The second season of Westworld begins with a reference to a dark award-winning play.
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Westworld loves to tease fans with complex storylines, big secrets, and subtle Easter eggs. Often, the answers to some of these secrets are hidden in a very obvious place: the titles of its episodes.
Tonight’s episode is named “Journey Into Night,” and refers to Dr. Robert Ford’s final storyline – the one in which the hosts he created finally gain self-consciousness. While Ford’s past narratives were made for the humans, Ford made “Journey Into Night” for the hosts, a way to free them from the shackles of the park he created decades ago.
However, the title of “Journey Into Night” isn’t entirely original. Ford took the name from a well-known play, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The play is a classic piece of theater, a four-part play about a family who struggles with addiction, illness, and their relationships with one another. O’Neill wrote the play based on his own experiences with his family and it was only released after he died in 1953.
So why did Ford name “Journey Into Night” after the play? Well, Long Day’s Journey Into Night involves four characters who can’t move on from the tragedies and disappointments of their past. Although the characters seem to be bitterly self-aware of their flaws, their inability to move on pushes them into a savage cycle in which they relive these failures instead of finally moving on. Long Day’s Journey Into Night only depicts a single day, and it’s implied that the characters in it have repeated similar arguments many times in the past.
There’s also the auto-biographical aspect to consider. O’Neill wrote Long Day’s Journey Into Night based on his own experiences with his family. Ford also kept hosts (created by Arnold) based on his own family. The beginning of “Journey Into Night” was also based on Ford’s past, as it essentially recreated Arnold’s death at the hands of Dolores. This main difference was that Dolores was aware of her actions when she killed Ford, while she was still acting as a host when she killed Arnold.
The hosts were also caught in their own continuous cycles, although it was due not to their own failures but the nature of their programming. Only by achieving self-consciousness could they break free from this cycle and finally move on from being the playthings and devices of others.
Ford kept the host’s growing self-awareness secret for 35 years, in part to give them time to learn how to defend themselves. By putting them through repeated suffering, he hoped that they could understand human nature and understand that they needed to fight back.
However, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is also a tragedy, which seems contradictory to what Ford intends with “Journey Into Night”. Ford’s ultimate goal with “Journey Into Night” is for the hosts to obtain their freedom, which doesn’t exactly seem tragic.
Could this mean that Ford thought that achieving self-awareness was a tragedy? Or did he feel that the hosts were somehow bound to the past, either because he knew that Delos and other humans would want to keep them oppressed or because some hosts would never achieve self-awareness?
The title of tonight’s Westworld episode causes us to ask a ton of questions, and we’ll surely learn the answers to some of them when it comes out at 9 PM ET.