Westworld did not disappoint – episode one recap

* spoilers ahead, proceed at your own risk *

Table of Contents

Wow, Westworld started off strong and ended with all the right questions.

The opening theme was a little slow for my taste but it was intricate and creepy with detail. Right from the start we’re given a look at what daily life is like in Westworld. This first episode follows Dolores through her daily routine, her repetitive meeting with Teddy and we get a chance to see how the human guests can disrupt those “story lines”. When we’re given our first meeting with Bernard, the head engineer, we are also given the causality of the how the show with unfold. A new update is being uploaded to the hosts and it’s discovered by Bernard that Dr. Ford has added code that connects behavior to “memory”. This code begins to malfunction on some of the hosts but initially begins to manifest as small behavioral glitches like impeded speech and paralysis. Management wants to pull out all affected hosts, a couple hundred, but to do that they need a diversion from the paying guest’s story lines. They facilitate a shoot out at the saloon. Dolores and Teddy are there for it but only because Dolores’s father, Peter, is experiencing what seems to be a glitch from the update. He had found a picture in the dirt of a woman in the modern, outside world, he can’t make heads or tails of it and it sets off the code error in his programming. He spends all night obsessing over it and in the morning he can’t articulate to Dolores what is wrong, he tells her that hell is empty and the demons are all here. He whispers one more thing to her which prompts her to go for the doctor in town and thus she ends up trapped in the staged shoot out. After the shoot out technicians come in to bring the affected hosts back to the lab for maintenance.

On a side note Ed Harris, who raped Dolores right off the bat, thinks there is more to Westworld then is being let on. While all this is going on in town, Ed Harris, who remains nameless as of yet in the show, is in the mountains killing the black jack dealer from the saloon. He cuts open the top of the guys skull to find a maze or a map tattooed on the underside of the skull.

Back at the lab Dr. Ford’s interview with Peter reveals how the code is effecting the hosts. Peter can recognize Dr. Ford and Bernard as the creators and inevitably the designers of the rape and violence that is often played out on Dolores. The memory code allows

Peter to access old programming from his previous role as a violent cannibal and he uses the access to his old character to make direct threats to Dr. Ford and Bernard. In another room Dolores is being interviewed about what she knows about her fathers condition. She seems to be relatively naive about what is wrong with him. She is asked what her father whispered to her before she went into town, she answers “these violent delights, have violent ends”. Her interviewer asks if she would ever lie to him, her response is no but in her last scene we can see that that might not be quite true. As she stands on the porch looking out on the world she slaps the fly that has landed on her neck.

We get our last look of Peter as he is being “put away” due to his obvious, and violent, behavioral glitch. It’s hard not feel sorry for him, and sad, with the amount of emotion on his face. Just as he’s walking into the tomb of other malfunctioning hosts Bernard touches him on the shoulder to whisper something in his ear.

So we’re left with a lot of questions and speculations.

I don’t think that’s the last of Peter we’ll see, he’s bound to do amazing – or terrible – things.

How did Ed Harris know there was a map tattooed on the inside of the dealers skull, and, who put it there?

Dolores’s slap at the fly signals that she knows more then she cares to let on (she’s the first host to react to a fly landing on their skin). So my questions for her are:

Did Peter say more to her?
Does she remember Peter after she’s reintegrated into Westworld?
As the oldest host in the park, what other roles is she going to be able to access memories from?

Lastly, what did Bernard say to Peter?