The biggest surprise in Westworld Season 1 was probably the revelation that idealistic William and the brutal Man in Black were the same person, whose seemingly concurrent storylines were actually taking place decades apart. To keep the secret of this twist, Westworld didn’t do much to interrogate the older William’s character in its first season, leaving viewers to wonder not only how the young man Delores loved could become such a monster, but also what the Man in Black’s ultimate endgame might be.

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Season 2 attempted to correct that problem, offering flashbacks dedicated to William’s life between his first entry into Westworld and the present day. Spread across three separate time periods, they shed some light on William’s (d)evolution into the Man in Black (although showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy still had the tendency to keep his motivations purposefully vague for much of the season).In the end, the full breadth of William’s story (at least as it stands after Season 2) is simultaneously disturbing and heartbreaking, as his obsession with the park drives away everyone who ever cared about him and fractures his own connection with reality. Through these scenes, as well as the sudden arrival of his daughter Emily in Westworld, William becomes something much more complicated than the park’s designated, stereotypical villain.Instead, he becomes its grand tragedy.William’s infatuation with the park and his fascination with the idea of host consciousness all come from a very human place: A desire for a greater meaning. Whether this search is called the Maze, the Door or something else, it’s a quest to ascribe a larger purpose to his life, to turn his obsession into something more than just cowboy LARP-ing. That search ultimately drives William to kill his own child in the throes of his mania, at last so delusional and paranoid that he can no longer distinguish the real world from the false.That’s pretty much as tragic as it gets.Yet, despite his story’s dire undertones, Westworld does not spare William’s character, showing viewers an unflinching depiction of a man at his absolute darkest point. William, as the Man in Black, is a monster who kills and tortures the hosts without mercy. He’s brutal, cynical and cold. But William wasn’t always the Man in Black. At one point, he was a kind young man who didn’t want to kill random bandits for fun or sexually harass women at the Mariposa. He simply loved a girl and wanted to save her. But that girl turned out to be a robot, and her love turned out to be a lie. And that was enough to change everything.William’s loss of Dolores fractured his life, at a time when he was already struggling to maintain clear boundaries between the real and the unreal. It largely drove his fascination with the park, his obsession with host consciousness, and his evolution into Westworld’s most fearsome guest. His discovery that the woman he loved is a host, that her memory could be reset, that every man who visits Sweetwater might theoretically experience the same things he did with her launches him into an existential crisis from which he arguably never recovers.By the time the Man in Black is on his search for the Door in Season 2, his depravity has driven his wife to suicide; his Forge file is labeled irredeemable; and he himself admits his soul is stained with darkness. He’s officially murdered multiple people. Therefore, when Westworld’s post-credits sequence jumps forward to a future where William is revealed as a host (or some approximation of one - at least at that point in time), there’s a certain sense of justice to it. He probably deserves worse. However, the fact that his host self must relive one of the most heartbreaking moments of his life over and over again adds a complicated wrinkle to this twist.Because despite seemingly years of tests, he has yet to find a version of his Westworld journey that doesn’t end in his daughter’s death. Whether that’s because he’s still rejecting his own culpability in his Emily’s murder or because Forge!Logan is right and human beings just can’t escape their programming is unclear. Either or both seem possible. However, the idea that there is a version of his loop in which Emily survives also implies there’s a version where William makes different, ostensibly better, choices. And is possibly a different man. And Westworld certainly implies that – at least in this instance – there’s some way to change things, even if only through force of sheer will.The idea that William is trapped in a hellish Sisyphean loop of his own making because he can’t stop committing his worst mistake over and over is both fitting and terrible. (In fact, it perfectly encapsulates Westworld’s ability to present this character sympathetically while not asking its audience to forgive or forget his crimes.) Plus, there’s some enjoyable irony in the fact that William not only becomes a host himself in the end, but also seems bound by a similar lack of real agency. However, since we’ve spent two seasons exploring ideas of free will, that is unlikely to be the case forever. “No system can tell me who I am,” he still insists, apparently misguidedly, after his untold hundredth trip through the park ends in tragedy.Maybe there really isn’t a way back for William after everything he’s done. Black hats don’t suddenly become white again, after all. Yet, we’ve seen that William has, on occasion, chosen the light. When the Man in Black returns to Las Mudas with Lawrence in Season 2, their second trip there plays out quite differently. When Craddock’s men kill and torture multiple hosts, including Lawrence’s family, William rescues everyone in a hail of gunfire after recalling the discovery of Juliet’s suicide. The importance of this twist is made explicit when we remember that we’ve seen this exact scene before. Only, that first time, the Man in Black filled the role Craddock does now, callously threatening Lawrence’s wife and mocking his family’s pain. Yes, right down to the same physical positions and lines. So, for lack of a better phrase, he breaks a loop in this moment. And that has to matter. One good deed, of course, can’t erase a lifetime of mistakes. But it’s a start.The park, Westworld repeatedly tells us, shows us a person as they truly are. And we’ve certainly seen the worst of William over the course of the show’s two seasons. But he was once capable of something more, and one of the tragedies of his character is his assumption that the darkness in his soul is both something he bears no responsibility for, and that he can’t change. This is a cop-out, of course – a way for William to shirk responsibility for his terrible behavior both in the park and outside of it. But as we see in “The Riddle of the Sphinx,” that doesn’t have to be the case. The tragedy of William’s life is that he refuses to accept the thing he most wanted to give the hosts: The ability to decide for himself the man he’ll become.Maybe he’ll get it right next time. We’ll have to see in Season 3.

For more on Westworld, check out our Season 2 finale review explainer on the Man in Black's big post-credits twist , and everything we know about Season 3 so far.Where do you think William's story will go in Season 3 and beyond? Share your theories in the comments.