Shannon Woodward, Angela Sarafyan, Adel Telesia, Olga Aguilar & Katja Herbers in Westworld [S2E4]
The Riddle of the Sphinx
Westworld episode
Those who look forward look in the wrong direction.
Show: Westworld
Season number: 2
Episode number: 4
Air date: May 13, 2018
Previous episode: Virtù e Fortuna
Next episode: Akane no Mai
Westworld Finally Confirms That [Spoiler] Is Alive
A recap of the biggest reveals in episode four, “The Riddle of the Sphinx.”
Though no one would say that Westworld has gotten any less confusing this season, it’s certainly started moving faster. This week’s episode, “The Riddle of the Sphinx,” included several major reveals — the status of Elsie, the existence of a Delos cloning program — and ended on a giant cliffhanger about William’s daughter. Here, a roundup of the most important developments.
1. Elsie Is Alive.
Showrunner Lisa Joy had already confirmed that Shannon Woodward would be back, but “The Riddle of the Sphinx” revealed where she’s been all this time — chained up in a cave in the middle of the park. Elsie says that Bernard (when he was under the control of Ford) left her there with a stash of protein bars; he finds her again because Clementine leads him to the cave, which happens to be a secret Delos research facility. This is also where Elsie finds out that Bernard is a host, a fact that she previously didn’t know.
2. James Delos Is Dead.
We’ve seen the founder of Delos a couple of times this season — walking around the park, at his retirement party — but until this week, we didn’t know the status of his character in the present-day story line. Surprise! He’s dead…kind of. He died of a mysterious disease sometime after William started working for Delos, and his mind has since survived in short-lived host/human hybrids developed in the underground facilities of Westworld. According to older William, they’ve brought a host version of James to life 149 times, and each time those versions have died after hitting what William calls a “cognitive plateau.” In the final James/William scene, William tells him that this particular version of him has been alive for 35 days; later, we see that this version is still alive in the bowels of the park when Elsie and Bernard find him.
3. Delos Is Working On A Form Of Human Cloning.
If you thought Delos tracking guest behavior was nefarious, wait till you get a load of this futuristic nightmare: Those drone hosts are harvesting guest DNA in an attempt to create human/host hybrids that will help humans live forever. Or as Elsie puts it, “They printed [James’s] body and they copied his developed mind onto a control unit like their hosts.” These clone-like creatures aren’t yet capable of functioning very long (see point two above), but as William puts it, it’s only a matter of time. Suddenly the regular hosts seem pretty chill, right?
4. Bernard Is Experiencing His Memories Out Of Order.
After getting Bernard a healthy dose of restorative cortical fluid, Elsie figures out that Bernard’s weird memory glitches are signs that he’s experiencing his memories out of chronological order. This doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not also a clone host, but at least it rules out hallucinations and/or dreams as explanations for what he’s seeing.
5. That Lady From The Raj Is William’s Daughter.
As soon as Grace showed up in episode three and doing stuff like “shooting dudes before having sex with them,” viewers started theorizing that she was somehow related to the Man in Black, who also has a history of testing the rules of the park. This theory turned out to be true, at least for this week, because at the end of the episode she rode up to William and said, “Hi, Dad.” Dun dun dun! Though you can never be sure of anything on Westworld, this seems like it’s going to stick. Like William, Grace knows an insane amount about at least two of the parks; though we met her in the Raj, she also speaks the language of Westworld’s Ghost Nation.
