As Westworld draws closer to its Season 1 finale, fans are growing progressively restless about tying up loose ends. Rampant theories have trailed the series since its premiere, and a number of loaded questions continue to hang in the balance. Perhaps its most prominent — and most convincing — hypothesis is that Westworld has two timelines. There’s already been ample evidence supporting the idea, and a recent episode just dropped a major hint that Maeve supports the two timelines theory.
For Maeve, the last two episodes have centered around her rise from subservient android to sentient being. She purposefully dies so she can be sent to Delos headquarters, where an employee named Felix gently explains the true nature of her world. Her conscious awakening hit a fever pitch in Nov. 13 episode “Trompe L’Oeil,” as she declared her plan to escape the park and coerced Felix and Sylvester, a fellow staffer, to help her. Against the turmoil of this major revelation — and the buzz surrounding that other big reveal — a few important clues about solving Westworld’s mystery may have slipped through the cracks.
As Felix tours Maeve around Delos’ upper levels in Nov. 6 episode “The Adversary,” they come across an ad reel that features Maeve in a former storyline. In it, she’s not the brash madame we’ve come to know her as, but instead a happy mother — a scenario she’s had flashbacks to since unlocking her buried past lives. “How did you have my dreams?” she asks. “Those moving pictures—I saw myself.”
Felix goes on to explain that she’s only been in her current “build” for about a year, and that her memories of moving from New Orleans and leading the saloon for a decade are actually false. The commercial itself shows another woman in her current role. As Reddit user Tickleson pointed out, this is the same woman William and Logan encounter when they first arrive in the park during the second episode, and she hasn’t been seen in what’s considered to be the present. Moreover, Maeve has never interacted with William or Logan. This certainly strengthens the theory that their visit is occurring sometime in the past, before Maeve was a madame.
Further clues point to the disparate logos, which have frequently been touted as proof for the two timelines theory: When Maeve is walking around upstairs, we see the newer, sleeker emblem, while William and Logan have only been spotted near the older seeming one.
This evidence is far from ironclad, but it's become increasingly clear that Westworld doesn’t do anything unintentionally, and it would have to be a pretty odd coincidence. After predicting that Bernard was indeed a host, fans can probably feel pretty confident about their guesswork, and their next big success may be the reveal of two timelines.
Images: John P. Johnson/HBO (2)
