Westworld seasons 1 and 2 recap: Everything to remember – CNET

Evan Rachel Wood plays Dolores in Westworld.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

It's been nearly two years since season 2 of Westworldcame to a confusing end. That's two years to forget some of the finer details of a story that jumps backward and forward in time and explores big themes like free will. Instead of retracing the complex narratives via your detective's "crazy wall," catch up with our guide to seasons 1 and 2.

We'll go through the main characters' overall storylines, focusing on where they end up at the end of season 2. Once you're done here, you should be ready to watch season 3, premiering on March 15 on HBO, without getting lost in the maze.

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Dolores and Arnold (Jeffrey Wright) at Escalante.

Our Alice in Wonderland-looking robot host Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) spends this season wrestling with traumatic flashbacks she doesn't yet understand. She begins searching for Escalante, a town with a church that keeps surfacing in her memories. Finding it in the final episode, she remembers what took place there years ago: A massacre. And she carried it out.

Early in Westworld's creation, theme park co-founder Arnold Weber (Jeffrey Wright) realized his robot hosts were gaining sentience. Afraid of what the park guests might do to them, he installed the violent Wyatt personality into Dolores' drive with instructions to destroy the other hosts, then himself, then herself.

Yet despite this massacre, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkinshaving way too much fun playing the other founder of the park) revives Dolores and opens the park anyway. In Escalante for the second time, and having reached full consciousness and gained autonomy, Dolores shoots Ford. But little does she know this was Ford's plan all along: He wanted to play gamemaster and facilitate the robot uprising.

Jeffrey Wright plays Bernard, aka Arnold.

Bernard Lowe, the park's head programmer who helps create the hosts, is Ford's right-hand man. Unbeknownst to Bernard, he's an exact replica of Arnold, created by Ford to assist him following the real Arnold's death.

At the end of season 1, Bernard reels from a murder he's forced to commit under Ford's control. This leads him to the revelation he's really a host -- "Bernard Lowe" is an anagram of Arnold Weber. Bernard confronts Ford to find the truth of who he is, resolving to rebel against Ford and help release all the sentient hosts from the park.

Ed Harris plays William, aka the Man in Black.

En route to Escalante, Dolores encounters William (Jimmi Simpson), future collaborator with the Delos corporation, which runs Westworld operations. When William and Dolores fall in love, William's future brother-in-law Logan Delos (Ben Barnes) cuts Dolores open to remind William she's just a machine and his real fiancee is waiting back home. This triggers something dark in William and his transformation into the sadistic Man in Black begins.

Intent on finding more to Westworld as well as meaning to his own life, the Man in Black obsessively returns to the park over many years. He searches for the center of a fabled "maze" until Ford informs him the maze isn't for him, it's for the hosts. The maze is a representation of Arnold's theory that hosts can't reach full consciousness on a linear path.

Thandie Newton plays Maeve.

We first meet host Maeve (Thandie Newton) as the Madame of Sweetwater, but in an earlier narrative, she was a homesteader with a daughter. On his philosophical rampage, the Man in Black murdered her child, leaving Maeve so profoundly distraught Ford was forced to reassign her a new role.

But the memory has stuck, triggered by certain images and phrases. Whenever Maeve is killed by guests, sometimes by her own design, she wakes up in the underground lab used to restore damaged hosts. Maeve wades through her confused state with the help of a sympathetic technician named Felix Lutz (Leonardo Nam) who bumps up her intelligence to the point where she essentially has mind control over the other hosts. Despite using her new abilities to find a way out of the park, she's halted by yearning to reunite with her daughter.

Teddy (James Marsden) and Dolores.

Dolores, aka "the death-bringer," spends this season gathering a small army and blowing things up on her quest to take over the human world. She and her followers end up in the storied Valley Beyond, aka the Sublime. It's a virtual heaven created by Ford where the consciousnesses of hosts can live freely away from humans. The Valley Beyond is also the location of the Forge, a database which houses replicas of the minds of every guest to the park. This is part of the Delos corporation's experiments with human immortality. Dolores, being Dolores, wipes the guests' data.

She then escapes Westworld with a Delos evacuation team, but not before using a satellite uplink to transfer the hosts and the Sublime to a secret location. Inhabiting a replicant body of Delos executive Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), Dolores makes it to Arnold's home in the real world, along with Bernard. There, Dolores finds a machine that prints hosts, making herself a new body (the same as the Evan Rachel Wood Dolores we recognize) and implanting an unknown host into Charlotte's body.

The Man in Black needs a new hobby.

Logan's dad James Delos has been experimenting with housing his mind in a host's body to achieve immortality. To ease the transition, Delos' host body stays in a test tube apartment caged in glass. William interviews each host iteration of Delos, but Delos always fails the cognitive test and the body is incinerated. After the latest iteration of Delos fails, William abandons the project (read: lets the malfunctioning Delos wreak havoc).

All this has consequences, and William's daughter Emily (Katja Herbers) pays a visit to the park to confront her father about his secret project. Mistaking her for a host, William shoots her in cold blood. A grieving William, severely injured in clashes with Dolores and Maeve, is just about facing his death bed. But in a post-credits scene, he appears alive in the Forge, only it's the far future and he may or may not be a host. Joining him is none other than Emily, who also appears to have been replicated.

Maeve in Shogun World.

Maeve's journey to find her daughter arguably brings the best episode of season 2, where she explores her host-controlling powers in a world based on the Edo period of feudal Japan. Gathering a party of her own, Maeve eventually escapes Shogun World and reaches her old homestead, only there she discovers her daughter no longer knows who she is, now living with a different host as her mother.

Still, Maeve wishes only for her safety. Maeve and her party are caught up in a battle between the Ghost Nation or host "Indians" and the Delos security team on their way to the Valley Beyond, otherwise known as Eden. Sacrificing herself, Maeve sees her daughter safely through the Door to heaven. But there's still hope for Maeve's survival (we've already seen her in a season 3 trailer), as remaining scientists are tasked with salvaging bodies from the battleground.

Luke Hemsworth plays Stubbs.

What happened to the other characters at the end of season 2?

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Westworld seasons 1 and 2 recap: Everything to remember - CNET

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