‘Vanishing Point’ is a dark journey into the corrupt heart of the Man in Black
Oh no.
William, what did you do?
She orders Teddy to gun them down.
Credit: John P. Johnson/HBO
“Which is why this is so hard.
You made me into a monster.”
So he takes out his gun and shoots himself.
Oh my God, Teddy killed Teddy!
What’s unclearbecause onWestworldthis is almost always unclearis whether Teddy is really dead.
The host backups were destroyed at the Cradle.
So he’s presumably gone?
Unless that bullet somehow missed his Brita filter CPU?
Or Dolores backed him up to a flash drive just in case he tried exactly this?
Clementine: The tech team has uploaded Maeve’s host-controlling superpower into zombie Clementine.
They test using her to spread a virus command to other hosts.
It’s a creepy sequence as Clementine silently orders hosts to brutally slaughter each other.
Charlotte Hale is quite pleased.
Behold Clementine, destroyer of worlds.
Maeve: Poor Bernard is once again being used as Dr. Ford’s avatar.
Still: Who would have guessed that Maeve would spend three episodes lying on a table?
The Forge is located at the Valley Beyond.
All these secret park location names sound like something from a fancy new open-air shopping galleria.
“Get out of my fing head!”
Bernard cries in a very non-Bernard-like way.
Bernard runs theWestworldversion of Norton antivirus to debug himself of Ford.
You could use both to reflect on the ambitions of Delos.
The fake quote is actually better, which is another reason Hans Gruber is awesome.
The mystery of Juliet’s bathtub suicide is slowly revealed.
At first, we think she’s just drunk and unhappy.
He delivers a cruel lowdown: “Everything you fear is true.
I don’t belong to you or this world.
I belong to another world.
William hid the profile card in a book, and Juliet gets up and reads it.
Is William’s theme park sinning a truth that Emily needed to know about her dad?
I don’t think it is, though perhaps you feel differently.
In this case, Juliet giving her daughter that profile led to an unforeseeable disaster.
She’s called the QA team for extraction from the park.
Her dad is wounded, perhaps dying.
But the Man in Black is convinced Emily is a host.
“I never told anybody about my profile… you gave yourself away.”
A part of me rebelled against this twist.
Would William really kill such a convincing vision of his daughter based on such a flimsy assumption?
Or William could have made a less permanent move and continued on to the Valley without her.
“Vanishing Point” was both an extremely well-made episode ofWestworldand a rather depressing one.
Teddy became so despondent with his new personality that he offed himself.
Maeve continues to lie all cut open on a table.
Clementine is once again back to being used by the powers that be.
Bernard was largely out of control, per usual.
Emily coming out of the sunset to greet her father was one of my favorite shots this year.
Next week is the finale.
Postscript: Some are asking why I didn’t discuss William digging something out of his arm.
Yes, I noticed.
What does it mean?
I don’t know, guys.
Is William a host?
That would be disappointing.
Is it a tracking gadget of some kind?
As you’re free to see, I literally have nothing interesting to say about it.
I figure we’ll all find out the solution to any lingering William mysteries next week.
The odds of the MiB surviving the season seem rather slim at this point.
