You know, I'm having a hard time getting over this point as we move into the final episode. If the whole thing is just a formal exercise, isn't the Jimmi Simpson/Ed Harris problem a deal breaker? The whole conceit hinges on its meta-textual rigor; this doesn't just bend the rules—it straight-up breaks them.

Exactly. It makes the invocation of sexual assault even more upsetting.

Or, with its introduction into Westworld's vernacular, it could be MiB's "cornerstone." Maybe MiB is a robot after all.

The Turing Test? It doesn't look like anything to me.

My point was that the show—which is about the creation/consumption of stories—went out of its way to establish that, in its world, a character is only played by one actor: young Ford = young Hopkins. Then it circles back to its awareness of its own casting decisions with the Bernard = Arnold reveal; again, one actor =…

My guess (informed mostly by the knife reappearing last night) is that he opened her up with the knife. Didn't he brandish it while saying something like, "Let's get reacquainted?"

Also, we've seen Bernard show "contemporary" images to hosts; the standard response is "that doesn't look like anything to me."

I saw that. I was part of the conversation until Disqus decided I was a robot and deleted my contributions. At least the comment is up now.

Dude. They pay me $3B/hour to brag from home. $$$ and driving a hovercar. Free airplane for no work and iPhone included. Can you blame me?

[Disqus's hazmat team is woefully ineffective and keeps mistakingly retiring this to its leaky basement. I'm going to try a workaround.]

Disqus sent out some hazmat guys to "correct the problem." If only they could freeze the conversation. I'm paying $40,000/day for this and I don't like interruptions.

They've deleted that damn thing 3 times now. I feel like I might be in some kind of loop.

Thank you for the upvote before the AV Club, using its superlative powers of deduction, dismissed my comment as spam. Curious to know if that was you typing before it was summarily deleted.

[disqus keeps preventing me from posting this comment in its relevant place, marking it as spam. I'm going to see if deleting it here will fix the issue.]

I still don't know. I'm half convinced—maybe a little more than half. But if William really is the MiB, then that whole de-aged Hopkins scene unfairly breaks the rules the show sets out for itself and us. I still want to think the show wants us to consider that we're watching two time periods—that it's insisting we…

OK. I've been reading your ideas for about a week now and, while it's a cogent argument, there's one problem.

I do too and was starting to fall for it as well. The show wants us to "question our reality" and is leading this thing on pretty hard. And of course; we're doing what it wants us to do.

As soon as I realized what Villeneuve was up to—earlier than others it seems—I got the sense that the material probably worked better as prose. A more rigorous adaptation would've made the alien language purely visual, something closer and truer to film grammar. As it is, we're left with a Nolan-esque parlor trick as…

You live in KC, right?

Another reason (discussed briefly on "The Next Picture Show" podcast) is that the Old West is basically the modern era without the benefit of technology and order. One could land in Calfornia circa the second half of the 19th century and navigate its social and cultural cues without too much trouble—no translation…