Season two of HBO’s Westworld is, in the words of Janet Jackson, a story about control. As in the first season, the action mainly takes place inside the park, a playground for the superrich to play with robot “hosts” with impunity—shooting them, drinking with them, having sex with them. By the end of the last season the hosts had become conscious of their servile condition and taken over. In this post-revolution season, the hosts split into various factions. Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood), former sweet ingenue, has embarked on a mission of liberation (or is it simple, spiteful revenge for her imprisonment?). Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), the senior park employee who discovers that he himself is a robot reincarnation of Arnold Weber (also Jeffrey Wright), the park’s co-creator, is scrambled in the head. William (Jimmi Simpson), aka the younger version of the Man in Black (Ed Harris), thinks it’s all a game for him to solve.



Season two plays out across multiple jumbled timelines, extending the show’s discussion of autonomy, freedom, and personal authenticity. The line between who is and isn’t a host gets ever blurrier. The park itself loses its borders; animals and people cross in and out of parallel parks based on colonial India and feudal Japan. For ten weeks, leading up to the season finale on Sunday, viewers have complained that the series has made less and less sense. But the show’s literary references may hold a clue. Season one’s catchphrase—“these violent delights have violent ends”—is a line from Romeo and Juliet. A more obscure reference in the season finale, one that passes by so quickly that viewers may not have noticed it, is a possible key to the second season’s new conceptualization of freedom.

The reference comes in the form of a word: “pearl.” On the show, a “pearl” is an orb that contains the data of entire hosts. It was Bernard’s pearl that was plugged into the park’s “cradle,” so that he could explore its structural underpinnings. Shiny and small, a pearl can roll under a table and disappear. It echoes another work of Shakespeare’s, one that also considers questions of autonomy, world-building, and the question of who has the right to knowledge: In The Tempest, a crew of Italians washes up on the shores of a mysterious island. They’re split up into different places, and go through different adventures that, unbeknownst to them, are being puppeteered by the island’s ruler, a magician named Prospero, through the powers of his captive sprite Ariel.

Ariel sings to Ferdinand, one of the shipwrecked Italians, a song about his father, whom Ferdinand believes is dead: “Full fathom five thy father lies.” The man lies fathoms under the sea, transformed into something permanent: “Of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes.” Pieces of the dead man have become valuable. “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange,” Ariel sings.

The father’s mortal eyes—symbol of human perception and subjectivity—have become incorruptible pearls, just as the delicate human mind has become, in Westworld, a hard and shiny ball worth serious money on the market. Nobody wants to die, the park’s creators gamble. And so perhaps everyone can become pearls like Ferdinand’s father, embedding their souls in an immortal orb. Provided they can afford them.