Westworld – Season 2 Post-Credits Scene

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It’s Ken L. with email #2.

Near the end of the episode, you guys called out the post-credits scene as a drawback to Season 2. I’d like to make the case for why it actually enhances the Man in Black’s story in Season 2 and sets up some potential great plots for Season 3 and beyond.

When I first watched the Season 2 finale, I actually missed the post-credits scene. When I saw William lying on the beach for extraction by the Delos team, thinking that was the end of his story, I was PISSED. We followed William through the park all season, learned about his tragic family life, watched him devolve into paranoia, murder his own daughter, and finally get his reckoning from Dolores all for what? A failed attempt to get to the forge? We go through all that – investing ourselves in his character – so he can ultimately archive nothing? That’s unsatisfying as hell. The post-credits scene offers some purpose to William’s failure.

Lisa Joy has told us exactly what’s going on in the post-credits scene. What we saw in Season 2 happened in real life to a human William. The post-credits scene takes place in the “far, far future” and is meant to show that at some point, a Hybrid-Host version of William (like Daddy Delos) is being run through the events of Season 2 as a test for fidelity “or perhaps a deviation.” All of this, including the quoted language about a deviation, is directly laid out in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter.

Let’s focus on that part about a deviation – why would anyone running a test on all Hybrid want to see a deviation? Isn’t the whole point of the fidelity test to make sure that the Human Red Marble works in a physical body DOESN’T break down and, thus, deviate from the baseline human consciousness placed into the body? Well, at first, sure – but we’re in the far, far future in the post-credits scene and William tells the final version of Daddy Delos that the team is maybe only a few years from solving the problem.

I posit that by the time of the post-credits scene, someone (Delos, Bernard, whoever) has successfully mastered the Hybrid technology, allowing human consciousness to be placed into a host body. We no longer need fidelity testing. William is being tested for a deviation – to see if he can re-live the events of Season 2 without killing Emily, to disprove Forge-Logan’s contention that humans always act by their code, to prove that a system can’t tell William who he is. The post scene with Host Emily is a final conversation after yet another of many failed loops.

This raises two questions for future seasons. 1. Does William ever succeed in deviating? 2. Who put William in the loop? I don’t think we’ll get an answer to question 1 this season, but I think we may learn who is testing William. I see two possible options.

1. William is testing himself. Unable to live with his choices, he decides he needs to prove that he can change by subjecting himself to his own technology that he hates so desperately. He self-imposes the hell he put Daddy Delos through so that he can “appeal his verdict” and is content knowing that the only version of himself that will ever escape from the loop is the one that rights his past wrongs.

2. The Hosts are testing William. Perhaps in an attempt to stop Dolores from destroying humanity, Bernard proposes that he can prove that humans can defy their code and change for the better like Hosts can – not unlike how Arnold tried to prove to Ford that Hosts can become conscious like Humans were. Dolores accepts his challenge – on the condition that she pick the test subject. She picks William, the worst example of humanity she could find.

Thoughts?

Ken L.

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