Season 2 of Westworld Had Bigger Challenges Than Before, But Couldn’t Overcome Them in “The Passenger”

Season 1 of Westworld had an easier task than Season 2 did. The first season of the show, as Clementine might put it, didn’t have much of a rind on it. All of its mysteries, all of its characters, all of its ideas, were completely new. The audience was starting from square one, and the show was able to spoon feed details and reveal important facts bit-by-bit until the shocking twists burst out. The first season also had a clearer trajectory for its season-length mega arc, with early hints that there was something amiss with the hosts, building to a full blown revolt at the end.

But as I discussed on the Serial Fanaticist Podcast, Season 2 had no such luxuries. Despite the introduction of a handful of new characters, when the second season rolled around, Westworld’s major figures had become known quantities. How the park worked, the contours of this artificial world, was no longer as burning a question after ten episodes’ worth of worldbuilding. And the path from business as usual in Westworld to all hell breaking loose proved a much clearer and more direct path than Season 2’s disparate collections of characters who each want different things, and are all marauding around the park in a far less unified fashion.

So Season 2 does what it can to compensate for that added messiness, for the lack of novelty that this type of science fiction thriller show otherwise relies on. Rather than building to a shocking end, it gave us the ending first, or at least chunks of it, and then showed how those conditions arose, to try to recontextualize them. Rather than trying to establish these characters, Westworld devotes entire episodes to exploring their backstories, helping us to understand them better now that they’re familiar creatures.

And rather than building to one clear event — a series of awakenings that lead to a rebellion — Season 2 of Westworld lets its various plot threads blow in the wind for several episodes, trying in vain to tie them altogether in an finale that’s overstretched in an effort to accommodate all that needs to be touched on in order to make that happen.

"We let the humans sit in generic office chairs all day. It seems to be comforting to them."

So while Season 1 could start small and expand outward, Season 2 has to try to repack a new series of mystery boxes, to elaborate on what we already know about its heroes and villains, and to manage a far more disparate and decentralized build to something meant to be a cohesive and all-encompassing final act.

That’s a lot of weight to put on “The Passenger”, the finale for this fraught season of television. It’s a ninety minute episode, that touches on essentially every character in the program, drops oodles of shocking twists and thematic bullet points, and endeavors to both act as a unified capstone for the motley collection of stories in this season, as well as a primer and tease for what’s to come.

The two most interesting things the episode does are thematic. First, it features Akecheta and his brothers and sisters (and Maeve’s daughter) finally reaching the Valley Beyond, finally opening the door to the truer, purer world that he’d been search for so long. That long ballyhooed locale is revealed as a paradise, constructed by Akecheta’s creator, meant to be a world where the hosts can live and found a community untouched and unspoiled by the tainted souls of the real one.

Like “Kiksuya”, the series’s finest hour, that works as both text and subtext. It makes sense that Ford would want to craft a safe haven for the creations he believes will inherit the Earth, a place where they can exist free from the mistakes that the humans have inflicted on the world. But it also works as metaphor. The imagery of the door is powerful, as host after host passes through it, their mortal bodies falling into the canyon below, but their “souls” (such as they are) persisting into that Eden. It’s a potent vision of the afterlife, one that pays off the good work the show did just a couple of episodes prior in making Akecheta’s quest a meaningful one.

Now you're thinking with portals!

That imagery also adds poetry to the episode’s biggest reveal. Once Dolores and Bernard enter The Forge, the Matrix-like digital world where all of the data on the park’s guests is stored, they meet the personification of the system in the form of Logan. In these environs, Logan reveals that the system figured out how to preserve humans by choosing not to overcomplicate them, by showing them as, title-be-praised, the passengers of their stories rather than the authors of them.

Again, there is haunting irony in that, the idea that humans can be reduced to a textbook-sized set of code. On System-Logan’s account, the stories we tell ourselves are just that, stories, with the real sources of our impulses and inclinations beyond our conscious minds and our ability to choose.

Much of Westworld has been about human beings trying to add complexity to the hosts, to bring them up to humanity’s standard for consciousness and agency. Instead, “The Passenger” flips the script, where the androids are trying to build humans and finding that the key to that effort is to simplify us to our basest and most basic collection of inputs and outputs. It is the hosts who can choose their destiny, who can genuinely change themselves and ascend, while we are stuck riding the flow of our own genetic code, unchanged and unalterable. It’s a perspective I don’t necessarily agree with, but one that has power in how it recontextualizes one of the central themes of the series.

The problem is that the convoluted plots and overdone monologues completely fail to support that level of profundity elsewhere. “The Passenger” bends over backwards to try to put all of its major characters in the same basic place so that it can bounce them off one another. It bends, and in places breaks, the characters’ standard M.O.s and personalities so that it can pair off and break apart certain groups and people. And the episode delivers every bit of information, whether it’s raw exposition, or the usual florid prose, or some other variety of cryptic hint, in the form of a painful, stilted speech.

"Pfff. Player pianos can't read."

“The Passenger” could seriously be renamed “Monologue: The Episode.” Nearly every character of significance gets a chance to wax rhapsodic about what their experience has been, or what their intentions are, or What It All Means™. Storytelling on television invariably involves some measure of artifice, and it’s churlish to complain too loudly about on-screen dialogue not perfectly replicating human speech. But each line of dialogue in the finale is so needlessly grandiose, so mired in trying to sound important, that it never bothers to sounds true. “The Passenger” is playing with some big ideas, but it loses, rather than captures them, by trying to convey them with ornate exchanges that devolve into lyrical nonsense.

The same goes for the plotting. Rather than focusing “The Passenger” on a handful of throughlines or key developments, Westworld throws the kitchen sink at its last outing of the season. Dolores is killed but then comes back in the guise of Hale and escapes. Maeve gets into a Jedi mind control fight with Clementine and dies temporarily to get as many compatriots to the valley beyond as possible. William gets pointlessly tricked by Dolores and ends up discovering that he too may be the product of the experiments with Papa Delos. Bernard kills Dolores and scrambles his memories to keep the Delos reps from sniffing him out.

None of it hangs together. And it quickly becomes just too much, too byzantine, too lost in its own backside to have the impact that a good season finale should. The best you can say is that “The Passengers”’s reach exceeds it grasp. The worst you can say is that it squanders strong character work and some deep, compelling ideas with a tortuous series of plots and twists that have less impact with each overblown reveal.

Season 2 of Westworld hit some of the series highest heights. It told us the story of how William became the Man in Black, how Dolores discovered a world worth seizing, how Maeve found herself in an alter ego, how Akecheta elevated the search for the real story of the park into a quest for a higher truth. But it also got tied up in its own plot threads, tangled in its attempts to recapitulate mysteries that could top those from the first season, and reverted to the type of bald exposition and verbal pabulum that can’t support the big ideas the show wants to impart.

“'If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.'”

And in the end, it gives us a slog of a finale, that introduces some truly fascinating and even moving ideas, but undercuts them at every turn in an ungainly lummox of a final bow for Season 2.

We know these characters now. We know their wants, their intentions, their flaws. We know the park now, its mysteries mostly unveiled, its world thoroughly if not exhaustively explored. We know the ideas that Westworld is playing with: the nature of humanity, to next phase of life on this planet, and the facts and fictions of consciousness.

That makes it harder to surprise, harder to amaze, harder to compel. But Westworld has the talent, in its amazing production, in its talented performers, and in its sporadic but firmly present ability to craft stories and words worthy of the potential of its premise, to produce something transcendent.

“The Passenger”, however, isn’t that, and after an hour and a half of one long, sour, final note for Season 2, it’s easy to wonder if the stars will align for Westworld again, or this is simply a wrong world, too far gone to be set back on its axis whenever the next season, a new set of challenges, rolls around.