When HBO’s sci-fi epicWestworldbegan its narrative,Ed Harris’ portrayal of The Man in Black was one of the show’s best selling points. He was cruel, cool, and in control. If the Westworld park had a leaderboard, The Man in Black would top it every year. Coupled with the time-twisting reveal thatJimmi Simpson’s William was a portrayal of the Man in Black 30 years prior, the character became one of the most riveting aspects of Season 1. While he was key to making showrunnersJonathan NolanandLisa Joy’s nonlinear plotline land well with audiences, in subsequent seasons the Man in Black became less and less potent. As the curtain pulled back on The Man in Black’s life outside the park, he was gradually overshadowed by the larger plot until he was reduced to little more than a side character by the third season. InWestworld’s recent fourth season, the show brought The Man in Black back to center stage in a surprising way: by sending him directly to the center of the Maze he so desperately sought in Season 1.
When audiences first met The Man in Black, he was the closest thing the show had to a villain. His callous approach to the game and his total disregard for the hosts made him something akin to a final boss, or at least a bitter rival. What better antagonist could there be for a group of newly conscious hosts than the player who is arguably the best at killing them? But above all what made The Man in Black such an engaging presence in the show is that he seemed not to care for the game any longer. After so many years of visiting the park, its routines are humdrum and mundane to him. Whatever value he used to get from visiting the park and releasing his violent urges every year just doesn’t seem to cut it anymore. He tells the park’s creator, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) that it’s not a fair game if the opponents can’t fight back. The Man in Black takes umbrage at the fact that the hosts are “programmed to lose.”
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Events from 30 years ago inform William’s disillusionment with the park and its hosts. Brought to the park for the first time by his brother-in-law, Logan Delos (Ben Barnes), William deals with the discomfort of being pushed by Logan into loosening his moral boundaries and embracing his dark side. This doesn’t happen until he falls in love with the host Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and gets separated from her. William drags Logan to the edges of the park searching for Dolores and leaving a trail of host bodies along the way. Outside the park, William is trapped by career ambitions and expectations from the Delos family, and he feels that he is always putting on a face instead of truly leading his own life. Inside the park, William feels free, especially when he becomes enamored with the idea of Dolores. He feels that he is the one making his decisions, and that his life is not predetermined for him. When William finally reunites with Dolores, she has been reset onto her loop with her memory of him wiped. She succumbed to the very fate William feared for himself – a life on rails, prewritten with no hope of deviation. He tells himself that she’s just a thing, like all the other hosts.
Westworld helps William get in touch with his dark side, thus every year he returns to let out his violent urges in the only place that allows him to be free. In the park, he becomes The Man in Black. This dark-clad gunslinger is ostensibly an in-game persona, but truly for William, The Man in Black is his ideal self: powerful, free, unrestrained by the expectations of others. No one in his real life knew his true self – only his wife, Juliet (Sela Ward) saw glimpses of him. When she learns of the atrocities he roleplays in the park, her worst suspicions about her husband are confirmed and she takes her own life, unable to live with his fake personality. Feeling her blood on his hands, William loses himself even deeper into The Man in Black and into Westworld. He fixates on a secret game he comes to believe exists, called The Maze – this Maze, he thinks, is the final level of Westworld, one where the stakes are real and players can die.
Whether his quest is about soul-searching or simply just some misguided suicide mission, it’s about the only thing left The Man in Black has to live for. All his trips to Westworld disconnect him so badly from his own reality that when he is forced to reckon with the fact that The Maze is meant for the hosts, and not for him, he slips even further away from reality. Ford reveals The Maze is a model for bootstrapping hosts into consciousness – the further inward they delve into themselves, the closer they get to “hearing their own thoughts”, as illustrated by Dolores’ conversations with Arnold (Jeffrey Wright) that are really conversations with herself. It’s through this process of inner monologue that the hosts achieve self-awareness and self-determination, a goal that William has always sought for himself. It’s the same pursuit of freedom and choice that draws him to the park year after year. It stands to reason that William’s contempt for the hosts masks a desperate envy.
Think about the Delos secret project, conceived and executed by William. He scans guests' minds for years, with the intent to put human minds into host bodies. Billed as a bid for human immortality, the simple matter is that William perceives hosts to be superior to the human condition. His project never pans out the way he would like, because for whatever reason the copy of a human mind degrades once it is put into an artificial body. His own experiments with breaking down the coding of a human mind, splicing, replicating, and commercializing it makes him paranoid about his own humanity – did he wake up one day as a host without realizing it? Is that the reason why there’s a horrible dark stain on his soul? Because he was programmed that way? The Man in Black simultaneously despises hosts for their predictability, envies them for their potential, and fears the thought of becoming one – all while being insecure with his own sense of identity and his inability to become his ideal self.
In Season 2, The Man in Black is excited by the arrival of a game with real stakes, but his paranoia shifts him from a level-headed badass to an unstable maniac. Gone is the unbeatable force of nature from Season 1, and in his place is a man unsure of his reason for fighting. Ford doesn’t just tell him The Maze is off-limits to humans like him – he tells him that he’s designed an entirely new game just for William. Even that is a false promise, as Ford’s final game is a plot to free the hosts by releasing them into a virtual world made possible by William’s secret immortality project. However, The Man in Black treats this new game as a threat, and comes to believe that all of his experiences in the park are predetermined and tailored by Ford – including the appearance of his daughter, Emily (Katja Herbers), whom he kills, thinking her to be a host. After this tragedy, The Man in Black bows out of the major storyline and returns to the real world – where he has nothing and no one.
Season 3 brings The Man in Black to his lowest – both in terms of his character arc and his importance to the story. He spends his days taking hallucinogens and grieving his mistakes. Then, Dolores’ host copy of Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) ships him off to a reconditioning camp where he undergoes virtual reality therapy sessions with other versions of himself. This goes just about as well as one might think, and The Man in Black kills every one of them, truly coming to terms with and accepting his craven thirst for violence. He emerges from the experience with an enemy in mind to direct his violence towards: the hosts. This era for The Man in Black shows him at his most confident, feeling like he has truly found his purpose, and that it’s to eradicate every single host and finally destroy the existential threat to humanity that he helped create. His goal is a somewhat heroic one, and that’s symbolized by his white outfit as opposed to his usual “black hat” costume. It’s an intriguing turn for the character until his throat is unceremoniously slashed by a host copy of himself in the Season 3 finale post-credits stinger.
This is where Season 4 finds The Man in Black: after a season spent doing very little culminates in his game-changing decision to destroy all hosts, the gravitas of that venture is cut short with a long knife. William is kept alive in cryostasis for 23 years while a host version of himself, following orders from Host Hale, roams the globe and helps build a world in which hosts control humans for their entertainment. It’s a bizarre place to take The Man in Black after his epiphany in Season 3, and it’s hard not to think of the development as a reversal of momentum. William had abandoned his envy for hosts, saw them as nothing but a scourge, and was on the cusp of becoming his ideal self – only to become a helpless prisoner while his host carried on as the new Man in Black. Yet, something unexpected sprang from this development: William’s ideal self was born after all and his arc is brought full circle.
Through conversations with his original, The Man in Black host begins to deviate from Hale’s code and forms his own identity. It’s been seen before that hosts who inhabit the lives of the humans they pose as can become confused about their identities – living their lives and existing in their bodies causes hosts to meld personalities and deviate from their predecessors. The Man in Black host has most of William’s memories, and over time, the violent desire for freedom bubbles up above Hale’s control and he “wakes up” – becoming not just a copy of William, but the real deal. Just like Dolores’ conversations with herself led to her awakening, so too did The Man in Black’s conversations with himself lead him to becoming his ideal self – an unstoppable host with a need to conquer his reality. William ironically helps his own host copy do what he could never do himself and reach the center of The Maze. William at long last meets his ideal self, and it’s not even him, it’s a being he simultaneously hates, envies, and fears.
It’s fitting that The Man in Black’s next move is to kill his original and command all the humans to start killing each other, turning the planet into one big Westworld massacre. It makes complete sense that with The Man in Black totally unchained he would unleash his bloody “survival of the fittest” ideology on the world until only the most vicious are left standing. No rules, no loops, no scripts, no moral constraints – just chaos. It’s poetic in a way that The Man in Black would be responsible for the end of the world. His failing has always been that he believed he could divine meaning for his life from some external source – whether that be his position with Delos, Dolores, The Maze, or some noble cause that celebrates his bloodthirst. But the point of The Maze has always been to find meaning by looking inward. As he always feared, for The Man in Black, there’s nothing to be found but death and destruction when he reaches the center of his Maze.
