Oh, sweet baby Stubbs…played by the lesser-est Hemsworth…hath thou been a host this entire time? Well, it’s now looking like it.
When Dolores (in Charlotte Hale form) attempts to sneak past security to leave the park, she’s met by Stubbs. Here, we finally get an interesting bit of background from Stubbs. Mainly that “the old man” hired him to look after the hosts inside the park. He calls it his “core drive.” Then he lets Dolores Hale leave.
Two things to glean from this interaction. The first is that Stubbs, whether he’s human or host, has always been here for the hosts’ protection and not the precious guests’. This explains why he’s always been soft on Bernard and sympathetic to the hosts in general.
The second thing is that Stubbs is possibly a host himself. His little message was full of double entendres that only a host would know about, but is he?? I mean, when I first watched this scene, I just took it as he was a human hired to take care of hosts. But as Joanna Robinson points out at Vanity Fair, if Stubbs is a host it accounts for a couple of timeline flubs from the first season. Mainly, we see a young Stubbs seemingly help Dolores and young William in their timeline back in Season 1. Maybe that really was…Stubbs-Stubbs. Because Stubbs as been a host this whole time!
Word of caution, though, to the theorists: Vanity Fair also reveals that this scene was written by Jonathan Nolan the night before shooting*. So it was a last minute twist nugget. So if Stubbs is now a host, that wasn’t necessarily the plan all along, but it does make for a convenient clean up to a couple of tiny plot holes….
*Also, this suggests that the Westworld showrunners might indeed be making a lot of this up as they go along.
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