“It doesn’t look like anything to me.”
The first episode of the second season of Westworld kicked things off with a bang, and before we get too much further into it, let us just say the word SPOILERS, and if you haven’t seen it, we advise you to check it out immediately (the episode is available to stream on Now TV right now).
Still here? Okay, on we go.
From what we’ve attempted to put together, things pick up with Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) waking up on a beach two weeks after the events of the finale of the first season, which saw Ford (Anthony Hopkins) kick off the robot rebellion by having Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) kill him, leading to a full-on hunting season on all the remaining humans in the park.
As Bernard’s version of events flits back and forth between the ‘present’ of attempting to figure out what happened two weeks later with the security team, and the ‘past’ of attempting to survive the first night of the rebellion when he is forced to team up with Charlotte (Tessa Thompson) to find a suitable hiding place, an interesting conversation comes up.
Charlotte reveals that Peter Abernathy (Louis Lerthum), Dolores’ father, is the key to their survival and escape from the park, and Delos, the company that owns the park, won’t come to rescue them until they find him, for reasons we haven’t been made privy to yet.
In a recent interview, Jeffrey Wright told Esquire that the pilot episode from the first season was already laying the groundwork for what was to come in this second season:
“In going back, I discovered that there are some flashing neon breadcrumbs that had been invisible to my eye in the the first reading, performing, and watching of the episode. In fact, there’s a scene, which I think may be the first scene that we shot for the pilot, that speaks to the overarching scene of Season Two. And I looked at that and was like, These clever bastards.”
If you go back to that pilot episode, we see Bernard and Ford questioning Peter, who then tells Ford that “You don’t know where you are, do you? You’re in a prison of your own sins”, and we also see Bernard whispering something into Peter’s ear.
From that, there are now three prevailing theories as to what Wright has meant by those ‘big neon clues’:
1. Do you see that scar up there on Bernard’s head? Well, that isn’t there for the rest of Season One, and also isn’t there for the scenes when Bernard wakes up on the beach, but it is there for the scenes immediately following the robot rebellion and the killing of Ford. This potentially means that there are multiple Bernards, which was made even more likely to be true when someone spotted this blink-and-you’ll-miss it frame from the last trailer:
2. In the opening scene of the first episode of the second season, we see Bernard waking up, and then being questioned by Dolores about his dreams, which is the exact opposite of what we’re used to seeing, which usually involves the operators questioning the hosts. This may mean that several of the scenes we’re seeing in Season Two are actually taking place before anything we watched in Season One.
3. And finally, that scar on Bernard’s head, that appears and re-appears, and that jab that Peter makes at Ford, could be hinting that Ford himself was a host for the majority of what we were shown in Season One, which could mean that Anthony Hopkins’ one-and-done season promise is potentially going to be broken quite soon.
While the audience was ahead of the curve for Season One’s twist of the two timelines revelation, it does seem that while Season Two initially appeared to be a lot more streamlined, there could potentially be a much-more-difficult to anticipate curve-ball on the way.
See how much more you can figure out from the preview of what is to come next for the rest of the season in the trailer below.
Or at the very least, check out Maeve (Thandie Newton) going full Kill Bill…
Clip via HBO
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