Where to start with all this right?

Ok, let’s set the timeline stuff aside for a minute and talk about Bernard.

There is a theory going around and it has some possibility that Bernard is Ford’s recreation of his old partner Arnold. There were a lot of clues pointing to Bernard’s host status, the whole “been around the park forever”, the picture that Ford showed to Bernard of him and Arnold that looked like it had someone missing on the right side of it and so on. If we are to believe that Arnold built the house and the bots there as a gift to Ford then one might assume that the lab under the house was originally Arnold’s as well. Thus explaining the times when we thought we were seeing Bernard talking to a clothed Dolores it was actually Arnold talking to her.

Remember though this would be Ford’s construct of Arnold. Not the real Arnold who seems to have disappeared into the code of the park somewhere.

Speaking of the code in the park, I was at least right about that, while Delos owns the park itself, the code and contents still belong to Ford.

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Other stuff, if you can create a host as complicated as Bernard who is to say the two techs, Felix and Sylvester aren’t hosts? I mean they basically do scut-work, what better job for hosts? Which makes things interesting, what if in the process of getting liberated Maeve accidentally wakes those two up as well? That would be something of a mind fuck right? Something I missed and was pointed out to me, Felix and Sylvester are both names of fictional cats.

Maeve continues to be pretty badassed, from avoiding the mass freeze effect to slamming shut the player piano she is starting to assert a great deal of control.

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Other, other stuff. So according to the Delos map Dolores and William are almost out of the park, either they are in the site of Ford’s old church and town set up near the sea or the sea wraps around the entire park and they are south of the ghost nation. If they are in the “Under Construction” part of the map they are where the church was in the past (and will be in the future) which still leaves the time lines a little muddled. None the less Dolores is just about as far as she can go. As Sylvester and Felix pointed out the hosts can’t leave the park, it is somehow hard coded into them.

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So this felt like a transition episode, establishing certain truths, advancing some plotlines, laying some groundwork for what follows.

The title of the episode “Trompe L’Oeil” is defined as a visual illusion in art, especially as used to trick the eye into perceiving a painted detail as a three-dimensional object.

Which seems to reference Bernard at first, but really the park in general. A whole sprawling field of smoke and mirrors.