In this week’s episode of HBO’s Westworld series ‘Contrapasso‘ Dolores, William and Logan reach Pariah, a town built on decadence and transgression–they’re  recruited for a dangerous mission. The Man in Black meets an unlikely ally in his search to unlock the maze.  

Contrapasso is a term most commonly attributed to Dante’s Inferno. It describes the relationship between sin and the resulting justification in Hell. The literal definition is the ‘counter-strike’ or the ‘counter-suffering’.

Tonight’s episode does offer some minor reveals. in Contrapasso, the discovery that Dolores was the last person Arnold spoke to before he died—and that she’s still in some way communicating with him (presumably through the programming Ford talked about a couple of weeks back)—is pretty big, and one of the few twists in the hour that legitimately felt like stakes are raised. The idea that Arnold’s real goal was to destroy the park he helped create is fascinating, and suggests Ford is an even more complicated figure than initially suspected. He might even turn out to be the show’s true villain, if such a thing exists.

Ever since Episode 2 of HBO’s twisty, sci-fi Western Westworld, those both familiar with the earlier work of Jonathan Nolan (The Prestige, Memento, Interstellar) and fond of fan theories have pondered the idea that we’re actually seeing multiple timelines play out concurrently. It’s easy to fool an audience when half your cast of characters are robots who never age. This week’s episode seemed to confirm, once and for all, that Westworld Season 1 is operating on two tim