Westworld Rundown: The Man in Black Reveals Himself in Contrapasso

In time for Halloween, Westworld episode five reveals who the self-proclaimed villain is.  And he's good.
​By J. Delano

By HBO Channel (YouTube) (Westworld: Tease (HBO)) [Public domain] via Wikimedia

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Parental Advisory

Episode 5 Contrapasso has some graphic scenes of nudity in the large dining hall of the town of Pariah and in the laboratory 

     Westworld last night hit the nail in the coffin with an episode that answered a lot of questions, and thankfully not all of them. We surely like mystery.  The producers also had good scheduling sense to broadcast Contrapasso on Halloween.  The ghouls of the modern celebration transformed subtly to what the characters need to be, dressing down from their costumes into who they are.  Spoiler Alert for those who still want their episode five intact in their heads.

The Four Things

     One thing that I think was imminent was that Dr. Ford and the Man in Black would be the great movers of Westworld the park.  It was even a surprise that Dr. Ford confirmed the Man in Black was his former partner, Arnold.  Believed to be dead for the last 34 years, he had been roaming the park and being utterly the foil for the hosts' own entangled narratives, like that of Dolores and Lawrence.  

     Two episodes ago, Dr. Ford described Arnold as someone who grew so attached to them that he joined them in the park.  However, in their much-anticipated confrontation, Arnold even boasted that the park needed a real villain.  What's not sure yet though was Dr. Ford's role in all of this?

Larger in the inside

     The other gigantic idea looming in this universe is that the park was larger than what has been revealed outside from Sweetwater so far.  Dolores, Slim Miller, Logan and William passed by an eerie cemetary and entered Pariah, a town rich in low-lifes and transgressions.  Logan even noticed that Pariah was raw and not "market-tested", making the town as a place of outcasts, like going through the grave and into Hades.  It makes you wonder if it was made on purpose by Dr. Ford or their corporation but it doesn't look like it.

     Despite all of what Pariah consumes and regurgitates, which was usually twisted, it had a different effect with William and Dolores.  It animated their real potential.  William became a protector and Dolores fought back.  Logan too showed his authentic self in Pariah, which was glaring to begin with but like the charming egoist that he has always been for the past three episodes, he described how he used William as a pawn.  

     By the way, Contrapasso is italian for "suffer the opposite" and derived from Dante's great work, Inferno, and St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica.  When souls reach hell, they suffer a punishment that suits the sin.  In this instance, Dolores and William didn't deserve Pariah and they knew it which led them to escape.

A Deeper Truth

     It then brings us back to Arnold and Dr. Ford's discussion with Teddy Flood shooting up a glass of whiskey amongst them in the table.  He said his role as the villain was his way of bringing out a deeper purpose for the hosts and "something true."  Dolores and William fighting back was part of that pivot to recognize a deeper purpose.  Lawrence had a purpose for Arnold and most especially for Teddy.  William surely may have been an accident, a tourist lost in the middle of the park amid hosts choosing different narratives for themselves, but for good or for bad he found a purpose.  As for Dolores, when Dr. Ford was talking with her at the beginning, she told him that Arnold said she would help him "destroy this place."  

     Unless nothing more changes, eventually this is the vision mission as the corporates call it.

Awakening

     So what about the lab techs?  They were fixing up Maeve after her common bouts with bullet-shooting customers in the saloon but one of the techs, Felix, had a side project.  He had a lifeless robotic sparrow and with some fixing up he brought it back to life, or to be accurate he reanimated it.  If you ask me, I'm betting a lot more will come alive in the next episodes. 
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About the author

J. Delano is an amateur photographer and story buff.