Westworld Season 2, episode 9 recap: Vanishing Point
By Kelley Hey
This week’s Westworld did not hold back one bit. Here’s everything that went down in Vanishing Point.
The episode opens with a flashback of William’s wife, Juliet’s, suicide. In the present, William wakes up to Emily taking care of him. They are at a rally point. She tells him she sent up a flare ten minutes earlier. They discuss her mother and their shared pain. Emily says she wants a relationship with him.
Dolores and crew get close to the Valley Beyond but are stopped by a group of Lakotas. The Lakotas do not want Dolores to go to the Valley. They fight. After the fight, the only two that remain are Dolores and Teddy. Dolores tells him to make sure there are no survivors. Teddy sees a Lakota survivor but lets him escape.
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In The Mesa, Ford-possessed Bernard see Hale and a tech transfer Maeve’s “powers” to Clementine. Ford tells Bernard there is one last thing they have to do before Bernard finds Elsie.
Emily tells William she knows about Delos’ secret project and she wants in.
Flashing back again, William sees Ford at a charity gala on the night of his wife’s suicide. Ford tells him to be careful what he wishes for with the Delos project. Ford slides a small plate to him, which we soon later find out is William’s profile. As William leaves, Ford states to himself there will be one last game.
Back in The Mesa, Ford leaves a message for Maeve mentally through Bernard. Bernard meets up with Elsie again. He tells her Delos is replicating guest information to turn them into hosts. All the guests’ data is in a place called The Forge. Bernard and Elsie make their way over.
Emily wonders how Delos got all their information. William tells her a scanner was “built in”. She wants in to know why her mom committed suicide. Flashing back again, a drunk and upset Juliet yells at William after the gala. Emily tells her she needs to go back to rehab. Juliet refuses. She tells Emily William
never loved either of them. William brings Juliet to bed and slips his profile in between her books.
As Emily tells her plan for Juliet to be involuntary committed to William, they both notice water dripping. William goes upstairs to find Juliet dead in the tub. In the present, Emily says she doesn’t believe William’s whole story. Again, William believes she is a host. Emily reveals she did not want to get closer to him, but rather expose him and the secret project.
QA comes in and William kills them all, believing they are all hosts. He then kills his own daughter. (I literally gasped.) Ford monologues to Maeve about the hosts and humans. He tells her she was his favorite and she deserves to live.
Soon later, Ford tries to convince Bernard to kill Elsie. He says she will eventually betray Bernard. Bernard says he wants to do things his way and then deletes Ford from his code. (Jeffrey Wright for all the awards.) Bernard leaves Elsie there as he says it will be safer for her.
Distraught over killing his own daughter, William puts his gun to his head. Again, he flashes back to the night of Juliet’s suicide. During that night, he tells her he discovered he has a darkness within him. He tried to put up a wall to deflect it, but she was the only one who saw through him. He apologizes to her, saying he was never meant for this world. Juliet takes his profile and sees all of the things William has done in Westworld.
In the present, instead of shooting himself, William opens up his arm. Teddy and Dolores stop for a moment on their journey and reflect. He tells Dolores he remembers everything now and that he loved her since he first saw her. Teddy tells her he will protect her until the day he dies. However, he is now a monster and can’t live with himself. He shoots himself.
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“Vanishing Point” started off a little slow, but its second half definitely made up for this. By killing off two characters, this episode proved that Westworld is not afraid to take risks. We only have one more episode left and I am super excited to see how this season closes.
Westworld airs Sunday nights on HBO.