I think Maeve wanted to sustain as much damage as possible, so that her repair process would take as long as it possibly could.

Right. . . it's no easy trick to put together dozens (or maybe hundreds) of interlocking narratives and have them all be both i) fully adaptable and ii) dramatically engaging (especially since, in game design as I've experienced it, i and ii tend to come at each other's expense) but that's presumably why the company…

The dramatic geology and the use of the constellation Orion as a plot point narrows the possibilities to the Northern hemisphere of Earth. Unless we assume Ford can literally move mountains (and that the Board would allocate the funds for him to do it), it's got to be someplace with the same kind of naturally…

Technically, yes (assuming there's no other storyline, like a posse sent from the town that's actually scheduled to find them dead) but in video games it's always extremely obvious when that sort of trick is deployed. In Skyrim, for instance, I was almost annoyed at the number of important conversations that my…

My guess is that the train probably runs in a very wide circle that the Park uses to simulate every train ride that any guest takes anywhere. For all we know, there could have been dozens of trains spaced out every few miles behind and in front of them, carrying guests involved in completely different storylines and…

Good question. I think it relates to the Park's pledge of relentless immersion. Even if no guests are around when they actually shoot each other, there's always a risk that some other guest, pursuing some other storyline (or wandering at random) might stumble across their bodies. If that happens, the scene needs to…

If only you had been right. . . .

You almost had it. Slight edit:

In hindsight, you (and Wallace) had it about half-right. Irony was useful for debunking illusions, but it exhausted itself as a political force just when a bit of vigorous illusion-debunking was exactly what was required.

Good point. I'd forgotten that the Board already knew about Theresa's death.

We don't know how long the timeframe is. Maeve seems to get herself killed on a daily basis, so if even if the repair assignments are random, if she wants to interact with that team, all she has to do is "act normal" for however many deaths it takes for her to get assigned to them again.

It's possible, as Keith mentioned, that Ford knows and is allowing all of this to occur. But it's also possible that the management of the Park has gotten sloppy. The underground infrastructure is almost in ruins, and the kind of low-ranking technicians who'd be tasked with things like monitoring what the Hosts are…

In a different story, I might be rooting for the humans to defeat the machines, but these humans deserve whatever they have coming to them. In that sense, the story is kind of like The Terminator, told from Skynet's point of view. . .

I have a terrible suspicion that what Ford is working on is a replacement Theresa.

I considered that, but when we see the Confederate bodies sprawled around the camp, there's at least one severed limb that ends in sparking wires. That would seem to indicate that we're looking at an earlier time in the park's history.

And now that you've reminded me about Battlestar Galactica. . . here's another thought: which "they" would be going there?

I think the story is ultimately about the nature of humanity. We're told repeatedly that the key to evolution is trial and error, with a healthy dose of suffering thrown in. My sense is that Arnold and Ford are trying to create the next stage of human evolution, which they agree will be synthetic in nature. . . but…

True enough. . . to the point where I wonder how many of the returning Guests are even their original selves, and how many of them are actually Host robots programmed to replace those people, returning to the park for periodic aging treatments and other general maintenance.

Exactly. Which makes me think that the Man in Black could ultimately turn out to be Logan.

Exactly. Unless Dolores does something later on in the William storyline to convince him that she was never really sentient at all (e.g., he finds out that a human technician/actor has been secretly "piloting" Dolores from HQ ever since she went off-loop), MiB is either someone other than William (Logan, perhaps?) or…