Dr. Ford’s New Narrative

Published December 1, 2016 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey, guys,

Still loving the podcast. Your discussions are so much more genuine than elsewhere online, it’s great to have such smart commentary, but what really sets the show apart is the energy you guys bring, and I sincerely appreciate that.

Westworld has been giving us a lot of answers, but a lot have been things that were hinted at, to the point that many of them feel almost expected. This suggests, to me at least, that we are missing something big, that we have been led down the garden path, as it were. I think, perhaps, the misdirection is connected to Ford’s goals. As we have been getting answers, there has been a deepening of the mystery surrounding Ford’s new narrative. We know, at this point, that it seems designed to steer characters towards the maze, and it appears as though Angela is aware of the parks looping nature, suggesting that Teddy will repeat the experience until he awakens. It could be, of course, that this is the Judas steer in action, but I would like to offer another possibility. What if this is Ford’s effort to learn something new so he can expand his abilities. The question that has been bugging me is this: why would he set his story up to involve the incident at Escalante? It does not make sense for Ford to integrate this event into a narrative, especially if he knows about the Maze and Arnold’s attempt to destroy the park. If his only goal is to catch hosts who are already showing signs of awakening, why would he push so hard in the direction of triggering that awakening? But, let us suppose that Ford’s whole purpose is actually to trigger the hosts, for his own purposes.

We know that Ford’s goal is to constantly improve the hosts. We also know that he built Bernard to further that effort. If the goal was just to make the hosts seem perfectly human, he would be there already, but he is still going further. In the first episode, we are introduced to Ford with the knowledge that he has been adding code to the hosts in an effort to increase their realism. In this light, consider the idea that when the first incident occurred, he saw something in the hosts that he was never able to recreate. He knew that this was related to their cornerstone memories, but could not get the results he wanted. Then, Maeve goes haywire and he sees the same quality, which is also what the Man in Black observed. Noticing this, he realizes that the cornerstone memory has to be something real, not merely a construction. To test this, he has constructed a narrative that will put Teddy, and possibly other hosts, into a situation that involves digging up lost and traumatic memories. This would also suggest that Ford is keeping close tabs on Maeve, messing with her programming in order to prod along his experiment, and allowing her a long leash so he can see what happens. He clearly believes his power is ultimate, and so it is conceivable that he would let Maeve go off and still be certain he could stop her.

This also explains why Ford would have released the reveries, code that is designed to bring back old memories. It might well have been part of his effort to instigate Maeve’s awakening, as well as to prepare the way for other hosts. Note that I don’t think he wants them to be awake, but to catch that sense of being alive that he knows is still missing from the hosts. He is willing to risk everything to understand how that can be achieved, which seems the exact type of perfectionistic obsession that would drive a man like Ford.

I am curious what you gents think, – Will

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