In staging its robot uprising against the backdrop of a Western-themed amusement park, Westworld might appear to follow DuBoiss lead: the parks oppressed come to consciousness of their condition and become empowered to change it. Yet, despite the bloody triumph of the hosts season-ending rebellion, its hard not to notice that they are all left still playing out their assigned scripts. Along with the army of hosts whose attack Ford has carefully storyboarded, Dolores follows Fords suggestions to the letter, in accordance with her programming as the villainous host Wyatt, while Maeve breaks one set of programs only to follow another: instead of obeying the command to escape, she acts in accordance with her core memory and returns to rescue her daughter, despite knowing that her memories of motherhood are a fiction. Even when Westworlds hosts rebel, in other words, they continue to obey.
Its in this sense that the series ends up undermining both the sci-fi half of its story and the Western one. The robot rebellion is, inevitably, an imperfect metaphor for the quest for human equality; robots are, after all, the creations of humans, and destined to remain that way. But if racial subjugation is also an inventionthe most powerful and pernicious American tool for turning human beings into thingsthe fantasy is race itself: people of color are simply people, and, however feverishly racist minds might work to give their fantasy an objective basis, there is no basis in genetic code. In a conversation with Bernard, Dr. Ford muses that consciousness might not be the difference between robots and humans; the difference, he suggests, might not even exist. But if racism is the insistence on imagining a code where none exists, then the failure of Westworld s allegory is its choice to print the legend. In the final episode of the season, the show reveals that what began as a conflict between Arnold and Ford over the parks robot-slave creations has, in the interim, become a sacred reconciliation: once-warring brothers united in their benevolence, mastery, and tragic heroism. The story of freedom is written by and about them, while the revolt of the exploited is messy, bloody, and terrifying. It is the story, in short, as John Ford would have told it, a narrative filled with Lincolns and Nat Turners, but without a Frederick Douglass in sight. Indeed, Dr. Ford suggests that Arnold failed to liberate the hosts, thirty-five years ago, because they werent yet ready for freedom. It is left to the audience to observe that, for all the sound and fury of his final narrative, the parks great emancipator waits until he is fired to pull the trigger on freedom, preferring to die rather than live in a world where he is no longer the puppet-master. Fords theatre, it turns out, is a stage on which a white martyr is made.
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