Dissonance Theory  doubles down on the confusion in many respects, offering some tantalizing hints about Ford’s plans without actually explaining them, showing Dolores slipping a little further down the rabbit hole, and catching up with the Man in Black as he hunts down his mysterious maze.

The maze also turns up in Dolores’s memory, and in the drawing of a little girl on the street, so even if we don’t have any immediate answers on it, at least there’s a sense of things getting tied together. It is, according to the Man in Black, the last mystery of the park, the one which introduces stakes that actually matter. So that should be interesting.

Westworld has emerged this fall as the geek obsession TV show, a gunslinger’s LOST about which people can’t stop talking and theorizing and debating. Don’t worry; Massively OP is not suddenly becoming an entertainment website, but I hope you’ll indulge me for a round of Westworld in this edition of Working As Intended because in every episode of the show, I see the MMORPG genre: our players, our proclivities, and our many, many problems.

And that’s by design. The show’s premise is that in some sci-fi near-future, wealthy people are able to pay their way into an elaborate, real-world theme park, where corporate game masters and engineers and designers control high-functioning human-like robots (“hosts”) in an Old West setting to create whatever role-playing or entertainment environment the guests are seeking. The players can interact with the robots in extremely realistic ways, from playing cards and having sex to going on scripted quest adventures — and even murder.