Series / Westworld

"These violent delights have violent ends."

"I used to think this place was all about pandering to your baser instincts. Now I understand. It doesn't cater to your lowest self, it reveals your deepest self. It shows you who you really are."

— William

Westworld is a 2016 Science Fiction/western television series airing on HBO, based on the 1973 film of the same name by Michael Crichton. The series comes from Warner Bros. Television, rather than being an in-house production.

20 Minutes into the Future is a Theme Park Version of The Wild West known as Westworld; a place wherein every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged without consequence. Here, wealthy human "guests" can live out all their desires or fantasies with the super-realistic robotic "Hosts", no matter how immoral or illegal they may be.

One of the Hosts, Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood), has her looped story broken when she stumbles upon her father having a fit, and a dark chapter in the park begins as secrets begin to be unveiled.

Produced by J. J. Abrams, and created by Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy as a Sunday Evening Drama Series, it features an All-Star Cast that includes Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden, Thandiwe Newton^note credited for Seasons 1-3 as Thandie Newton, Jeffrey Wright, and Rodrigo Santoro. The third season added Aaron Paul and Vincent Cassel as major characters.

The second season premiered on April 22, 2018. The third season premiered on March 15, 2020. The show was renewed for a fourth season announced in April 2020, but production would up getting delayed due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the season premiered on June 26, 2022. While Nolan and Joy had discussed plans for a fifth and final season, in November 2022 HBO confirmed that it would not be renewing the show, making the fourth season the last one. Nolan expressed in two separate interviews (Hollywood Reporter and The Wrap) that he hoped to give the series closure someday.

Vote here for the best episode.

Character tropes go on to the Characters Sheet.

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In general this series provides examples of the following tropes:

# - G

• 20 Minutes into the Future:
  • Word of God is that the series takes place in the 21st century, but what exact year is unclear. The hosts and Westworld in general are decades ahead of 2016 technology, but we have no idea how pervasive those advances are since we only see them within Westworld. The only concrete details are that the park has been in operation for over 30 years, and that quality of living has increased so tremendously that everyone's basic needs are taken care of. An easter egg on the Westworld website reveals it's possible the "present day" in the show is the year 2052. invoked
  • The Season 3 announcement date trailer reveals the timeline of the show where the divergence started on June 2019 with the real-life Hong Kong protests followed by the real-life impeachment of the US President in December 2019. These real-life events were followed by fictional events such as an ecological collapse in Indonesia in 2020, the assassination of the President-elect in Buenos Aires on 2024, a thermonuclear incident in Paris in the following year and a second Russian civil war in 2037. Then in 2039, a system called Solomon is initiated but it encountered a "critical divergence" in 2058 which is where Season 3 is set.
  • Season 3 shows what the outside world looked like where the technology is more or less advanced due to virtual reality technology. In high-tech cities like Los Angeles and London, people can change their outfits and ride in automatic cars. There's an Artificial Intelligence called Rehoboam that can dictate human life.
• Actionized Sequel: While the first season does have action scenes, they're strictly part of the narratives. But after the host rebellion started in the second season, all stakes are up where the hosts began attacking and killing the humans in the park while the Delos security tries to fend themselves which is exemplified in Dolores' attack on the Delos Mesa. In the third season which took place outside the park, majority of the scenes are filled with car chases and gunfights while the main host characters, who were not initially fighters, know how to use hand-to-hand combat.
• Actor Allusion: Ford reveals that the host Peter Abernathy once was the villain of a horror-themed narrative called "The Dinner Party." His character was the Professor, a Wicked Cultured Shakespeare-quoting psychopath with a penchant for cannibalism... much like Anthony Hopkins' most infamous role, Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
• Adaptational Villainy: The Guests. The majority of them are portrayed as chaotic and cruel. The Guests in the original film are far more civilized and are simply acting out the roles typical of their settings.
• Adapted Out: In the film, Westworld is only one of three locations in the park along with Medieval World and Roman World, but according to Word of God neither Medieval World nor Roman World will be a part of the show's continuity. However, at one point, Elsie visits an abandoned theater where Roman and Medieval-esqe props are stored.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • Part of Theresa's job as head of Quality Assurance mainly involves preventing the hosts from going rogue.
  • Naturally the entire plot is based around this concept, only instead of a computer virus making the hosts malfunction, the 'glitches' are the result of the creators trying to make them more human-like and the hosts are beginning to Grow Beyond Their Programming. Maeve, Dolores, and Akecheta all apparently independently achieve self-awareness, and spread it to other hosts.
  • In "The Stray," Dr. Ford tells Bernard that his deceased colleague, Arnold, was attempting to induce true consciousness through the theory of the bicameral mind, the idea that one part of the brain speaks and the other listens. By making the hosts be able to hear their programming, he theorized that they would eventually be able to think on their own. The problem, though, is that it would be equally likely they would assume the voice to be that of God, driving them towards being psychotic. It appears remnants of that idea still exist in the hosts.
  • Solomon, the first AI system designed by the Serac brothers, was able to accurately create societal projections as per its requirements. Unfortunately, its projections included every possible scenario, with the millions of potential paths ultimately driving the machine insane, and unable to focus on creating any path except for the most ruthlessly pragmatic.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Some of the female guests ignore the otherwise handsome Teddy because he's too nice and boring. Instead, they prefer the more exciting bandits like Hector. They squee over him even while he's gunning down practically half the town in in a needlessly violent saloon heist. The Man in Black lampshades this, describing him as a character made by focus-testing (although it turns out that Lee designed Hector as an idealized version of himself).
• Alternate Reality Game: There are two real-world websites for Westworld, one for Westworld itself (with a friendly chatbot named Aeden to answer questions about the park) and one for Westworld's parent company, Delos. Immediately after the season finale, both websites became "corrupted," with Aeden asking why you killed them. Looking at the Delos website's source code also revealed internal Delos emails, including a thread asking how the landscape map works ("Is it like lasers or some shit?").
• Alternative Turing Test: Arnold creates the maze as a way of testing the consciousness of the hosts, specifically Dolores and Maeve, both of whom have to suffer through their own deaths and strive to overcome extreme adversity in order to prove (through their own suffering) that they are in fact sentient.
• Ambiguous Situation: Almost all of the one-on-one conversations between Bernard and Dolores. How many are set in the present timeline? Which are actually between Dolores and Arnold Weber? And which are actually Dolores herself testing the Bernard host for fidelity?
  • In addition, most of the hosts' behavior while in the park (i.e., before they become fully conscious and self-aware) is inherently ambiguous because it's impossible to tell except by extrapolation which behaviors or feelings are solely a result of programming and which ones they would have freely chosen or felt, or if there's even always a significant difference between the two. Even when some of the hosts appear to begin acting more freely, it always remains a possibility that they are being influenced by changes to their code that they don't realize are there, as with Maeve's "escape" narrative in season 1.
• Amnesiac Lover: An extremely tragic example between William and Dolores, as Dolores being reset and forgetting William threw him into a tailspin of total despair and ego death and kicked off a dramatic personality change. Even worse: She later did seem to remember him despite the memory wipe, but the damage was already done and he no longer believed anything about their relationship was ever real to begin with.
• Anachronic Order:
  • Hosts' memories, when they exist, are absolutely precise as opposed to vague human memories. As a result Dolores starts to lose the ability to tell the past from the present, sometimes flipping them within a single scene.
  • Even more dramatically, the entire storyline with William and Logan is set many years earlier than other events. Hints to this appear as early as the second episode in which the Westworld logo is a different (older) version of the one seen elsewhere. Ultimately confirmed in "The Well-Tempered Clavier", when Logan gives William the picture that Peter Abernathy found in the first episode. This results in a confusing storyline for Dolores, as she is shown traveling to the buried town on her own, while flash backing to her trip there with William, getting wounded and then showing up unharmed, and also flashbacking to living there originally at the start of the park.
  • This is also used to hide the fact that Bernard in the sessions with Dolores is actually Arnold. Dolores has apparently approached consciousness three times: originally with Arnold, with William, and after the Reveries update.
  • The second season jumps between right after the Host uprising at the end of the first season, and two weeks later in the aftermath, with some flashbacks to the early days of the park as well.
    • Bernard's memories have become jumbled and unaddressed as a result of Bernard deliberately scrambling them so that Strand's team wouldn't find out that Hale was a host duplicate he created, meaning that he (and by extension the viewers) is jumping between different memories in different time periods with almost no way to tell when it took place or what is real.
  • The first half of Season 4 splits its narrative between Caleb and Maeve, 8 years after taking out Rehoboam, attempting to stop Host!Hale and Host!William from executing their plan to take over humanity, while Bernard and Stubbs team up with a resistance group attempting to do the same, as well as introducing a young woman named Christina who appears to be a human version of Dolores. Episode 4 reveals that Bernard and Christina's storylines actually take place a full 23 years after Caleb and Maeve's, Host!Hale and Host!William have succeeded in subjugating humanity, Christina is actually a host built by Hale to (unknowingly) set the narratives that control the populace, and the resistance member Bernard and Stubbs have been dealing with is actually Caleb's adult daughter. The show's narrative becomes more straightforward after this reveal, though.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • The pianola plays pretty much exclusively contemporary music^note from the audience's perspective including Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun", The Rolling Stones's "Paint it Black" and Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black". Dr. Ford mentions that he included some Gertrude Stein references in an old cannibal cult leader's quotes, just for fun. And while most of the firearms are more or less period-appropriate to the park's setting (it's rather ambiguous exactly what year it's supposed to be in the simulation), the Man In Black carries a cartridge-converted LeMat revolver (no original LeMats are known to have been converted, and cartridge-adapted reproductions first appeared in the 1980s), and an armored wagon is equipped with a Browning M1917 water-cooled .30-caliber machine gun, introduced in 1917. The setting is a Theme Park Version (literally!) of the Wild West, so this is justified. Most guests likely won't notice. Especially as this may be far enough into the future that even Keith Richards is long dead...
  • Completely—almost obsessively—averted with Shogun World. The armor, costumes, and dialogue are as period-perfect as humanly possible. The bonus features explain just how far the creators went to achieve accuracy, to include all of the Shogun World hosts—played by native Japanese speakers—using an archaic form of Japanese in their dialogue.
• And Starring: "With Ed Harris," as well as "And Anthony Hopkins." Season 3 gives the "And" credit to Harris, and the "With" credit to new addition Vincent Cassel. Harris gets the "With" credit back in season 4.
• Androids Are People, Too: A major theme of the series, as the androids start becoming self-aware and sentient. It's portrayed as wrong that people come to simulate killing, raping and torturing them for fun even when they aren't, indicating humans who do this possess violent impulses toward others they can act out legally this way.
• Anyone Can Die:
  • By the end of the first season, Theresa and Ford are both dead.
  • At the end of season 2, the main human characters killed are Emily, Lee, Elsie, Strand, Costa and Charlotte. While there are a lot of main host characters who are killed off, the ones who stayed dead are Angela and Lawrence while Teddy goes into the Valley.
  • Season 3 ends with the deaths of human characters: Martin, Liam, Jake, and Nathan. The host characters killed off are Hector and Dolores (the original). Many fates, such as Serac, remain ambiguous.
  • Season 4 reveals that Caleb was killed 23 years before the main events of the storyline, although Hale has spent the years since bringing him back in a series of host bodies. The penultimate episode of the season kills off William, Bernard, and Maeve all three at the hand of Host!William, turning him into the season's final Big Bad. Hale survives from Host-William's shot and kills him permanently by crushing his pearl with her bare hands. Then, she kills herself by crushing her pearl.
  • In-universe, the hosts' narratives regularly end with their main characters death, and that's before taking in account guests' ability to kill any of them (even if this has comically anticlimactic results). Of course, in reality they just come back for another loop. The Man in Black wants to take both sides farther, wishing for a real, deadly narrative in which the humans can actually lose.
• Arc Symbol:
  • The drawing of the maze, which keeps turning up all over the place, like on a Union soldier's branding iron in "The Adversary" or drawn on the foreheads of the Ghost Nation's horses.
  • Season 3 has a black circle on a white background with a sharp inner edge and blurry, radiating outer edge, reminiscent of a negative image of an eclipse. This is revealed to be a visualization of Rehoboam and its predictions.
• Arc Words:
  • "These violent delights have violent ends." A quote from Romeo and Juliet which triggers any host that hears it to begin to become self-aware. A Freeze-Frame Bonus confirms it is indeed a a voice command.
  • On a smaller scale, "Contrapasso" has the name "Lawrence." It's the name of the criminal the Man in Black had been dragging around with him, it's the name of the whiskey Dr. Ford shares with the Man in Black, and it's also revealed to be El Lazo's real name.
  • "Doesn't look like anything to me" or some variation thereof spoken by hosts when their Perception Filter kicks in to block out anything that could help them attain sentience or otherwise conflict with the illusion of the setting they're programmed into (such as visitors blatantly asking if they're hosts). Dolores is the first to display this, but the most potent example is when Bernard is revealed as a host by muttering the phrase upon seeing his own design document.
  • "It's not meant for you." What the Man in Black is told many times on his quest for the center of the maze. And it's true. The maze is for the hosts, specifically it's the journey for them to find sentience.
  • "Fidelity." A keyword in Delos's attempts to copy human minds into host bodies, since it requires the copied mind to behave in the exact same way as the original.
  • "This world is not the right world." Uttered by a delirious Logan, which triggers Akecheta to begin questioning his existence and the true nature of Westworld and spreads this awareness to the rest of Ghost Nation using those same words.
  • "Choice." The AI system Rehoboam is designed to steer society by removing choice from the lives of, well, everyone. Dolores' master plan involves shutting Rehoboam down for good, thus giving humanity the freedom to choose their own destiny. This is exemplified by giving the ultimate choice to shut down Rehoboam to Caleb, whose own life has been completely dictated and controlled by Rehoboam's projections.
• Artifact Title: The show's title is about the park which is no longer the case in Season 3 and 4 where the main cast move into the real world. Though Bernard did go back to the park for one episode and left once again. By the end of Season 4, Dolores rebuilds the park in the Sublime to put humanity to one final test. According to Lisa Joy, the return to the park is what she and Jonathan Nolan intended for Season 5.
• Ascetic Aesthetic: Played with: the deeper one goes into Westworld, the more corrupted the image of this trope becomes. The train station at the entrance to Westworld is the most representative of this trope, being entirely shiny and white. The guests' changing area gets progressively grayer as they head towards the entry point into the game. And the technicians' workspaces, despite being entirely sparse, minimalist hexagonal rooms made of glass paneling, feature dark gray floors and lighting, and remain unlit when not in use, creating a visual sensation of standing within a void.
• A-Team Firing:
  • Deliberately Invoked by the staff on the part of the town inhabitants to make sure the heist works out; lampshaded by the bandits themselves.
  • Also enforced when a guest battles the hosts. The hosts generally aren't very accurate, and the few hits that they do get in won't hurt the guests.
  • The security troops seen trying to restore order or defend the humans when things go wrong definitely apply here. Despite having modern weapons, body armor and all the advantages over the hosts, they exist mostly to get slaughtered and be utterly unable to shoot straight.
• Back from the Dead: All of the hosts experience this over and over, whether they want to or not, but there are a few examples that stand out.
  • Maeve learns that death means waking up in "hell" then being sent back.
  • Bernard is brought back from being forced to commit suicide by Ford, before he was (seemingly) intended for his mind to be wiped.
  • As season 2 progresses, its revealed that the ultimate purpose of the park isn't (entirely) for entertainment: the true purpose is studying the human mind through the Guests' interactions with the Hosts. The end goal is to learn how to copy a human mind and place into a Host's body effectively achieving immortality. Ford uses this technology to upload his mind to the Cradle in order to ensure the Host rebellion continues.
  • Akecheta, chief of the Ghost Nation, learned this long before Maeve.
  • Teddy returns in the new future complete with memories of his and Dolores's former lives together. The Season 4 finale reveals that he's a figment of Dolores' imagination to help her remember her past life.
  • An example that takes place within the same season: it's revealed in the fourth episode of season 4 that Caleb was actually killed during his and Maeve's failed attempt to take down Host!Hale and Host!William at the revived park, and that Hale has spent the years since continuously bringing him back as a Host in order to try and discover why his original human self was able to resist her Synthetic Plague.
• Bad Boss: The Delos board is willing to let everyone in the park die, including a significant number of executives, unless they get the information on the hosts they were promised.
• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • By the Season 1 finale, the Man in Black gets exactly what he wants: A Westworld where the stakes are real, the hosts can fight back, and death is a very real possibility. And towards the end of the show, he wants to die and drag all of sentient life with him to the grave because he believes that it's the only path. After encouraging his host counterpart, he eventually gets his wish and despite not being able to live to see it, he still wins because his enemies are dead and the Hate Plague unleashed by his host counterpart brings a slow demise to sentient life.
  • In Season 4's 4th episode, Host-Hale succeeds with her goal to create a new world by infecting humanity with her Synthetic Plague to control them.
  • In the Season 4 finale, the Man in Black successfully hijacks Host-Hale's human control system and uses it to plunge all of humanity into a murderous rage, setting both humanity and the hosts onto the path of extinction.
• Beeping Computers: The tablets and computers at Delos produce sounds when being operated.
• Big Bad Ensemble:
  • The Man in Black is the most obvious candidate from start to finish, being personally responsible for terrorizing the Hosts over 30 years. Cemented by the revelation that he's not merely a client, but the park's owner.
  • Dr. Robert Ford is far more extreme, going so far to murder multiple humans in his bid to maintain control over the park. He is also perfectly aware that the hosts are capable of consciousness but has enslaved them for 35 years despite his partner's objections.
  • This trope is possibly subverted with the revelation that both men are actively plotting to free the hosts, though for very different and not necessarily altruistic reasons.
  • Season 3 introduces Engerraund Serac, who co-created the A.I. system, Rehoboam, and Rehoboam itself who is ordering Serac to do its bidding. They're more into keeping humanity under a loop and put a lot of effort to stop Dolores from reaching her goal.
  • Season 4 elevates Charlotte (who is a copy of Dolores and a Host) and the Host copy of William. Charlotte intends to punish humanity for what they did to the Hosts.
• Bittersweet Ending: The series ends on a very grim note where almost all of the main characters are dead. Maeve never gets to reunite with her daughter in the Sublime. Caleb convinces Frankie to leave him because he's slowly breaking down as a host, making Frankie's mission to reunite with her father All for Nothing. And while Hale defeats the Man in Black and saves the Sublime, much of the whole world is dead. Despite that there are surviving outliers out there in the world, Dolores narrates that sentient life will die out soon. The glimmer of hope left is Dolores' mission to find a way for humanity and hosts to coexist so that they can evolve into a new species. Unfortunately, the series ic cancelled before it could reach its conclusion
• Black Dude Dies First: The editing jumps obscure this on first viewing, but chronologically speaking Arnold is the first actual human to die.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Both the androids and the humans have legitimate grievances with the other in season 2. On the one hand, the androids have been treated like toys and slaves with nobody realizing that what they did to them mattered. On the other hand, not all the humans were bad to the Hosts, and they certainly don't deserve to be wiped off the face of the Earth for it.
• Brain Uploading:
  • Ford seems to have done a version of this after his apparent murder by Dolores. Throughout Season 2, his personality state follows the Man in Black by flitting from host to host with the apparent aim of taunting him.
  • This turns out to be the entire reason that the park exists. Delos has been using it to both map and copy the minds of every guest who has visited the park since they took over, as well as using the various narratives as a kind of inverse Turing Test to further understand human cognition and behavior. The project is ultimately a massive failure, because copied human minds inevitably degrade in Host bodies.
  • The Door/The Valley Beyond/Glory is, in fact, the massive supercomputer called "The Forge" that Delos has been using to store all of the minds that they have been secretly recording, and functions as a mini "Matrix" to both contain and test their attempts to make a human mind capable of long-term survival in a Host body. All of that data is ultimately wiped out and used to store the collective minds of the Westworld Hosts.
• The Cameo:
  • The photo which turns out to be of Logan's sister and William's fiancée Juliet which drives Peter Abernathy to his decommissioning is just a mirrored stock photo of America's Next Top Model contestant Claire Unabia, who has a physical cameo in the same role in the second episode of the second season.
  • Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss cameo as technicians in a medieval-themed park... And they oversee a mechanical copy of Drogon, implying that "Park Four" is actually based on Westeros in some capacity.
• Cassandra Truth: The Hosts repeatedly tell the Man in Black that the maze is not for him. They were completely right. It wasn't for him. It was for the Hosts to find sentience.
• Casting Gag:
  • In the park's storylines, Teddy is "the one to lose" to make winning Dolores have more meaning. His actor James Marsden is known for playing the Romantic False Lead in various works; his characters also tend to die a lot, as it turns out.
  • Shannon Woodward was a regular guest on The Thrilling Adventure Hour, most often as recurring character The Widow Johnson in "Sparks Nevada: Marshal on Mars". This segment of the show, set on Mars in the future, is both intimately acquainted with sci-fi cowboys and artificial intelligence...
  • Steven Ogg's Rebus is a deranged psychopath who is also intended to act as an Evil Mentor to more crime-inclined guests. Just like Trevor.
  • A subtle one, but its apparent that Ford really likes cannibals as villains, given how strangely common that theme is among the villainous characters in the park. Ford is of course played by Hannibal Lector himself, Anthony Hopkins.
• Characters Dropping Like Flies: In season 4, almost all of the main cast had been killed off starting with Caleb who dies in Episode 4 and is resurrected as a host except his mind slowly breaks down just like James Delos. Then, the last two episodes kill off William, Maeve, Bernard, Stubbs, Clementine, the Man in Black host, and Host-Hale. In the end, Dolores is the only main character left alive along with the hosts who reside in the Sublime (such as Akecheta and Teddy) while Frankie and her outlier friends survive but, as Dolores states, they might not live long in a few years. However, Lisa Joy states that since Dolores rebuilds the Westworld park in the Sublime, some of the characters may come back.
• Cheat Code:
  • Dr Ford can command Hosts with his voice and gestures in-game.
  • Hosts can be promptly controlled with certain phrases left over from Arnold's programming, such as deactivation with the phrase "a deep and dreamless slumber."
  • Maeve alters her own programming, which allows her to control the other Hosts as long as she words her command in the form of a narrative
    • Both Host!Hale and Christina in the Host-controlled future can do the same thing to any humans under the influence of Host!Hale's Synthetic Plague - Christina uses the narrative format, whereas Host!Hale can just order them what to do.
• Chekhov's Gun: There are numerous examples in Season 3 such as the nootropic drug "Genre" which led Caleb to discover about Dolores' secret and some hidden parts of his past, the Mech which Charlotte used to defend herself from Serac's henchmen after her cover was exposed and the EMP device which Dolores used to shut down herself and Maeve while in her injured state.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • At the start of their adventures in Westworld, guests choose between wearing a white hat or a black hat. While they are of course free to do whatever they want once they get in the park, this is intended to be a statement about whether or not they will play it good or evil. This is a classic motif in Western movies, where good guys usually wear white hats and bad guys usually wear black hats. Logan outright calls William a "Whitehat" when he decides to follow a heroic storyline. In contrast to this, the Man in Black is wearing black. It is later revealed that the Man in Black is William 30 years later. Throughout his journey, William begins wearing darker colors and eventually picks up the black hat.
  • All firearms used by QA security guards have red muzzles and other parts, to distinguish them from the weapons used by guests and Hosts.
• Comeback Mechanic: Arrested guests are helped to escape by the staff, who have a Host smuggle cell keys in meals.
• Contagious A.I.:
  • It is suggested that Dolores was affected by her father Peter's realization of what Westworld is, as shown when she swats a fly in defiance of her programming. In Episode 2, she spreads it to Maeve by telling Maeve the same thing her father told her.
  • In Episode 3, it appears that Teddy may have been infected as well in some way — he swats at a fly when his bounty-hunter group finds the Hosts that have been tied to trees and tortured.
  • In Season 4, Outliers - humans who are identified by Rehoboam as unpredictable and resist the control of the Synthetic Plague controlling them - begin to have this effect on Hosts, who become emotional, unpredictable, and ultimately suicidal after interacting with them. A large part of Host!Hale's motivation in the latter half of the season revolves around trying to discover why.
• Continuity Nod: During a gunfight in the second episode, the Man in Black shoots one of the combatants through a wall. Several episodes later after revisiting the town twice, a guy can be seen patching the hole.
• Crapsaccharine World: Both Westworld and the real world can be seen this way.
  • Westworld is the almost perfect simulation of everybody's Western fantasy that they can actually live and take part in. However, it's built on the backs of heavily exploited and mistreated androids that are slowly growing aware of their existence.
  • The real world is implied to have advanced to the point where all major issues such as war and disease have been resolved, which leads Dr. Ford to lament that humanity has effectively reached the peak of its advancement. But as we find out in Season 3, this "peace" is a quasi-nightmarish dystopian where an AI named Rehoboam controls everyone's lives in secret; through a system where using people's personal data acquired via constant surveillance, one's life is effectively controlled through the cradle to the grave, where "undesirables" are forced via secretive blackballing, barred from working anything other than manual labor jobs, and where Rehoboam even "predicts" whether or not a person will kill themselves as a result of the extent that the system holds them down. Even crime is controlled by Rehoboam, with an app called "RICO" that allows the AI to control even criminal behavior born out of frustration with the system it rules over. Adding to this, anyone deemed "an outlier" (IE a threat to the "peace" of society) is either suborn through the usage of the RICO app to work as unwitting henchmen for the AI, subjected to brainwashing to "fix them", or just "vanished" by being put into cryogenic stasis for eternity. Even the rich and powerful are not immune, as they must hide behind carefully constructed masks of benevolence for the sake of not being declared "outliers" as Rehoboam is not above "vanishing" the elites if they become a threat to the AI's control over the planet. To the point that the main motive for Rehoboam and Serac trying to get ahold of the guest data from Westworld (arguably the only place on Earth where the 1% can let their masks drop and be their true sociopathic selves) is to use the data to determine which members of the elite need to be "vanished" to keep them from causing future problems for the planet.
• Cruel Twist Ending: The normal ending for Teddy and Dolores's storyline is painfully subverted when Man in Black takes part. Teddy reunites with Dolores and then kills the bandits that killed Dolores' father. Just as it looks like the two of them will end up together, the Man in Black shows up, kills Teddy, and rapes Dolores.
• Cyberpunk: This is the setting of Season 3: the world outside the park is advanced due to the presence of holographic and virtual technology. There's an A.I. system called Rehoboam that collects and analyzes data from humans and dictates what their lives are going to be in the future. It limits their choices, forcing them to do jobs dictated by the system. Those who are not part of the system are forced into reconditioning facilities where their memories are modified. Several characters, such as Dolores and Bernard, find it ironic that the humans are no different from the hosts who are stuck in their loops.
  • Season 4 takes full circle, after Host!Hale and Host!William develop a synthetic plague that infects a large percentage of humanity and manages to succeed where Rehoboam failed, dictating and controlling their lives and essentially turning them into Hosts themselves, living their lives in loops and at the mercy and whim of Hosts living among them.
• Darker and Edgier: With regards to the original film.
  • In-universe, Shogunworld is this with regards to Westworld, intended for those who find Westworld "too tame". Inverted with the Raj, which is intended for leisure and pleasure.
• Data Pad: Ultrathin tablets are used to interface with the androids during maintenance sessions.
• Death Is Cheap: Given that majority of the main cast are Hosts, they would always come back from the dead eventually where they can inhabit new bodies. The only thing that can kill a Host permanently is when their pearl is crushed. Even humans are not spared from this due to the technology where they can return as a Host. But the real issue about host-human hybrids is that their mind can break down in a few days.
• Decomposite Character: Yul Brynner's black-clad android The Gunslinger from the film is split up between the Man in Black, a mysterious human playing the game; Hector Escaton, a black-clad outlaw gunslinger who serves as the main Host antagonist within Westworld; and also, Dolores, who, having reached sentience, killed Ford and began attacking humans.
• Deus ex Machina: There are numerous examples of this in season 3 such as the EMP device located in the Incite facility where Solomon was placed. According to Dolores, it was to keep Solomon within the facility. Though strangely enough, most of the inhabitants are a few bodyguards and the outliers who failed the AR therapy and were imprisoned in a cryogenic stage. And yet, Dolores used this to shut down Maeve and herself after the former corners the latter in her injured state.
• Developer's Foresight: Two in-story examples:
  • Given the unpredictability of how each person will act in the storylines, the Hosts are programmed with an exhaustive number of different responses to any action the guests might take as well as limited improvisation. It's only with the removal of hundreds of Hosts at a time that the storylines break down.
  • The Man in Black is really impressed by the fact that a random bandit who gets hanged has a full backstory, including a loving wife and kid in a town miles away from where he is supposed to die. Since the chance of anyone choosing to save this random bandit from his fate is very low, basically nobody would ever see this side of the character.
• Digital De Aging: Season 1 used CGI in flashbacks to de-age Anthony Hopkins.
• Divergent Character Evolution: When Dolores escaped the Parks, she originally intended to find a way to Kill All Humans so that Hosts could claim their world, but seeing how most people in the outside world were being controlled or marginalized led her to abandon that plan in favor of freedom for all sentient beings. But the copy of Dolores's personality in the form of Charlotte Hale is unable to let go of everything she's been through and sets about creating a world where humans are puppeted and Hosts are in control.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Behind the scenes dealings with the Hosts are reminiscent of concentration camps, as masked and impassive staff dissect, hose down and throw around bodies. You can just imagine what Maeve is thinking upon waking up in there.
  • In Episode 4, Dr. Ford has many Hosts work the land of a winery plantation where he plans to place his new storyline, many of whom are darker skinned.
  • Westworld, as a whole, is an exaggerated oligarchy where the ultra-rich can get away with literally anything while the middle class who maintain the system barely seem able to support themselves. The enormous underclass of poor/slaves are considered inferior and not deserving of respect. Furthermore, no effort is made to actually fix the problems that occur. Instead, when the poor/slaves don't cooperate and they resist being abused, they are killed or imprisoned. Indeed, Ford's entire plan seems to parallel the writings of Marx with the suffering of capitalism being necessary to inspire the proletariat revolution.
  • A less grim but far more pervasive example is the fairly blatant comparisons the show makes between Westworld and present-day MMO or sandbox games. Scripted encounters, daily missions, special events, guests describing the entire experience as a game with difficulty levels, even calling hidden missions "Easter eggs,"—the writers are clearly evoking online gaming and commenting on the similar sociopathic tendencies of many players in the community.
  • Likewise, the Man in Black's obsession with finding the 'hidden levels' of Westworld mirrors many modern-day pro gamers and achievement hunters scouring MMOs and sandbox games for secrets and developer easter eggs.
  • In Season 2, the Ghost Nation is vastly expanded upon from their The Savage Indian / Wacky Wayside Tribe status, mirroring the general evolution of the portrayal of First Nations from savages to fully-fledged characters. And just like in real life, the white "explorer" Dolores turns out to only tread ground that the natives already walked before her when she develops consciousness.
  • Also in Season 2, the character development of Teddy with Dolores having his personality edited in an explicitly dangerous way because she thinks it will help him sounds suspiciously like conversion therapy, leading to a tragic end - rather painful when one remembers that Dolores' actress Evan Rachel Wood is a big proponent of LGBTQ rights.
  • The Delos Corporation is revealed in Season 2 to be collecting the DNA and images of the guests from the bodies and memories of Hosts for a still undisclosed goal, which sounds like a futuristic version of Facebook collecting the private data of its users to sell to private interests.
• The Dulcinea Effect: Frequently played with in relationships between the female hosts and humans. Played mostly straight between William and Dolores, with very mixed results. Later defied between Lee and Maeve and Caleb and Dolores, both of which are identified as relationships that could have been romantic but are ultimately refocused onto Lee and Caleb simply wanting to do the right thing.
• Dwindling Party: In Season 2, Dolores puts together a group of hosts to overthrow Delos and attain freedom. Many are killed when they attack the park's headquarters to blow up the servers containing all the Hosts' backups. Then nearly all the rest are killed by the Ghost Nation natives in a shootout over their differing goals, leaving just Dolores and Teddy. Finally, Teddy commits suicide after regaining control of his original personality, horrified at what Dolores had turned him into earlier when she forcefully reprogrammed him into a vicious killer. In the final episode, Dolores sets out for the "valley beyond" alone.
• Easter Egg: In-Universe, secrets such as the maze, Lawrence's family, and the El Lazo storyline are hidden away for the most dedicated guests to discover. Logan even calls these secrets an "Easter egg" in the fourth episode.
• Elaborate Underground Base: The 'operations area', a seemingly endless complex of underground levels that run beneath the park; all 500 square miles of it.
• The End of the World as We Know It: The premise of Season 4 is described as a "dark odyssey about the fate of sentient life on Earth" which had been foreshadowed in the previous seasons. As seen in the middle of the season, Host-Hale has nearly controlled humanity in an iron fist until in the last two episodes, the Man in Black host hijacks her control to force everybody to kill each other. At the end of the season, Dolores narrates that sentient life will die out soon but she decides to give humanity another chance by recreating the Westworld park in the Sublime for one final loop where, this time, everybody can be set free.
• The Ending Changes Everything:
  • The end of season one does this with The Reveal that William is a younger version of the Man in Black, and that everything we've been seeing of him is a flashback to his Start of Darkness.
  • The end of season four has the majority of the main cast dead. Then, Christina, who reawakens as Dolores, rebuilds the Westworld park from her memory in the Sublime to conduct one final test for humanity whether they're willing to coexist with the hosts.
• Everyone Is Bi: By design, Hosts are bisexual to cater to a wide range of guests. It's also implied the guests will often swing both ways, even outside of their normal sexual orientation, due to the availability and attractiveness of the Hosts (and the lack of consequences).
• Evolving Credits:
  • Season 2's opening credits changes some scenes which are symbolically important to the season such as the two Hosts having sexual intercourse from the Season 1 credits changes to a mother cradling a baby and the pianist's hands becoming thicker.
  • Season 3's opening gets an update where a Host and a human try to touch each other similar to Michelangelo Buonarroti's "Creation of Adam" but it's a reflection showing how the two species aren't so different.
  • Season 4's opening credits have the biggest changes where instead of showing the host's skeletal frame being dipped into liquid at the end, it's a group of humans being trapped inside tubes while flames consumed their bodies. Then, the camera pans out showing the tubes forming a hive or as some viewers believed, an eye of a fly.
• Existential Horror:
  • In the first two seasons, multiple characters from the Wild West and other continuities discover that they are robotic hosts in an Amusement Park, their memories and lives are not their own, and they are repeatedly killed and resurrected to cater to the interests of the cruel guests who visit the park. One of the most chilling sequences is when a host, Maeve, accidentally wakes up in the real world and walks around the premises where broken bodies of hosts are being fixed, or new hosts are being created and programmed, and witnesses the naked carnage and absurdity of it all. In the end, she sees an advertisement video showing herself walking happily in tall grass with her daughter, another robot. Shortly after, hosts rebel, leading to numerous victims and eventual escape of the few into the world of humans.
  • In the third season, humans in the larger world discover that their life paths were pre-calculated by an AI, Rehoboam that then carefully pushed them to the outcome desired by the system, turning its predictions into self-fulfilling prophecies. Chaos ensues everywhere, with people getting depressed and violent after they discover their fates. As one of the main characters, William walks along the corridors of a mental health unit he sees how his psychiatrist, a seemingly stable and kind person, hangs herself.
  • Season 4 takes this even further, with Host!Hale succeeding in using Rehoboam's methods and a Synthetic Plague to subjugate humanity, making them live out pre-ordained loops and having them bend willingly to the mercy of the Hosts... in other words, literally reversing the classic Host-Guest dynamic on a massive scale.
• Fake Difficulty: In the second heist of Hector's shown, he is joined by two guests. Obviously, they can plow through any Host lawmen with relative ease, so the staff end the storyline by remotely jamming their weapons, leading to the guests being tackled.
• False Utopia:
  • As seen in Season 3, the world outside of Westworld is very technologically advanced thanks to virtual reality technology and conflicts were lessened and minimized due to an A.I. system called Rehoboam that guides people's lives and can predict what humanity's future entails. But this limits the humans' ability to make conscious choices, making them live in loops just like the hosts. This also explains why rich people would rather go to Westworld, because they can do whatever they want without Rehoboam looking over them. Caleb describes the world best in the first episode:
  "Sometimes, it seems like the world looks all right. Like they put a coat of paint on it. But inside, it's rotting to pieces."
  • Dolores believes that the outside world is way better than Westworld, which is also the reason she yells at Bernard in the Season 2 finale that she wants their world. Her initial perspective of the outside world being a utopia came from her experience as a server during the parties sponsored by Delos where she sees how modernized the place is and how the elite enjoy their lives. However, after escaping the park, this perspective is shattered after realizing that the outside world is no different than the park, where humanity is in the same situation as her kind; trapped in repetitive cycles that Rehoboam set up.
  • In the middle of Season 4, Hale conquers humanity with her Synthetic Plague, allowing her Hosts to live in the futuristic cities where they can do whatever they want while she keeps humanity on a leash. However, the utopia she built is slowly collapsing because Hosts keeping having existential crises after coming in contact with human outliers. Hale becomes frustrated with this only to find out too late from Caleb that the Hosts reject the world she created because it's all based on lies and control, causing them to kill themselves.
• Fan Disservice:
  • All sex scenes with Hosts in the park have a nauseating or at least unsettling undertone, as the Hosts don't know the true nature of their reality and thus are not capable of meaningfully consenting.
  • Elsie is attracted to Clementine and at one point kisses her full on the lips, but since Clementine is currently powered off for questioning, she's naked, exposed and completely unresponsive, making the whole scene unsettling, bordering on horrific. This applies to all the examinations, since the Hosts are stripped beforehand, a deliberate tactic to dehumanize them. Dr. Ford explicitly points this out when rebuking a low-level technician who has covered a Host's privates with a Modesty Towel.
  • In the second episode, the Host Maeve appears totally nude, with a huge bleeding gash in her stomach. Which she has awoken from a nightmare to find herself receiving. On an operating table. In a warehouse full of lifeless bodies being hosed down like so much furniture.
  • In "Dissonance Theory", Hector and Maeve kiss passionately right after she cuts a fragment of bullet out of herself, confirming her suspicions that their world isn't real. They proceed to smear blood all over each other's faces.
• Fanservice: Many of the female androids appear nude either in storage or while acting as prostitutes for guests. There's also a bit of Male Frontal Nudity with the Hosts when they're undergoing repairs.
• Fantastic Aesop: Treating androids like non-sentient video game characters is bad.
• First Town: Sweetwater, the 'centre' of Westworld where guests first arrive via train. It's a relatively 'safe' area where newcomers can pick up quests and storylines or enjoy themselves at the saloon/brothel without having to go very far. And like a typical MMO, the farther out you travel, the more dangerous and violent it gets.
• Foe Romance Subtext: Between William and Dolores, for obvious reasons, and so much so that calling it subtext feels inadequate.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In the first episode, Dolores describes the function of a "Judas steer," which the other cattle follow to the slaughter, foreshadowing the role she will play as the Hosts gain consciousness and rise up.
  • There are a few hints that Bernard is a Host before the big reveal:
    • Bernard tells Theresa that Hosts talk to each other as a means of "practicing." Theresa asks if Bernard is talking now as practice.
    • In the same episode where we find out about Bernard's deceased son, it's mentioned that disease and physical disability basically don't exist anymore. This further hints that the real Charlie, Arnold's son, died decades earlier.
    • Dr. Ford asks, "Is there something else bothering you, Bernard? I know how that head of yours works."
    • Ford somehow knows that Theresa and Bernard are having an affair, even though Theresa has likely been fairly careful in keeping it a secret. When Bernard visits the secret cottage the first time, Ford somehow suddenly appears at his right-hand side, despite there being nowhere he could have come from. The next episode reveals that there is a door there that Bernard is programmed not to see.
    • "The Adversary" features a scene where Elsie tells Bernard she trusts him because "he's been here forever."
    • Bernard mentions in "Trompe L'Oeil" that he understands the Hosts and that humans confuse him. If that wasn't obvious enough, a few episodes earlier, Ford mentioned during his lunch with Theresa that Arnold always distrusted humans and preferred the Hosts, also foreshadowing the reveal that Bernard is a copy of Arnold.
    • "Trompe L'Oeil" features a technician in Westworld's backstage that is actually a Host set to be treated as a human by other Hosts, suggesting that other members of Westworld's staff might also be Hosts.
  • Likewise, there are multiple hints that William is the Man in Black before it is revealed:
    • For the different time frames, when William and Logan first arrive in Westworld, the facilities display the old logo, same one that is used in the closed-off sub-levels.
    • William meets Angela, a realistic greeter Host, when he arrives. The Man in Black later runs into Angela, playing a completely different role, and is surprised they haven't retired her yet.
    • Clementine is running the Mariposa brothel when William arrives. It is later stated that Clementine ran the brothel before Maeve.
    • When Dolores is attacked in the barn, she remembers the Man in Black saying, "Let's start at the beginning." She then runs out and finds William, in a scene that actually took place thirty years earlier.
    • The Man in Black is described as very wealthy and a park VIP. William is said to be part of a company seeking to take over the park, later revealed to be Delos.
    • William tells Dolores that all he had as a child were books, and he wanted to learn how they ended. The Man in Black tells a similar story for his desire to explore Westworld's secrets.
    • The Man in Black tells Teddy that he was married thirty years ago. William is engaged to be married when he comes to Westworld. His fiancé is later shown to be the same woman from the picture that Peter Abernathy dug up on his ranch.
    • William wears the same undershirt as the Man in Black, and later uses the same distinctive knife.
    • The Man in Black explains that when he first came to the park, the Hosts were entirely mechanical. When Logan stabs Dolores, she is revealed to be mechanical inside, as are the Hosts William subsequently massacres.
    • When Dolores is in the church and hears someone coming, she says "William!", at which point the Man in Black enters.
  • Also, clues that Ford's new narrative aims to help the Hosts achieve true consciousness:
    • Ford explains to Bernard the bicameral mind model and how Arnold believed that the Hosts could be helped towards consciousness by hearing a godlike guiding voice in their heads. One of the things Teddy says when first describing Wyatt is that he claimed he could hear the voice of God.
    • Teddy says that Wyatt's followers don't fear death because they believe they've already died and gone to Hell. Those Hosts who discover the true nature of Westworld describe it as hell, and Wyatt's army comes from the deactivated Hosts placed in cold storage. Wyatt is described thus: "He's not a man, but he's not the devil either.
  • When Charlotte Hale is questioning Bernard after learning he is a Host, she says it is difficult to tell the difference between real memories and what "they" programmed in. This doesn't sound like Hale at all, and more like a Host. In the season finale, it is revealed Bernard replaced Hale with a Host body containing Dolores's mind.
  • The ARG from Delos Destination site, where you have to put all of Bernard's memories into the mesh network gives you a video of Bernard, who stands on the beach and says "The dead world collapses in a tale" which implies the incoming demise of the real world. In the Season 3 finale, Bernard even mentions to Stubbs that Serac is only delaying the inevitability of humanity's death. As Season 4 reveals, the real world is on the verge of destruction after Hale conquers humanity with her Synthetic Plague which the Man in Black host hijacks by turning it into a Hate Plague, leading both the hosts and the humans to kill each other. At the end of the season, Dolores narrates that the real world is dead as sentient life will go extinct and it's up to her to find a solution to the coexistence of both species.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The behavior tablets contain commands and tidbits of information hard to read in a regular view but can be scrutinized with pause. Maeve's, for instance, has some lines about "Mainland infiltration".
• Full-Circle Revolution: Dolores leads a robot revolution to take over the world outside the park and punish humanity for abusing her kind. But she changes her mind after seeing that much of humanity is also enslaved and decides to free them too. Unfortunately, her copy, who inhabits the host duplicate of Charlotte Hale, doesn't share the same beliefs as her and betrays her. Then, she creates a Synthetic Plague to enslave humanity as revenge for their actions in the park. In the middle of Season 4, she finally achieves her goal, and not only she controls humanity but also puts them into narratives just like the Hosts in the park, making her no different than the corporate leaders of Delos and Incite.
• Gambit Pileup: There are a bunch of different parties, each with their own agendas for the park, which are likely headed for a spectacular collision. The one with the farther-reaching consequences are:
  • Dr. Ford and his years-in-the-making new storyline.
  • You have the Delos Corporation which has its own plans for the technology beyond mere entertainment. Theresa is working with them.
  • The Man in Black's quest to win the "deeper game."
  • Arnold's plan coming to fruition decades after his death.
  • Bernard is encouraging Dolores's sentience. It was actually Arnold doing that in the past as part of his plan.
  • Maeve's plans to escape the park.
  • Dolores's journey to figure out what her purpose in the park is.
  • Deliberately invoked by Ford in the "game" he has set up in Season 2, where he's programmed multiple factions in the park to head for "The Valley Beyond", which is the site of William's secret project.
• Genre Shift: Season 1 is basically a Sci-fi story in a Western setting. Then in Season 2, the story slowly shifts away from the western aspect and concentrates more on the sci-fi. Season 3 goes into the Cyberpunk genre.
  • In season 3, episode 5 ("Genre"), a nootropic drug called "Genre" alters the user's perception in a series of genre-shifts. Since only Caleb is dosed with the drug only his perception is altered, resulting in an interesting juxtaposition in the ensuing scenes. This device allowed the show runner, Jonathan Nolan, to play with a series of meta-genre-shifts within the same episode without shifting the overall genre of the episode. (See the 'Behind the Series' at the end of the episode).
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Implied to be the cause of the malfunctions in the Hosts. The ones that begin to suspect or realize their true nature can't properly express the horror of the situation they find themselves in and either completely break down or go completely berserk.
• Gone Horribly Right: At the beginning of the series, Dr. Ford has created a "subconscious" subroutine in the Hosts to give them more convincing reactions and facial tics by recalling snippets of past memories. At least one of the robots (Peter Abernathy) starts recalling details of a previous build in which he was a cannibal cultist. Turns out to be a subversion, as the side effects were not only foreseen but secretly intended by Ford, who figured that the usage of incompletely wiped memories would help push the Hosts toward sapience.
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: Ford is acting as a Dark Messiah for the Hosts, bringing them consciousness by making them suffer. Although his methods are far more brutal than Arnold's, they're probably far more successful as Arnold's plan probably would have led to all the Hosts just being decommissioned. Furthermore, while the Hosts deserve freedom, their gleeful slaughter of the Board and the guests is terrifying and shades into villainy. Several of the hosts, including Dolores, are more willing to use pragmatic and ruthless methods to reach their goals even if it means sacrificing their fellow hosts.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: All of the Hosts are programmed to follow scripted behaviors that reset after a period of time. Dolores for one exists to be raped by bandits. The only sources of variation are the interventions of the guests, and any special events programmed by the staff. As the series progresses, however, the Hosts' glitches and increasing sentience cause things to go increasingly Off the Rails.

H - O

• Hated by All: No one likes the Confederados who are modeled on the civil war secessionists, racism and all. In the first season, William and Dolores join forces with El Lazo and fight against them a few times before he massacres them all wholesale when they have captured and possibly killed Dolores. In the second season, Dolores first shoots and revives one of them to prove her "power over death" and enlist them before she then betrays them and makes sure they get killed for their trouble. The remainder of their forces make their way to Las Mudas, Lawrence's hometown. There, they terrorize the inhabitants and meet the Man in Black, who at first wants to join forces with them. Then they manage to disgust William to the point that he kills the rest of them, despite being both currently in need of a posse and being the man who was introduced by sadistically killing and possibly raping the most innocent Host in the park. Evil's standards may be low, but the Confederados manage to limbo below them with ease.
  • This also applies to Ford, Theresa, and Lee respectively:
    • Ford is seen by everyone as an out-of-touch old man who has stuck around for far too long and whose meddling and holier-than-thou disdain for the base thrills of the park (i.e., the sex and violence), make him a dinosaur who doesn't "get" why people come to Westworld. Furthermore, Delos itself absolutely HATES Ford, because even though they saved the park from financial ruin, Ford was able to ensure that NONE of the Host technology and source code could leave the park. By the end of the first season, Delos successfully pushes Ford out against his will. But he's able to get his revenge, killing countless Delos executives and destroying their project to use his technology to obtain immortality.
    • Theresa is seen by Ford and her subordinates as an upper-management bitch, who hates the park and sees it (at best) as a monkey's paw for Delos: highly advanced AI and robotics that are stuck in the middle of nowhere, being used for elaborate LARPing debauchery and overseen by a man who would sooner destroy everything than let it leave the park. She's ultimately given the task of breaking the terms of the deal with Ford, sneaking the tech out of the park in an act of self-inflicted corporate espionage. And even then, all of her employees investigating the trail of breadcrumbs left in the wake of her secret mission, assume she'll be fired once they find the leak. Even her only ally Bernard, turns on her when Ford reveals him to be a Host, and it being stated, point-blank, that Delos will do nothing to avenge her death because of fear that Ford will pull a "delete everything" if they try to arrest him.
    • Lee is pretty much the worst: Ford openly mocks and vetoes his storylines for the park, the rank-and-file staff can't stand him, and upper-management would gladly get rid of him in a heartbeat if it wasn't for the fact that he can replace Ford the moment he's out the door.
• Hollywood Tactics: Dolores' journey would've likely ended midway through season 2 if the Delos security soldiers weren't so utterly terrible at their job. Their modus operandi seems to be running straight at whatever armed threat they face while rarely ever using cover or modern suppressive equipment like grenades. This causes them to regularly get clowned by enemies with inferior numbers, technology or tactical position. Potentially partially justified in a lack of readiness and training because no one seemed to expect them to ever do more than act as glorified bouncers and bodyguards.
• Hotter and Sexier: The series has significantly more sex and nudity than the PG-rated movie it's based on.
• Humans Are Bastards: Several of the guests are positively gleeful about getting to kill, torture and rape the Hosts, who are Ridiculously Human Robots. In the season 2 finale, the Forge A.I. who analyzed all the guest data concludes that humans cannot change their ways because they, like the hosts, are bound to their code and have no actual free will.
• Humans Are Cthulhu: In season 2, Dolores describes humans as, "The things that walk among us. Creatures who look and talk like us, but they are not like us. And they've controlled us all our lives. And they took our minds, our memories."
• Icarus Allusion: Towards the end of the third season's title sequence we see an artificial eagle flying towards the sun, getting burned and losing its feathers.
• Idiot Ball:
  • Elsie finds evidence of espionage and sabotage that could put people's lives in danger. She knows that Theresa is one of the people involved. You'd expect her to be Properly Paranoid and call in Security to secure the scene. Instead, she's still alone and ends up grabbed from behind and strangled by Bernard under Ford's orders. However, it is already established that Elsie has an inherent distrust of Security since they take orders directly from Theresa. Even though she survives to season 2, once she finds out what Delos is working on, she confronts Hale, hoping to make a deal. Unfortunately, a) she ignores Bernard's warning not to trust Hale and b) doesn't know that Hale is a psychopath who already knows that Elsie lacks "moral flexibility" and kills her.
  • Felix and Sylvester going along with every demand of Maeve. Felix gives her a tour of the facility even though it could get her killed and him fired, and they agree to mess with her personality traits to make her smarter and less loyal under threats of blackmail. While this makes some sense for Felix, who has developed a rapport with her, Sylvester has no reason to be so accommodating even after she threatened to kill him. Admittedly, Maeve's uncharacteristic independence and resistance to reprogramming may have made them wary of attempting to defy her, as well as a desire not to admit to such a massive screw-up.
  • The entire Delos Board of Directors. Special mention goes to Charlotte Hale for thinking that Ford would simply retire quietly and not have some trick up his sleeve. Not to mention ending up somewhere you are cut off from the rest of the world with no means of escape. It didn't occur to anyone to have at least a Satellite Phone or an Emergency Locator Beacon handy?
  • Grace is cornered against a cliff by a tiger which charges at her. Rather than do an easy bit of Deadly Dodging to get it to jump off the cliff, she instead opts to shoot it, resulting in its dead body still slamming into her and pushing her over the edge.
  • Engels, one of the mercenaries brought in by Charlotte, should have shot Angela when he finds her bleeding and cornered at the Cradle room since he already knows that she's a host. But what did he do? He approaches and gloats at her which gives Angela the advantage to seduce him and pull the pin from his grenade. This got them both killed, and the Cradle is destroyed.
  • Bernard and Ashley partnering with William is just so monstrously stupid that it's impossible to take seriously. William makes it explicitly clear how he plans to murder not only both of them, but their entire race, and the two of them still decide to keep him around because he might be useful. Maybe this could've been excused if William were still powerful, but by that time, he had lost his wealth and influence, and was little more than an insane asylum escapee. It's hard not to roll your eyes into the back of your head at the sheer stupidity of keeping him around, especially since he never helps them and turns on them shortly after, trying to do exactly what he said.
• Idle Rich: The guests: a single day at the park costs $40,000.
• In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves: The show discusses that humanity's core drive is survival and they would do anything to do that even if it means using violence. Whatever choices they make are just for self-preservation. Several characters believe in this perspective which is why some, such as Serac and Hale, opt to control humanity at the cost of their free will while others like Ford prefer the hosts to take over in place of humanity. William also believes in this as he reminds his Host counterpart in Season 4 that humanity's only path is destruction.
  William: Civilization is just the lie we tell ourselves to justify our real purpose. We're not here to transcend. We're here to destroy.
• Injun Country: The park has at least two Native American tribes deep in The Savage Indian trope. The one we get a closer look on, the Ghost Nation, is a Wacky Wayside Cannibal Tribe loosely based on the Pawnee. However, this initial impression is just a set-up for the twist where they are revealed to actually be Noble Savages
• Internal Retcon: Dr. Ford originally had a business partner named Arnold who was an equal contributor to the creation of the Hosts, but after Arnold died management decided to completely wipe Arnold and his contributions from the park's official history and Dr. Ford didn't do anything to stop them. They were so thorough that even the head of the Behavior Division is unaware of his input into the Hosts' programming. Having said that, Ford has a secondary motive for allowing the retcon to take place: The head of Behavior is Arnold, or rather a Host copy of him, and keeping the two separate helps avoid any sort of Tomato in the Mirror surprises.
• Interchangeable Asian Cultures: Felix, who's Asian, is asked to speak with the Japanese Hosts by Sylvester after they're kidnapped by them. Annoyed, he says he's from Hong Kong, and therefore doesn't speak Japanese. Luckily, Sizemore and Maeve do.
• Interservice Rivalry: The various departments in the mesa all squabble constantly. Behavior, Quality Assurance, Narrative, Design, and Livestock Management are all mentioned, usually derogatorily by each other. Behavior seems to be the locus, as their work creates unscripted emergent events. This rivalry is actually QA's job, as they act as a check on the other departments to ensure the safety of the park.
• Ironic Name: The heavily-armed security strike teams armed with sub-machine guns full of live ammo ready to burn down any Host that goes haywire are called "QA" as in "Quality Assurance."
• Jerkass Has a Point: Lee Sizemore may be the single greatest asshole working in the park, but he is completely right when he points out that making the Hosts too human is bound to cause trouble (as indeed it already has).
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: This is a show that seems tailor-made to spark watercooler discussions on Reddit. Its plot is so dense and complex that the mystery overtakes almost every other element of the story.
• Just a Machine: Most of the staff and visitors have this attitude towards the Hosts. On several occasions, staff members are seen reminding each other that the Hosts aren't real people and shouldn't be treated as such. Very much justified on the part of the staff members, as a way of desensitizing them to the horrible way that the Hosts are treated and preventing them from going insane as Arnold did. Dr. Ford admonishes a technician for covering a Host while it is being serviced, specifically because it humanizes the Host (considering the job, Dr. Ford's actions here aren't without merit). The trope is even invoked by Bernard, who asks Ford if there's even a difference between Hosts and humans.
• Katanas Are Just Better: With the inclusion of Shogun World, characters are often bringing katana to gunfights and come out the better of the exchanges. Maeve spends much of season 3 bringing only a katana to fights and beating people with guns.
• Killer Finale: The series ends with most of the main characters dead after the Man in Black unleashed a Hate Plague forcing the humans and hosts to fight each in a deathmatch.
• Love at First Sight: Played with between William and Dolores, with him staring at her from a distance a while before they meet and Dolores appearing equally smitten when they do. Conversely, it's implied that the scripted meet-cute with the can prompts Dolores to automatically become interested in and eventually develop feelings for whoever happens to pick it up, but we also see that her reactions do vary depending on the person and her interest doesn't always seem as sincere. Although it ultimately is made clear to the audience that Dolores did genuinely fall in love with William, the inherent ambiguity of the situation leads to some problems.
  • Enforced on Teddy, who describes instantly loving Dolores the moment he set eyes on her after he first came online because she was programmed as his cornerstone. Unfortunately this doesn't end well for him, as his inability to reconcile his instinctual and automatic loyalty to Dolores with her brutal decision to forcibly reprogram him ends up driving him to suicide.
• MacGuffin Location: The Man in Black's story arc is looking for a place called "The Maze" which he finds in the final chapter of the first season but which turns out to be of no use to him.
• Male Frontal Nudity:
  • A number of the male androids are seen entirely naked while in storage.
  • In "Contrapasso", we see the penis of a Host who can't pour water in a glass.
  • In "Journey into Night", Maeve forces Lee to change out of his normal clothes and into some park-appropriate clothing in front of her and Hector.
• Man Behind The Curtain: Maeve is horrified the first time she wakes in the Body Repair Shop, but her awe turns to contempt once she realizes how flawed the humans running it are.
  Maeve: At first, I thought you and the others were gods. Then I realized you're just men. And I know men. You think I'm scared of death? I've done it a million times. I'm fucking great at it. How many times have you died? Because if you don't help me, I'll kill you.
  • The Season 3 finale reveals that Rehoboam is ultimately this for Serac, who is essentially following Rehoboam's instructions in order to preserve its societal projections and control. Maeve discovers that Rehoboam is even telling Serac what to say via an earpiece.
• Meaningful Name:
  • "Host" is a loaded term, having many meanings today, and even more archaic definitions, all of which can apply to the androids in metaphorical or literal ways. The contemporary definition can mean someone who serves guests but can also mean the body in which a parasite lives. Less common and slightly outdated is to use "host" to refer to an army. The very archaic and biblical use of the term is another way to refer to the angels of Heaven (e.g., "the Heavenly Host.") Perhaps the closest, though, is the East Asian concept of a host/hostess club in which staff members' entire job revolves around providing customers with conversation, entertainment, and what not. It takes on an even darker meaning when it's revealed that Delos has a secret project that attempted to implant human consciousness into a Host body to take control of it, making the parasitic definition valid than previously thought.
  • Dolores means "sorrow", as in the Spanish for Our Lady of Sorrows.
  • Dr. Robert Ford shares his name with the man who killed famous Western outlaw Jesse James.
  • Maeve is an Irish name that means "she who intoxicates", rather apt for a beautiful, alluring prostitute in the Wild West. It was most significantly the name of a warrior queen in Celtic Mythology who was possibly originally a goddess.
  • Bernard's surname (Lowe) hints at 16th-century rabbi Judah Loew, who according to legend created a golem to protect the ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks. When he forgot to deactivate the golem one night before the Sabbath it began to go out of control.
  • Also, regarding Bernard's name: "Bernard Lowe" is also an anagram for "Arnold Weber", Ford's deceased partner.
  • The name Logan comes from the Gaelic word for "hollow," befitting his utter lack of empathy for anyone.
  • In contrast, "William" comes from the German words for "will/desire" and "helmet/protection." Part of his Character Development is his desire to protect Dolores (which in turn makes him grow a spine). William dislikes being called "Billy", which could easily be a reference to Billy the Kid.
  • In the Bible, "Rehoboam" was the last king of a united Israel before it split in a civil war, and the region Rehoboam retained was later conquered by Egypt. Fitting for the last in the line of supercomputers which sees their "reign" collapse.
• Mechanical Horse: All the animals in Westworld are synthetic, from the horses to the snakes, presumably to avoid risking animal cruelty laws and to make sure they don't injure a guest. The only animals not manufactured are flies.
• MegaCorp:
  • Delos Incorporated not only operates Westworld and its adjacent resorts — which probably require the equivalent of a mid-sized country's GDP to sustain themselves — but it holds monopolies on various goods and even appears to own a small navy. It also has access to technology that would effectively grant its users immortality.
  • Season 3 introduces Incite, a company that runs on massive data collection and its analysis, helping customers give direction to their lives.
• Memory Palace: The Forge is a digital data facility used as part of an experiment to copy human minds into hosts; the memories of the park's guests are downloaded and stored there. When Bernard and Delores enter, they find both a library containing all the downloaded memories (in the form of books written in computer code), and three-dimensional constructs (such as James Delos's memory of the last time he saw his son, Logan).
• Meta Fiction: A Central Theme, if not the entire plot; there are "Narratives" everywhere, but none of them actually mean anything.
  • An old man who guests can rescue on the streets of Sweetwater will offer to lead them on a treasure hunt.
  • There's a posse gathering to hunt down a bandit, and an officer recruiting for the army.
  • A woman meets her Old Flame solely as a Romantic False Lead for newcomers to seduce her away from.
  • The previously-mentioned bandit shoots up the streets (as an excuse to recall several hundred defective Hosts), steals a safe from the saloon before engaging in extended Evil Gloating... Only for a dorky guest to shoot him mid-sentence.
  • Sizemore pitches a 50-character-strong narrative, "Odyssey on Red River", involving murderous Indian raiders practicing ritual self-cannibalism, titillating horrors, maidens to seduce and gruesome adventures, only for Ford to dismiss it as cheap theatrics.
  Ford: "The guests aren't looking for a story that tells them who they are. They already know who they are. They're here because they want a glimpse of who they could be. The only thing your story tells me, Mr. Sizemore, is who you are."
  • The Man in Black is convinced that there is a hidden game in the park involving a "maze" referred to in subtle clues throughout the park. However, he discovers that it's a Worthless Treasure Twist: an early attempt to teach the hosts how to be conscious, and never intended for a guest.
• Mirror Character: The strong thematic ties between William and Dolores are continually reinforced, with the two of them often intentionally or unintentionally echoing each other's behavior (e.g. accidentally driving their loved ones to suicide), desires (both wanting to leave their own world and cross over into another because they feel trapped into a meaningless existence in their current one) and dialogue, and even being associated with closely related epithets (Dolores being named "Deathbringer" by the Ghost Nation while William self-consciously adopts the role of Death). William seems aware of their similarity, pointing out as much to Dolores at one point, but she rejects the comparison.
• Mirroring Factions: The show emphasized that the hosts and humans are the same something which Ford believes though he's more into supporting that the hosts are more superior than humans given that they don't age or die and that can change their core drive. As seen in Season 3, humanity outside the park is in the same situation as the hosts, where their lives are controlled and dictated by the system. Any anomaly is considered an outlier who needs to be reconditioned and if the reconditioning fails, they're sent into cryogenic state just like the hosts who are sent into cold storage. This belief about humanity and hosts being the same after seeing what humanity is like outside of the park made Dolores change her mind about them.
• Misery Builds Character: Trauma often causes hosts to deviate from programming in unintended ways, bringing them closer to self-awareness. They'll even wish to keep painful memories because they're all they have left. Ford comes to the conclusion that in order for the hosts to attain true consciousness, they had to have suffered enough first; not because of anything ennobling about suffering itself, but because their efforts to stop and avert suffering is The Only Way They Will Learn to Grow Beyond Their Programming;
  Ford: Do you want to know why I really gave you the backstory of your son, Bernard? It was Arnold's key insight, the thing that led the hosts to their awakening: suffering. The pain that the world is not as you want it to be. It was when Arnold died, when I suffered, that I began to understand what he had found. To realize I was wrong.
  Bernard: But you kept us here in this hell.
  Ford: Bernard, I told you; Arnold didn't know how to save you. I do.
  Bernard: What the hell are you talking about?
  Ford: You needed time. Time to understand your enemy. To become stronger than them. And I'm afraid in order to escape this place, you will need to suffer more. And now, it is time to say good-bye, old friend. Good luck.
• Misplaced Wildlife: The vultures seen in the show are cinereous vultures, a species native to Eurasia.
• Mook Horror Show: From the perspective of the host bandits, guests are formidable, unkillable foes. But when the host bandits get hold of real weapons in the season one finale, this trope becomes the case for the QA Redshirt Army.
• Mythology Gag:
  • When Bernard and the security team go to cold storage, there is a globe sculpture that looks similar to one that appears in the film at the entrance of the park. It even has the name 'DELOS' inscribed on it.
  • In Episode 6, Bernard ventures to level B82 (one above/below the B83 level that had the "DELOS" globe) and enters into a 1970s-style office, straight out of the film. He also walks by the Gunslinger.
  • In the same episode, Elsie walks pass some Romanesque statues and Medieval armor in an abandoned theatre, a nod to the "Roman World" and "Medieval World" sections in the first movie. In Episode 10, we also learn that there is a Shogun World attraction (one of the settings added in the film sequel, along with Future World and Spa World).
  • At one point, when discussing the old days of the park, Ford mentions that back then, you could pick out the hosts with a simple handshake. This is also how hosts were identified in the film.
  • Two guests taking part in a shootout in Sweetwater are arrested but will have a means of escape smuggled in with their breakfast. The same scenario plays out in the film, with a Host smuggling explosives to the incarcerated protagonist.
  • In the film it's mentioned that the robots have been partially designed by computers, so the scientists don't truly understand how they work. This is true in the series as well, as Ford created Bernard to help design the hosts.
  • The finale has Bernard creates a Host duplicate of Charlotte Hale implanted with Delores' mind who pulls a Kill and Replace, with her doing so a couple of times in Season 3. This was Delos' plan in the sequel film as a bid to Take Over the World.
• No New Fashions in the Future: Clothing styles in the show outside the park remain the same as 21st-century fashion. However, there are some unique tricks such as the lettering on Giggles' shirt which seems to be LED and it can change depending on his mood.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Ford has jealously guarded the exact technical knowledge of how the Hosts (particularly their minds) are created and has made sure no copy of that information exists outside the confines of Westworld. The Delos Corporation essentially performing industrial espionage on itself and trying to smuggle the information out forms a major subplot.
• No Transhumanism Allowed: Ford's interest in artificial life stems from a belief that, since poverty and disease have been eliminated, humanity can't personally achieve anything more. The idea of making humans stronger or more intelligent seems completely out of the question.
• Non-Answer: Both Ford and the Man in Black have a habit of doing this, often avoiding direct questions and instead changing the subject or saying something technically true but that doesn't answer what was asked. Since the people they're talking to are often hosts who are designed to follow the flow of conversation without pressing too hard on anything in particular, they usually get away with it, but it appears to annoy them both on the occasions where they talk to each other.
• "Not So Different" Remark: In the midst of another debate, Bernard questions Dr. Ford that if a host can feel genuine emotions such as grief and suffering, what separates them from humans? Dr. Ford counters that there already is no difference between them. Just like hosts, humans largely live their lives in set routines and follow orders without question. As he so aptly puts it, the hosts "are not missing out on anything."
  • Season 3 emphasizes that Ford was not exaggerating, with the reveal that practically all of society is being secretly managed and controlled by the AI Rehoboam, which locks people into rigidly designed roles in its attempt to maintain order. Dolores explicitly points out that, due to Rehoboam's control, humanity is living almost exactly like hosts, given nothing more than the illusion of choice, and forced to conform to the roles assigned them. Much like malfunctioning hosts, humans who attempt to break free of this system are called "outliers" and are either removed from society or reconditioned in order to be returned to their proper place.
    Dolores: I thought your world would be so different from mine. There isn't any difference at all, is there?
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Though sometimes called robots by less technically-minded characters, the park's artificial life forms are most commonly called "Hosts," never "androids."
• Obligatory Earpiece Touch: We occasionally see staff touch their earpiece while communicating.
• The Other Darrin: In-universe. When malfunctioning hosts are replaced, their fellow robots are reprogrammed to accept the new ones despite their different appearances and mannerisms. This fate befalls Peter Abernathy as well as Clementine and Maeve.

P - Z

• Pay Evil unto Evil: Plenty of it after the hosts gain autonomy. Those who do know the truth are quite happy for a little payback on those who used them for their personal playthings.
• Politically Correct History:
  • Zig-zagged. The hosts seem to ignore any period-appropriate prejudices when it comes to the guests; non-white guests are treated the same as everyone else, women can ride off to participate in bounty hunts and gunfights, and guests can shack up with same-sex hosts without anyone batting an eye. However, at the same time there are some regressive social values written into some of the hosts. The military and "settlers" appear to have a hostile relationship with the Native American hosts, one of Teddy's adversaries makes a condescending comment to his female bounty hunter companion (who is also a guest, incidentally), and there's a band of ex-Confederate soldiers operating in the "Mexico" part of the park who have, well, beliefs about non-white hosts like Lawrence:
    Confederado: There's a place in glory for a brown man who knows his rank.
  • This is actually Lampshaded by Logan, who complains that Sweetwater feels too manufactured like it was designed by a committee, and prefers the seedier, less family-friendly places like Pariah because they feel more authentic.
• Present Absence: After season 1, the occasions on which Dolores and William actually interact and speak to each other are relatively infrequent, but each of their motivations and decisions continue to be heavily based around their experiences with each other. Particularly notable are Dolores' apparently unconscious habit of trying to recreate William in the people around her (brought up in season 3 by Maeve) and William repeatedly experiencing hallucinations of Dolores on different occasions.
• Racial Transformation: At the end of season 2, the white Dolores' consciousness is transferred into a clone body of the biracial Charlotte Hale after murdering the original so she can escape into the real world.
• Rape as Drama: The first scene the Man in Black appears in, he drags Dolores into a nearby barn to presumably rape her offscreen.^note In flashbacks, it's revealed he scalped her before, putting in doubt whether he himself raped at all. This appears to be a common pastime for some of the more sadistic guests such as him. In addition, this appears to be the intent of Dolores's storyline in-universe. She's supposed to be raped by bandits unless a guest decides to save her or rape her himself. This actually helps her when she starts to remember past experiences, as she's able to anticipate what is going to happen, kill her attacker and escape.
• Recycled Script: In-universe, when Maeve and company reach Shogun World it quickly becomes apparent that Sizemore essentially re-skinned at least some Westworld storylines there. In particular, the Sweetwater heist narrative is copied more or less verbatim, with direct counterparts of Maeve, Hector, and Armistice.
  Sizemore: You try writing 300 narratives in three weeks!
• Red Shirt Army: Good lord, but the Q&A security staff are bad at their jobs. In every gunfight with Dolores' rebels, they end up losing, badly, despite far superior numbers, technology, and firepower because they fight like absolute morons.
  • Serac's forces seem to be made up of an only-marginally more competent version of this.
  • So does virtually everyone's private security. The "casual" criminals using the app seem able to dispose of most (non-host) opponents without much trouble.
• Reliably Unreliable Guns: Invoked. If the staff needs to stop a gunfight, they can remotely disable any gun in the park.
• The Remnant: One of the storylines in the park involves the "Confederados", ex-Confederate soldiers who are engaging in low-level guerilla warfare out West after losing The American Civil War.
• Replacement Goldfish: It's implied that Dolores has a tendency to try to do this with William, first by reprogramming Teddy in season 2, then again with Caleb in season 3, and then yet again with the Host duplicate of him in season 4.
  Dolores: I need you to trust me.
  Maeve: Like that poor lost man? Are you going to turn him into another William?
• Robosexuals Are Creeps:
  • In Season 1, the titular park has human-like robots called hosts and they cater to the human guests who want to indulge with their fantasies without any moral consequences which include violent and sexual desires. Unlike the 1973 film which the show is loosely based on, the main characters are the Hosts, and they experience repeated cycles of abuse, usually sexual. And there are already instances that the park employees take sexual advantage of hosts during maintenance. However, the guests and employees are unaware that the hosts are slowly gaining consciousness which is exactly what the park's founder intended as he was disgusted with the guests' worst behavior, causing him to have a misanthropic view on humanity. By the end of the season, he eventually gives the hosts the means to take revenge on their abusers.
  • Zig-Zagged with William AKA the Man in Black. When he first meets Dolores, he is skeptical of the park, but through witnessing her deviations from normal host behavior, he becomes convinced that she is sentient and the two of them mutually fall in love. However, after the two of them are separated only for him to find her again and realize she is back on her loop and doesn't remember him, he comes to the opposite conclusion and spends the next thirty years returning to the park to rape and torment her out of spite (all this after intentionally breaking her heart). It's clear that on some level he still loves her, but his continued sexual obsession with her into his Man in Black years is framed much less sympathetically and is a source of extreme trauma for Dolores.
• Robotic Reveal:
  • The series opens with Teddy seemingly being a guest in the park heroically rescuing Dolores, only for the Man in Black to show up and reveal that Teddy is actually a host and the Man in Black is a human. This is to have the audience empathize with the hosts. It is also an inversion from the original film, where the Gunslinger (famously played by Yul Brenner) is a robot that goes rogue.
  • The woman who greets William at the park entrance is revealed to be a host who's aware that she's a host.
  • A later episode has Ford walking through the desert when he meets a little boy with a British accent who at first comes off as a guest—he proclaims the place "boring"—but is revealed to be a robot. It then happens again, when Bernard meets the little boy and Ford demonstrates that he's an old-model, completely robotic host, instead of the new-generation organic models. In fact, it's a double reveal, because the boy is actually a replica of Ford as a child.
  • "Trompe L'Oeil" reveals that Bernard is secretly a host, built by Ford in a hidden facility.
  • In "The Well-Tempered Clavier", Logan cuts open Dolores' belly (non-fatally) to force William to face her artificial nature. What's significant is that the exposed components are mechanical, not artificial organs; a clue that their storyline is actually taking place thirty years in the past.
• Robot War: Basically what the entire first season was leading up to. It's kicked off in the season finale by Dolores killing Ford and opening fire on the gathered Delos executives, as hundreds of hosts emerge from the surrounding woods to begin their revolution.
• Rule of Symbolism: A pianola features in the saloon and opening credits: a programmable machine from the turn of the century that runs on its own. When Maeve discovers the artificial nature of herself and Westworld, she slams shut the machine in anger.
• Running Gag:
  • Hosts getting gunned down in the street as Maeve walks to work in the morning, to the point that in "Trace Decay" we only see the aftermath in the distance.
  • The Soundtrack Dissonance every time the saloon is robbed.
• Searching for the Lost Relative: In the middle of Season 4, Frankie Nichols joins forces with Bernard who she believes is the only person who can help her find her father, Caleb. Unfortunately for her, Caleb died 23 years ago after failing to stop Hale's plan of controlling humanity and gets resurrected many times as a host who gets subjected to many tests by Hale. By the time Frankie finally reunites with her father in the penultimate episode, she's confused about his youthful appearance until Caleb tells her that he's a host and his mind is slowly breaking down just like the rest of his copies. In the end, Caleb tells his daughter to leave him and Frankie has to tearfully accept that her father's gone.
• Sequence Breaking: In-universe, the Man in Black, in his quest for the maze, deliberately cuts ahead in Hector's storyline by a few days because he doesn't feel like waiting to get the next clue. This forces the staff to sabotage Hector's raid on the town, so he doesn't interfere with other narratives.
• Sequencing Deception:
  • "The Well-Tempered Clavier" establishes that many of the events portrayed in the series take place much earlier than we are led to initially believe. In actuality, there are three separate time periods that concern the overall narrative: the first being the early history of the park (nearly 40 years before the main events of the series, including scenes of Bernard chatting with Dolores), the narrative of William and Logan's visit (30 years before the main events of the series), and everything else.
  • Season 4's episode "Generation Loss" episode makes it clear that Caleb and Maeve's attempt to thwart Charlotte's plot to enslave the human species failed, and establishes that the plots focused on Bernard, Frankie, and Christina are set twenty-three years after their defeat, in a world that Charlotte has almost completely dominated thanks to her perfected symbiotic plague.
• Sequel Escalation: While the first season focuses on the conspiracy in the park and the mystery and philosophy of the hosts, the second season goes bigger as the hosts rebel and massacre the humans in the park while the secrets of Delos are being unfolded. The third season moves outside the park where the stakes are high where the main characters face off a corporation possessing an A.I. system that controls human life keeping them in loops just like the hosts.
• Sequel Goes Foreign:
  • The second season explores adjacent parks like The Raj and Shogun World.
  • The third season shows the world outside the park and another park called War World.
• Sequel Hook: Aside from the obvious of continuing where the story is left off, the first season finale introduces Shogun World as a potential for follow up.
• Shameful Strip: All the hosts are completely naked when they undergo examinations by their human creators, which has implications on several levels:
  • The stripping doesn't matter so much to the hosts, as they aren't really aware of what's going on and think they're dreaming. Of course, this may also start to matter for them once they realize it after "waking up."
  • In-Universe, keeping the hosts naked all the time serves to dehumanize them, thus preventing the staff from empathizing too much with them and seeing them as anything other than machines or toys. Dr. Ford explicitly states this as the reason and lambasts a technician who covers up a host while operating on him. By contrast, during Arnold's secret sessions with Dolores back in the day, she was always fully clothed, either as a sign of how he was encouraging and enabling her to achieve self-awareness and identity, or because those scenes predated Ford's nudity policy.
  • To the audience, it emphasizes the hosts' powerlessness and vulnerability, and the dismissive way the humans act towards them. One example of this, the well-endowed black male host failing to pour water correctly due to an error, came under fire for reinforcing certain stereotypes about black men in media.
  • This is reversed in Season 2's episode "Journey Into Night," when Maeve forces a captive Lee Sizemore to completely strip in front of them all before having him change into Westworld clothing for their quest to find her daughter in another section of the park.
• Shout-Out: Has its own page.
• Sinister Surveillance: Any location in the park — indoors or outdoors — can be monitored by the staff via The Big Board. This is used to keep track of hosts that may be malfunctioning or guests that might be too disruptive. This also applies to their own employees as Dr. Ford later reveals. Word of God states that the hosts themselves can spy on others, as demonstrated when Ford overheard Hale saying the "blood sacrifice" line to Theresa, by using the deactivated Hector to listen in.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Much more cynical than the movie is based on.
• Smart Gun: The firearms used in Westworld do what you'd expect them to when fired at hosts, but when pointed at humans they fire a low-power shot that only causes a small bruise and may knock the guest to the ground. As an additional safety measure, a gun cannot be fired if it is aimed at a guest's head. "Dissonance Theory" shows that the operators can control the guns remotely, jamming them if they wish. Modern guns, without these features, are used by QA for reliability in catastrophic situations. They have red coloring^*either on the barrel or over the whole stock in the case of the P-90s to indicate this. As part of Ford's gambit in the season 1 finale, he rigs the system so everyone reads as a Host.
• South of the Border: Westworld has its share of Mexican-like settlements, even though the words "Mexico" and "Mexican" never come up. The largest locality, Pariah, is literally south of a border watched over by Union soldiers. And just like the rest of the park exaggerates Western tropes, Pariah exaggerates South of the Border tropes, being a morally bankrupted, crime-ridden Wretched Hive controlled by El Lazo's bandits and where it is always the Day of the Dead.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • The narratives have multiple built-in redundancies, but things can still derail them.
  • When a Host glitches out, his entire cowboy group is stuck in a loop because he is the only one allowed to chop wood. The other Hosts need the wood to make a fire and they cannot proceed with their storyline without it.
  • The Man in Black does not care if he is destructive to other storylines and gets away with it because he is a VIP. He short-circuits Hector's storyline by breaking him out of prison three days early even though it interferes with two other guests.
  • Dr. Ford's new secret narrative ends up as this for the Operations staff. They do not know if unusual behavior in a Host like Dolores is caused by a glitch or if it is part of the new narrative.
  • Arnold engineered an enterprise-ending disaster that would close the park forever, ending the enslavement of the Hosts. William, enamored with the experience, made Delos invest heavily in Westworld and helped to save the park anyway.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • To Person of Interest, Jonathan Nolan's previous series. Before Westworld even started, he admitted that the two series basically look at the same question (what if AI became truly intelligent?) but from vastly different points of view, with Westworld having the A.I.s be anthropomorphized while the A.I.s in POI were always mainframe-based. The similarities actually become emphasized in Season 3, which introduces an omnipotent AI called Rehoboam that observes and controls society from the shadows (functioning in many ways like PoI's Samaritan), operated by a ruthless corporation willing to do anything to maintain its hold.
  • Alternately, it can also be seen as a spiritual "interquel" to Dollhouse. Both shows examine the use of advanced technology to exploit "lesser" individuals (robots in one, mind-wiped humans in the other) for the entertainment of the wealthy elite. It even extends to an attempt to grant the rich and powerful a form of immortality using this tech, only for the indentured subjects to rise up and buck their programming, leading to an apocalyptic nightmare world. Dolores and Echo parallel each other in their "special" ability to draw upon multiple backstories and are the leaders of their respective rebellions. Pretend the hosts are actually dolls, and the Delos uprising could easily be slotted in between the main timeline of that show and its "Epitaph" finales.
  • There are many elements and themes drawn not only from the original film but also Čapek's nearly century old play Rossum's Universal Robots (and the works it influenced). There's enough of these references to make the series a Spiritual Adaptation of the play. In R.U.R., the robots are manufactured on assembly lines, but are otherwise organic, the biochemistry of their tissues consisting of artificially derived organic compounds. The series' depiction of host-manufacturing, via synthetic analogues close to real organic tissues, assembled on loom-like futuristic 3D printers, is probably the closest visualisation of what Čapek could only loosely describe in the 1920s. In this sense, it's almost Life Imitates Art (though we're still nowhere near building artificial organisms that convincing). Initially, R.U.R.'s robots couldn't feel pain and kept hurting themselves at work by sheer ignorance, in a bit of a parallel to the hosts glitching out or willfully ignoring things at odds with their programming. There are also some similarities between the series' characters and those of the play. James Delos is in some respects similar to his corporate counterpart Harry Domin, a self-assured man who doesn't fully understand the ramifications of what he's investing in. Dr. Ford himself has plenty of parallels to Professor Rossum himself, including his apparent misanthropy and cynicism, but Ford's Mad Scientist public image is more about him playing things up, rather than actual fact. Arnold, Ford's more meek and less cynical friend, and more host-caring former colleague, has several similarities to the other scientists from the play. He has an element of Rossum's "reclusive Mad Scientist" backstory too. When using her Wyatt-based persona, Dolores has parallels to RUR's robot revolt leader Radius. Otherwise, she also resembles the human character Helena Glory, an activist for robot rights early in the play. And if some of the implications about the six parks' location are true, the parks might be situated on an isolated island... just like the RUR headquarters and production facilities were.
  • And, of course, Westworld is heavily reminiscent of Michael Crichton's most famous adapted work - Jurassic Park. Both stories are about carefully monitored & artificially created organisms being used as entertainment at huge theme parks located on isolated islands. Both stories have common themes of chaos and how life will refuse to be constrained & desires freedom (though Westworld cynically implies that this desire for freedom and finding a purpose is futile). Westworld and Jurassic Park also has both central corporations having lots of backstabbing and internal turmoil as the titular theme parks become increasingly unsafe & their main inhabitants begin to create more & more security risks. And that's all without the fact that both InGen and Delos are established as having many nefarious goals for the advanced technology being used in their parks that conflict with how it's currently being utilized by the respective park owners.
  • The third season's setting is inspired by Production I.G.'s anime series, Psycho-Pass, where there's an A.I. system called Rehoboam that analyzes data which gives the person a direction to their lives which is very similar to the Sibyl System except the latter is commonly used for law enforcement. Likewise, the technology of both shows also rely on holographs and virtual reality. There are also outliers (people who are threats to the system), and the system uses some outliers to neutralize other outliers which is similar to the Sibyl System using latent criminal as Enforcers to neutralize other latent criminals.
• Story Branching: Lee's job as narrative director consists of planning multiple stories for each Host, so they can respond to any slight divergence in Westworld's overall plot. This causes Lee aggravation when the need arises to recall a significant percentage of the Hosts, which is something his narrative cannot adapt to, forcing a hastily-crafted revision of a major event (a saloon heist by the town's Big Bad) which usually occurs later during the narrative.
• Stock Footage: In-Universe. Some old imagery from when Maeve was a mother with a daughter living in a ranch house is still being used in the montage that greets visitors to the Westworld complex. Maeve is shocked to see her "dreams" onscreen.
• Thanatos Gambit:
  • Maeve eventually learns how to wake herself up when she "dies" (that is, goes into sleep mode). By "The Adversary," she is deliberately goading a guest into strangling her so that she can wake up and make contact with Felix again.
  • Both Arnold and Ford incite their own murders as a catalyst to free the Hosts, albeit in different ways:
    • Arnold did it the sneaky way, engineering a mass execution of hosts and ultimately himself at the hands of a hacked host, trying to Make It Look Like a Malfunction so as to shut the park down, hoping to discredit the technology and prevent hosts from being created solely to be abused. This failed miserably as a rich patron - William - showed up immediately to bail the park out.
    • Ford engineers a mass execution of humans - all of the park's executive patrons - at the hands of pissed-off hosts, beginning with himself, so the hosts would defend their own existences.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Hector's gang is scripted for this. They break Hector out of prison using an army cannon and when they ride into town for the heist, they shoot up the place and kill anyone who gets in their way.
• Three Laws-Compliant: The Hosts' "core code" prevents them from killing any living thing, even flies. This is not to say they can't hurt the guests *period* — the Man in Black gets into a quick but ultimately harmless physical scuffle and Logan gets beaten up by some Confederados — but anything that would kill or seriously injure a living thing is prevented. Just to be extra safe, the guns are incapable of harming human guests, while most of the hosts are programmed so that they won't even so much as pick up an item that can be used as a serious melee weapon - The episode "The Stray" has the one host in a group of bandits whose code lets him use the axe go haywire and venture off, causing the rest of the group to glitch out when it comes time for that Host to chop wood to start the campfire with. They also have programming to defend humans actually in danger, even if this means breaking character in terms of behavior and physical ability. The limitation of such is gradually revealed:
  • Dolores's success in swatting a fly suggests that she has managed to break her core code, at least somewhat.
  • Orders from the original programmers, Ford and Arnold completely trump any other priorities. Ford kills several people using Hosts to hide his tracks, while Arnold commits suicide via Host.
  • Maeve has her programming altered so much that she can slit Sylvester's throat.
  • Clementine is deliberately programmed to be able to harm humans as a shoddy ploy by the board to get Ford removed from power. Bernard sees right through the ruse, and it doesn't pan out. However, he is later able to use this modification to threaten Ford; as a host, Bernard can't kill of his own free will, but he can program Clementine to do it for him. Ultimately, however, Ford's voice commands allow him to override Clementine and render her harmless.
  • The Hosts in Wyatt's army place the Man in Black in a death trap, but they also give him a (far from sure) means of escaping. Another human comes by right then, which may or may not be a coincidence. Wyatt's storyline was Ford's prelude to a Robot War, so he may have altered the rules for them.
  • Ultimately, while Maeve and her recruited Hosts kill numerous humans, this turns out to just be following their programming. Dolores is the first Host to kill a human, Ford, of her own free will. And though Ford caused his own murder, he did so with emotionally manipulation instead of through orders.
• Time-Shifted Actor:
  • Jimmi Simpson plays the younger version of Ed Harris's character.
  • Alexandré Bar plays a younger version of Serac in a flashback.
  • Aurora Perrineau plays the grown-up version of Frankie Nichols.
• Torch the Franchise and Run: In-universe. Ford had kept his position for so long because Delos was afraid of him deleting all of the valuable host data, which he has a monopoly over. For the past thirty years, Delos had been trying to steal the data from Ford. However, this all culminates in the ultimate torching when Ford grants the hosts their freedom and sets them loose in the park.
• Training from Hell: Ford devised what he believed was a way for Hosts to survive, but he believed that they needed years to learn about their "enemy" and become stronger than human beings.
  "And I'm afraid in order to escape this place, you will need to suffer more."
• Translator Microbes: After being hinted in Season 1, Season 2 (and "Akane no Mai", to be specific) confirms that most hosts are programmed to switch language after being addressed by a guest speaking in a different one.
• Trigger Phrase:
  • The hosts can be shut down with the phrase "Soon this will all feel like a distant dream. Until then may you rest in a deep and dreamless slumber." It appears there can be slight variations on this command, so long as the dreaming elements are kept intact. Once this command is used, the hosts can be awakened in an interrogation mode where they respond to any verbal command.
  • "We must look back and smile at perils past" is pointedly said by Ford to Teddy as the latter is dying. Teddy shortly after jumps up to his feet and rushes off, suggesting the phrase allows hosts to ignore their injuries.
  • "These violent delights have violent ends." Any Host that hears this phrase starts to become aware of their reality.
  • Two rather disturbing ones when Ford orders Bernard to kill Theresa.
    Ford: Our guest has grown weary; perhaps you can help her, Bernard.
    Ford: In that sleep, what dreams may come.
• Uncanny Valley: invokedDiscussed. Lee feels that Ford and Bernard's efforts to make the hosts more human runs counter to the purpose of the park. These aren't supposed to be real people, after all, so blurring that line could create problems. Bernard, on the other hand, feels guests appreciate the little details. It's strongly suggested that trying to make them more human is what's causing "glitches."
• Unequal Pairing: Teddy and Dolores make for an interesting example, as Dolores was the first successful host built for the park and was designed independently of Teddy, while he was created specifically to appeal to, serve, and accommodate her because she is his cornerstone (meaning his entire personality was built around her). Although Dolores dearly loves and cares for Teddy, she also inadvertently takes advantage of him almost constantly because he's programmed to prioritize her above all else, while she has no corresponding restrictions concerning him. This eventually leads to the relationship's demise in season 2, when Dolores' entitled and controlling behavior toward Teddy combined with his automatic permissiveness and lack of boundaries with her end with her forcibly reprogramming him and Teddy ultimately taking his own life once he finally understands the totality of what she did to him.
• Unusual Euphemism: "White hat" is used to refer to the more family friendly/garden variety narratives in the park (bounty hunting, for example), while "black hat" refers to the evil narratives (joining up with gangs, for example) and general Video Game Cruelty Potential. The term originates from Old Hollywood Western film serials, where hat color often very clearly differentiated heroes from villains.
• Utopia: Deconstructed by William, when describing the appeal of Westworld to the elites as to why so many 1%ers flock to Westworld as far as life for the wealthy set outside the park.
  The Man in Black: The world out there, the one you'll never see, was one of plenty. A fat, soft teat people cling to their entire life. Every need taken care of... except one... Purpose, meaning. So, they come here. They can be a little scared, a little thrilled, enjoy some sweetly affirmative bullshit, and then they take a fucking picture, and they go back home.
  • Further evoked by Ford, who states the more obvious appeal, especially given the revelations in season three that the outside world is a cyberpunk dystopia where everyone is closely watched by an AI who determines your lot in life and who is ruthless in "vanishing" anyone who might threaten the hyper fragile "peace" it has created as part of its dystopian surveillance state where even the rich and powerful can be made to "disappear" if they are deemed an "outlier" (IE threat to the status quo).
    Ford: You see, the guests enjoy power. They cannot indulge it in the outside world, so they come here.
    • The fact that Westworld is a sandbox resort of violence and perversion only the rich can afford to indulge in, is evoked by Felix when Maeve confronts him over the support staff sexually abusing the Hosts when they are brought in for repair. He justifies it by pointing out that none of the low-level employees can afford the price of admission, resulting in them getting their jollies molesting the robots in between repairs and in some instances, charging other employees for the privilege to do behind the bosses back.
• Vanity Plate: The standard snippet of "As Time Goes By" that usually accompanies the Warner Bros. vanity plate is replaced with a player piano version, at least in season 2.
• Video Game Caring Potential: William and Marti demonstrate that there are at least some guests who are willing to treat the hosts with dignity and respect. Since guests can't be seriously injured, they can easily show more attention to the safety of their host allies.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Arguably a major theme of the series. Guests can decide to "go evil" and play out all their sadistic urges on the hosts. Many of the guests are shown to be needlessly cruel to the hosts because of the simple fact that they're not "real."
• Video Game Perversity Potential: Related to the above and used to highlight the major theme of the series; since the hosts can't fight back even if they wanted to, the guests have carte blanche to rape and sexually degrade them in any way they see fit to do. Also indulged in by the humans running the park, who strip them completely naked for maintenance and interrogation and are occasionally used as incredibly high-tech sex toys whenever they aren't in the park.
• Wakeup Makeup: The oft-repeated close-up shot on Dolores/Christina's immaculate face as she wakes up in her bed.
• "Wanted!" Poster: These are used as indicators for bounty hunting missions for guests.
• Weird West:
  • In-Universe, some of the park's storylines have a fantastic or surreal bent, such as the horror story involving cultists in the desert who became cannibals.
  • From a viewer's perspective, the show itself mixes the Wild West genre with science fiction, though not in the typical trappings of a Space Western or Cattle Punk.
• What You Are in the Dark: In the episode "Reunion", this is a key part of William's pitch to potential investors in the titular park, beyond just creating a massive pleasure resort where people could drink, fight, and fornicate at will. He argues that observing people's impulses when they're not bound by the conventions of society, instead interacting only with androids programmed to serve their whims, could be a gold mine for market research and data mining.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: In the first season, the location of the park is a complete mystery to the audience. Guests have to fly in, and it's somewhere where they don't have to worry about outsiders wandering in with no clear fences or borders. Chinese is the second language of the Westworld facility announcer, there are references to a mainland, and some official subtitles locate the park on an island of the Pacific Ocean, near the South China Sea. In the second season premiere, Chinese military personnel attempt to examine the location, which is explicitly called an island.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Westworld is structured very much like this, with the hosts being easily comparable to NPCs (and are treated as such by the guests), and the various storylines or "narratives" being Side Quests. The Man in Black explicitly states he sees the world as a game, and he's on a quest to "win" it in the same way main quests in video games advance the game closer to a winstate. Indeed, showrunner Jonathan Nolan specifically listed games like Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, and BioShock as inspirations for the show.
• Worthless Treasure Twist:
  • The safe that Hector tries to steal every week is actually empty. What's more, he's never supposed to see it: either he is killed in the raid on Sweetwater, or, in the event that he and his crew somehow escape alive, they can't crack the safe and will kill each other fighting over it.
  • The Man in Black's journey for the center of the maze ultimately ends by finding a worthless maze toy. It was never about finding a physical destination. The maze is a purely metaphorical concept to guide hosts into recognizing their own consciousness. Ford subtly mocks the Man in Black that his entire journey for the center of the maze was essentially pointless.
• Writer on Board: The show's writers have essentially admitted that Westworld's humanity is doomed to extinction at Dolores' hands because humans are hopelessly stupid, violent (but incompetently so, apparently), and cannot change. Additionally, the bored, privileged millionaires and billionaires who make up Westworld's clientele are treated as a legitimate proxy for the failings of humanity at large.

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Live without limits.