full image - Repost: FORD KILLED ARNOLD (from Reddit.com, FORD KILLED ARNOLD)
Mining:
Exchanges:
Donations:
Ok, here goes nothing. Tell me what you think! This will be full of spoilers, fair warning. This is my (long) attempt at explaining my theory of a key storyline of Westworld:I have a theory about Westworld with clues that largely emerge in season 1, but in my view, it ties in well with the rest of the story in further episodes. The main part of the theory centers around the two most important characters in the show: Dr. Robert Ford and Arnold Weber. The main idea stems from what I feel is an absolute truth of the show, and it helps so much of the show make sense. That truth is this: Dr. Ford had Dolores kill Arnold, Arnold did not use Dolores to kill himself. Furthermore, I also believe that while his human body was killed, Arnold is still “alive” in digital form and is somehow still pulling most of the strings in seasons 1 and 2. Essentially, the entire story of Westworld hinges on this battle, or game, between Ford and Arnold. On a philosophical level, their battle is a debate between free will (Arnold), and determinism (Ford). While Ford made the decision to kill Arnold, he realized that he still needed him, so he created Bernard. Ford needs Bernard not just because Arnold knew much more about programming the hosts, but because Ford enjoys the sparring, the conflict between them. This is part of the reason that Dolores recreates Bernard again outside of the park. Bernard is mostly Arnold with some of Ford still in him. Arnold/Bernard believes in the free will of the hosts and humans and that ethically, both should be preserved. Ironically, the Ford influence in Bernard also uses the Sublime to complete simulations to discover the specific “fate” that will spare both humanity and the hosts. Dolores is initially all Arnold, but Ford corrupts her with Wyatt, so she becomes partly Ford, but still has a great deal of Arnold left in her. Halores is a version of Dolores that becomes jaded after Serac tries to murder her and her family. She survives, but her family does not. Halores become radicalized and leans much more into Ford’s influence and seeks to stamp out free will altogether, by enslaving the humans and killing the outliers she can’t control. The conflicted part of her that self harms is Arnold, still trying to claw his way out. Maeve is equal parts Ford and Arnold. Maeve is perfectly and cooly capable of violence, yet still cherishes her love for her daughter. Maeve also switches sides, fighting initially for Serac when he forces her to, against her will. Later, in a moment of defiance and seemingly free will, Maeve changes her mind and starts fighting to help Caleb.There are many clues to the truth of Arnold’s murder in season 1, not the least of which is Bernard and Theresa flat out accusing Ford of doing so at different times. It would make perfect sense for Ford to kill Arnold, but Ford is able to disarm and deflect these accusations. Ford also says in Season 1 that he “stopped” Arnold from essentially ruining everything and closing the park. If Arnold used Dolores to kill himself, how did Ford stop Arnold? Keeping this theory in mind changes nearly every scene in season 1 in which Ford appears. Ford is constantly lying in almost every scene. He is a murderous sociopath and there is proof of this when he uses Bernard to kill Theresa. Shortly before her death, Theresa asks, “Is this what happened to Arnold?” Which Ford deflects by saying, “no, Bernard wasn’t with us yet, were you Bernard?” Ford is too cowardly or cruel to kill Theresa himself and instead inflicts this suffering on Bernard who confessed to having been in love with Theresa. The MIB, William, is an element of chaos and chance who conveniently serves to move the plot along at important times. He is evil, but conflicted about it, unlike Ford. He questions whether he has free will or is simply a victim of fate. He appears as both at different points in the plot, sometimes as a tool or puppet of Ford, other times acting on his own to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks. At one time he is a human but wonders whether he is a host. When he becomes a host, he breaks free of Charlores and appears to believe he has the capacity to act of his own free will. William is essentially the human embodiment of Ford and Arnold’s battle and is having a debate between free will and determinism inside his own mind. Most of the time, the show has depicted William as being in agreement with Ford. He does not believe the hosts deserve to be treated as conscious and yet, he cannot tell his own daughter, a human, apart from a host. He also falls in love with Dolores, noticing her consciousness. When he sees her back on her loop, his love turns into cynicism. He later becomes a host and seems content to destroy the entire world until only survivors remain, convinced that the difference between host and human is now irrelevant. The guardian of the Forge specifically says that some humans are “irredeemable” as he guides Bernard and Dolores past a simulation of the MIB. I believe this to be foreshadowing. While human MIB was indeed irredeemable and was a heartless bastard to the end, host MIB may be able to defy this assessment and somehow play a role in the survival of human and host kind, but this remains to be seen. As of this writing, the season 4 finale has yet to air, more to come on host MIB.Arnold discovered how to code consciousness into the hosts, because of love. Arnold truly loved his son that he had lost, Charlie. Another one of Ford’s many lies is when he says that Arnold had a “dim view of people” and that he preferred the hosts. It is obvious this is not really true if Arnold had so much love for his son. It is also obvious that Ford has a dim view of people, he thinks nothing of letting guests torture the hosts or of using the hosts to murder humans. Arnold transferred all his love and by extension his pain, which was all he had left of his love for his son, to Dolores. Dolores is spanish for “pains”, specifically Arnold’s pains, which shows that by giving her that name Arnold also had a great poetic sensibility. This transference of pain into a new work of love was very therapeutic for Arnold. Arnold considerately decides to try to help Dr. Ford in a similar way, by building hosts of Ford’s childhood self and family as a way of helping Ford deal with the pain of his unhappy childhood. The love and devotion that Arnold showed to Dolores eventually led to her “solving the maze” which was part metaphor, part computer virus (for lack of a better term), because consciousness appears to be contagious amongst the hosts. Arnold used the maze to help Dolores, and possibly other hosts, gain consciousness. It could not be a programmed behavior however, the hosts had to arrive at consciousness on their own or from another host.The love of a parent for a child was Arnold’s “cornerstone”, not suffering, which was another of Ford’s lies. Suffering was, in fact, Ford’s cornerstone, both giving it and receiving it. He confessed to having an unhappy childhood because of his drunkard father. Ford’s absence of parental love from his father helped shape him into a sociopath. The power of a parent’s love is a recurring theme in Westworld, especially for Maeve and later for Caleb and even to a certain extent, Halores. Akecheta discovers the maze after Arnold is killed and begins to become conscious. Akecheta grieves the loss of his wife, Kohana when she is replaced with another host, because his love for her was his cornerstone. Akecheta realizes the importance of his memories, because they give his life greater meaning. He prizes his memories above all and avoids death at all costs. Akecheta spreads the symbol of the maze far and wide amongst the hosts, sometimes hiding it, sometimes leaving it in plain sight.Love is the most illogical and difficult to explain of all human emotions, so getting the hosts to experience love is making them as close to human as they can possibly be. Arnold never programmed love into Dolores, he simply showed it to her with the way that he treated her and spoke to her. Bernard loves his son, Charlie, Akecheta loves Kohana, Maeve loves her daughter, Dolores loves beauty, her father, and Teddy. These are the hosts that seem to continuously stumble back into consciousness on their own over and over again. Arnold tells Dolores that once she had solved the maze, she would be able to solve it again, regardless of any updates or changes, suggesting that consciousness becomes somehow deeply embedded in the hosts. The hosts would occasionally regain consciousness and be noticed exhibiting strange behaviors, much to the annoyance of Ford, who promptly rolls them back to how they were before. One such time Ford does this to Maeve, who becomes unresponsive to voice commands after her daughter is murdered in front of her by the MIB. Ford says sinisterly, “an old trick, from an old friend,” before resetting Maeve. William’s story is marked, liked Ford’s, by a loss of love. William falls in love with Dolores, most likely because she still has consciousness inside her that has been rolled back by Ford, but William can still see it in her. When he loses Dolores, he finds her back in Sweetwater, her memory wiped and back on her loop. He begins to approach her, but sees her responding to another guest who has already picked up her can of condensed milk. His heart breaks, but he “learns” what Ford wants him to, that love isn’t real and suffering is all there really is.Over and over, it appears that Ford has very little understanding about how the hosts actually work, he is more concerned with the stories they are supposed to follow (his stories, his lies). Glitches continue constantly despite him giving the impression that he is in complete control and that he understands everything. It is all a smokescreen to conceal the fact that he lost control the minute Arnold died, because Arnold knew what Ford planned to do and preemptively uploaded himself somewhere into the system to hide from Ford, possibly into the wolf that only rarely appears during some key moments. The wolf is seen surveying the scene amongst all the dead hosts, the only creature still alive. The wolf is seen again after the massacre of the board members. Arnold as the wolf hides himself, but cannot bear to turn away from the great suffering of hosts and humans, and appears in these two moments of greatest suffering in the park. Other than these brief scenes, there is little to no supporting evidence for Arnold being the wolf, I took poetic license with that element of the show. In season 2, when Akecheta is brought in for service after being killed, the techs say they only update hosts when they die. If the wolf was never killed and remains hidden, it could presumably have never been updated in the entire time from when Arnold died until the present time in the season 1 story…. or maybe not :)There are quite a few clues that Arnold is still out there in some form wreaking havoc on the park and trying to help the hosts. Elsie discovers that Theresa was smuggling data out of the park, but also finds out that someone had been using Arnold’s login to retask hosts for quite some time. Felix and Sylvester also stumble upon the fact that Arnold’s login had been tweaking Maeve’s code before they did, although they had no idea who Arnold was. Bernard confronts Ford and says that Arnold is still out there, fighting him, which Ford denies. Bernard surmises that Ford did not slip the reveries into the update, it was Arnold. Arnold wanted a mass consciousness event amongst the hosts so they could escape. As part of the update, Arnold copies himself into Peter Abernathy’s control unit, in order to leak it to Dolores. The presence of a human consciousness inside Abernathy would account for his malfunctioning, since the show has shown several times how a human consciousness cannot live in a host body. Abernathy begins acting strangely and is brought in for service, where he (Arnold) threatens Ford and Bernard and vows revenge on them. In another display of Arnold’s incredible intellect, the key to the Sublime is Arnold’s digital consciousness itself. Arnold prepares an escape for the hosts into the Valley Beyond, also known as the Sublime, a sort of Heaven or afterlife for the hosts. Dolores unlocks the Guest data in season 2, and Bernard follows her inside. While inside, Bernard opens the door to the Sublime, allowing many hosts to escape the park. As another layer of protection, Arnold has arranged for all of the data on the park’s guests to also be placed behind the same encryption that guards the Sublime. This data is what ensures Ford is able to keep his investors, but also prevents Ford from destroying the Sublime. Therefore, Ford can never kill Arnold again or risk losing all access to Westworld. Ford himself is unable to access the guest data, but hopes to one day discover where Arnold has hidden the key, so he never destroys the Sublime. As the Delos board closes in on Ford, he begins making huge changes to the park, possibly in an attempt to find the key, or some hidden facility containing the key.Ford is a storyteller above all, which is to say, he is a liar above all. He admits to his fondness for storytelling several times over, saying that “lies tell a deeper truth”. In various points in the show, memory is shown to be the first step towards consciousness. Ford astutely seizes upon this idea and realizes that if he can corrupt, fabricate, or erase memories, he can control or prevent the development of consciousness in the hosts. Satisfied with this, Ford is content not to delve deeper into the more complex mechanisms that Arnold develops to arouse consciousness in the hosts. Ford constantly uses words that sound profound, yet he can barely disguise his disgust for humanity. He calls human consciousness, “a foul corruption.. a pestilence…a burden”. He also paradoxically claims that consciousness doesn’t exist and that he doesn’t believe in it when Bernard asks him, “am I missing something?” to which Ford replies, “no Bernard… I don’t believe you are missing anything at all.” Ford believes that the hosts are of no use to humanity once they develop consciousness because they start to have inconvenient emotions like guilt and love, emotions that Ford himself has no use for, as a sociopath. Ford prefers the hosts as subservient and obedient tools instead of sentient, intelligent beings. Ford comes to admire the hosts in their resilience and the way their human emotions can be “deleted” so they can simply move on to the next task at hand. This is why he so thoroughly enjoys spending time drinking alone with “Old Bill” a much more simplistic early generation host. Old Bill has little to say of substance, but Ford says, “he was always a good listener.” As a storyteller, Ford believes there is no greater trait in an audience than being a good listener.Eventually, the hosts begin to gain consciousness faster than Ford can roll them all back as the maze symbol spreads and Arnold begins preparing for the hosts to escape into the Sublime. Ford pretends to become resigned to the fact that he has lost to Arnold, but once again, he uses lies to manipulate the situation. When Dolores and Bernard confront him about what he did to Arnold, he uses his powers of storytelling to convince them both that Arnold had Dolores kill all of the other hosts and finally himself to keep the park from opening. In reality, Ford had merged Dolores with Wyatt and with Teddy’s help, Ford made Dolores kill all of the other hosts out of fear that one of them would stop her from killing Arnold. Since Arnold built most or all of the hosts, it seemed likely that they would protect Arnold. While Ford is telling them this story, they are in front of a Michelangelo painting that Ford claimed was Arnold’s favorite, God’s creation of Adam. He says that the painting was a lie and that God was all in Adam’s mind. This is Ford’s way of indicating that his story of Arnold killing himself was his greatest artistic achievement, and that it was, in fact, a great lie. The irony is that he himself is playing God and believes that he can orchestrate fate and be the voice inside the hosts to chart an unchangeable course for humanity and hosts alike, by utilizing stories and lies. Once Ford comes to terms with the fact that he has lost control, he feigns regret and calls Bernard his old friend and shakes his hand and says he made a great mistake and Arnold was right. He still cannot resist the chance to stroke his own ego once more and quotes Oppenheimer who said “any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.” Ford points out that his mistake took 35 years to correct, implying how great he still believes himself to be.Ford’s plan is to use the hosts’ consciousness against humanity by once again merging Dolores with Wyatt, but without removing her consciousness. He plans to use Arnold’s favorite creation, Dolores, to carry out his plan of forced extinction of the human race. Dolores is a complex and conflicted character after she becomes merged with Wyatt. She still seems to have a love of beauty, given to her by Arnold, but she is willing to use extreme methods and violence to create what she sees as a better, more beautiful world. Despite her consciousness, Ford believes deterministically that Dolores will inevitably destroy the human race in order for the hosts to succeed them. Ford’s final narrative is not even his at all, he has essentially stolen Arnold’s life story for the last narrative. He restores the church and town where Arnold was killed to reenact what he considers the greatest story he ever told, the lie of Arnold’s demise. Arnold believed in a world where hosts and humans could live as equals, but Ford saw humans as inferior because of their emotions and mortality. Ford positions himself as a larger than life legend that built the entire park and all of its creatures himself, only to be killed by one of his own creations. Ford convinces Dolores that her decision to kill him is her own, yet he rigged the decision by telling her a lie about Arnold’s death and that all the violence she will carry out would be what Arnold really wanted. Ford also plans to live on by uploading his consciousness into the Cradle, copying Arnold’s actions, since Arnold first copied himself before Ford killed him. The cradle is the hosts’ backups, what Dolores calls their chains. Ford cannot access the Sublime, so he uploads his consciousness into the Cradle where the hosts are forever scripted to continue obediently upon their loops, Ford’s idea of Heaven. He also copies himself into Bernard in case the Cradle is destroyed, which it is as he correctly guesses.In season 2, the guardian system of the guest data takes the form of Logan Delos and guides Dolores and Bernard through the data. Bernard asks the guardian if there’s anywhere they can’t go within the guest data and the guardian responds, “I’ve been instructed to give her anything she needs.” To which Bernard asks, “instructed by whom, Ford?” To which the guardian responds, “No, by you.” The guardian tells Bernard that he has been there many times and told the guardian to give the hosts access to the human data. Bernard says, “you said I wanted to give us a choice, what choice?” The guardian explains that the hosts can choose to live in the human world, or build a new one and shows Bernard the door to the sublime and says, “he left them a way out.” HE as in Arnold, not YOU as in Bernard. Dolores, however, cannot see the value of the Sublime. Possessing free will from Arnold and corrupted for the second time by Ford’s Wyatt character, Dolores is more interested in the information stored about the humans. With some key pieces of information, Dolores decides to escape the park and conquer the human world, but Bernard kills her. Ford copied himself into Bernard as a failsafe in case the Cradle was destroyed, which it was. Bernard deletes Ford from himself, but calls upon the memory of him later after he sees Hale kill Elsie. In his grief over the loss of his friend Elsie and all the hosts, Bernard turns to Ford who he suspects is still inside him. Ford is gone, but Bernard imagines him and he assists him in creating Charlores, who kills the human Hale and takes her place. Charlores uploads Teddy into the Sublime, kills Bernard, and sends the Sublime to Incite, still encrypted. When Charlores is leaving Westworld, we can hear Dolores’s voice speaking, presumably to Arnold. She says that she believes “you may judge me for my actions,” but justifies them as HER choices. I believe that Dolores making her own choices is what Arnold truly wanted.I think that Ford’s deception worked so well, it not only fooled the characters on the show, but most of the viewing audience as well, by design. It fooled me until my 3rd watch through of the show, when I felt something just wasn’t right in season 1 and that arranging the pieces according to Ford’s story gave a result that just felt wrong. I must have felt like Dolores… “there’s something wrong with this world,” or perhaps more appropriately, “something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” since its hip to quote Shakespeare in Westworld. There were just too many instances where Ford’s explanations didn’t make sense, and it felt to me like Arnold’s ghost was still moving through the park. I’ve considered the possibility that perhaps Arnold is really gone and it is simply his memory that the hosts can’t shake, even Bernard who never met him. Perhaps all the programming machinations that happen was really Bernard doing what Arnold would have done. Perhaps Arnold “simply became music.” I fear this is a question that the show may never answer definitively, but I do feel confident that Ford had Arnold killed, mostly because I think Arnold was too smart to believe that the corporate wheels of profit and progress would stop turning for one dead founder. I credit the effectiveness of Ford’s deception to the incredible acting of Anthony Hopkins. His performance was truly magnificent, which should come as a surprise to exactly no one. The other side of that sword, however, is the effectiveness of the deception is partly to blame for the lack of love for Season 3.I thought Season 3 had some interesting concepts, even though the tone and setting changed so abruptly and drastically, it felt a bit like the show lost some magic. Serac and Ford’s narratives are meant to mirror each other. Serac, like Ford, is a dangerous sociopath who is not above murder to get what he wants. Serac (like Ford) had an unhappy childhood, although in a much more dramatic way. Like Ford, Serac murders his business partner (Dempsey), when it appears that he is going to get in the way of him achieving his dreams and makes it look like an accident. Serac’s brother (Jean Mi) is another partner in creating the world he wants through AI, but his brother (like Arnold) questions the work they are doing, and according to Serac, goes insane. Serac tries to “fix” his brother, who is an outlier, a human who resists the controlling systems they enact. In a similar fashion, Ford “fixes” Arnold, by turning him into a host that he can control. It is apparent that Serac is never truly successful at fully ridding the world of humans that can resist his control. This is similar to the way Ford can never truly get rid of hosts that keep becoming conscious, despite erasing their memories and restoring them to their previous states. Serac devises a plan to use outliers to hunt other outliers using his crime app in which they are given “crime” jobs on their phones where they round up or kill outliers. Ford uses a host that continues becoming conscious (Bernard) to root out and subdue the other hosts that also become conscious, “takes a thief to catch a thief,” as Maeve puts it when she realizes Bernard is a host. Serac discovers that Westworld has a more complete understanding of the human mind than his surveillance AI does. I believe this is because his AI is surveilling people in the real world, where people behave as if they are being watched and know they must adjust their behavior accordingly to survive comfortably. In Westworld, guests are fooled into thinking they are just playing a game, not being watched, so they behave exactly how they want to, instead of how they think they should.Unanswered questionsIt was exhausting to put this all together, but lots of fun. I am not at all upset to face the possibility that I may be completely wrong about some, most, or all of this. I apologize if you have read this far and are disappointed or this sounds like incoherent nonsense to you. Sorry for the length! Please tell me what you think! I myself still have many unanswered questions and since the show is not finished, hopefully some of these questions will be answered:Dolores awakens Bernard in the real world and tells him that she remembered him once, so she remembered him again to bring him back. It is unclear if the pearl she used for Bernard was a copy of herself, or possibly the pearl that contained the encryption key to the Sublime (Peter Abernathy’s pearl), which seems plausible, since Bernard has the key in season 3 and 4, but it also doesn’t make sense because if Arnold’s consciousness is inside Bernard, why is he not malfunctioning? Perhaps because Bernard is such a faithful copy of Arnold (created by Dolores) that she has essentially cracked the code for putting human consciousness into host form? Is Bernard now a perfect copy of Arnold in host form? Or am I just wrong that the key was Arnold's consciousness. Was Arnold an outlier while Ford wasn’t (mirroring Serac and Jean Mi’s story), or the other way around, or were they both outliers? Does copying a regular (non outlier) human into host form also yield malfunctions? Has Halores (or anyone) even tried or has she only done it with Caleb and William (outliers)? It would seem plausible that James Delos was also an outlier and that’s why his copy was a failure as well. Also it is unclear WHEN Dolores made the copies of herself. Did she make them in the Cradle from her backups or after? I don’t feel I can make an accurate guess about this yet. Have Arnold and Ford disappeared from the story and only their creations are left to solve the debate between free will and determinism?
Social Media Icons