I’m pretty sure William isn’t making it out of this season alive.
The newest episode of Westworld — “The Riddle of the Sphinx” — is everything fans could want. There’s gunfights, plot-twist, scary robots and Ed Harris being an absolute badass. Be at peace, my weary soul.
There’s no Dolores or Maeve in this edition (as we’re adding lots of additional characters to the show, as Westworld becomes more and more like Game of Thrones with each episode), but instead just a focus on William, Jeffrey and a familiar face we once thought dead.
Three pivotal flashback scenes pave the way for the episode’s climax, which we’re going to deal with first. James Delos (aka William’s father-in-law) wakes up in some sort of enclosed space. It’s a fully decorated room in which he has everything he could possibly need. He doesn’t seem too be surprised there, as there’s an overwhelming and alarming sense of calm to the whole place.
Delos gets a visitor — William. After sharing a drink, which William rejects because of the time of day but Delos happily accepts because “If you aim to cheat the devil, you owe him an offering,” the two get down to business.
William wants to establish some kind of baseline for what he’s calling “fidelity.” Delos, and we as the audience, don’t necessarily means what this means yet but something is also clearly long with Delos — he’s constantly shaking, just like Bernard did when he was malfunctioning.
You guessed it. He’s a robot.
Scene two: Now that we know Delos is some sort of robot, it makes sense why he does the exact same routine the next morning. William arrives again and the two carry out the exact same conversation that we witnessed in the first flashback.
At the end of the conversation, William smiles and reveals a piece of paper. It has everything Delos said written down on it, proving to him that they’ve achieved this “fidelity” that William wants so desperately to achieve.
Delos gets the message. The real James Delos died seven years ago and his consciousness has been transferred to this new, mechanical body. There’s a great moment here where Delos asks William if they were still in California, to which William responds, “If you can’t tell, does it matter?” — the exact same phrase that Angela asked him in season one.
Now that he knows what’s up, Delos is eager to get back out into the world and see his family again. Not so fast, says William. Delos is still glitching at times, meaning he’s got to stay in the lab. A lab where buried deep under Westworld, where he’s going to be held for years and years and years.
Scene three: James wakes up with the same routine. This time, though, something’s different. The voice that tells him he has a visitor is different than the one in the previous scenes. We soon realize why that’s the case when William — now the Ed Harris version — walks in.
That means Delos has been trapped in the lab for decades now. He’s been brought back 149 times, to be exact.
William basically came to visit just to rub it in Delos’ face. Given that they haven’t been able to crack the code to make him stop glitching, William regrets bringing him back altogether.
Delos is mad at that, but William goes full villain when he reveals that Delos’ wife is dead, his daughter (who William was, at once, married to) killed herself and his son Logan overdosed. He has no one left.
William leaves and Delos freaks out, but there’s nothing he can do. With an added touch of cruelty, William tells the technician to leave him alive and observe his degradation over the next few days, just to make Delos live with the memories for a little longer.
That’s cruel man. That’s really cruel.
This has already all gone down in the season two timeline, as the Man in Black/William is still on his mission to find Ford’s game.
He’s got a new idea on how to beat it too — team up with Major Craddock, who has been even more merciless and evil lately after he got screwed over by Dolores in the previous episode.
William finds Craddock holding up the town in which Lawrence’s — who, yes, is still along for the ride — family lives. Upon making his presence known, Lawrence and his family are instantly tied up and taken prisoner. William watches with some unease, but he figures it’s just the price he has to pay.
That price is weighing heavy on his soul the longer it goes on, though. Craddock is all but torturing Lawrence in front of his own kids. Eventually, William can’t take it — he changes his mind and guns down Craddock and his army. After freeing Lawrence and picking up a few more men, they continue their journey onward.
Not before Ford once again interjects, of course — this time through the mouth of one of Lawrence’s kids. Ford tells him that no good deed is going to save him from this upcoming game. He’s looking in the wrong places — focusing on the present instead of the past. Clearly, Ford is going to make William pay for his mistakes and those mistakes, I think, are going to revolve around Delos.
Then there’s Jeffrey in all of this, still out doing his own thing. We do get the return of another fan-favorite character from season one, one whom we all thought dead: Elsie (Shannon Woodward).
Turns out that she wasn’t really dead, just chained in a cave somewhere. Bernard stumbles upon her and, after some catching up and all, the two eventually come across a secret lab buried deep underneath Westworld (you can probably tell where this is going).
Bernard is still malfunctioning through all of this. After doing some investigating, Elsie learns that Bernard is experiencing memories left and right. Worse yet, he can’t be sure when all these memories take place. That means he’s seeing all kinds of flashbacks during reality, and he can’t make out which one is which.
Elsie is more concerned about this lab itself, as there are dead bodies and those big scary faceless robot things everywhere (she does have to shoot one of them, and it was terrifying). Eventually, they uncover the truth: it’s a lab that’s putting human consciousness into robots.
Which is why it makes perfect sense that they find Delos hiding in a room in the back, still sticking to his routine schedule.
Upon seeing new faces, Delos snaps. He grabs a shard of glass and tries to kill them, but Bernard and Elsie are able to escape and wind up torching the entire place. Now they know William’s secret — Westworld really is a bad place after all.
Bernard still has some secrets of his own. As they’re leaving, he comes across one of these floating memories that reveals something pretty major: he was the one who killed everyone in the room. He chooses not to tell Elsie (which is ironic, because she made him promise no more lies right before the flashback hits) and the two continue forward.
The episode ends with William again. He and Lawrence are riding out into the sunset when another figure appears. Upon approach, we realize it’s Grace — whose real name is actually Emily. And what does she say when seeing William?
“Hi, dad.”
Oh, my. Looks like William’s daughter inherited all of his badass skills and is about to clean house in Westworld. I still don’t think William is going to survive Ford’s game, but the addition of Emily just adds another complex component to it all.
Tune in to HBO tonight for the next episode of Westworld, and check out our other Westworld recaps by clicking here!