Westworld fans who signed up for Discover Westworld, HBO’s companion website for the show, received a very interesting email today that may hold some new clues to obsess over.
[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Westworld’s first season.]
The email comes from Aeden, a bot that users could direct questions to about the show. In his email, he said he’ll be undergoing some maintenance, but before leaving will answer a few more questions about Ford’s new narrative. Clicking on the link that’s provided brings you to a specific screen, but before any questions get underway, you’ll notice that it glitches out entirely.
The glitch features a scene between Logan and Dolores talking about Westworld and who it belongs to. The glitch doesn’t seem to give anything away necessarily, but if you choose to restore the screen, Aeden reappears and asks if you want to see an early configuration of his code. Accepting the offer will bring you to a new page with code, which can be seen below.
While there may not be anything in there, this isn’t the first time that the Westworld team may have used code to alert fans to something. On the Delos Incorporated website, one Redditor, yenwood, discovered that if you typed “reverie” into the admin box and hit the enter button, a group of hex code was presented. Yenwood then translated the hex code into Base64, a binary-to-text encoding screen, which he further translated into two different links.
The first link is a three-second video, captured from the screen of a Delos tablet, which shows Elsie’s recent activity. The second is a three-second soundbite that features Elsie saying, “Hello?” This has lead to questions in the community about whether that means Elsie is actually alive.
One of the biggest questions that was left at the end of the first season was whether Elsie and Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) were dead or alive. Polygon has written pretty extensively about the way that Westworld handles death — and how unafraid it is to show death on screen — so the fact that Stubbs and Elsie’s bodies were never shown suggests that the two characters are alive.
This new code also seems to confirm that theory, but of course, things could change between now and 2018 when the show returns to HBO. Both the code from Delos’ website and the glitch Aeden suffers on Discover Westworld prove that showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, along with HBO, aren’t going to step back from the series anytime soon. Those looking to keep up with new theories and try to figure things out ahead of the season two premiere should have their hands full.
Westworld has become one of HBO’s biggest shows, and currently holds the record for the most watched first season of any of the networks’ series. The show averaged 12 million viewers an episode, making it bigger than Game of Thrones’ first and second seasons.
Comments
My theory of Ford being a sentient host still has a chance. I find no reason why a man who spent the entire season treating Hosts as little more than utilitarian task handlers, would suddenly have a reversal and allow them to find true freedom through achieving sentience. Even then it wasn’t true sentience since Maeve’s code was altered by Arnold (which could be Ford, or for your tin-foil hat pleasure, Arnold’s consciousness somehow got into the system all those years ago and he’s a ghost in the system) to make her think she had free will. Also, after Dolores and William "fight" at the church and he stabs her, Teddy takes her to the beach, which turns out to be the riverbank alongside the town buried under the sand. So, Ford controlled the both of them to be a part of his presentation even though we’re meant to think they’re both acting of their own accord.
Ford was never a man to show any kind of hesitation, worry, doubt, fear, or any other emotion than confidence and assured conviction. I find it strange that both he and Arnold would elect to suicide by Host. There is something Shakespearean about that, true, but I just can’t let go of the nagging feeling that neither of them dying was really them dying.
By TransientState on 12.08.16 7:18pm
Isn’t it rather obvious that he supported Arnold’s ideas from the start, but simply concealed all that in order to make his plans work?
By BigDaddy0790 on 12.08.16 7:59pm
What plans? Apart from his thoughts on sentience being gained through suffering, he didn’t really have any plans. Killing off the Delos shareholders wouldn’t do anything for the Hosts. Now, if through the final act of making Dolores "kill" him he hoped she would find true sentience through the pain of knowing she’d killed both her creators…..maaaaaaaybe I could see his plan through some twisted looking glass, but that only applies to her. What of the rest of the Hosts?
By TransientState on 12.08.16 8:59pm
The "code" sample looks more like a weird combination between a core file and syslog dump. The most interesting thing I could find in it is that they appear to be running RedHat EL6 on an intel x86_64 architecture. Oh, and about halfway through there appears to be a kernel panic.
By MarcusMaximus on 12.08.16 8:38pm
I remember playing with that bot. It didn’t have answers for a lot of stuff, but it did have a fun little responses for "Who is Arnold?" and "Are there Robot STD’s?".
By Master Turkey on 12.08.16 11:51pm
This is what I was talking about earlier in the week in another WW article. Kinda cool. Though there was a screen in another article that shows the day of june 15th, 2052 on it, so people are wondering if that’s when the shows taking place.
By nickpeck40 on 12.09.16 8:22am