【White Nude Taken Down】

This recap contains spoilers for Westworld Season 1,White Nude Taken Down episode 8, titled "Trace Decay." Refresh your memory of where we left off with our recap of episode 7.

There were no big twists on Westworldthis week -- fitting, given the enormity of last week’s reveal that Bernard has been a host all along. Instead, “Trace Decay” focused on the hosts’ ongoing struggles with identity, consciousness and memory.

That, and the Man in Black’s backstory: “I’m a god,” he says. “A titan of industry. Philanthropist, family man, married to a beautiful woman, father to a beautiful daughter. I’m the good guy, Teddy.”

But his wife died, his daughter rejected him, and he returned to Westworld to find out who he really is. Like William, the Man in Black found his true self in Westworld. And apparently his true self is a real son of a bitch, one capable of butchering the Homestead iteration of Maeve and her innocent daughter “just to see what he felt.”

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The parallels between Ed Harris’s character and William continue to stack up, and the two timelines theory -- that William’s story takes place in the past and the two characters are one and the same -- remains in play. One great clue: the Man in Black recognizes a female host that he and Teddy come across on the road, telling her that he imagined she’d been retired long ago: that host is the same one who welcomed William to the park and gave him his orientation back in episode 2.

Dolores questioning her reality in “Trace Decay” also aids that speculation. Are her hallucinations of the town and the church in the past or the present? When is her journey with William really taking place? How will all this factor into Ford’s fabled new story?

The flashback to Maeve’s painful memory did reveal one potentially important fact: that Arnold is the one who invented Ford’s famed “reveries.”

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“An old trick from an old friend,” Ford says, as he calms Maeve down with a song: Claude Debussy’s “Reverie” (hence the name). How exactly they sparked the hosts’ various breakdowns (and whether or not they really did) -- not to mention whether Ford anticipated such an outcome and if not, why not -- remains to be seen.

“Trace Decay” itself refers to the psychological concept that memories leave a chemical trace in the brain that decays over time, one human trait that apparently was not programmed into the hosts. “You recall memories perfectly,” Felix tells Maeve. “You relive them.”

That fact has caught Ford off guard before, and may again. He erased Bernard’s memories of not just murdering Theresa (and apparently Elsie too), but his entire relationship with the icy head of QA. That didn’t work so well in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it likely won’t work here either -- especially if Stubbs keeps up the suspicious streak he exhibits when Bernie so adamantly denies his involvement with Theresa and seems disinterested in Elsie's absence.

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The poor head of security, played by Luke Hemsworth, seems perpetually behind on the goings-on inside Westworld and the company’s headquarters. Wouldn’t it be great to see him crack this thing wide open in the end?

That is, if Maeve doesn’t burn the place to the ground first. She’s been grasping more and more power every week, and in episode 8 finally resolved to “write her own fucking story.”

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I’m always game to watch Hector Escaton and Armistice’s gang roll into town, especially now that Maeve has somehow given herself the ability to rewrite the story in real time. Unfortunately for her, the park’s control room has finally caught on that something’s up with her, and the last we see she’s faced with a choice: go quietly with the techs sent to retrieve her, or reveal that she has overcome her programming and cut those fools like she did Sylvester.

But while HQ is finally paying attention to Maeve, one has to wonder whether they’ve noticed what the Man in Black is up to. Stubbs said episodes ago that the MiB gets to do whatever he wants, but how far is Ford willing to let him travel down the path toward the maze? What does Ford know about the quest that no one else seems to?

We know the maze “isn’t meant for” the MiB, but so what? Will that stop him from completing it and unlocking the hosts’ true potential as he plans?

Meanwhile the park’s “fearless leader” didn’t create a host version of Theresa the way some viewers anticipated, instead opting to make her death look like an accident and use her various transgressions to get Bernard reinstated with the company.

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That begs the question: how long has Bernie been with him? How many times have they done this dance? Ford once mused to Theresa about her many predecessors, and the park’s extreme isolation from the rest of the world (not to mention from its parent company, Delos) probably allows for all kinds of hijinks on Ford’s part. I doubt that Elsie is the only other person Ford’s ever sicced his creation on.

One of the main potential twists that Westworldhas foreshadowed repeatedly is that Bernard is in fact a host version of Arnold. “You should be proud of these emotions you’re feeling,” Ford tells him. “You yourself are the author of so many of them.” That certainly supports the theory.

Ford says he built Bernard because the other engineers working on the park in the early days -- the human ones -- weren’t up to the task of programming truly lifelike emotions for the hosts. But Ford and Bernard -- human and host -- together were.

What really happened to Arnold? “You’re not the first man to threaten me,” Ford says. “Arnold came to feel the way you do. He couldn’t stop me either.”

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Yet as the masterful Anthony Hopkins earlier recited, “One man’s life or death is but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge that I sought, for the dominion I should acquire.” Not coincidentally, that’s a quote from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And who ultimately triumphed in that classic story? The creation, the creature, destroyed its creator's life and they both wound up sad and ruined. How’s that for foreshadowing?

“Trace Decay” revealed a few new tidbits, but as viewers we remain as confused as ever. The Man in Black this week more or less confirmed that he intends to break the hosts’ core code and let them harm humans, but at least one big question has yet to be answered: if Wyatt is the key to the maze, and the maze is Arnold’s game, yet Wyatt is Ford’s new villain, how can they be tied to one another? With just two episodes left, Westworldwill hopefully start the true reveals soon.

Westworldairs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.