Though we do get immersed in behavior specialist Elsie’s perspective early in the season, she eventually goes missing, too — and practically no one who works at Westworld gives a shit. Presumably, it was head programmer/secret robot Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) — through the manipulation of Westworld founder Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) — who manufactured the lie that Elsie has taken an abrupt, extended vacation. Ashley Stubbs, played by Least Famous Hemsworth Brother, is the only person who seems to care about Elsie’s disappearance, but doesn’t press Bernard after he brushes off questions regarding her whereabouts. At the end of Episode 6, “The Adversary,” we see Elsie attacked by an unknown assailant; by the end of Episode 8, “Trace Decay,” we learn that Bernard, under Ford’s orders, has strangled her.



Before her disappearance, Elsie was the only Westworld employee determined to figure out why hosts were going off-script and whether their erratic behavior had anything to do with data getting stolen from the park; she was well on the way to cracking the case. Elsie was pushy and clever and funny and gave off some great Ellen Page-meets-Nancy Drew vibes (although she also had serious flaws – more on that later). I’d have accepted her throwaway kiss with Clem more readily if we got to see Elsie further developed, but in retrospect that moment only sheds light on how undercooked her entire storyline is. There’s a definite possibility that Elsie is still alive — maybe Bernard, for whatever reason, quit choking her before she stopped breathing — but it seems likely that she met a grisly end before we could see her really triumph, which would make her yet another queer female character to get killed off in this very violent year for bisexual women and lesbians on television. Or at least, a potentially queer character; all we have to go off is that Clem kiss, which isn’t much of anything at all.

In Westworld, as they are in so many other shows, queer and maybe-queer female characters are disposable when they no longer serve the stories of (straight) men. Marti is a flimsy tool to get Teddy where he needs to be, and Elsie’s death can fuel Bernard’s guilt in the same way his killing of Theresa (Sidse Babbet) does. In the end, Marti and even Elsie aren’t very much better off than the robot women who are programmed to kiss each other as an added bit of spice for male guests’ pleasure during orgy scenes — they’re merely props, or some pretty window dressing.

But Elsie herself is just as guilty of reducing other characters to sexual objects. In one throwaway scene we really could have done without, she remarks upon a black host’s “talents” while he’s asleep and naked in her charge; as Kathryn VanArendonk notes in Vulture, it’s a gross and dehumanizing joke that turns the host, Bart, into a safe and controllable sex toy. The show doesn’t care to explore Bart’s sexuality beyond a racist punchline, just as it doesn’t care to give much narrative attention to anything other than straight sex and forcible rape. (Westworld offers up only one queer man: a skeevy employee who’s supposed to be cleaning up hosts but takes some time out of his busy work schedule to sexually violate the guy robots when they’re sleeping. Not exactly the most positive bit of queer representation.) What we’re supposed to be seeing as the future of sex looks not only underpopulated, but positively bleak.

In the end, the show’s most provocative storylines involve female hosts who will stop at nothing to free themselves from living through endless loops of sexual victimization and violence — the memories of which, in a cruel twist of irony, get them closer to consciousness: Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores and Thandie Newton’s remarkable Maeve are the two most humanlike hosts (besides Bernard) by the end of the season. There’s no clear reason why a show that raises questions about consent, about relationships, about who gets to wield gendered power and why isn’t bothered to push those questions too far beyond the limited bounds of straight pairings.

Westworld at large seems aware of how ridiculous it is to shove women into romances and sexual relationships with men purely for the sake of highlighting some piece of the male ego. In the season’s final episode, Ford dupes the party of investors and other Westworld bigwigs into thinking the big finale of his new storyline is just Teddy blathering on about hope for the future while Dolores dies in his arms, a saccharine-sweet oceanside take on Western love stories — when, of course, Ford’s actual new storyline is a real-life robot uprising, with Dolores taking glorious center stage. It’s disappointing, then, to see the show occasionally dip into the same sorts of heteronormative blind spots it devotes a portion of its finale to critiquing. Even in a fantastical world that explores the farthest reaches of human ingenuity and identity, queer characters just don’t seem to make the cut.