The Tragedy of William, the Man in Black

I find William to be one of the most interesting and important characters in the show. His role is also crucial in presenting the themes that the showrunners are exploring.

Before the Game:

From the get-go, we see William as a person who is very conscious of the way he presents himself in the world and of the way he interacts with everyone. On the shuttle into the Park, William is annoyed by Logan's comparing of the shuttle waitress to the women in Westworld. More likely, he is annoyed by how blunt and shallow Logan is being, but also because he is aware that the waitress may have heard him. In the wardrobe room, William denies the greeter host's advances because he's engaged to someone. Before he even gets to the Park, William is interacting with the hosts as if they are human. Maybe because he's unsure if they are, as he asks the greeter host if she is human, or because that's simply the way he treats everyone. He's polite and considerate to others' needs and wants as a default. Here comes the first indication that this is an act, however...in the wardrobe room, the greeter host makes a big deal over which hat William can choose, as if it were the most important choice before entering the park: will you pick the role of the hero or the villain? This is an established choice, as Logan later tells William, "Go Black Hat with me." William picks the "hero" hat.

Why would William choose to play the hero? It could be that he does this because, all his life, he's presented himself as being polite and somewhat submissive. He obviously dislikes Logan and disagrees with his actions and philosophy, yet he still listens and sticks around with him. So, this is the way he acts in the real world by default: he's the "nice guy." But...there's something here that suggests William is just pretending. He deliberately chose the white hat, which means he wants to be perceived as the good guy in the park. In regards to undressing with the greeter host's help, he asks, "what do most people do?" He's conscious that his actions will speak for him, and he wants to make sure he's coming across well and choosing what most people do. I say pretending because that's a word he uses when speaking to Dolores later, and also because we know what William is like deep down.

Playing the Hero:

From here on out, William plays Westworld as if he were choosing the "Good Karma" actions in a videogame. His first interaction is with the "gunslinger type" who, if you bump into, will move as if to challenge you to a duel. William apologizes, and Logan chastises him for being too considerate, and flips the guy off. Later, we see William help an old guy out of the mud. He's choosing all the "Good Karma" actions, maybe because he's really a nice guy, or maybe because he's pretending to be one. We know that later, he becomes even more blunt than Logan. William then acknowledges the same old guy at the bar and shows interest in the side quest he's proposing, but Logan stabs the guy, effectively ending the side quest.

At the Mariposa, William is disgusted by Logan's actions and tells Clementine that Logan isn't really his friend. Again, he's just pretending, probably because he's dating Logan's sister and Logan is the heir apparent to the Delos company. William then defends Clementine, shooting an escaped bandit and asking if she's alright. He also picks up Dolores's can and tips his hat to her.

Later, in Pariah, we see that William has a hard time playing anything other than the hero. Logan wants to join the Confederados, while William sees that as going down a dark path. When he and Logan get into an argument and Logan mocks his submissiveness, William's polite demeanor falls away and he attacks Logan. This is the first glimpse we get of William's underlying dark side.

It's Just a F•cking Game, Billy!

The problem with William is that he is too invested in the hosts and the experience to realize that this is all just a game. Discussions about the host's conscience aside, the world that the Westworld park portrays is not real. When you shoot a host, you're not shooting a real person. You may be shooting something with a conscience and a capacity for suffering, but you're not killing a real person because hosts are: 1. able to be revived easily. 2. (for the most part) able to be reset to forget their suffering. This means that the hosts aren't actual, real people. But for William, they appear to be more human than not. His reaction to killing a host (as we see with the bandit that kidnapped Clementine and the Union soldiers) is a lot like the reaction you'd have to killing a real person.

When William goes on a bounty hunt and is concerned when Dolores collapses into their camp that night. After he and Logan capture their bounty and Logan hears he's connected to El Lazo and kills the host bounty hunter, William freaks out, asking what the fuck Logan is doing, acting as if Logan had actually killed a real person. This is the first real indication that William has a hard time distinguishing choices made in the game with choices that you make in real life. Killing a defenseless man of the law is shocking and despicable to him because doing so in real life would make you a psychopath. "You shot an innocent man!" "No, he's a robot. Just like her and just like Slim here." "What is your problem-the second we get away from the real world you turn into an evil prick." "Evil? It's just f•cking game, Billy!" Logan has to remind William that this is a game. It's not real. The hosts and the storylines are here so that the guests can do as they please. The storylines even encourage you to shoot and kill hosts (as can be seen with the dead or alive bounties and the fact that it would have been almost impossible for William and Logan to free that family without killing the bandits).

William's confusion with the reality that the park presents is further exacerbated by Dolores. She appears to be malfunctioning or glitching in some way, skirting her programmed limitations and feeling, remembering, and experiencing things beyond them. William falls in love with Dolores, as I imagine most guests would who go on a storyline with her. But William sees Dolores's fledgeling consciousness and underlying humanity because of her escaping her loop and the reverie update screwing with her programming. If Dolores had stuck to her loop as she does with most guests, William's love for her would never have gotten past a momentary crush, as he'd seen her meet other guests the next day and realized she forgets guests with no attachment. However, as she's escaped and is with him, he gets to spend much more time with her and go through several traumatic events with her. Their adventure is something that would bring two people closer together in the real world, and it does so with them. The tragedy here is that William was right about Dolores's humanity coming to the surface past her programming. Had he spent more time with her without Logan interfering, his love for her would have remained, and he might have actually helped her escape. But Logan's ruthless views about the hosts being nothing more than playthings and his cruel stabbing of her to reveal her working parts caused Dolores to escape and later be killed and reset, undoing her memories of William.

I Was Born Here:

After Dolores runs away from the Confederados, Logan seemingly convinces William that she is just a robot and to stay with him to bond as future brothers in law. However, William just uses this as a ruse to get Logan drunk. While Logan is out, William massacres all the Confederados. This is a reaction to the traumatic event of seeing the woman he has fallen in love with being stabbed in the stomach and then have her skin peeled apart to reveal that she's in fact just a robot underneath. The even was incredibly disturbing and cruel to us as viewers. Now, imagine how traumatic it must have been for William to witness his brother in law doing this to the woman he loves and to be helpless to stop it.

William didn't just massacre the Confederados, he actually took them apart as well. This mirrors what the MIB tells Teddy many years later, "When this place started, I opened one of you up once. A million little perfect pieces." Now, with Logan unconscious and William reeling from the traumatic brutalization of Dolores, William is left to process everything alone. He was surrounded by men who helped Logan do what he did to the woman he loved, and who were responsible for steering William's adventure away from him and Dolores's journey of mutual self-discovery into this war-time horror. William's true potential for violence comes to light here as he kills the Confederados and they're powerless to stop him. He then opens them up, making the point that they're robots crystal clear to him. He has time to dissect them and analyze them, seeing for himself that they're just things, that the woman he fell in love with and who showed him who he really was (or wanted to be) was also one of these things. All the while, he also realized he was good at killing. However, as we've previously explored, this is a man who had trouble distancing this artificial world from the real one. In his trauma of having that perfect, innocent fantasy of love with Dolores ripped apart and shown starkly to be artificial, his act of killing these artificial beings affected him deeply, as if he were killing and mutilating real people.

William then takes Logan out to the far reaches of the park and takes his revenge upon him. William wants Logan to appear to be a reckless and incompetent heir to his father's company, and he wants to take the promise of that future away from him. In a sense, Logan destroyed and corrupted William's dream of a possible future with Dolores, of him saving her from Westworld. So William destroyed Logan's dreams of running Delos and his credibility.

With that done, William then rampaged through the park. Each kill making him better at killing, and numbing him to it all. Eventually, William came to view the hosts as things, without caring for their suffering as long as they were in his way as he searched for Dolores, the one true thing he found in the park. A part of him also liked the ruthless actions he performed. He was finally free from being polite and considerate, subservient to other's needs and wants before his own. He was also taking his revenge upon the entire park for making him fall in love with Dolores and then having it be twisted so terribly.

Finally, he returns to Sweetwater without having found Dolores. And he finds her there. However, she had been killed and raped by the Confederados, and thus had been reset. She no longer remembered William, and all the progress she'd made due to the reveries was seemingly undone (but still there beneath the surface). Another guest picks up Dolores's can, and she shares a sweet moment with him. Upon seeing this, William realizes that Dolores is just another host after all. Everything he'd shared with her, all the signs that she was actually different and more human than the rest...it was all undone. It was gone. She was just a playing her role as if nothing had happened. She was a doll, like Logan had said. Something put there to sweeten the guest's experience as they arrived. She could be just as intimate with thousands of guests as she was with William. Countless guests could love her and share a night of love as he had with her, and she'd be as genuine with them. This breaks William completely. Imagine knowing the woman you loved had not only forgotten you, but was set up as this sweet, perfect thing that would seduce literally thousands of men over and over again. She'd appear innocent and tender and these men could do whatever they wanted with her, rape her even, and she'd just forget and be right back in the same place so another man could do whatever he wanted with her. It's at this moment that William puts on the black hat. He's free from morality and all preconception he brought in with him at the start. And it's like a shield against all the things the park had done to him. But, as much as he may have tried to convince himself this was all fake, his experiences with Dolores and the trauma of losing her, followed by his descent into ruthless mass-murder...it all changed him. As deeply as if it had happened for real, with real people.

Bring Yourself Back Online:

William's revenge on the park continues after Logan is deemed too unstable to lead the company, and William holds the place of Delos's heir apparent. After convincing Delos to invest in the park because of what they could do in the future with the knowledge of who their guests really are (as he found out who he really was there), William meets with Dolores in the analysis room. He's then incredibly cruel to her, going on a spiteful monologue, "You really are just a thing. I can't believe I fell in love with you. You know what saved me? I realized it wasn't about you at all. You didn't make me interested in you, you made me interested in me. Turns out you're not even a thing. You're a reflection. You know who loves staring at their reflection? Everybody. Everybody wants a little bit of what I found here. And I can't wait to use you and every one of your kind to help give it to them. Hmmm. But there is something else. There is something beyond that. I think there's an answer here to a question no one's ever even dreamed of asking. Do you want to see?"

Now, I don't believe William here for a minute. He had them bring Dolores to the analysis room so that he could convince himself that she's just a thing, but I don't think he could. Deep down, he's still trying to get over what happened to their love. He spits on what they shared, calling it something cheap and easy and for everyone. He says she made him more interested in him, but that's not true. She made him find himself (or a dark part of himself) after she was gone. When they were together, he thought he had found the real him in their love. Someone who was actually happy without having to pretend to be content and polite. But then he found out he could be a ruthless killer and feel nothing as he tried to find her again.

The real tragedy here is that William really loved Dolores and still does. He was deeply traumatized by what Logan did to her and by her forgetting him. Now, he holds it against her, and wants to take revenge upon her and her entire kind because of the loss they made him feel. The Man in Black is just a persona William took up to convince himself he was numb to the horrors he experienced in Westworld when he was a young, innocent man. Because the characters in the park were artificial beings, William has tried desperately to convince himself that what he felt was artificial, and that who he became on his quest for revenge was the only real thing. But, William and Dolores did really love each other. That was real and pure, and partly based on the fact that Dolores was becoming more human and aware of herself. And that was true, not just a glitch. But William became blind to it. Because he saw her back on her loop, he believed she really was just a doll. Even worse, she was a ruse put there to lure naive men like him into falling in love with something fake that would just do the same for thousands of others. But, that's not true. Dolores really isn't just that fake ruse. There's something underneath that's real, and that's what William saw and fell in love with. But Logan's traumatic action of revealing Dolores as an android, and Dolores being wiped and put back on her loop changed William irrevocably. It turned him into the Man in Black, a hurt, traumatized man who is desperately searching for the deeper meaning he once saw, and then lost in decades of violence when he was trying to convince himself this was just a fake place and taking revenge on it as a whole for making him feel such a great loss.

Dolores's expression during William's monologue is heart-breaking. Here is this man who once loved her and saw her humanity, now sharing the same philosophy about Dolores's kind as Logan did. William became the very thing he hated about Logan, but he did so as a tactic to forget Dolores and the loss of the only real love he ever felt. It's a tragic love story to such a disturbing and multi-layered degree that it shows exactly why the idea of Westworld really is evil. The horror in Teddy's eyes as the lab tech told him, "It's just for fun!" really shows why the park is one of the most disturbing ideas. It not only has sentient beings suffering hellish horrors over and over for the entertainment of others, but it can have devastating effects on the human guests again, and William/MIB is the proof of this.

Some Dark Star:

The true effects that Westworld had on William can be seen in what happened to Juliet, William's wife. "Then, at the funeral, I tried to console my daughter. She pushed me away. Told me that my wife's death was no accident. That she killed herself. Because of me. Emily said that every day with me had been sheer terror. Any point I could blow up or collapse like some dark star." "Did you hurt them too?" "Never. They never saw anything like the man I am in here. But she knew anyway. She said if I stacked up all my good deeds, it was just an elegant wall I built to hide what was inside from everyone. And from myself. I had to prove her wrong so I came back here. Because that's what this place does, right? Reveals your true self? But that time I didn't join one of Ford's stories, I created my own. A test. A very simple one. I found a woman, an ordinary homesteader, and her daughter. I wanted to see if I had it in me to do something truly evil. To see what I was really made of. I killed her and her daughter. Just to see what I felt. Then just when I thought it was done, the woman refused to die." "You're a fucking animal." "Well, an animal would have felt something. I felt...nothing. And then something miraculous happened. In all my years coming here, I've never seen anything like it. She was alive. Truly alive...if only for a moment. And that was when the maze revealed itself to me." "The maze. What's that damn pattern have to do with this?" "Everything. In Ford's game, even if I go to the outer edges, you can't kill me. Can't even leave a lasting mark. But there's a deeper game here Teddy, Arnold's game. And that game cuts deep."

We see the effects the atrocities William committed in Westworld had on him and also on his family. His brutal actions, even if they were just on artificial beings that can be revived, had a profound effect on his personality and demeanor. Just as if he had killed real people. They could sense he was hiding what he had done, pretending to be someone else on the outside. In last night's episode, William is doing that same thing with Dolores in the analysis room. He's trying to convince himself she's just a thing and that he never felt anything, but as mush as he tries to pretend, the effects are always there beneath the surface.

Sorry for the essay, but I just find this character emblematic to the series as a whole and wanted to write this out to explore for myself the progression of William from hero to villain, and why this downfall occurred. What are your thoughts? Do you think William was trying to convince himself when he was speaking to Dolores in the analysis room?