The Man in Black presses Dolores about Wyatt’s whereabouts and the center of the maze, and reveals he is actually an aged William. Dolores then remembers Arnold’s order to kill him and destroy the park, and that she is actually Wyatt. She attempts fighting back, Teddy rescues her, and they flee to a distant beach. Dolores dies in Teddy's arms, though that is revealed to be part of Ford's narrative. During her escape from Westworld, Maeve—aided by Hector and Armistice—finds Bernard's corpse, and Felix repairs him. Bernard warns Maeve that her desire to escape was programmed into her. Although Maeve—now alone—initially continues her escape, she has second thoughts and exits the imminently departing train to find her daughter. Back at Westworld, Ford tells Dolores and Bernard that he regretted his role in Arnold's death, came to desire to free the hosts as well, and has spent the last 35 years preparing them to fight back. He then gives a speech in front of Charlotte, the Man in Black, and the rest of the Delos board, criticizing their handling of the park. Dolores then shoots and kills Ford while an army of reactivated hosts emerges from a nearby forest and begin shooting at the guests.
This episode provides examples of:
- Actually, I Am Him: William is the Man in Black, and Dolores is Wyatt.
- Age Cut: The transition between young William and the Man in Black happens under a lowered hat, just as in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Ford promises "those things you have always enjoyed; surprises and violence". He delivers.
- Black Comedy Rape: Destin's habit of molesting deactivated hosts is played for dark comedy.
- Chekhov's Skill: Felix was earlier experimenting and practicing with a "dead" host bird, figuring out how to bring it back to life properly. This comes in handy when he restores Bernard in this episode.
- China Takes Over the World: The announcements at the train station are repeated in what appears to be Chinese language, implying that this trope is in play.
- Cynicism Catalyst:
- Finally finding Dolores, only to discover that she has been rolled back with no memory of him is what really puts William over the edge. Before then, he had cut a bloody swathe through the hosts just to find her. After seeing her apparently lost to him forever, William fully embraces his own cruelty and sadism for the sake of it.
- For Dolores as well, as the only decent human she remembers turns out to be the brutal sadist who's tormented her for years. At the end of the episode she's apparently decided to Kill All Humans.
- Died in Your Arms Tonight: Dolores dies in Teddy's arms at the beach as the Delos crowd watches on.
- Do Not Go Gentle: When Maeve leaves Hector behind and he turns around from the elevator to give the tactical response team a final shootout.
- Dangerously Close Shave: The Man in Black lets Dolores shave him with his very large knife.
- Dramatically Missing the Point: Hale thinks he has Ford figured, and that he'll never destroy decades of work in a fit of pique rather than hand it over to the Board. However she doesn't know that Ford's work is not Westworld itself, but his striving to make the hosts sentient.
- The Ending Changes Everything: All of the twisting plot threads have been according to Ford's design.
- He engineered Maeve to break out, in order to give her the choice to break her programming by staying and searching for her daughter.
- He caused Dolores to retrace her steps and find the maze.
- He had Bernard shoot himself in the exact place to allow Maeve to find and re-activate him.
- He created his new narrative as a way to give the sentient hosts a chance to rebel against Delos.
- Ford tells Bernard that Arnold's initial attempt at freeing the hosts was quick, cheap, and dirty and it didn't really have any chance of success. All the programming attributed to Arnold from beyond the grave influencing current events was in fact Ford's doing while playing his Long Game to accomplish what Arnold couldn't.
- Facial Dialogue: Hale can be seen tensing up when it looks like Ford is delivering a "Reason You Suck" Speech to the board, but relaxes again when he appears to be going with the program.
- Final Words: Dolores gets to speak some final lines before dying in Teddy's arms.
- Fingore: Armistice wakes up while a lab tech is working on her teeth. She bites off his finger and shoves it into his mouth.
- Foreshadowing:
- An early clue that William was the Man in Black was when he recognized Angela, who was the same host that greeted William on arrival at Westworld.
- Teddy said in a previous episode that Wyatt's men aren't afraid to die because they think they're already in Hell. Maeve says she's going to Hell to get an army, and sure enough an army of deactivated hosts come to life to attack at Wyatt's behest.
- Full-Frontal Assault: Armistice, who is naked as hosts usually are when in the Mesa, murders a repair tech.
- Good All Along: Dr. Ford wasn't trying to keep the hosts trapped forever. He was behaving that way to evolve them to fight back and free themselves. His entire new narrative has in fact been a way to conceal his creation of a host rebellion and the grand opening as a set-up to allow the conscious hosts to kill of the entire board of Delos in one fell swoop.
- Gone Horribly Right: Logan brought William to Westworld to force him to put aside his Holier Than Thou nature. It works so well that William usurps Logan's position on the Delos board and, years later, drives Logan's sister to suicide.
- Gory Discretion Shot: The exit wound from the bullet Ford takes to the back of the head from Dolores would've been too nasty to put on screen.
- Headphones Equal Isolation: Destin puts in noise cancelling earphones which keep him oblivious of the Full-Frontal Assault happening in the room behind him. At least until the glass pane breaks.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: The hosts kill using the very gunslinger skills the humans programmed into them for entertainment's sake.
- Hold the Line: Armistice after her arm gets caught in the door.
- Hollywood Healing: The Man in Black holds his arm stiffly after Dolores breaks it, but is otherwise unimpeded.
- Humans Are Bastards: Maeve tells Felix he'd make a poor human, with this trope in mind. She's actually complimenting him.
- Humiliation Conga: Logan opens the episode being dragged on the end of a rope behind William's horse, and ends it being sent naked on his way tied to a horse to an ambiguous fate.
- Iconic Item: William picks up a LeMat revolver and black hat from the people he's killed during his Roaring Rampage of Rescue.
- Instant Expert: Despite being completely unfamiliar with automatic weapons, Hector and Armistice use them to decimate a Redshirt Army of QA soldiers.
- Ironic Echo: Destin's "Just you and me now, macho man" when getting it on with Hector is being reversed soon after when Hector rises from his chair and announced "Just you and me now, my friend."
- I Will Find You: Deconstructed; William's determination to find Dolores only corrupts him.
- Letting the Air out of the Band: Played for drama in the beginning when Teddy arrives at Sweetwater and the pianola music slows down and we see the massacre scene.
- Life-or-Limb Decision: Armistice does this to free herself from a security door during the breakout.
- Lock Down: Doors seal off the QA control room.
- Long Game: Ford has been playing a 35 year long game, one that Arnold started with the goal of freeing the hosts. Ford realised that the hosts needed time to develop consciousness and that pain and grief are key components in generating sapience.Ford: Wasn't it Oppenheimer who said that "Any man whose mistakes take ten years to correct is quite a man"? Mine have taken thirty-five.
- Lost in a Crowd: Armistice and Hector hide in cold storage amongst the decommissioned hosts, making it hard for the QA response team to pick them out.
- Love Makes You Evil: William is actually the Man in Black.
- Meaningful Echo: Ford's final speech describes Westworld as "a prison of our own sins", which harkens back to Peter Abernathy in the first episode saying Ford is "in a prison of your own sins".
- Militaries Are Useless: Quality Assurance security guards act as Canon Fodder for Armistice and Hector.
- More Dakka: Hector and Armistice are both surprised and happy to find that the FN P90 can fire automatically, whereas they're used to manually operated firearms like shotguns, revolvers, and rifles. Armistice gasps with delight after firing her first burst from an automatic weapon.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Dolores' reaction when Ford reveals that it was her who shot Arnold.
- New Era Speech: Ford's farewell speech at the gala doubles as one, with the slightly unusual component that he's shot at the end.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Dolores delivers one to the Man in Black. Right up until he stabs her.
- No Time to Explain: When walking through the room full of Samurai-themed hosts, Maeve asks what they're for. Felix simply says that it's complicated.
- Out-Gambitted: Sizemore had planned to smuggle out a host from cold storage containing the entire source code for all the hosts at the behest of the Delos board. When he discovers all the hosts in cold storage are gone, it means Ford has also delivered the source code into the hands of the hosts too so that they can reproduce.
- Perception Filter: It turns out Teddy's memories of Wyatt and him killing fellow Union soldiers and then Wyatt killing "the General" were his actual memories of Dolores and him killing the rest of the hosts and then Dolores killing Arnold.
- Proscenium Reveal: Teddy carries Dolores to a moonlight beach where she gives a final speech and dies. The action freezes and floodlights come on to reveal it's the climax of Ford's new narrative.
- The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: The first act of rebellion is to brutally murder the entire Delos board of directors at the grand unveiling of Ford's new narrative. In fact, this was entirely by Ford's design.
- Senseless Sacrifice: Forty years ago, Dr. Arnold tried to prevent the park from opening by reprogramming Dolores and Teddy to massacre an entire town's population of hosts, and then himself. He hoped it would shock the investors into backing out and make Robert Ford scuttle the project altogether. It didn't work, Ford went ahead with the park because it was his dream and William/The Man in Black invested enough money to keep the park open. That, combined with Delos erasing all evidence of Arnold's existence ensured that Westworld would be in business for decades. In the end, it's not entirely pointless because it contributed to Ford realizing his own mistake shortly after, and makes him resume Arnold's agenda at a very slow pace as a tribute to his friend and a way to atone.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: William's original journey to find Dolores winds up this way and leads him to become the Man in Black when she doesn't recognize him after being cleaned up and rolled back. This is later mirrored when the end of his journey to find the maze turns out to be useless to him. Even after Dolores remembers who William was as a young man, she turns her back on him and leaves him with nothing.
- Single Tear: Dolores does this on several occasions including weeping over William's lost innocence, when she's dying in Teddy's arms on the beach, and her memory of killing Arnold.
- The Stinger: "The Bicameral Mind" ends its credits with a still-trapped Armistice cutting off her arm to continue attacking QA security teams.
- Tempting Fate:
- Hale tells Sizemore that everything is under control. And it is — Ford's control.
- After gunning down the Redshirt Army of QA soldiers, Armistice says that these "gods are pussies". Right then a wounded soldier presses a Big Red Button that slams shut an emergency door on her arm, trapping her in place.
- Thanatos Gambit: Ford's plan all along has been to follow in Arnold's footsteps and die at the hands of a host as the opening shots of a host rebellion. Arnold himself planned this, but it didn't work out.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Played for laughs — when Felix discovers that Bernard is a host, he stares at his own hands until Maeve tells him not to be an idiot — he's human.
- Wham Line: For Dolores, when the Man in Black finishes his story about William's fate:Man in Black: I really oughta thank you, Dolores. You helped me find myself.
- Wham Shot:
- Maeve's group manages to get out of the main Westworld facility... and stumbles into another facility containing samurai-themed Hosts with a different "SW" logo, revealing that Westworld is not the only Delos theme park.
- Sizemore walks into cold storage and finds no one.
- Of course the literal case of Dolores's shooting of Ford.
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: There's reference to Maeve reaching the 'mainland', implying that Westworld is located on an island rather than the Delos Corporation buying up most of Utah. In fact, there are numerous hints
to the location being underwater. - William Telling: Teddy shoots a bottle off a Rebus's head for the Delos guests. A guest then takes the gun and shoots Rebus. The same host is later shown smiling when the massacre starts.
- You Are Not Ready: This has been Ford's attitude towards the hosts' freedom. He tells Bernard the hosts needed time to grow and learn about their enemy in order to develop full consciousness and earn their freedom.
- Zero-Approval Gambit: Ford had to do this to give the hosts an enemy to struggle against in order to win their freedom.
