Telegraph – Closed Captioning Errors And Arnold = Beach Bernard

Published May 31, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hello Rog/Big D/Gene/Kerri

To start with a couple of closed captioning notes, Katja Herbers (Gremily) confirmed that she said the word “gala” and not “gauntlet” in her dialogue with MIB. Also, HBO corrected the closed captioning during Elsie’s dialogue with Bernard (where it previously said “Hale”, it has now been corrected to “Elsie). I think those were two things that were blown out of proportion due to close captioning errors.

The topic that I wanted to discuss is, what I feel, the most intriguing thread of Season 2, and that’s the Arnold/Bernard/multiple Bernard theories. The entire “scar” search not withstanding, I think the past couple of episodes have helped focus in on what “Bernard” we’re seeing in the 2-week future timeline (Beach Bernard with Stubbs, Strand, etc.) In EP5, Elsie apparently fixed Bernard. She said so herself, and since that point we haven’t seen Bernard twitch. He was twitching mightily before encountering Elsie because he was never properly repaired after the self-inflicted gunshot wound from Season 1. Felix merely patched him up, and said so himself that it was a patch job at that time. So, if we assume that Elsie did in fact fix Bernard, and that we haven’t seen him twitch since that repair, one can conclude that Bernard should no longer twitch. However…in “Journey into Night”, we see Beach Bernard twitch his hand after Strand and his tech open up the Ghost Nation host in the field. But if this is indeed Bernard, and Bernard was fixed by Elsie, he shouldn’t be twitching.

Other than a broke host with injuries, where else have we seen a host twitch? We saw James Delos twitch when he was questioning his reality during the fidelity interviews with MIB. Based on the circumstantial evidence thus far, I believe that Beach Bernard is actually Arnold (in host form). Beach Bernard is confused, seems lost, and doesn’t seem to know what is going on. If this is Arnold, he would be confused, lost, and wouldn’t know what’s going on. With the revelation of the Arnold/Dolores fidelity interviews, I believe that Ford had been trying to duplicate Arnold all this time. In Season 1, he showed Bernard how Arnold puts his glasses on and gave Bernard the same cornerstone as Arnold. He was doing it in parallel with MIB’s attempts to duplicate James Delos (and probably unbeknownst to MIB). We see in the preview for the upcoming episode that Charlotte/Strand/Stubbs uncover a room with multiple decommissioned Bernards (the same scene that was shown in one of the early season 2 trailers). Those Bernards are the failed attempts by Ford to duplicate Arnold, but instead of burning the failed attempts, he keeps them in storage.

The one thing that has bugged me since Journey into Night is Bernard’s flashbacks that occur in the first minute of the episode. He flashes back to multiple memories. Some are from Season 1 when he finds out he’s a host and not a human. Some are from Season 2 (his encounter with Dolores at Fort Forlorn, his encounter with Peter, him shooting the machine gun in the Mesa)..but there’s one flashback that we see in that montage that is actually Arnold and Dolores in China. Why would Bernard have a flashback to an Arnold memory? When Arnold and Dolores were in China, and Arnold was showing her his house, that was 30+ years ago when Arnold and Ford were trying to secure funding for the park. Bernard didn’t exist then and should have no memory of this. This has always bugged me that Bernard would have an Arnold memory. But it makes sense if Beach Bernard is actually a host Arnold, and somehow during the events of Season 2, the switch was finally flipped to turn Arnold on within Bernard.

Shat on TV is the best Westworld podcast out there, keep up the great work, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks
Ash

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