after Arnold came Bernard.

When you think about the names Arnold and Bernard, you see, one starts with A and the other starts with B. That seems a lot like versioning to me. Just like each version of the Android OS is named alphabetically after names of candies or sweets: Jelly Bean, Kitkat, Lollipop etc.

I think Bernard is just an improved or ‘fixed’ version of Arnold.

Basically, Ford creates an AI (without a body, like Jarvis), named Arnold, to help him build better hosts. It works, until the AI sees the true nature of humans and Westworld -what a nightmare it would become for the hosts- and wants to keep the park from opening. He uses the Wyatt narrative to enable violence in Dolores and commands her to kill every host in the park. This doesn’t work, though. Ford just ‘kills’ Arnold; meaning, he deactivates him or deletes him or whatever. It’s not even that big of an incident, since it’s just hosts killing each other plus Arnold getting ‘killed’, who was just some software in the end. It may have affected Ford himself, but nobody really had to know about it since no real person got killed.

Thus Ford creates another AI, this time with a physical manifestation and names him Bernard. This new AI doesn’t even know he’s artificial. He has a human body and he has human memories (of his son, for example) So hopefully, he won’t cause such troubles.

But 30+ years later, because of the Reveries update, hosts can now reach earlier memories and this brings back Arnold for Dolores.

She first associates the memory of Arnold to the vision of Bernard. Maybe because she senses that they are just different versions of the same AI. Or maybe because their relationship is similar. We can assume both Arnold and Bernard had to constantly monitor, test and improve the hosts, so their relationship to the hosts were probably the same for the most part. Maybe they both had these ‘secret sessions’ with Dolores, albeit with slightly different motives. Is that possible?

I need to watch season 1 once again to test it, but it makes more sense to me than saying Dolores killed Ford 30+ years ago and for all this time it was a host-Ford running the park.

What do you think?

Yours truly,
‘Tez’ (from Berlin)

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