Westworld Season Two, Episode Two: Have You Ever Seen Anything So Full of Splendor

Westworld Season 2 is going against the genre, building a world where the robots are the good guys fighting for truth and justice. “I used to see the beauty in this world, and now I see the truth.” — Dolores

Westworld‘s Backstory Fuels Its Heroine

Reunion, the second episode of Westworld‘s second season continues to explore the complications of orchestrating a revolution against a world whose characters belong, primarily, to another. Delores’ (Evan Rachel Wood) band of renegades must recruit enough of their kind to fight an army of 800 Delos security personnel by convincing them that they need to know the truth about their world. But many have seen all the truth that they can bear or, like Maeve (Thandie Newton), seek a different truth.

The Search for Funding

The backstory of Delos’ initial investment in Westworld is slowly woven into this episode, with the timelines diverging between a present, chaotic park full of dangerous renegade robots, and the stark contrast of past in the real world where all-too-perfect and very polite AI’s attend parties and networking events in search of funding for their creator’s vision. Delores and her ilk are being used to convince Logan Delos (Ben Barnes) to invest his father’s money in their project. They are beautiful, well-behaved, and even “too human” enough to convince Delos that there is only one robot hiding in the crowd. A small gesture reveals that every guest at this party is manmade, securing Logan’s interest and indeed, his fascination.

An Angel Investor

Logan’s father, who holds the purse strings, requires more convincing. In a parallel for a different kind of augmented reality — the digital space — Young William (Jimmi Simpson) convinces Delos Sr that Westworld is not just a high tech theme park but in fact, a place to mine the purest data on its patrons. In a “place hidden from God,” where people indulge in their deepest, darkest, and often most driving desires, the sheer amount of market research that could be conducted makes the park well worth a large investment.

Déjà vu

These scenes from the past are seen through the memories of Dolores, who can now remember all the trauma she experienced in all her previous days. No longer a simple country daughter, her perfect recollections of the evils that were done to her and near her drive her to recruit marauders from various plotlines across the park to join her fight. She recalls The Man in Black who once loved her repeating back to her a line she used frequently as a guest to describe his events in the real world, “Have you ever seen anything so full of splendor?” The irony now that she remembers it all is that, of course, she has.

Westworld continues Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.

Photo and video credit: HBO


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