Westworld basically just confirmed that it has multiple timelines

Overcame your core programming to read on? Good stuff.

Basically, this week’s episode seemed to finally acknowledge the long-running fan theory that we were watching more than one time period on screen, previously evidenced by the fact that the park looked slightly different in scenes involving William (Jimmi Simpson) to how it looked in scenes involving characters like Maeve (Thandie Newton) and the Man in Black (Ed Harris).

But the latest episode made clear that something strange was going on after the MiB and Teddy (James Marsden) uncovered a host who’d gone through some trouble with mysterious baddie Wyatt – only to find that she was the same host (played by Tallulah Riley) who first greeted William to the park way back in episode 2, helping him pick out his outfit and offering some “extra services” if he was so inclined.

Discovering her, the Man in Black commented: “It’s you! I figured they retired you. I guess Ford never likes to waste a pretty face…”

Now, this is obviously more grist for the “William is a younger version of the Man in Black” rumour mill, and this development certainly seems to point in that direction. Clearly there’s a time jump between the two storylines, and clearly the MiB has the same kind of history that William does with the Tallulah-bot.

(The MiB also had a big speech about his personal life this week, including being a “titan of industry” and having an unhappy wife, that seems to tie in to William’s life as a company vice-president soon to marry into the business owner’s family).

But whatever the truth of THAT theory, it does seem that we are at the very least seeing more than one timeline in Westworld, and that has all sorts of ramifications for the plot.

Were the scenes this week where Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) hallucinated that she was travelling on her own actually true, with her and William’s journey just a memory of an earlier time? And how does her other flashback to some sort of training town for early hosts (featuring ANOTHER appearance by Tallulah Riley’s robot playing a different role, by the way) fit into the park’s history?

For now, short of some hasty brain-programming by Felix and Sylvester we’ll have to wait to find out the truth. Still, we’ll leave you with one final supporting detail – remember the importance of the flies back in the first episode? Well, some fans have noticed that the only time you DON’T see flies (particularly around dead bodies) is in the scenes set during the William, Dolores and Logan (Ben Barnes) plotline, with a particular contrast found between the massacres discovered by William/Dolores and The MiB/Teddy in this week’s episode.

William and Dolores see bodies with no flies, while the other pair see flies galore. The official Westworld site takes pain to point out that flies are the only non-robotic creatures in the park, while the series told us that the park switched from robotic to organic androids in more recent years. Ipso facto, flesh-and-blood bodies may have attracted more flies, and we might be noticing another significant difference between two timelines, albeit one less crowd-pleasing than the continued appearances of a star from St Trinian’s.

You could even say there are no flies on us, eh?

Westworld continues on Sky Atlantic on Tuesdays at 9.00pm, following an airing by HBO on Sunday evenings