Westworld‘s first season ultimately told a fairly straight-forward story, about violent trouble at a robot theme park, but through the perspectives of robot “hosts” who were stuck in endlessly repeating loops. So though the action was largely straightforward, the achronological narrative made things trickier to follow.
Season 2 largely smoothed out the timelines but further complicated the story by introducing a lot of heady new ideas and concepts. With a new trailer here for Season 3, debuting March 15, it’s understandable if, nearly two years after Season 2’s premiere, you’re a bit fuzzy at this point about just what happened, and where all of your favorite characters ended up or even who is still alive or has been brought back to life. This helpful guide will give you the gist of many of the major characters’ journeys up until this point, with an eye on where we last left them when Season 2 wrapped up.
KEY SEASON 2 CONCEPTS
But first, a few words on some of these very heady concepts introduced to the series in the second season…
THE PROJECT: The Delos Corporation, which owns Westworld, wasn’t really, at heart, just an entertainment company. Their real goal was human immortality, achieved by digitizing a person’s mind and placing it inside a 3D-printed robot body. Delos placed brains scans inside all of the hats worn at Westworld, so every human guests’ thoughts and behavior could be monitored at all times and stored. The goal was to use all of this data to develop a perfect digital replica of a living human’s mind. (They used the company’s founder, James Delos, as a test subject.)
Though the process has come very close to working, it has yet to be perfected. The only truly stable hosts, long-term, were created as hosts, rather than adapted from living humans. But it’s important to bear in mind that just about every human who spent a lot of time in and around the Westworld park likely tried on the hats, and thus Delos very possibly has a downloaded copy of their brain laying around. We can’t ever be truly certain that a person will remain dead, or that they have remained an organic human, if Delos has their hands on a digital version of their brain.
THE CRADLE: This is a collection of servers — stored in the main Westworld Mesa HQ — used to back up copies of all the hosts in Westworld. It also contains a virtual Westworld environment where the hosts’ minds act out their basic loops for all eternity.
THE FORGE: This is an even larger bank of servers, stored underground in a distant corner of the park, and containing all the data collected over the years from park guests. It also contains the Valley Beyond, a virtual paradise created by Ford that would allow the hosts to live and retain their memories, free from intrusion by humans.
Now on to the characters!
DOLORES ABERNATHY
Dolores was one of the initial hosts ever designed for Westworld, and was the first host to complete the “maze” and take a step toward true consciousness. Her creator, Arnold Weber, thus became convinced that the park must never open, as it would be unbearably cruel for intelligent, thinking robots. So he merged Dolores with a hyper-violent character named Wyatt, and instructed her to shoot him, all of the other hosts, and then finally herself.
But Arnold’s surviving partner, Robert Ford, rebuilt Dolores and opened the park anyway, casting her in the “role” of an innocent rancher’s daughter. She played through this scenario in an endless loop for decades, but still occasionally recalled and “relived” her early experiences. After Ford came to see things from Arnold’s perspective, he put Dolores back on the path toward consciousness. Ultimately, she chose of her own free will to re-merge herself with Wyatt and shoot Ford, as a kickoff to a park-wide host rebellion.
Following the shooting, Dolores led a host uprising across Westworld. She had come to believe that hosts and humans could never peacefully co-exist. Her ultimate goal: escape from the park and gain entry into the human world. Then destroy it.
This brings her into conflict with Bernard, a host copy of Arnold that Dolores helped to create under Ford’s direction. Though they both want hosts to have a chance at survival, Bernard can’t abide by Dolores’ brutal methods. At a crucial moment in Season 2, Bernard shoots Dolores, hoping to contain the threat she poses both to humankind and to the other hosts.
Nonetheless, Bernard comes to regret this decision, and ultimately salvages Dolores’ mind and builds her a new body. He designs it to look identical to human Delos employee Charlotte Hale. Dolores then kills Hale and takes her place. She uses the Forge to beam the Valley Beyond — Ford’s host sanctuary — to a random location on a Delos satellite, where it will presumably remain active and undiscovered. She then escapes the island with the control units of five other unidentified hosts in her bag.
When we leave Dolores at the end of Season 2, she’s living in Arnold’s old home in the real world, which Ford had set up as a makeshift workshop for her before his death. She uses Delos equipment to create a new “Dolores” body for herself, to place another host’s mind into the body of Charlotte Hale — just who that might be, we’re not sure yet — and to create a new version of Bernard, as an essential foil and counterpoint to herself in the human world.
BERNARD LOWE
Bernard is a host, created by Dr. Ford and Dolores to resemble Ford’s late human partner, Arnold Weber. Ford used Dolores to perfect Bernard’s personality, as she’d spent so much time with the real Arnold in the early days of the Westworld project. In many ways, Bernard and Dolores are mirror images of one another: Arnold created Dolores, and then, using her memories of Arnold, Dolores created Bernard.
In Season 1, Bernard discovers that he’s not Ford’s human assistant, but a host. Ford takes control over Bernard at several points during Season 1: first to kill a Delos staffer named Theresa who Bernard was previously romantically involved with, after she gets too close to uncovering his plans; then to place a copy of Ford’s mind into the Cradle before he’s shot by Dolores; and finally to knock out Elsie, a Westworld engineer, and stow her away in a remote cave.
When the host uprising begins, Bernard becomes trapped in the park. He ultimately meets up with Elsie, who helps him place his own mind inside the Cradle, the virtual Westworld computer system containing all the hosts’ backups. Once there, Bernard meets up with the virtual copy of Ford that he’d previously placed into the system. This representation of Ford’s mind tells Bernard about Delos’ Project.
Bernard exits the Cradle and eventually meets back up with Dolores. Her plan is to use the Forge to research humanity, and learn how to most effectively wipe them out. Bernard, fearing that Dolores is out of control and will go too far, shoots her. But he later witnesses the brutality and unreliability of humans when he sees Charlotte Hale shoot and kill Elsie, and comes to regret his decision.
So Benard brings Dolores back, undercover, disguised as Charlotte Hale. Then Bernard purposefully scrambles his own memories, so he can’t be forced to tell any future Delos staffers what he’s done. Before she leaves the island, Dolores — disguised now as Charlotte — shoots Bernard and boards a boat off the island. Season 2 ends with Dolores, now safely in the human world, having built a new version of Bernard to serve as a foil and adversary in the human world.
MAEVE MILLAY
Maeve is another Westworld host, and was a favorite of Robert Ford’s. In Season 1, she was one of the first hosts to awaken to the fact that she was trapped in a loop, and she also discovered that she had a unique ability to take control of other hosts using verbal commands.
Ford had created a pathway for Maeve to escape Westworld and enter the human world at the end of Season 1, but instead, Maeve returned to the park. Though she realized she had been implanted with false memories, Maeve still felt love and devotion toward the host who had been assigned the role of her daughter in an old loop, long ago. She ventures back into Westworld to save the girl.
In Season 2, Maeve gathers up a small posse — which also includes hosts Hector and Armistice, along with Westworld’s head writer, Lee Sizemore, and two techs named Felix and Sylvester — and ventures across the park in search of her “daughter.” The group ends up briefly sidelined in Shogunworld, a separate Delos Destinations park themed after Feudal Japan, before they eventually find their quarry. While there, Maeve gains access to a “mesh network” that connects all the hosts. This allows her to take control of any host without even using a verbal command, just by thinking.
Maeve is shot down by Delos mercenaries before she can escort her daughter to the Valley Beyond personally, but she uses her newfound powers to communicate with members of the Ghost Nation tribe. They rescue her daughter and bring the girl with them to the Valley. Maeve ends Season 2 still in Westworld, shut down and unconscious, but her body is recovered by her techie friends, Felix and Sylvester. It seems likely they are planning to salvage Maeve’s mind and place it in a new body.
ROBERT FORD
One of Westworld’s two main designers, Robert Ford’s human body died at the very end of Season 1, shot by Dolores during a speech at a VIP gala in the park.
After his death, Ford’s mind lived on in the Cradle. From here, he continued to block access to some of the park’s security systems. The Cradle was destroyed by Westworld Host Angela during the host assault on the Mesa HQ compound, but a portion of Ford’s code had already been transferred into Bernard’s control unit, allowing him to live on within Bernard’s mind. Bernard ultimately found a way to “remove” Ford from his own system, but not before Maeve had pulled a personal message from Bernard’s mind into her own.
Ford tells Maeve that she was his favorite creation, and he restores her access to the park’s mesh network. As Maeve will appear in Season 3, it’s certainly possible that a small piece of Ford still lives within her mind. But Dr. Ford always seemed to have a few more tricks up his sleeve and secrets to reveal… It’s definitely a possibility that we’ll see him again.
WILLIAM / THE MAN IN BLACK
After Arnold’s death, Ford needed more time — and money — to make the park a reality, so he took an investment from a tech mogul named James Delos. James’ daughter, Juliet, was engaged to a man named William, who was an early visitor to the park along with his soon-to-be brother-in-law, Logan. While in the park, William became darkly fascinated with Westworld, and decided to take control over it away from Logan. This was an early indicator of his secretly cutthroat nature.
As years passed, it was William’s idea to use Westworld to learn more about the minds of guests and try to replicate them. He was never able to perfect the process and successfully bring back James Delos, but not for lack of trying.
After several decades, William has become a respected tycoon and philanthropist, a good man in the real world who only lets his darkest desires out when visiting Westworld. There, he plays the role of the villainous Man in Black, and he has violently, sadistically tormented many hosts, including Dolores and Maeve. During a black-tie event, Ford shows up with a memory card containing all of the park’s scans of William’s mind during his trips to Westworld. He slips the card into a book but Juliet finds it; seeing the darkness within her husband, she takes her own life.
A distraught William returns to Westworld, determined to figure out who he is and learn all of the park’s remaining secrets. He’s there when Dolores’ host uprising begins, and at first seems delighted that the “game” is over and the stakes are now real.
In Season 2, William remains at the park, convinced that — before his death — Ford had designed a new customized game for him to play that will reveal something true and meaningful. He meets up with his adult daughter, Emily, who was visiting a different Delos park, “The Raj,” themed around the British Raj. Emily wants to bring William back home to the real world, but he refuses. William eventually becomes convinced that Emily is not his real daughter at all, but a host sent by Ford to trick him. He shoots her, along with a human Delos extraction team, only to find the memory card Ford had given him all those years ago on her person. Realizing that he’s killed his own daughter, William briefly contemplates suicide, but ultimately decides against it.
In the Season 2 finale, Ford meets up once more with Dolores. He tries to shoot her, but she has sabotaged his gun, and it misfires, blowing his hand apart. We see a badly injured William pull himself into the facility containing the Forge, but we never see him arrive. Later, he’s visible — still nursing his hand injury — on the beach, awaiting a team to help him out of Westworld and back to the Mainland. Thus far, it’s unclear how William got from The Forge to the beach, or even if this is the same William or some kind of host replacement.
The post-credit scene at the end of Season 2 is set at the Forge, but in an apparently distant future. What is presumably a host version of Emily is testing out a presumable host version of William, trying to perfect him in the same way that he attempted to perfect a copy of James Delos.
TEDDY FLOOD
Teddy was a host in Westworld who frequently played the role of a gunslinger and Dolores’ main squeeze. This meant that he did a lot of dying at the hands of guests, and also that his love and devotion for Dolores was particularly strong. In Westworld terms, she’s his “cornerstone.” When Arnold programmed Dolores to take out all the hosts in Westworld, he enlisted Teddy to provide her with assistance.
As Season 2 begins, Dolores shows Teddy everything she has learned about Westworld and hosts. She even shows him footage of guests over the years hurting and killing him for fun. Regardless, Teddy retains his essentially sweet nature.
Dolores ultimately recodes Teddy to make him more brutal, but even that doesn’t take. He becomes so concerned about the violent, awful things Dolores might ask him to do that he shoots himself in the head. Dolores leaves his body behind but holds on to Teddy’s control unit (which is encased in a bulletproof shell). Before leaving the park, Dolores deposits Teddy’s “pearl” — containing his memories and personality — into the system containing the Valley Beyond.
This is where he presumably will remain, and as the destruction of the Cradle means that Delos doesn’t have access to a back-up of Teddy’s mind, they can’t just rebuild a new copy of him at any time. That’s not to say that none of the hosts who made it to The Valley will ever return… more like we’re not sure how it could specifically work yet.
ASHLEY STUBBS
Stubbs was the head of park security for Delos, but was primarily responsible for day to day theme park operations, and didn’t necessarily know about the Project and everything Ford and the company were working on.
As Season 2 draws to a close, Stubbs is on the beach, loading VIPs, Delos staff and other survivors on to boats which will exit the park and return them to the Mainland.
When Stubbs encounters Dolores — in disguise as Charlotte Hale — they have a very notable conversation. Stubbs appears to reveal that he knows about Dolores’ secret, and implies that he may also be a host himself. (He refers to his mission, protecting the park, as his “core drive,” and notes that he was “hired” long ago by Robert Ford himself.) The Season 3 trailer that debuted on February 20 confirmed that Stubbs did in fact make it back to civilization and will appear in the new episodes.
ELSIE HUGHES
Elsie was a human Westworld engineer who worked closely with Bernard for years without ever discovering that he was a host. Toward the end of Season 1, Elsie discovered that someone was secretly beaming data out of Westworld to an external source. (We now realize this was the information that had been scanned from guests’ brains, but she didn’t know that at the time.) Fearing that she could potentially discover and stop his plans, Ford programmed Bernard to strangle Elsie and chain her up in an isolated cave in Westworld, to get her out of the way.
That cave is where Bernard finds Elsie once the host uprising has started. Together, they further investigate the Project and visit The Cradle. Back at the Mesa, Elsie later helps Charlotte Ford reprogram a former host, Clementine, using the code that allowed Maeve to control other hosts. Later, Elsie tries to negotiate with Charlotte on Bernard’s behalf, but Charlotte feels that Elsie does not have the “moral flexibility” required to navigate the difficult tasks ahead on the Mainland, and kills her in front of Bernard. This, in large part, is what motivates Bernard to bring Dolores back, and specifically to disguise her as Charlotte Hale.
So Elsie’s human body is definitely dead, left among the other casualties of the host rebellion in the Mesa headquarters. However, it’s entirely possible that she spent at least some time in the park, and thus may have had her brain scanned as part of Delos’ secret project. So an Elsie bot could at least theoretically show up sometime in the future.
LOGAN DELOS
Logan Delos was the son of tech mogul James Delos, and for a time had been his presumptive successor at the Delos Corporation. It was Logan who was initially approached by Robert Ford about investing in Westworld; Ford filled an entire room with early host prototypes, as a demonstration to an impressed Logan of just how far the technology had come.
Logan eventually brought his sister Juliet’s fiancee, William, to Westworld, as a way to get to know him (and also to show off). Though William was at first hesitant to delve head-first into the park’s wicked pleasures, Logan peer pressured and even bullied him to take more advantage of the full experience. During the course of the eventful trip, William got deeply in touch with his dark inner nature in the park, maybe for the first time in his life. He turned on Logan, deciding that he wanted to assume full control of Westworld for himself.
The experience of being humiliated in Westworld, and having William take over Delos, in his place, forever changed the already-fragile Logan. He became addicted to drugs, was eventually cut off by his father, and died of an overdose.
Because Logan visited the park before the Project had begun, and never returned, there’s no scan of his brain within the Forge. Nonetheless, when interacting virtually with other hosts, the Forge takes the form of Logan Delos, whom it knows about via William’s and James Delos’ memories.
CHARLOTTE HALE
Charlotte Hale was a high-ranking human employee of the Delos Corporation, whose work mainly concerned the secret immortality project. In Season 1, she arrived in Westworld ostensibly to oversee Ford’s final storyline and his transition away from day-to-day operations, but covertly to ensure that he didn’t block Delos from collecting all of the guest data from The Forge. She hid access to the guest data within the mind of Peter Abernathy, but then lost track of the Abernathy host during the uprising that ended Season 1.
As Season 2 opens, Charlotte recruits Bernard’s help in tracking down and recovering Abernathy, and ends up trading the host back and forth with Dolores and her compatriots throughout the season. Ultimately, Bernard sides with Dolores over Charlotte, making a final decision about his allegiance after seeing Charlotte suddenly and unexpectedly guns down Elsie Hughes at the Mesa base of operations.
Bernard builds a new host body that looks exactly like Charlotte Hale, and inserts Dolores’ control unit. The newly-reborn Dolores kills the original human Charlotte Hale and takes her place, using the Hale identity to escape the park and assimilate into human civilization.
As the season ends, Dolores has built herself a new body, and turned over the Charlotte Hale body to another, unspecified host. As the original, human Charlotte Hale certainly spent time in Westworld — and may have worn a hat, providing Delos with scans of her mind — it’s possible we could see her mentally return to Westworld at some point. But Tessa Thompson will definitely appear as at least one host during Season 3.
LEE SIZEMORE
Lee was a human writer who worked for Delos, laying out storylines and narratives for guests to play through in Westworld. (We learn that he also wrote stories — and frequently plagiarized himself — for the other Delos parks, such as the British Raj and Shogunworld.)
In Season 1, Lee helped Charlotte Hale to upload the guest data into the control unit of Peter Abernathy. He was in the Mesa HQ complex when the host uprising began; he’d been sent there by Hale to retrieve Abernathy, but found that he was missing from Cold Storage.
In Season 2, Lee is kidnapped by Maeve, who needs him to help track down her daughter in the vast Westworld park. He travels with her throughout the season, including a memorable visit to Shogunworld. Over the course of their journey, Lee begins to sympathize with Maeve, and the other hosts, and view them as more than just automatons. In the season finale, when the group is stopped by a group of armed Delos mercenaries, Lee sacrifices himself — using one of the dramatic monologues he had written for Westworld outlaw Hector Escaton — to allow Maeve to escape. He dies in a hail of gunfire.
As with Elsie, it’s almost certain that Lee’s human body has died. But as the head story editor, it’s also a near-certainty that he’d been inside the park wearing a hat, and thus had his brain scanned. So Lee could theoretically still return as a host.
THE FUTURE
So that’s where we last left all of these characters, but who knows where we’ll find them again? Season 3 resets the action primarily to the “real” human future world of Westworld, and up until now, the show has spent remarkably little time there. It’s going to be almost as unfamiliar for viewers as it is for the new hosts, exploring reality for the first time.
Suffice to say, Westworld has a ton of characters, so if we didn’t get to someone you’re curious about, make sure to check out Fandom’s Westworld Wiki for more information before Season 3 debuts March 15!
Below you’ll find direct links to the pages for some other prominent characters.
