Now three episodes into its first season, HBO’s Westworld seems to be thriving on its ability to craft intriguing and complex questions that may or may not have obvious answers. Much like the two episodes that preceded it, “The Stray” focuses heavily on setting up mysteries and expanding upon existing ones, but it’s also the first episode that feels like it’s entrenched itself in a storyline and is ready to get moving.
We know who the players are, we sort of know what the overarching narrative is (judging by the preview for next week’s episode, the hunt for the maze is about to become heated) and we’re pretty much through all the introductory business. Still, that doesn’t mean that “The Stray” answers very many of our previous questions and it also introduces quite a few more at the same time. Here are the ones we’re most hung up on heading into episode four next week.
10. Why Did That Host Kill Himself?
The episode’s title refers to the stray host that Elsie (Shannon Woodward) and security officer Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) venture into the hills to find and as expected, it all ends in violent fashion … although not in the way many of us likely imagined. While it looked like Elsie was going to be bludgeoned to death with a boulder, the stray ended up bashing his own head in, and it’s an outcome that seems to have left Elsie and Stubbs just as perplexed as we are.
We see the stray Host attack Stubbs in the pit before pulling himself out, so we know that he is hostile towards humans when he picks up that boulder but for whatever reason, he decides to kill himself instead of Elsie. Was this the “Voice of God” at work or did someone at HQ step in at the last second to put a stop to him? Whatever the case, it seems likely that Elsie now shares some of Stubbs’ paranoia about the Hosts’ potential to rise up and kill them all.
Source: HBO