Season 2 finale "Westworld": co-creator Lisa Joy on season 3 and the man in the state of Black

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details about tonight season 2 finale of Westworld sure HBO

From the moment Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) died at the end of WestworldSeason 1, a robot apocalypse took place throughout last season, with hosts and humans as collateral damage. And while the Delos SWAT team seems to have repressed the uprise, we end up with the notion at the end of the episode of 20:20 "The Passenger" tonight, written by the husband and wife Westworld the creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, and directed by Frederick EO Toye, that our world is about to be attracted to robo-dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), Robo-Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), and the venerable host Bernard (Jeffrey Wright).

However, the most discordant part of tonight's season 2 has occurred in the post-credit epilogue. Doubts are high here on the humanity of Man in Black (Ed Harris) and if his real daughter Emily (Katja Herbers) died or not in the penultimate episode (Joy gives us a little insight in our interview below).

He arrives in shambles at the park's Forge Nerve Center and finds himself in a similar studio where the owner of Park owner James Delos has been tested (and failed). We find Emily questioning Black's reality, a role typically reserved for a human. She informs him that he does not live in a simulation, and that she has to check her diagnoses for "fidelity". Although Emily was scanned as a human in episode 19, all this technology is for nothing, as we see Robo-Charlotte thwarting the scanners as she navigates to the real world.

Before all this, Maeve (Thandie Newton) tries to lead the guests to the valley beyond in a metaphor very similar to that of Moses. Similar to the way the sky is described in the Bible, the valley beyond is a similar place: Many are called, but few are chosen to pass through the sky pin-pin door . Those who make the segue include Maeve's daughter as well as the warrior of the ghost nation Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) and her beloved. Their bridge is closed, and Westworld is flooded by Dolores (from where the shooting in season 2 opener where we see the hosts drowned in a lake). Meanwhile, Bernard, who has as host all the free will that a human can envy him, shoots Dolores, allows robo-Charlotte to shoot the real Hale before fleeing the park by boat. She re-emerges with Dolores and Bernard in the opulent house of the latter which is adjacent to Central Park of a city.

Below, Joy exposes more about everything you may have been confused tonight, as well as what to expect in season 3 of Westworld.

Wait a second, Dolores is not in Charlotte? Why are they standing together at the end?

JOY: What Dolores did, is that she's snuck out of the park by usurping Hale's identity. She's back in her body, and yet Hale is still there. The question is where is Hale now? And that is a question we will visit next season.

As Charlotte buzzes away from the island, in a bag she carries several pearls from the forge.

JOY: In these pearls are a handful of hosts that she makes out of the park. What hosts they are, we will explore.

We see the man in black digging in his arm, and he does not suffer much. Does that make him a host? We see that there is actually a backup of it that exists.

JOY: This season, we have seen him suffer a lot and digging in his arm, he is suffering from madness. He himself does not know whether he is a guest or not. We have basically had two timelines this season in the classic structure of the film noir. We saw him play the game and figure his steps to the valley beyond, but he became confused on his side of reality, questioning his nature. If you immerse yourself in the game for too long, do you lose the sense of what is real and not real? He struggles with this and this leads to the moment when he kills his daughter Emily thinking that she could be a host. He was in fact deceived, and he digs in his own skin to find answers and finds no thread at the arrival of Dolores. At the end of this period, he is sent to the real world. He killed his own daughter, he is in the prison of his own skin, locked in his own confusion and his own guilt.

The chapter happens after the credits [editor’s note: Where the Man in Black arrives in an apartment that looks a lot like the one that housed android James Delos being interrogated by daughter Emily as though she is the human, and he the robot] is a small piece of what will happen in the future. It gives the complete closure of the timeline by validating what happened in the park when the black man leaves.

And Bernard?

JOY: He leaves his house at the end to be in the real world. Dolores is totally frank with him. That they have escaped the park, and even if they work as enemies, they will have to survive both. The real world is what we are studying next season.

Tessa Thompson told Deadline at the beginning of the season that "women are reigning supreme this season, everything revolves around women". That said, how much did Time's Up era inspire the Season 2 writers' room?

JOY: By the time Time's Up started as a move, we had written all the scripts and tournaments. I am inspired by this movement today and every day. The series is a reflection of a movement that took place in the company before Time's Up. It is women who are fighting in all forms of oppression, there have been networks to deal with it, and there has been a lot of suffering. The fact is that I am a human being living in the world and I am a woman and I know these things. I have been affected by them. Fiction has always been a way of looking at society and its flaws and trying to expose them. You find pain and struggles in the art.

Human-wise … who is even alive? There was a big bloodbath. Even the noble employee of Delos, Elsie, was shot. Lee Sizemore is dead. Ashley Stubbs seems to be alive.

JOY: There is management outside the park. Like any company, the brass is not centralized during the commercial operation. There are more people to meet. Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum) and Lutz (Leonardo Nam) survived, of course. The series deals with a great period of time, and in a story about A.I. you will say goodbye to humans en route.

We see all these hosts of James Delos. Will they walk in season 3?

JOY: They were not physical copies, but occurred in this digital space that Dolores and Bernard entered. As we saw in episode 4, the mind tended to reject their bodies by bringing these humans back to life. He went crazy and it did not work that way.

Was there an alternative end? Was there a version of tonight where some arcs terminated differently?

JOY: I do not think so. We arrived at all our ends. It's a long finish, and we managed to poke a lot in it. We told the story that we decided to tell. This chapter is now over and we have a small fleet of hosts in the real world.

Jonathan Nolan and CEO of Space X and co-founder of Tesla Elon Musk are close friends. They had a panel at SXSW this spring. Musk said that A.I. is the greatest existential threat of humanity. Did his theories inspire Westworld's writers' room?

JOY: For me, the series is a tale of morality about the fear of humans. The protagonists that I sympathize the most are Dolores and Maeve. It's the examination of human nature, this unique experience and the extreme human experience. From the point of view of A.I., You see some of the faults of humans in the harsh light. There is violence and tribalism and a lot of darkness in humans that the series explores. It also makes the light brighter, when you see Maeve's character sacrificing everything that she has to save her daughter; the overwhelming love of a parent for a child. There is a human instinct programmed into her, and she chooses to preserve and understand her beauty, the beauty of the human being. It's fun to write Lee Sizemore as a narcissistic idea under duress, which happens when you are the worst of humanity, but sometimes you see the best manifest.