There Are Spoilers In Our Westworld: Riddle Of The Sphinx Review – Episode Discussion
So the latest episode of Westworld just aired and this one picks up pretty close to where the last one ended. We don’t see Dolores or Maeve. But instead this week we focus directly on the stories of Bernard and The Man In Black (William).
William’s story I think is the most interesting side of this episode. But I must say, the writing team had a great ability in this episode to integrate what was going on with William with what was going on with Bernard quite well.
William as we know is one of the longest guests in the park and the as a result he knows quite a few secrets about what went on there. What we learn in this episode, was that William was very involved during the time of the death of Jim Delos. William was also trying to resurrect the man using a combination of cloning and the park’s robots. It’s a failed experiment really and we see Jim Delos and William having multiple conversations throughout the episode as William slowly ages. Delos is attempting some form of resurrection but things just don’t go to plan. His body starts shaking after a couple days and starts malfunctioning. Delos never makes and when Bernard discovers him towards the end of the episode, we see that Delos has become quite the monster. Much like Mary Shelley’s modern day Prometheus, things don’t work out.
One of the things I wonder about the episode and the symptoms that Delos suffers from is if these symptoms are similar to what Bernard is currently struggling with. Bernard’s unit has been around for a couple of days now and one of the things I don’t really know about is if Bernard is installed in a similar way. I do remember he was once alive and isn’t a created AI like Dolores is. The other thing I wonder is if they can now bring people back using this technology is if it can be used to bring other characters back, like Ford for example. We’ve seen Ford pop up in other forms this season and chat with William, could he be getting teased to return eventually? I’d love to see Anthony Hopkins back in the show if it’s possible somehow!
The discovery by Bernard in this episode of the possibility of another body being there certainly means someone important is due to make a debut. There aren’t really any other big characters to bring back other than Ford either, so I’d say chances are good that he’s coming back. But I might be totally wrong in a few weeks, who knows.
The final big part of this episode is in the ending after William goes on a bit of killing spree taking out some bandits (in a good way). I have to say I really enjoyed Ed Harris’ performance in this episode.
But the big part didn’t happen right until the end when William is riding off into the wild lands of Westworld where he encounters his daughter. For those who were wondering last week who that mystery woman they introduced was, we now know who she is. She’s William’s daughter and in this episode we also learn she’s the granddaughter of Delos. But that’s about it that we know about her. I don’t know what her motives are in this story, why she’s there or even what her relationship with her father is actually like. We know William has been very obsessed with the park for so long, did she grow up alone?
Even though we discovered quite a bit in this episode and learnt about all the resurrection plans, there’s still a lot of questions raised. Like when Bernard was in the room with all the bots, what compelled them to kill all the people working there? I liked this episode because it was well written and by focusing basically on just Bernard and William, the writers had a good amount of time to tell an interlocking story which as things went on was quite interesting. The integration of resurrection, death and similar themes was great and the use of Greek mythology references was very interesting, the Riddle Of The Sphinx, which is the title of this episode is actually an old Greek myth all about death and how it’s so hard to beat, the myth itself is referenced quite a bit within this episode. You can read more about the myth on Wikipedia right here. It was a great episode and I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with next week!
