A Westworld Spiral Timeline Theory

Published May 4, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey gents,

Here’s a thought I’ve had after listening to both the E1 and E2 deep dives. The theory centers on 2 foundations:

1. The show runners certainly love the idea of messing the the audience’s mind when it comes to the idea of time and place 2. It is uniquely human to be able create conscious life / procreate

Given the revelation last season that there was a past and a present timeline, the audience enters this season primed to look for clues to distinguish where on a basic, linear timeline things take place. However, my theory is that the timeline is a bit more complicated than that. I believe the audience is being purposefully misdirected with the clues that are given to help orient them on a the timeline season 1 seems to support (i.e. when someone is young, when someone is old, etc.). However, as stated previously, I believe though that the show runners are not done messing with the audience when it comes to our perception of time. In short, my theory is that a large reveal in this season will be that some things that were thought to have happened in the past actually happen much further down the timeline (and vice versa).

To that fact, I believe that the timeline has more of what an engineer or a designer like myself would call a spiral development feel. That is to say that while time moves forward (or upward in the direction of the spiral), events tend to repeat themselves. This is played out on the small scale in the way the park generally operates – people and storylines resetting and playing out again and again. On a broader scale though, I think we could be seeing this play out in the statement Westworld may be making about the future of humanity.

So, I believe that were are perhaps not seeing simply 2 generations of characters (humans characters and human-created AI characters), but possibly 3 or more generations of characters (human characters, human-created AI characters, and perhaps AI-created AI characters) and that we are being tricked into thinking we must label them in a binary fashion (human or AI, old or young, etc.). It might be foolish to think that just because a character is old that they come later on the timeline than the young version of that character since the young” version may be human-created AI or even AI-created AI. Furthermore, it may be foolish to think that what we classify as a purely AI character (e.g. Delores) might not have also existed once as a human (I believe that it is possible for us to have seen a human version of Delores in S2E2 – the one who stumbles upon Logan – but that’s a theory for another time).

Further complicating our ability to distinguish old from young and human from AI is that fact that the goal of all of these generations of characters is, in short, to create consciousness (what I believe to be the highest point on the consciousness pyramid). As stated in my second foundation of this theory, it is uniquely human to be able to procreate, both in terms of sexual procreation as well as the creation of artificial intelligence. But to be a conscious AI and know this differentiation is to still carry with you the burden of knowing that you are perhaps not truly real or human. Thus, I believe that the human-created AI (i.e. the hosts) will themselves return to the same point on the spiral that the humans did and try to create truly conscious beings (i.e. AI-created AI), and that this cycle will be doomed to repeat itself again and again and again.

Lastly, to that point, I believe it may be possible for the Bernard / Arnold that we see in the first scene of S2E1 sitting with Delores might actually be the consciousness of Delores (in a Bernard / Arnold body) herself trying to create consciousness in a new lifeform (one made in a very God-like manner in her own image). As such, this scene is not the past as we are lead to believe by how the show trained us to think in S1, but this may actually be a scene from the furthest point up the spiral that we have seen so far (i.e. the start of a new turn in the spiral).

Chad C

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