'Westworld' season two finale recap: 'The Passenger'

I stood up and yelled “Oh my God!!” three separate times.

With the season two finale entitled “The Passenger,” Westworld has once again come to a close. It’s 90 minutes long, exciting as hell and a whole lot goes down.

Here we go.

Not everything happens chronologically during “The Passenger” itself (classic Westworld, am I right?) but that’s how I’m going to go through the finale just for the sake of keeping timelines straight.

Dolores, now by herself, is continuing her journey to the valley beyond. She runs across the Man in Black, who’s still cutting his arm up to see if he’s human or not, and decides to bring him along just in case.

This idea, obviously, doesn’t end so well as the Man in Black tries to betray her the first chance he gets. Luckily for Dolores, she rigged the pistol he’s using and the gun backfires on him.

He’s not dead, but he also barely does anything else for the rest of the episode. We see an extraction team pick him up at the very end while he’s alive and breathing, but that pretty much does it for the Man in Black this season.

Dolores then meets up with Bernard, who’s also alone, and the two head down into the Westworld underbelly together.

While all this is going on, Maeve is making her comeback. She’s able to fix herself up, meet up with her old crew and begin their own journey to find her daughter — who also just so happens to be heading to the valley beyond.

There’s a pretty sweet moment where the whole gang is cornered by the Westworld employees and, instead of letting Hector be the sacrificial hero, Lee cuts off the speech that he technically wrote and goes in guns a’blazing. Of course, he doesn’t make it out alive (R.I.P. Lee), but it’s long enough for Maeve and crew to escape.

They soon arrive at the valley beyond, finding that literally, all the hosts have come to the place. They’re lead only be Akecheta, who’s promising all of them that they’re headed to a better world — even though no one really knows what that means.

Charlotte’s caught wind of this and she’s brought Clementine — now zombie Clementine — along with her. As soon as she appears, the hosts start attacking each other and give Maeve a whole new threat to worry about.

Luckily, Bernard and Dolores are making quick work in The Forge. They upload themselves to the place where all the guest’s data was being stored, only to find Logan waiting for them.

Okay, it’s not actually Logan himself — he’s still long dead. It’s just a virtual memory of Logan based on Delos’ memories. Fake Logan is now in charge of running The Forge and, more or less, tells them how to open the door to the valley beyond.

The valley beyond, it turns out, is an Eden that Ford designed for all the hosts. It can’t be seen by regular humans, as it literally requires the host to throw their body off a cliff as their minds enter a place where they can be whatever they want to be (even though all we actually see anyone do is stand in a green field).

Bernard is all for the idea, but Dolores instantly has doubts. She’s sick of the worlds that Ford has built for them. She’s ready to experience the real thing, even if it’s not as magical of a place as this new Eden might be.

The door, meanwhile, is still open for the time being and the hosts are flooding in. Clementine is shot down, and her daughter and Akechta make it in. Sadly though, Maeve isn’t so lucky. She and her crew stay behind to try and save as many hosts as they can (who are still battling each other) and wind up dead. At least, for the time being. Thandie Newton has already been confirmed for season three, so I’m pretty sure she’s coming back.

The dynamic duo is still having an argument about the valley beyond that eventually results in Bernard shooting Dolores in cold blood.

That was the first time I got up and yelled.

The door is shut and the fail-safe — which happens to be a flooding system — is activated. That’s why we saw all those dead bodies in the lake during the premiere episode: they were all the hosts whose minds have entered the valley beyond while their bodies had to stay put.

Bernard goes back to headquarters, not sure if he made the right choice. Elsie is back, and she’s dealing with her own morals too — she helped Charlotte shut everything down but now she’s wondering if that was such a good idea.

She realizes it wasn’t and decides to confront Charlotte about this. Charlotte pretends to listen for a hot second but then decides it would probably be easier if she didn’t have to deal with this. She pulls out a gun and, boom, down goes Elsie.

Cue the second yell.

Bernard, now horrified, saw all this play out from afar. He decides he’s had enough and wants to do something about it — so he summons Ford through his sub-conscious. Lucky for him, Ford is still there and willing to help.

That brings us to the other Bernard and Charlotte timeline. He, tripping on his memories, is being lead back into the Forge by Charlotte’s extraction crew as they’re trying to figure out what happened. Now that they’re inside, it looks like they’re going to shut down the whole valley beyond, meaning all the hosts inside it will die. Needless to say, things are pretty grim.

That’s where the twist comes in.

Bernard, with the help of Ford, takes Dolores’ consciousness after seeing Elsie killed and realizing the mistake he makes. He begins making a new host to upload that consciousness into — not one that looks like Dolores per-say, but one that looks like Charlotte.

New Charlotte, who is actually Dolores, then kills mean Charlotte. That means that the Charlotte we’ve been following in the future Bernard timeline has actually been Dolores the whole time. Bernard wiped his memory after this so that no one could possibly know this secret and went down to lay by in the ocean, which is where we see him wake up in episode one.

And that was the third yell.

So. New Charlotte/Dolores reveals herself and kills the extraction team that followed them into the forge in the most badass way possible. She’s changed her mind about Eden — kind of. She’s willing to let the hosts stay there, but she wants to bring them somewhere safer.

Somewhere far away from Westworld.

Since she can now disguise herself as Charlotte — who everyone still thinks is old, mean Charlotte and a normal human being — she can now leave the park and go to the real world to do this.

The only thing standing in her way is Bernard, who she promptly shoots and kills.

She heads back to the beach and gets ready to board a ship, stopping to have a really double-sided conversation with Stubbs before she leaves. Stubbs, pretty much, knows it’s Dolores but he’s too busy questioning his place in all of this so he decides not to do anything about it.

Felix and Sylvester, meanwhile, are left in charge of reviving any host who may not be beyond repair and, wouldn’t you know it, they look over to their right and see Maeve laying there. Told ya she’s not done in this show yet.

Neither is Bernard. After having a brief realization that it wasn’t Ford he was talking to earlier (deleting him from his code worked the first time), but himself projecting Ford so that he could do was necessary, he wakes up in a lab to find Dolores bringing him back online.

All those scenes we saw throughout the season in which Dolores was programming Bernard weren’t from before the season was set — they’re after. Dolores is recreating Bernard/Arnold from her memories once again, saying that it’s going to “take both of us if we’re to survive. You’ll try to stop me, both of us will probably die, but our kind will have endured.”

Dolores/Charlotte then leave the room, followed by Bernard. He exits the house to find they’re out of Westworld and in the mainland. They’ve made it.

AND GUESS WHAT, there’s a post-credit stinger too (which I didn’t realize for a good couple hours after I finished the episode and was looking things up online).

The Man in Black stumbles into the destroyed Forge facility, only to find Emily there waiting for him. He puts the two and two together instantly — he’s in the machine he created for Delos.

Emily tells him that the system is shut down, but still leads him to the room he kept Delos in for so long. She then begins testing him for fidelity, which causes a slow smile to creep up on his face — maybe he’s found immorality after all. Maybe he’s found a way to actually beat Ford’s game.

I'm still not sure if that’s what all of this actually means, as it’s another confusing ending for Westworld. We’re going to have to wait until the next season of HBO's Westworld to come out, which is hopefully right around the corner. Until then, we’ll just have to binge season two over and over again to try and figure out some of those secret meanings.

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