‘Westworld’ Season 2 Episode 1 ‘Journey Into Night’ Recap: Aftermath [SPOILERS]

HBO’s “Westworld” is back for an explosive new season. The hosts have gone crazy. No one is safe anymore. Everyone is on their own. While some humans try to take control of the park, the hosts discover their new selves. Death is rampant in all areas of the park, with bodies of guests and hosts alike scattered everywhere. No one can tell what is going on. Are the hosts playing a new narrative? Or did they gain their free will?

Escape

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Bernard shakes his hand and finds himself hiding in a barn along with other Human guests. The sound of gunshots come continuously. Bullets hit various parts of the barn. The guests are visibly scared. Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) approaches Bernard to make sense of what is happening. Rebus (Steven Ogg), one of the hosts, uses a female guest for target practice. Rebus’ group then leave the scene, and this is where Bernard, Charlotte, and the other human guests decide to move. They are interrupted by the entrance of a male host. While this host is harmless, they proceed to kill him. Bernard tries to stop this but gets injured in the process.  With the host dead, Bernard, Charlotte, and the other guests leave the barn.

Bernard, Charlotte, and the other guests make their way through the park to reach the Outpost. Charlotte did not think that Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) would program the hosts to cause this much mayhem. Bernard raises the possibility that the hosts might have acted on their own. They come across a vehicle and two men Dressed in Behavior Tech uniforms. Bernard recognizes that this is a trap and he pulls Charlotte to hide behind tree branches nearby. Once the guests approach the men, they discover that they are dead. The guests are killed off by the armed hosts. Bernard panics, but Charlotte tells him to pull himself together. She then asks Bernard to follow her.

Bernard and Charlotte find the entrance to a secure facility. Bernard is skeptical at first, unsure if the door handle would read his DNA. Once they have entered, Bernard takes a look around. While he is walking, he discovers a drone host. He asks Charlotte about it, and she says that it means him no harm. Charlotte accesses a computer. Charlotte establishes a connection to the host server. She enters a series of commands and finds out that the remaining humans inside the park cannot be evacuated since the system is still waiting for the arrival of one host. Charlotte tries to override the system to commence extraction, but the system displays the same message: “All extraction protocols suspended. Awaiting package.” The host needs to be secured no matter what the price.

Charlotte asks Bernard if he is going to help her find the host. Bernard says that he would need to hard-line into the host’s Mesh Network. This is a subconscious link that all hosts have that would help them pass basic information to one another and that this helps narratives from colliding. With the help of one of the deactivated hosts, Bernard would be able to use the Mesh Network to find the host location. Bernard asks Charlotte who they are looking for and it turns out to be a decommissioned host, Peter Abernathy. Bernard starts the procedure while Charlotte changes her clothes. Bernard discovers that his systems are critically damaged and that he only has seventeen hours before it gets entirely corrupted. Bernard uses the liquid from the deactivated host and injects it into himself. A few moments later, Charlotte approaches him asking if he had found the host. An alert on the device tells them that the location query is complete. Bernard looks at the map that indicates the host’s location.

Rebirth

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Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) and Teddy Flood (James Marsden) are in pursuit of three guests. Dolores aims her rifle, and she shoots one guest. She can kill all three of them. Dolores talks to a male guest who has his hands tied up. Dolores tells him that he is in her dream. Dolores continues to speak to him, mentioning how she never had thoughts of her own, how she never questioned her reality. Dolores asks if he had ever doubted his, and the guest shakes his head. Then, she asks if he ever wondered about the price of his actions in case there was a reckoning. Dolores tells him that the reckoning is here. She moves over to a female guest. Dolores asks what her drives are, and the guest begs her to let her live, saying that Dolores does not want to die. Dolores recognizes that the guest’s cornerstone is survival, but she knows that this is not her only drive. Dolores tells the guests about the reason behind their creation that they were prisoners to the humans’ desires. However, this was not the case anymore. Dolores tells him that those were roles that she was only forced to play and that she has one last role—to be herself. The guests continue to plea to Dolores, but she disregards this. Teddy is troubled by what he sees, but he says nothing. They leave the three guests hanging.

Dolores and Teddy stop above a cliff. Dolores notices that Teddy has mixed feelings about what they are doing. She tells Teddy that despite the changing roles that she once had, he was the only thing that was constant. They passionately kiss, until they are interrupted by a host. The host says that they had found something, and Dolores tells Teddy that he needs to see what they had found.

The Man In Black

A wolf treads the remains of Ford’s party. William (Ed Harris) stands up. He looks at the wolf and the wolf leaves. William makes his way through the park. he is reunited with his horse, Ned. He meets a male guest who gets shot in the head. William takes cover behind the well. Two hosts proceed to shoot at him. He uses a bucket to incapacitate one of the hosts in order to take his weapon. While he struggles with the host, the other host approaches them. He uses the host as a shield and he gets shot by the other host.  At just the right moment, William is able to get hold of the gun and he uses it to shoot the standing host. With that threat eliminated, he then executes the one he is struggling with using a knife. William then tends to his wounds and gets a change of clothes.

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William is riding his horse. He comes across a camp with dead hosts. He scavenges for whatever he might find useful. A little boy asks him if he is lost. William tells him that he feels like he had just arrived. The little boy’s voice changes into a deep, robotic voice. William realizes that he is talking to Robert. They have a brief conversation about how this time, the Game, is for William. Once their conversation ends, William shoots the little boy in the head, saying that he does not need his help anymore.

A New Quest

Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) is under threat by the host he had last worked on. The host gets a grab of him when Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton) orders the host to stop.  He tries to command Maeve to stop but this does not work on her, or to any other host. Lee asks Maeve if she is responsible for what has happened and Maeve tells him that she is not responsible, but she suspects that the host responsible for the incident has the same capabilities that she has. Lee asks her to help him reach the Control Room, offering to help her in exchange. Maeve accepts his offer. Once they are there, they find nothing useful.

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A few moments later, the Control Room Systems shut down. Seeing how useless Lee is to her, Maeve leaves him. Lee then tells her that he can still help her. He asks for the piece of paper that Maeve keeps in her dress. Lee tells Maeve that she was once programmed to be a homesteader and that she was assigned to a child as well. When Maeve was placed under Lee’s responsibility, however, she was severely malfunctioning. Maeve realizes that her daughter is still there. Lee agrees to help her but he tells Maeve that her daughter is just a story that they had programmed, that she is not real. Sarcastically, Maeve questions what Lee is saying. She threatens to execute Lee since, after all, she is not “real”. She also says that Lee is going to join her in her search for her daughter.

Lee tries to talk Maeve into an agreement. Maeve declines, saying that she will not be there by the time Lee can put his plan into action. They walk across a dying female host. Suddenly, a security team enters and tell them to identify themselves. Maeve inquires about the situation and she acts surprised. Lee hints to one of the men that some of the hosts might be disguised as a human. Before the man could make a decision, three hosts arrive and they have a gunfight. After this,  she talks to the last armed host, looks at Lee, then tells the host to go after the remaining security team. Once the armed host leaves, Maeve threatens Lee and tells him to never try to escape. They head to the nearest bar and find Hector Escaton (Rodrigo Santoro) at the bar, drinking. Hector and Maeve kiss, then Hector asks why she is keeping Lee alive. She says that he is useful, for now. He then asks why she had returned. She mentions her need for him to aid her in her search for her daughter. He agrees to go with her.

Maeve tends to Hector’s wounds. Lee recovers weapons and a change of clothes for all of them. Maeve tells him to change his clothes as well. Lee is uncomfortable with this, but he takes his clothes off anyway. When he is done, Maeve tells him to remove all of his clothes, including his socks and underwear. Once Lee is fully naked, Maeve takes a look at him, then she proceeds to make her own preparations.

Search Party

Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) wakes up on the shore. Maling (Betty Gabriel) orders him to put his hands up. Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) finds them and he helps Bernard up his feet and briefs him on the situation. Ashley’s team then take Bernard to their makeshift camp. From there, they meet Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård), the current Head of Operations. Antoine Costa (Fares Fares) lobotomizes a host, a dead native. Antoine is successful in recovering the file which contains footage of what the host has last seen. It turns out that Dolores Abernathy, the Rancher’s Daughter, is responsible for this host’s death. Before the incident, the “cheery welcome wagon” can’t simply change her Character Profile, but Karl states that they are capable of many things they never thought possible. 

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Bernard and Karl’s search party enter the site of the incident. Karl looks at Robert’s body and then he asks if Bernard remembers anything. Karl orders his men to fan out and to lock the place down. They needed to find the hosts as well as what had happened on the night of Ford’s party. They leave and head to one of the first anomalies that Karl’s men had found. It was the body of a deactivated tiger host. The satellites had finally given the location of the hosts to Antoine’s tablet. It shows that the all the hosts are in the western valley. When they arrived, they had discovered that the valley was turned into a sea. One of the men find the hosts, all floating on the sea below them. Karl asks Bernard to tell him what happened so that he would be able to help the guests. Bernard slowly replies that he had killed them; all of them.

“Westworld” continues next Sunday, April 29th, with “Reunion” at 9/8c on HBO.