Well, this was the big one according to executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, especially with Lisa Joy directing the episode, you knew a lot was going to happen. Sadly, this was NOT the Shogun World episode, but that did not mean it did not deliver as the episode was jam packed full of big reveals, new mysteries, action, and the return of a fan-favorite character whose fate we have been wondering about since Season 1.
Jumping right in, I’ll start where the show did, with the story of James Delos. His mysterious illness (at the mercy of a disease he de-funded research for 15 years prior apparently) killed him shortly after he funded Westworld (Project ARGO), but not before the Delos/ Westworld/ ARGO folks are able to properly scan his mind into the computers, thus preparing him for a true consciousness transfer, which many fans have been theorizing has been the true point of the park all along. One problem, it does not seem to work correctly as we soon learn from William’s multiple visits to the various James Delos Host body incarnations (of which they tried 149 over the course of 20 something years). The human mind apparently does not take well to a Host body and William begins to think people are not meant to be immortal, no matter what Delos wanted. He eventually pulls the plug on the experiment leaving the final incarnation of Delos in his last Host body to rot in his “cell” without destroying the experiment, pointing out that the world is probably better without returning Delos to it as the man was a real “son-of-a-bitch.”
Back in the present, Bernard is dragged by Clementine to a small cave and left there with a rifle. While I thought it might be a bear cave, it is actually where we at last come upon Elsie, who was tied up and left there by Bernard last season (on Ford’s command) with nothing but water, some protein bars, and a bucket. She is pissed, and after Bernard frees her, wants to abandon him, but takes pity on him as he breaks down and she realizes he is just a Host and was under Ford’s command. After she does some patchwork repairs on his mind, he realizes (thanks to his memories flashing around) that there is a hidden facility in the cave where she could fix him up some more (and get him some more brain fluid – ZOMBIE BERNARD!), so they head inside Sector 12 and discover the remnants of a bloodbath, with dead lab techs and drones all over the place. One drone is still alive though, and Elsie quickly kills it, never having seen them before.
Elsie fixes Bernard for the moment, and they head into the deeper part of the sector and discover the room where the techs ran all the tests on James Delos. They discover the “man” (in his host body) is still inside his cell where William left him, his face sliced up and clearly a little more insane than ever. 
They brawl with him and manage to escape and then destroy Delos and the room, realizing that the man was both Host and human. The two of them connect the dots on what exactly the Delos Corporation was up to in Sector 12. As Elsie vows to shut it all down and survive, Bernard says he’ll help her but Elsie makes him promise never to hurt her again. He agrees right before he flashes back to a memory of himself in Sector 12 where he steals a control module on Ford’s orders and then commands all the drones to kill the lab techs, and then themselves, causing the bloody mayhem whose remnants are still in the room. As his mind returns to the present, we cannot help but wonder if he will truly be able to keep that promise to Elsie. (Continued on next page…)
