Westworld: Here's What the Delos Project Really Is

After telling a beautiful story about a robot in love in "Kiksuya," Westworld bounced back the following week with a sad story about a human in pain in "Vanishing Point." The hour was our time with William/The Man in Black (Ed Harris, kicking ass again), one of the series' most enigmatic mysteries, as we saw how his wife Juliet (Selma Ward) killed herself and how both Emily (Katja Herbers) and William (and Juliet herself) were responsible for her death.

But I've got a batshit theory that underneath the surface of the episode, we may just have seen a glimpse into what this whole project that Delos was working on actually was. If you've watched Jonathan Nolan's previous series Person of Interest, you'd know that Nolan loves to make the grand nefarious plans of the so-called villains come with a bit of understanding; the purpose behind that show's ultimate evil -- the AI Samaritan -- was to protect the population, not just watch over it. It may have been created under misguided auspices, but that was, at least at one point, its purpose. As with all things on a grand scale, somewhere along the way it took a wrong turn. Something similar could be happening here in Westworld.

Did Westworld Make a Huge Mistake or Did It Reveal a Big Secret?

Knowing Westworld and its repeated head fakes, it's reasonable to believe that everything we've learned about this secretive Delos project is wrong. We've come to understand that all the surveillance of the guests and storage of their experiences (and now thoughts, thanks to handy-dandy scanners in the cowboy hats -- hmm...) was the company's pursuit of selling immortality, a way to copy a person into a body that doesn't degrade with a backup mind just a download away in case something goes bad. But we've only assumed that, along with characters who are just learning about the project themselves. We haven't heard from someone who is actually leading the project -- William, particularly -- that immortality is the main objective. I believe the project was about something else.

What was "Vanishing Point" about? It was about broken, flawed people -- most notably, William and Juliet. William repeatedly talked about something inside him that was wrong, and Juliet was doomed by her alcoholism. Between those two things, their marriage and their relationship with their child was destroyed, along with their lives.

"I don't want to do this, dad, but there is something wrong inside her," Emily tells William just before they discover Juliet's dead body. There's a reason that line of dialogue was written that way.

William didn't just want to "fix" Juliet's alcoholism, he wanted to fix that part of himself that he suppressed for so long. "No one else sees it, this thing in me, even I didn't see it at first," he confessed to Juliet. "And then one day it was there, this stain I never noticed before." But he couldn't fix it. He goes on to explain that the "stain" was why he chose Westworld over his real life.

Westworld largely operates under the idea that people, well most of us anyway, are pieces of shit in some way or other. That beneath our smiling exteriors are wretched monsters who would rape, murder, deceive, cheat, steal and commit any other felony at the first chance we got when we are sure no one would be looking. It was the appeal of Westworld and why rich folks vacationed there. Not just to live without consequence, but to feed their bad side, consciously or unconsciously. But what if you could get rid of your bad side?

"What is a person but a collection of choices? Where do those choices come from?" he says in voiceover. What if you could override that part that makes those choices?

Here's what I'm thinking: Delos didn't want to give humans immortality, it wanted to improve humans. If these copies of humans that are sitting in the Valley Beyond are just strings of code -- "All the guests laid bare in code on a vast server," Bernard says -- it stands to reason that the code can be adjusted. A new copy of Juliet could be created without the code that made her an alcoholic. A second William could be duplicated with everything except that stain. Why copy humans if they're going to be just as flawed as their original versions? The business model here is: don't just sell someone a copy of themselves that can live forever, sell them a better copy of themselves that can live forever.

Westworld: Who Are We Supposed to Be Rooting For?

There's been a repeated point made about the hosts being able to alter themselves with a swipe on a fancy iPad, why wouldn't that be applicable to the copies of humans? We even saw a preview of what could be done when Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) erased Ford from his mind. A simple click improved himself by getting rid of what was bad inside of him.

"All this ugliness, all this pain, so [humans] can patch a hole in their own broken code," Ford told Maeve.

This doesn't make what Delos is doing a good thing; part of being human is being flawed, and I think that's a big theme that Westworld is trying to get across. The lack of being able to fix ourselves -- our deep, dark selves -- is what separates man from machine. A host can be rebooted with an update. Humans are stuck with who they are, but it's natural to want to try to fix that. We try, and fail, to do that all the time.

I don't believe this is the ultimate goal of Westworld; the show is much more complex than that and there are several other questions of human nature, the dangers of technology, and the line between artificial intelligence and consciousness in the other storylines. But I do think that it's part of the equation. Also, I'm probably wrong.

The Season 2 finale of Westworld airs Sunday, June 24 at 9/8c on HBO.