Season 2, Episode 9: ‘Vanishing Point’

Off the top, let’s note that this week’s episode of “Westworld” comes with its own “KICK ME” sign: “Humans will always choose what they understand over what they do not.” This would be your cue to pick up the remote and catch up on old episodes of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”

For those humans who continue to choose “Westworld,” however, “Vanishing Point” is a strange animal, the rare penultimate episode that taps the brakes instead of building momentum for the season finale. There are plenty of important developments in the hour, but a notable paucity of action or forward movement. The Valley Beyond is visible in the horizon, but there’s mostly just discussion here about what it is and who deserves to get there.

Given last week’s episode, which concerned itself almost entirely with the back story of Ake, the leader of the Ghost Nation tribe, “Westworld” seems oddly content with stroking its chin — a sharp contrast with the huge battle between humans and hosts promised at the beginning of the season. The finale stands to be busier, if the gala massacre that wrapped up Season 1 is any indication, but the show has shown a willingness to sacrifice pace for more interior revelations.

Much of this week’s episode, titled “Vanishing Point,” focuses on one of the most persistent — and yet least compelling — mysteries that the show has teased from the beginning: Who is the Man in Black? We know from last season that he is William, the young man who entered Westworld as a timid upstart and grew to be corrupted by his decades in the park. One true thing about Westworld is that it reveals the guests for who they really are, which is a big reason the Delos corporation has so valued the user information it has been harvesting. But for William/the Man in Black, the park has provided a journey into his own heart of darkness: “I was shedding my skin,” he narrates. “The darkness was what was underneath. It was mine all along, and I decided how much of it I left in the world.”

The episode has a tragic arc to it, taking full measure of William’s all-consuming obsession and the destruction it has caused in his life. The show has often flashed back to the image of the overflowing bathtub where his wife committed suicide, but now the full story can be told, with the killing of his own daughter added as a stinger. It’s both a feature and a bug that Ed Harris, an actor known for his explosive displays of emotion in films like “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Pollock,” has been so inaccessible throughout the show’s run. His craggy face has been a window into William’s desiccated soul, but the character has been wandering the park like Judge Holden in “Blood Meridian,” an implacable source of violence against anyone who stands in his path.

At times, the Man in Black has appeared to be a force for good, relentless in exposing the park for what it really is. But now, the true corruption (“the stain,” as he calls it) is within him, and continuing to play Dr. Ford’s “game” has just forced him to confront it. His paranoia leads him to the shocking mistake of believing his daughter is one of Ford’s tricks, a host sent to knock him off the path. Whatever flicker of humanity he had left has been snuffed out.

“Vanishing Point” keenly ties William/the Man in Black’s downward trajectory to that of Dolores, whose own bloody, relentless quest for vengeance has taken a moral toll. For hosts like Dolores, freedom and the power of self-awareness also means taking responsibility for your choices, and her desire to get to “the weapon” and use it against her former captors has obliterated her conscience. Changing Teddy from an earnest simpleton to a coldhearted gunslinger was only the capper to a violent campaign in which she — and she alone — has determined who is fit to reach the Valley Beyond.

Dolores’s similarities to the Man in Black have helped enforce the show’s theme about the park itself as a corrupting landscape, but it has also been disappointing to experience to the same kind of disconnect with her character. After all, Dolores is someone who once greeted the “splendor” of each new day with optimism and a romantic spirit, and ended it in the looped horrors of rape and murder. The righteousness of her mission, as well as her basic “humanity,” has been forgotten.

The deaths of Teddy and Emily toward the end of “Vanishing Point” have a terrible finality to them for Dolores and William, who are now permanently condemned figures in whatever world they attempt to conquer. (Although technology has put an asterisk on all deaths in “Westworld.”) That leaves Bernard, who is now in some nebulous place between human and host, questioning his allegiance to Dr. Ford and to Elsie, whom he has vowed not to hurt again. He’s a closet full of Bernards on the inside, too, and the future of “Westworld” will likely depend on which Bernard he decides to be.

Paranoid Androids:

• There are no hard conclusions to be drawn from the shot of the Man in Black carving into his own arm, but Reddit posters have been batting around the Man-in-Black-as-host theory for quite some time. It is also possible that his false certainty about his daughter’s being a host has triggered his paranoia and that he’s treating his arm like Gene Hackman’s apartment at the end of “The Conversation.”