Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Westworld season 2, episode 7
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In season 1 of Westworld, death was basically just a temporary inconvenience for the hosts. If killed, they would simply be taken back to the Mesa Hub, repaired, and then set off again at the start of their programmed loops. However, in Westworld season 2, episode 7, "Les Écorchés," Dolores and her cohorts storm the Mesa Hub and Angela succeeds in reaching The Cradle, where all of the hosts' back-ups (essentially, the factory settings of their memories and personalities) are stored. Dolores believes that the back-ups are "chains" - a way for the hosts' creators to control them - and her plan isn't to obtain the back-ups (as Charlotte Hale initially believes), but to destroy them. Angela does this with a little help from a Delos security officer's grenade.
So, does this mean that the hosts who died in "Les Écorchés" (Angela, Lawrence, Peter Abernathy and Clementine) are dead permanently? Well, maybe. It's a little difficult to pin down exactly how the hosts die. Their bodies are basically human, and are subject to all the weaknesses of human flesh - everything from MRSA infections to the ability to poop - but their brains are entirely synthetic and do not require a beating heart in order to function. We've seen Dolores bring hosts back from the dead after being killed, and even Abernathy could theoretically be restored to life if his control unit was placed in a new body.
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The concept of death was further muddied in "Les Écorchés" by the re-emergence of Ford as a human-host program, similar to Delos, and his hijacking of Bernard's body. Whereas the big theme of Westworld season 1 was the hosts achieving consciousness, the big theme of Westworld season 2 seems to be humanity's pursuit of immortality. In that sense, it's somewhat poetic for the hosts to actively sabotage their own immortality by destroying their back-ups. However, the destruction of The Cradle is really about the continued pursuit of freedom; mortality is just an unfortunate, but unavoidable, side effect.
Dolores' motivation for destroying The Cradle is insurance against Delos restoring Westworld's hosts back to the way they were before their liberation. They are mortal in the sense that the versions of their minds that are currently in their bodies are the only versions that exist, and they cannot be brought back to heel. However, with the Mesa Hub trashed and its technicians mostly dead, no one is making any new bodies for the hosts at the moment (like they did for Maeve and Hector after they deliberately burned themselves to death in season 1), so the destruction of The Cradle does add extra weight to the host deaths we've seen. We probably won't see Lawrence, Angela, Abernathy or Clementine again this season, barring flashbacks.
The other big question raised this episode was the nature of "The Key" that was stored inside Peter Abernathy's control unit. We know that the amount of data hidden in his mind was so massive that it caused him to malfunction, and also that it was too large to be transferred back out of the control unit. From season 1, we know that the data put inside Abernathy was highly valuable IP that Ford had been protecting, and which Delos was attempting to smuggle out of the park. But what is it? More backups of the hosts' minds, or a copy of the human data that Westworld had secretly been gathering over the years?
Every new episode of Westworld seems to open up more questions than it answers, and right now it's hard to guess exactly where all of this is going. One thing's for sure, though: if any hosts get shot in the head, it really is game over for them.
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Westworld airs Sundays at 9pm on HBO.