After seeing the Season 2 Finale, I can't see how there's a season three
But Google tells me they have plans for more. I'm not sure I'm on board for it, as it seems they wrapped most of this up, leaving only a few needful loose ends.
shareWhat, you mean you're not going to watch? Seriously? :)
(Major spoilers - you've been warned !!!)
I'm still trying to process all that. They're not big fans of chronological order, which means you often have to think a while to put the events together in your head. But we have some hosts that didn't make it - some of which can be salvaged, like Maeve. We have a bunch that got uploaded into a Matrix style virtual world in some remote server, or maybe distributed across the internet. Dolores has become a Charlotte duplicate and gone out into the real world. Meanwhile a copy of her is with Bernard in the virtual reality, somehow.
Stubbs the security guy is a host too. At least I'm pretty sure he is. And William is doing the James Delos thing with his daughter - the real one, a host copy, or a successfully resurrected version, we don't know. So if William has repeated this park experience countless times, what does that mean for all the other characters? Despite the revelations and additional backstory we're actually further away from understanding the true nature of what's happening now than at the beginning of the season. That finale made me feel like I took some bad acid!
"Meanwhile a copy of her is with Bernard in the virtual reality, somehow."
Nope, this is not VR. It was not an anamorphic scene. There were no black bars on top and bottom. Dolores smuggled out several pearl control units, so it's pretty obvious that once she got to Bernards house she manufactured bodies and put herself back in her old one. We don't know yet who is now inside of the Charlotte host. But that scene with Bernard was happening in the real world.
And what William is doing with his daughter is in another time period completely. I think the best guess is the distant future. We don't know exactly what became of him when he originally went into the Forge elevator, other than he survived the flooding incident and was brought back to the beach. I think its very likely that the next season could see a big time jump if the post-credits scene is any indication.
That fits in with the post apocalyptic scenario, that this entire show takes place long after some event wiped out higher life on Earth - a war, an asteroid impact, whatever. In which case none of the characters are truly human. Although their brains may contain archived downloads of the personalities and memories of their original long-dead selves. The longer they avoid actually showing the outside world in the present time frame the more likely something like that becomes. We'll have to see if Dolores-Charlotte actually gets to the Delos Home Office next season or if we continue to glimpse the outside only in flashbacks.
shareWe've already seen the outside world. To say the entire show takes place after a post-apocalyptic event is disingenuous. That might hold true for the post-credits scene, but we know there is a real world, Dolores and Bernard are there now. I'd recommend not overthinking this show, it's not as hyper-complicated as people make it out to be.
shareDolores and Bernard may be there now. Never take anything at face value on this show. They could be inside another part of the same simulation as the other escaped hosts. Or a different one altogether. So far we've only seen the outside world in flashbacks to earlier times. And as the last scene in the finale shows, we can't necessarily take it for granted that what you think happened a year ago, or ten years ago, didn't happen much further in the past.
The theory goes that sometime between young William's visit to the park and the first episode of the show, when Black William showed up at Dolores' farm, there was a mass extinction event. Which is why all animals in the park other than the insects are artificial. A lengthy impact winter, say, would do that - leave only the bottom of the food chain intact. If you departed the island on a helicopter you might fly over a barren landscape of scrub vegetation and dead forests, to find only long abandoned cities crumbling from hundreds of years of neglect.
The island's experiment would essentially be an attempt to reboot civilization. The guests are stuck in loops just like the hosts - and James Delos - with Ford (perhaps the only human who successfully made the transfer to digital form) running the park and gradually refining his techniques to bring back the stored minds of as many humans as they were able to "record" before the end. Something along those lines. There's some question about whether William is looping over and over his entire experience in the park or just his descent into the Forge. If he's repeating the whole thing then everyone else must be repeating it too.
I'm not saying I am fully convinced by this theory. Only that you can make a plausible case for it. They've consistently avoided showing the outside world except during forays into someone's memory. If New Charlotte makes it to the outside in season 3 and we see her there, that would instantly disprove the theory. It'll be a while before we find out. Late 2019 or 2020 is what they're saying for the third season right now.
What, you mean you're not going to watch?
I really do think they should've wrapped it up with this year's ending or a slightly modified version. For my money, they don't have to detail what will happen with the escaped host (Dolores 1) the remade hosts (Dolores 2 and Bernard) and the virtual world where many of the other hosts went.
Three stories were told:
1. That Ford saw how his guests interacted with the hosts and thought men horribly corrupt.
2. That escaping into a virtual reality is actually escaping if you can make it or remake your life as in the "real" world.
3. That our smart creations may be smart enough to go forward without us guiding them or controlling them.
Of these only the first may be truly false. In essence, Ford was watching people live out their fantasies, and no one should be judged by those. Even the Man in Black was different in reality. He told his wife how hard he tried to do the right thing even though he felt a great darkness. In a way that's many of us - fighting to be civilized even as the animals we are try to take hold.
That being said, I'll probably end up watching next season, as it's my nature to finish things. This is high end stuff with very good actors lush sets and nuanced writing. share
Apparently they have a rough map of where the entire series goes. A lot remains to be filled in, but they're not flying blind. Assuming it continues to keep its audience there's a finite number of seasons and a definite endpoint. Like GoT.
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