How Are Wyatt’s Men Bulletproof?

Published February 5, 2017 · Updated July 6, 2022

Today I listened to your most recent Westworld podcast, the “Episode 11” Telegraph. Thanks for responding to two of my emails, and for your nice comments about them … now I’m about halfway to my 15 minutes of fame.

Three comments regarding other items discussed during the podcast:

Regarding the email from a Westworld viewer
who mentioned the Chekov Gun principle–that
a gun shown in Act I must be used by the end
of Act III–and who thus feels it was poor
writing to have shown a host being
mysteriously constructed yet not explain it
by the end of the season, my response is that
season one is more like Act I than Act III.
Act III is yet to come. I think the odds are
good that the identity of that host will be
revealed early in season two, and that once
it’s revealed it will be clear that revealing
it in season one would have been premature,
like a spoiler. There are other such “loose
ends” in season one, such as the fate of
Stubbs (last seen wrestling a Ghost Nation
warrior) the fate of Logan (last seen playing
Lady Godiva) and the whereabouts of Peter
Abernathy #1. (A.k.a. Wyatt?) Patient must
one be.
Regarding the ability of Wyatt’s men to shrug
off gunfire (and perhaps the same can be said
for Hector and Armistice, who easily
slaughtered teams of armed security guards in
episode 10), recall that Theresa’s Clementine
hoax established that a host can be adjusted
so it reads as human, and humans can’t
normally be seriously injured in Westworld.
(Maeve too may have been set to read as human
to facilitate Mainland Infiltration.) I’ll
guess that Hector and Armistice also had
their core programming modified to allow them
to kill humans, because otherwise the
security guards must be hosts and should be
their allies rather than their victims.
Finally, note that “Mainland Infiltration” is
not equivalent to “Maeve infiltrates the
mainland.” Her Escape narrative could be
about helping someone or something else to
infiltrate. She might never go there
herself. Similarly, Dolores’ “Wyatt”
narrative doesn’t imply Dolores is Wyatt; it
only implies she has a role to play in the
Wyatt story.