Westworld Theories: Dolores/Wyatt Connection, Bernard's Orders, Flies, More Human Hosts & Westworld's Location

We are getting closer to that mysterious maze, yet we return with some more Westworld theories for you to consider before the penultimate episode of the HBO series. We take a look at a mind-blowing theory which suggests a connection between Dolores and Wyatt. Did Doctor Ford order Bernard to kill? Could Arnold have a much different appearance than we were led to believe? Might we have found the location of Westworld? Plus, a possible reason for the flies in Westworld and more speculation about another human who might be a host. All this and more, after the jump.

In the last episode, Bernard asks Ford if he's ever had him hurt anyone else. Ford says "no, of course not." Then we see a flashback of Bernard strangling someone who appears to be Elsie. First of all, we don't know for sure this is Elsie, and second, of all, we don't know that Bernard kills her. But many fans believe it to be the case: Bernard killed Elsie because of Ford's orders.

But it makes no sense at all. Why would Doctor Ford order Bernard to kill Elsie? Elsie was chasing down a conspiracy involving data being stolen from the park behind Ford's back. The information Elsie was after would have only helped Ford, not hurt him. There was no reason for Ford to order Bernard to kill Elsie. So what happened? A new theory suggests that when Elsie told Bernard of Theresa's betrayal, he decided to kill her (or take her out of commission — again, we don't know for sure that she is dead) in order to protect Theresa.

We assume that Ford is lying and ordered Bernard to kill Elsie. But he had no motive to do so. She discovered Theresa's data theft and would have corroborated his story of Theresa's death. He had no reason to want her dead. Also, if we believe Anthony Hopkins very precise acting, he seems genuine. There's no flicker of a grin or any sign that he's lying. He even seems a little surprised at the question.

In this case, Bernard's memory would be accurate, but it was not Ford's doing.

Reddit user NoMereVeneerOfVanity has come up with a theory that at first seems ridiculous, but the more you read the argument, the more it begins to make sense. The theory is that Dolores is actually Wyatt.

This is the big drop of this episode. As I mentioned before, Teddy's Wyatt flashback mirrors Dolores almost perfectly. We know that when hosts 'relive' violent memories, they act them out (like when Maeve slashes Clemantine [sic] 2.0's throat remembering MiB), establishing that Dolores really did shoot a bunch of hosts and then put her gun to her head, as she does this in the present.

When Ford originally creates the Wyatt storyline, Ford mentions that the narrative is rested in truth. So this could explain why Teddy remembers Wyatt shooting up the town instead of Dolores because his memory has been altered for the new narrative. According to the theory, Dolores remembers the event correctly as we saw in her flashback in Episode 8, where Dolores was at the center of this host massacre. Ford has insinuated that Dolores may have killed Arnold, and this theory suggests that is the case:

During the massacre, Dolores killed Arnold. Arnold's death occurred at the same time as the massacre, and maybe the massacre even resulted from Arnold's work on Dolores. Dolores is somehow linked to Arnold more than any other host, and it may be the case that Arnold told her to kill him, or got her to kill him, to prove that she is conscious and solved the maze. Ford wouldn't say that he and Dolores are friends 'at all' because she is either the host that killed his dear friend, or the creation of his arch nemesis that he can't seem to crack. Dolores is posed as the ultimate enemy here by Ford to ground in truth the way that he sees her and what she did.

Another Reddit user named grandramble has posted the above graphic which furthers this point but also theorizes that Arnold might not look like anything we had imagined. Previously we argued that Bernard may have been created in the image of Ford's former partner Arnold. But maybe we were wrong. Ford told us Arnold died in the park in an accident. What if he wasn't lying?

We've seen this scene in flashback several times: a group of hosts learning to dance under the supervision of a black female tech (green), with Armistice (yellow) getting distracted. This week that scene expanded to the point that the tech (green) actually got a couple lines of spoken dialogue – lines that didn't serve any purpose other than to bring attention to this tech, who's been repeatedly seen but hasn't actually done anything yet. Also in the background of this expanded sequence are a guy dressed exactly like young-CGI Ford (red) and another guy in a lab coat conducting the dance (blue). We know this scene doesn't end well – we saw Armistice (yellow) in this exact get up covered in claw marks in an earlier flashback, and we're looking at the exact same set in the dance sequence and the massacre (the saloon building, marked with pink, is in both sequences), although the angles are subtly changed such that the locations we saw all three techs in moments before aren't visible in the massacre shot.

Grandramble believes that Arnold is one of these two techs (blue or green), and that we'll see a further expanded version of that massacre scene "where the camera pans just a little bit further and at least one of those two techs — Arnold — is visible dead on the ground among the hosts."

Why don't I think the blue tech is Arnold? Simple – we've seen the green tech in at least three different episodes and she's had actual spoken dialogue. Right now she's a Chekhov's gun – the only character to appear in multiple episodes and be given dialogue who still hasn't actually impacted the plot. There's definitely something important about her. I'm betting Ford's been misleading people by referring to her using only her surname (presumably-Dr. ___ Arnold) and the male pronouns, so that if anyone questions him about her it'll be obvious when they actually do/don't know what they're talking about.

We've theorized in the past that Westworld might not actually be located on Earth, but maybe another planet. A new find suggests it might be on Earth after all. The Westworld map on the DiscoverWestworld.com website contains a latitude and longitude coordinate.

Westworld is at 17º E. Gr., which means Westworld is on Earth. Of course, the Moon, Mars, and any other celestial body can have a coordinate system with latitude and longitude. But our mother Earth is the only one whose prime meridian is "Gr.", i.e. Greenwich. One might think that the coordinates do not refer to the real location of the park, but rather to places simulated within the park. If so, the coordinates should point to western regions of US (e.g., Utah, Colorado), but this is not the case. The 17th meridian East of Greenwich passes through Baltic Sea, Europe (e.g., Wroclaw, Poland and Bratislava, Slovakia), Mediterranean Sea, Africa (e.g., Libya, Chad, Congo, Angola), Atlantic Ocean.

So how would Westworld be located in the middle of the ocean?

We've theorized about the flies in Westworld in the past. It's suspicious that flies are the only other living thing in the park other than the park guests. The flies were focused on mainly in the pilot episode to establish that some of the hosts were able to defy their programming and hurt a living thing. But what if the flies represent something more in the series?

Audiosemipro believes that the flies are the single largest piece of evidence for two time periods theory, and tries to explain why they were introduced into the park. The argument points out that we see no flies in William/Logan scenes, but we see a ton of flies during the sequences following the Man in Black. He points out that in episode 8, William and Dolores come across a bunch of dead bodies and we see no flies circling the bodies. When the Man in Black and Teddy come across dead bodies, we see and hear flies.

He says that throughout all eight episodes this is consistent, although I don't have enough time to wade through 8 hours of television to confirm this. Let's continue under the assumption that this observation is correct. He believes this is not a production error but a carefully planted detail.

Fliess are in westworld when they introduce the new organic bodies. This is because flys couldn't eat anything w/ the old hosts because they weren't flesh, so there were none in the park.

Also remember that the official Westworld website features a contract with terms and conditions for a stay at Westworld which also contains a mention of the flies:

(d) All livestock within the Delos parks are Hosts, with the notable exception of flies. All humanoid and animal Hosts within Delos parks work to keep guests safe, even when the narrative calls for them to appear to endanger guests. Please note, the appearance of danger is not the same as true danger, and all Hosts utilize the Good SamaritanTM reflex to prevent bodily harm.

Since the start of this series, we've speculated that some of the human characters may be undercover hosts. A couple of weeks back that was confirmed to be true with Bernard being revealed as a creation of Doctor Ford. And we know about Ford's underground laboratory where he has a fabrication machine capable of creating more hosts. What if more of the characters we assume to be human are Ford's secret hosts?

Some fans have noticed that Felix's face has some of the same features as one of the facial castings on Doctor Ford's office wall. Now this seems too circumstantial to me, because, it's not clear it's the same face and we don't know that the facial casts on Ford's wall are from hosts he created for Westworld. But again, let's run with this just to entertain this new theory.

Could both Felix and Sylvester be hosts that are part of Ford's master scheme to save the park from Arnold's plan to destroy the park? It might explain why they listen to Maeve and are so readily willing to do her bidding (honestly, my least favorite part of the series so far). We assumed that it was Theresa or Arnold's that was the one with "much higher permissions" that was messing with Maeve's personality matrix, but what if it was Ford himself?

The theorists argue that this would also explain why Maeve was able to hurt Sylvester. We've pointed out previously that Felix and Sylvester are the names of cartoon cats, and that might be in character for Ford to call the duo after something he may have enjoyed in childhood.

I don't buy this theory. I don't think Ford would publicly display clues to his secret wrongdoings on the wall of his office. I think the cat names were a clever tease by the showrunners. Felix and Sylvester chase a bird around a glass room before catching it, and perhaps the writers are hinting to how the duo will ultimately be killed by their curiosity.