Westworld Season 1 finale recap: What the hell just happened?

It Was All Ford’s Narrative All Along

In the final twist of the episode, we saw Westworld play the Red Wedding card in it’s season finale. Where Game of Thrones waited until Season 3 to bust this out, Westworld wasted no time in A) having a Red Wedding of its own an B) leaving it as a cliffhanger. In the wrong hands, this could have been botched leaving fans pissed off and the show looking foolish for wasting a whole season on nothing.

But that’s not the case. Where The Walking Dead left fan hanging for an entire offseason, Westworld gave us taste of violence and then left us wanting more — a brilliant strategy that only the bravest of shows can execute. After learning that Maeve’s mission was nothing more than an escape narrative, we learned the real narrative Ford was working on. Rather than fight to keep his park, Ford sacrifices himself to both make the park more interesting than it has ever been before and also drain it of all value it had before. It is revealed that Delores’ search for the center of the maze was actually Ford allowing her to unlock consciousness, or what he wanted her consciousness to be. The whole Arnold thing was largely a MacGuffin that led us to Ford controlling Delores to such a degree that she chose violence against him to act as his grand exit from running the park. This then shifted to the freed minds of Westworld revolting on the humans attending this grand gala unveiling of the new narrative — one in which they are now trapped.