I Can’t Believe That Black William Did That. SPOILER
He murdered his own daughter, Emily, with a machine gun! This is true horror on a nearly-unimaginable scale! Emily was by far my favorite character. She had him by the proverbial balls. She had a well thought-through plan to destroy him as revenge for driving her mother (played by Sela Ward, who looks AMAZING at 62 years of age) to suicide. He told his wife that she was the only one who could see what he really is, but he was wrong. She passed that understanding on to
Emily, housed in the birthday gift that Emily rejected because she thought that her mother did not understand her, ironically. Emily is her father’s daughter AND her mother’s daughter, and stood right up to him every step of the way. Terrific acting from her, completely holding her own with Ed Harris, and terrific writing from the script. She says that he is having a psychotic break. He decides that Emily is a host, to protect his fractured psyche, and kills her with no hesitation. Stained and damaged as he is, suicidal as he is, William must nonetheless now know that the parks are not really places where you can sin and no one will know. YOU will know! William, who has murdered his wife and child, now has to be in his own private Hell. To what acts will his torment lead him now? There are no restraints on him any more, not that there were many before he murdered Emily. He literally has nothing left to lose. William, who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and achieved so much, is Damned.
So now we have Damned Black William, who wants to destroy the whole theme park complex, the Delos folks, who would rather destroy all the hosts than let even some of them get into the world outside, versus Ford, who wants to see the birth of a new species, and Delores, who is determined to escape to the world outside. Then there are the two wild cards: Maeve, of whom Ford thinks as a daughter, and Bernard, who Ford tells that he, Bernard, is the only one who can stop “it.” A 91-minute season finale awaits. I think this episode is even better that episode 2.8, and that is very hard to do.