Season 2, Episode 4: ‘The Riddle of the Sphinx’

To its many exclusive complications, add the fact that the second season of “Westworld” has become a patch on the first. Mysteries that lingered from Season 1 have been solved or extended further, and our understanding of the characters has changed, like a shift in objects during flight.

Take the Man in Black, for example. In the first season, we learned that William and the Man in Black were one and the same, but their stories were unfolding on separate timelines, leaving over three decades of space between them. Based on the evidence, it was reasonable to conclude that Westworld the park had a deleterious effect on the souls of its guests, since William started as a White Hat who didn’t share Logan’s frat-guy lustiness and gradually turned into a Black Hat who murdered his way to the center of Dr. Ford’s Maze. But we didn’t actually see that transformation. We made a cognitive leap.

This week’s episode, by far the best of the new season, suggests a gap in our previous perception of William/the Man in Black — and, by extension, of many of the other characters on the show as well. Think of the first season timelines like a jigsaw puzzle: William and the Man in Black are at opposite edges of the puzzle, and now the show’s architects have a lot of pieces they can play in the middle. His development (or degradation) as a moral being isn’t as clear-cut as it once seemed, and one major reason is that William spent the intervening years running Delos, which had plans for this paradigm-changing technology that extended far beyond theme-park gratification.

Season 2 made it clear early on that the park was always about the guests, not the hosts. But this week’s episode, titled “The Riddle of the Sphinx,” revealed just how far the company’s vision for its technology extends. Only two episodes ago, I wrote about “Westworld” as an allegory for contemporary fears about the internet, which presents itself as an open space for exploration but subjects users to data harvesting, corporate microtargeting and other assaults on privacy. That’s essentially William’s original investment pitch to his father-in-law, Jim Delos: What better marketing tool than an ever-expanding dossier of observational data on how people behave when they’re not being judged? But “The Riddle of the Sphinx” moved the show forward to still-bigger themes: creation, death and the hubris of men who believe these forces can be reshaped.