Alright, let’s get right to it. After having a little bit of time to digest the climactic events of the finale, I think I liked what ‘Westworld’ managed to pull off in final episode of Season 2, though I honestly have no idea where they are going to go from here. However, that is not a bad thing – the show has managed to introduce enough new mysteries and intrigue and leave enough cliffhangers that I’m still excited for the Season 3, but do not feel like they failed to deliver on everything that was going on in Season 2.
Jumping right in, Maeve. Right as her jerk of a tech was about to slice her neck open, she managed to raise the dead Hosts around her to attack the man and kill him instead. She then uses her mind control to have the Hosts use the tech tools to heal her, only question being what took her so long to do this in the first place.
As suspected the rest of her crew arrive, find Lee who informs them he was only trying to save Maeve while sniveling on the ground, and then sit back and watch as Maeve orchestrates her own escape using some robotic bulls to tear through the QA members on that floor. Reunited, the group heads for the Valley Beyond/ the Door, as Maeve knows that is where Ake is taking her daughter for safekeeping. They are close when QA catches up with them (they are in cars after all, while Maeve’s group is still on horseback), and they are pinned down close to their allies. Hektor decides to sacrifice himself to give them all time to escape, but he is pulled back by Lee, who says the speech Hektor was about to give was something he wrote anyway. Lee makes the sacrifice play, allowing Maeve and the others the time they needed to reach the Ghost Nation, who are escorting hundreds of hosts toward the Valley beyond. 
They cannot find Maeve’s daughter as she is near the head of the group, and look back to see Clementine approaching (as directed by Charlotte Hale), a carrier who leaves Host madness and zombie-like violence and destruction in her wake.
Clementine makes her way through the horde of Hosts who were waiting to head through the “Door” that Ake found, but is finally stopped by Maeve’s crew. Sadly, it is too late, almost all of the Hosts have gone mad and are killing each other, except for Team Maeve, the Ghost Nation members, and Maeve’s daughter and her new mother. Maeve finds her daughter just as Ake moves to save the child and her new mother, and Maeve makes a sacrifice play, saying goodbye to her daughter and then turning back to the violent mass. In full Neo style, holds up her hand to freeze everyone to allow Ake time to get her daughter (and the child’s new mother) through the door to safety.
Alas, QA wants all the Hosts dead, so they shoot and kill Maeve (in a very sad moment), and shoot Ake right before he makes it through the door, but fortunately for him, he does make it through, leaving his physical body behind as his mind gets to the safety of the Valley Beyond right before the door closes. Maeve, smiling in her final moments, sees her daughter is safe.
Now, for the heart of the story, Bernard. He makes it to the Forge first, followed closely by QA, who are shot down by Dolores and the MIB, who have temporarily joined forces to get to the Forge. 
Dolores is still reeling over the death of Teddy and the MIB over the death of Emily. After QA has been handled, Dolores greets Bernard and says they were basically meant to go in together, as we had recently learned that Dolores actually created Bernard in the Cradle, changing her directive from recreating Arnold exactly into creating something similar but its own self – thus “Bernard.” The MIB, feeling he no longer needs Dolores, tries to shoot her down but she proves resistance to bullet wounds (because he never shoots her in the head), and he ends up blowing off his own fingers when his gun, which had been messed with by Dolores when she inserted the broken bullet that had killed Teddy, blows up and knocks him down.
Dolores and Bernard leave the MIB and head inside, finding the Forge to be similar to the Cradle, and both entering with their minds to search for answers. They find evidence of the Delos experiments, and eventually find the consciousness of the Forge itself, taking the form of Logan, who tells them about the over 11,000 tests he ran to recreate Delos. He finishes by saying the real trick was to realize simplicity was the key, that each human was merely 10,247 lines of code, and was incapable of basically doing anything different besides living up to their own unique code of living. He brings them to a “library” with all the books of code for every human copied, allowing Dolores to read her fill so she can learn more about mankind, while telling Bernard he had visited the Forge many times and prepared a special world for the Hosts to escape to, the “Valley Beyond” which could only be reached by the digital door that was activated by 
Bernard’s presence in the Forge (what Ake and his people start going through on the surface).
Dolores is incensed, saying it was nothing more than another “gilded cage,” another false world given to them by Ford, and she would rather set free all the Hosts by killing them along with all the humans. She leaves the Forge, activates the flood system to destroy the facility (or so she thinks), and starts deleting all of the human copies, but she is stopped by Bernard, who does not want to see her kill all those Hosts and humans. He shoots her in the head, and leaves her there, unable to stop the flood but saving the data of all the human copies and the Hosts safely in the Forge in the Valley beyond.
Bernard heads upstairs to find Charlotte, QA and ELSIE!, who worked with Charlotte to end the robot uprising, and Bernard is horrified to find all the dead hosts, believing he failed to save anyone. Elsie takes him back to the Mesa, keeping his secret, but shuts him down while she goes to speak to Charlotte, though Bernard has a view of their conversation. Hale knows that Elsie will not keep quiet about the human mind copy project, especially after Elsie threatens her with that knowledge, with Hale revealing that Delos kept tabs on their employees’ profiles as well, so she already knows Elsie cannot be bought off or bribed.
So Hale shoots and kills Elsie (dammit) all while Bernard watches, having been told to sit still by Elsie. He breaks through his programming and tries to get Ford to appear, but discovers Ford’s code is truly gone. Yet somehow Ford appears regardless, and they work together to implement the final stages of the plan. We eventually find out that Bernard makes a new Host, an exact copy of Elsie, and puts Dolores’s mind sphere into it. Then Dolores kills Charlotte and takes her place, meaning that the “Charlotte” we saw in the 11 days later storyline has always been Dolores. Bernard then goes to the beach himself and plants himself there, right before realizes that Ford truly was gone, and this “Ford” was his true consciousness revealing itself. Sadly for him, he wipes his mind so neither Delos nor Dolores could use his information, a trick which only gets fully unscrambled and fixed later when Charlotte, Bernard and the Delos company go to the Forge to recover the human mind data. Bernard finally remembers everything, which triggers Dolores to act, killing all of the Delos team members, leaving only her and Bernard alive.
She says she changed her mind about killing the Hosts in the Valley and instead uses the Delos satellites to send them somewhere safe where they can live happily forever, throwing in Teddy’s mind right before she sends it off. 
She then kills Bernard, knowing the man was a liability, though it appears she took his memory sphere as well. She heads to the beach to leave the island, where she runs into Stubbs who hints that he knows she is truly Dolores, but is ok with it, because he has had directives from Ford himself all along, chief among them to protect the Hosts, and he was never on board with the Delos massacre of her people.
Dolores leaves Westworld with 5 memory spheres in her bag and makes it to the mainland where she finds Arnold’s house (the one he was working on in the flashbacks), and inside finds everything she needs to continue her rebellion, including machines to create more Host bodies for her friends. She recreates a Dolores body, as we later see Dolores and the Charlotte Hale host standing side-by-side, and brings Bernard back to life, claiming that they are both needed for Hosts to survive what is coming, but cryptically saying they will not be working together, or be friends, but will be working against each other, whatever that means. She leaves with the Charlotte Host, and Bernard dresses himself realizing he is indeed in the real world when he leaves the house and discovers the world beyond outside.
Lastly, we have the MIB, who was left behind outside the Forge. More crippled with injuries than ever, he makes it to the elevator to the Forge and oddly does not find Dolores and Bernard, but rather finds a copy of the “fidelity testing” apartment, being led there by another Host with Emily’s face, somewhat confirming that Emily was a Host all along. And as she begins to question William inside the apartment, one more thing becomes clear to the MIB and the audience. And it is confirmed when the Emily Host says they are testing for the MIB’s fidelity, and we now know for sure that he was a Host all along.
WORLD OF THEORIES:
- Who is in the Charlotte Host body once Dolores returns to her own? My money is on Angela.
Who are the 5 spheres Dolores had? We know one was Bernard, and I’m guessing another is Angela, but who else could be in there?- When did William die? Could it be when he attacked Maeve the first time and she shot him? Could “real” William still be alive somewhere?
- Will Maeve be saved next season by Felix and Sylvester bringing her back from the dead?
- Are we truly finished with the Hosts who made it to the Valley Beyond? Or will they still factor into the story next season?
It was an epic, 1.5 hour finale, and I’m very sad to see this season come to a close, as I have had a great time watching, theorizing, and reviewing this season. The show managed to hold onto, introduce, and continue to roll out new theories in a much more satisfactory way than in Season 1, and left a great cliffhanger for the season without feeling like they did not cover most of the seasonal mysteries in the finale. I am looking forward to seeing where they go with everything in Season 3, and to see what shape the narrative will be next season, or if they stick with their muddled timeline formula.
Thanks for reading, feel free to share your thoughts on the finale and the season in general in the comments below!
