The twists, turns, unclear timelines, hushed melodramatic voices, and presence of so much dust in Westworld Season 2 has had me feeling like I am a kidnapped sorority pledge, blindfolded and thrown into the back of Ashlynn’s Jeep Renegade and driven around campus 30 times until I am so disoriented that I’m heaving and weeping even though Britnee and Ashlynn said it was supposed to “the most fun time ever” which I will “remember for the rest of my life.” (“I’m coming, I’m coming!” -Spoilers) Sunday evening’s one-and-one-half-hour finale saw our season’s heroes converge at the Valley Beyond (where we knew they would one day converge), and it turned out basically everyone was kind of right about what they’d find there. Ghost Nation and Maeve’s one-time daughter get the eternal peace of “The Sublime,” a San Junipero-esque cyber-paradise that gets beamed to an unidentified location. Maeve (slay queen of the robotic bulls!) and her gang nobly sacrifice themselves on the battlefield (though it seems they’ll come back with the help of lab tech Felix and the beard guy), with Lee Sizemore finally getting to play one of his own parts. And, most radically, Dolores floods the Forge, gets brain-swapped by Bernard into a Charlotte Hale host body, and then the three of them eventually escape to the real world. Get ready for Season 3, Ex Machina 2: More Inscrutable Than Ever! In this week’s Westworld Conspiracy Corner, Deputy Editor Julianne Escobedo Shepherd and I break down the episode piece by piece, including the revelations about petite Hemsworth and the Man in Black. Please participate. My eggs are scrambled.
