Occam’s Razor

Published May 30, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hello from the UK!

I’ve been listening to your Westworld podcasts since the beginning and I love all the random chats and tin-hat theories you come up with, but let’s step back a bit and consider the wood, not just the trees.

Taking into account all the twists, turns and reveals we’ve been through in S2, I’m beginning to think we’ve all fallen for the writers’ tricks – hook, line and sinker just like they want us to do. They want us to think it’s really complicated when it really isn’t at all. Let’s apply Occam’s Razor to what we know to see if it becomes clear.

In the story so far, there have been two major ‘tasks’ for the hosts to complete:

1. Finish the maze – which is to discover (or realise) they are hosts
2. Find ‘the door’ – which is to escape the park

Hosts who don’t complete the maze simply keep repeating their loops ad infinitum. Hosts who successfully finish the maze either:

1. ‘Freak out’ and are sent back to QA to be reset to their original loops to try again (a la daddy Delos)
2. Succeed and become ‘woke’ (a la Bernard who, obviously has passed the test that Delos couldn’t because he knows he’s a host but isn’t breaking down. Or is he?)

Woke hosts now have to try and find ‘the door’ – which is actually just another bigger, less constraining loop. This also has two potential outcomes:

1. They ‘lose it’ and end up going completely off the rails (a la Delores) and killing themselves.
2. They succeed and are able to escape the park entirely and function as ‘real’ people. (This is an assumption at this point but has to be the other option.)

Hosts who fail are reset with a ‘clean’ install from the CR4DL and have to start over from the beginning.

Hosts who succeed are out in the world or maybe have to go through another bigger, badder loop that we will see in S3.

Ok, characters. There are three types of characters in the park:

1. ‘Vanilla’ hosts – just robots and software, nothing special, not on the maze path
2. ‘Hybrid hosts’ – host bodies with implanted human personalities, on the maze path
3. Humans – real people with no s/w, mainly QA, staff and (some) guests

The main characters: Bernard, Ford, Delores, Maeve, MIB, etc. are all hybrid hosts on ‘find the door’ loops.

Random tin-hat theories:
— The scene showing Delores talking to Bernard was actually in the past when she was running fidelity tests on Arnold in Bernard’s body. This is because she was the first host and helped train some of the other hybrid hosts at some point. — The CR4DL is simply the storage system holding completely clean installs for all the hosts – including hybrid hosts. When a host loses it, it’s the ‘backup’ from the CR4DL that gets uploaded into the hosts. That’s why the CR4DL is the phase space – it’s the single master copy of everyone’s loops.

Would love to hear your thoughts. Keep up the great work!

//david
—
David Mulhall-Brown

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