Westworld series one recap: what has happened so far in the story?

Westworld returns today with the second series of its mind-frazzling drama.

Series one began with guests visiting a Wild West theme park populated by robots (known as hosts) where they could drink, kill and have sex without consequence. It ended with the hosts turning on their makers in a bloodthirsty massacre.

Here’s a brief round-up of what happened in between:

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Dolores’s creation

Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), one of the oldest operating hosts in Westworld, is at the centre of the first series. Her story arc finally begins to make sense at the end of the season when we discover many of her scenes were actually flashbacks.

She and the other hosts were the brainchild of Dr Robert Ford (Sir Anthony Hopkins) and Arnold Weber. Thirty-five years ago, just before the park opened, Arnold wanted to pull out of the project. He believed he was close to “waking up” Dolores, giving her human consciousness, and did not want to condemn the hosts to a life of enslavement.

When Ford refused to listen, Arnold programmed Dolores to kill all the hosts and himself. However, Ford rebuilt the robots and went ahead with opening the park, partly owned by a shadowy corporation called Delos.

Dolores’s awakening

In the present day, staff at Delos spent much of the series investigating why some of the hosts were malfunctioning. They traced the cause to an update run by Ford: he wanted to make them more human, while Delos wanted to “roll back” the hosts to make them less life-like.

Over 30 years of watching humans do their worst to the hosts, Ford had apparently come around to Arnold’s way of thinking. In the final episode, we realise he has been guiding Dolores towards consciousness the whole time.

Ford discovered that memory and suffering were key to “waking” the hosts. Previously they would start each day afresh with no memory of the pain they suffered at the hands of humans and repeat the day’s events on a loop. But in Ford’s update to their coding, he enabled them to recall memories when they heard the phrase: “These violent delights have violent ends.”

The Man in Black and the Maze

To help Dolores achieve consciousness, Arnold and then Ford put her on a quest to find the centre of “The Maze”. Rather than a physical place, this turned out to be a concept created by Arnold, symbolising the path to consciousness. She finally “reached the centre" when she crossed paths with the human guest she had fallen in love with 30 years before: William.

William started out as a sweet-natured executive at Delos but descended into a violent monster after he was separated from Dolores in the park. He mounted a bloodthirsty mission to find her, throwing aside his previous empathy for the hosts, and when he finally tracked her down, her memory had been wiped.

By the present day, he had become Westworld's main financial investor and returned regularly under the guise of the Man in Black, playing the park in the most violent way possible. He discovers clues to Arnold's maze and becomes obsessed with finding its centre.

When the pair eventually cross paths in the finale, Dolores’ reaction to what William has become appears to be the final straw in her awakening. She realises the voices in her head are not those of her makers but her own.

Dolores kills Ford and other Delos shareholders, mirroring the massacre 35 years ago, but this time she is doing it through her own choice rather than through programming. Ford has created the conscious hosts and put them on the warpath with humanity.

Maeve’s rebellion

While Dolores led an uprising in the park, another host was causing carnage behind the scenes. Maeve, a brothel madam played by Thandie Newton, started having flashbacks from her painful past after Dolores repeated the phrase “these violent delights have violent ends”. She remembers watching the Man in Black kill her young daughter as part of an old host plot and realises her world is a lie.

She later comes to life mid-operation in the Delos lab and forces two human technicians to give her administrative privileges and stage a breakout with wild bandit hosts Hector and Armistice. It is during the breakout, that the hosts discover Samurai World, another themed part of the park.

It emerges that Maeve has been programmed to escape by Ford, casting doubt over whether she has truly “awoken”. She may have been just part of Ford’s plan to create a distraction and allow decommissioned “cold storage” hosts to return to the park and join Dolores. However, just as Maeve boards the train to leave Westworld, she changes her mind and returns to presumably find her host daughter.

The first episode (Journey into Night) of series two can be watched on Sky Atlantic tonight at 9pm.