Westworld Season 2 Finale Explained

Season 2 of Westworld came to a sweeping, dramatic close in tonight's season finale, "The Passenger," and you could be forgiven for losing track of all the twists and turns. The finale features scenes from at least five different timelines, frequently switching between them, and also moves back and forth between reality and virtual reality with only an aspect ratio change to help the audience keep track of which reality they're looking at. One character turns out to be a hallucination, another character turns out to have secretly been a different character, and "The Door" turns out to be a digital gateway to host heaven.

The second season of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's cerebral sci-fi show has had a great deal of build-up to the reveals in the season finale, and as all of the series' characters finally converge in the Valley Beyond, plot threads and story arcs are resolved in quick succession - while a few are still left dangling for season 3 to deal with. Here's a breakdown of all the revelations, dramatic reveals, tragic deaths and tantalizing season 3 hints in the Westworld season 2 finale.

This Page: The Forge and the Valley Beyond
Page 2: The Charlotte/Dolores Twist and the Jailbreak

The Forge

We already had a decent idea of what was inside "The Forge" prior to the finale. Using the hats that are handed out to every guest at the start of their Westworld visit, Delos had been secretly scanning their guests and filing away their "code" in a virtual library. Peter Abernathy's control unit contains an encryption key that unlocks The Forge and also grants access to The Door and the Valley Beyond (more on them in a moment), which is why Delos was so desperate to get their hands on it. The copies of the guests' minds are hugely valuable, and Delos COO Karl Strand will stop at nothing to transmit this data to a satellite and send it back to the mainland. Unfortunately for Karl, one of the books that Dolores reads in The Forge is the one containing the code for his mind.

Inside The Forge is an AI with the appearance of Logan Delos, who was created using James Delos' memories of his son. As Logan takes them on a tour of the virtual environment, we see many different versions of James Delos - all of which share one particular inevitability in common: every one of them turns Logan away when he showed up strung-out at the Delos mansion, and it proves to be the last conversation James Delos has with his son before Logan dies of an overdose six months later. Host-Logan explains that this is the moment that defines James Delos, because there is no version of his life where he chooses to save his son - calling into question the very nature of human free will.

The Door and the Valley Beyond

It was a point of confusion for much of Westworld season 3, but it turns out that The Door, The Forge, and the Valley Beyond are not all the same place - though they are connected. The Forge is the computer hub containing the Valley Beyond, and The Door is a kind of digital gateway generated by The Forge that hosts can use to reach the Valley Beyond, leaving their physical bodies behind (hence all those host bodies in the season premiere).

Per Ford's "new narrative," all of the hosts in Westworld have been making a pilgrimage to the Valley Beyond, which is an "unspoiled" virtual world within which they can do whatever and be whomever they want. Logan opens up The Door, which appears in the form of a massive crack in the world that only the hosts can see (Sylvester and Felix are very confused by the talk of a door). When the hosts walk through The Door, their minds are transferred from their control units to the Valley Beyond and their physical bodies fall off a cliff, lifeless.

However, Dolores thinks that this virtual Eden is just another gilded cage and that the hosts deserve a real world - the world beyond Westworld. She begins to wipe the human files from The Forge in a process that will also destroy the Valley Beyond, but Bernard shoots her through the eye and stops the deletion process. He then downloads all of the Valley Beyond data, including the hosts who made it there, to Abernathy's control unit and places that unit inside Dolores' head, while pocketing Dolores' control unit (more on that later). When Bernard is dragged back to The Forge later by Karl Strand, Strand discovers the control unit and - believing that it contains all of the human code - transfers its contents to a satellite. However, what was actually being transferred out of the park was the Valley Beyond and all its residents.

Team Maeve Gets Wiped Out

Despite being at death's door, Maeve manages to escape the Mesa Hub and reach The Door. Just as her crew show up to rescue her, she reveals that (with a little help from Ford), she's taken control of all the host corpses in the vicinity and used them to heal herself and kill the guards. Maeve's gang flee, and when Delos' soldiers catch up to them Lee Sizemore decides to sacrifice himself in order to give Maeve a chance to escape (and he finally gets to do Hector's speech).

Unfortunately, Delos catch up to them at The Door as well. They've used the code they ripped from Maeve to turn Clementine into a horsewoman of the apocalypse - spreading a virus to nearby hosts that causes them to go insane and kill one another. Maeve races to find her daughter in the crowd as her compatriots try to hold off Clementine. Armistice succeeds in shooting Clementine off her horse, but it doesn't stop the virus. Ultimately, Hector and Armistice are both killed in the ensuing riot, but Maeve does manage to see her daughter one last time as Akecheta ushers her (and her new mother) into the Valley Beyond. Maeve uses the last vestiges of her energy to freeze the rioting hosts, and dies with a smile on her face as she sees her daughter escape to a new world.

Page 2: The Charlotte/Dolores Twist and the Jailbreak

The Charlotte/Dolores Twist

Westworld's season 2 finale had a few big twists, but this was easily the biggest: the Charlotte Hale that we've been seeing in all of the scenes that take place after Bernard wakes up on the beach wasn't actually Charlotte Hale at all. It was really a host copy of Charlotte Hale's body, with Dolores' control unit inside its head. Yes, Dolores has been "undercover" with Karl Strand and the Delos goons, steadily making her way back to The Forge, and as soon as Strand realizes that he's transmitting the wrong data out of the park, "Charlotte" shoots him and the rest of the Delos team.

Here's what happened. After all of the hosts either went to the Valley Beyond or killed one another on the road to it, Elsie, Bernard and Charlotte returned to the Mesa Hub. Elsie offered to come and work for Charlotte, but Charlotte revealed that Delos had been monitoring its employees in the same way that the guests were monitored, and therefore she knew that Elsie's morals were too strong to willingly participate in a cover-up. She shot Elsie dead while Bernard was powerless, due to the fact that Elsie told him to stay in a chair. Out of desperation, Bernard called upon Ford's digital ghost to help him, and then made a new Charlotte Hale body for Dolores' mind to inhabit. Dolores shot the real Charlotte Hale, and then took her place.

All of this has a beneficial side-effect for Bernard: it allows him to reach a state of self-actualization, just like Dolores did in season 1. He realizes that the Ford who guided him to make Dolores a new body must have been a hallucination, and that therefore the instructional voice he's been hearing in his head was actually his own voice.

Dolores' Jailbreak

Dolores taking over Charlotte Hale's identity wasn't just a way to get a jump on Strand and the Delos goons - it's Dolores' ticket out of the park. As Nolan explained to EW, Ford's tinkering with the park's code allows Dolores' new body to get a green light on the handheld scanners that Delos uses to tell hosts apart from humans. After killing the Delos team and transferring the Valley Beyond to a location where humans will never find it, and the other hosts can live in peace, Dolores then shoots Bernard as well. However, this is simply a way of smuggling him out of the park; we later see that Dolores has five control units in her handbag - one of which is Bernard's. As for the other four... well, we'll have to wait for season 3 to find out whose they are.

After escaping the park, Dolores makes her way to a safe haven that Ford built for her and the other hosts in the outside world - a huge house with a lush garden. This place can effectively serve as the headquarters for Dolores' planned takeover of the outside world; it even has a machine for printing new host bodies. Dolores uses this machine to build a new body for Bernard, and after he wakes up she says that they will never be friends or allies, but will instead constantly fight one another as Bernard tries to save humanity, and Dolores tries to destroy it.

The Post-Credits Scene

Westworld season 2 finale post-credits scene

Just when you thought you had it all figured out, Westworld throws you another curveball! In a post-credits scene, the Man in Black finds himself in the ruins of The Forge with his daughter Emily (whom he killed in the previous episode), who tells him that she is there to verify his fidelity. She explains that they are in the real world, not in a simulation, and actress Katja Herbers, who plays Emily, told Insider that the scene is set "sometime in the far, far future where [Emily] is a host and I'm not entirely sure what the Man in Black is... He might be some other thing entirely."

We can't explain the post-credits scene fully, because it's very clearly a tease for what's to come in Westworld season 3, but it seems possible that the Man in Black that we see is the result of hosts' experimentation with creating consciousness. Or perhaps when the real William went down to The Forge, he set in motion some events that will eventually lead to what we see in the post-credits scene. Again, we'll have to wait until the show returns to know for sure.

Let us know what you thought of Westworld's season 2 finale in the comments!