Darth Lucifer wrote: ↑2018-07-05 01:50am
I'm kind of fuzzy on Ford...we learned that the version of him that manifested AFTER Bernard exited The Cradle was really his Bicameral Mind. Possibly even when we first saw Ford at the piano inside the Cradle. I think he may be dead for good because one of the recurring themes of other science fiction (nBSG comes to mind) and religion (I think) is that children can only truly advance beyond the parents after they die, which I think is a fitting end for Ford. Even if he really was in The Cradle for a brief while, storywise it feels right that he's gone now and that Dolores and Bernard have to get on without him.
Erm, not quite. The show made it pretty clear that Ford was alive in the Cradle, and then put himself into Bernard's mind to escape the Cradle. The "Bicameral Mind" part didn't come into play until Bernard deleted Ford from his mind shortly before ditching Elsie in the dune buggy. The show was pretty explicit about this point. Remember, we KNOW Ford HAD to have been alive before that point, because before Bernard deleted Ford, the latter had the scene saying goodbye to Maeve where he granted her admin-level privileges. I think it's performing unnecessary mental gymnastics to try and twist those scenes in any other light.
Darth Lucifer wrote: ↑2018-07-05 01:50am
Many people think that the person in the final scene in the tent on the beach was the last appearance of the human known as "William." But I'm beginning to think that The Man in Black has been a human/host hybrid (or just Hybrid, like James Delos) from his first appearance in the scene where he drags Dolores to the barn. I think the MIB is a resurrection of the Old Man William we saw in the round room testing the Delos Hybrid for "Fidelity" earlier in Season 2. And while i'm on that episode, I love the fact that this is where the MIB ends up, even after he sliced his own arm open.
The Man in Black took a ridiculous amount of damage which would have killed any human his age without plot device armor. Also, the entire time they've said "The Maze is not for you" to the MIB. Whether he was a human or a Hybrid from Episode One, Ford did not intend for him to be in the hosts' sanctuary; he decribed The Valley as "untouched by human..." something, sin or corruption, whatever.
The show-runners more or less confirmed in an interview that Man in Black we've been following was human, before he was transferred to a host. I say "more or less" because it's a little more complicated than that: some of the scenes we were seeing were actually the "fidelity" tests being run on William's memory to make sure that the new host version of William would make the same decisions as the human William did. So, in reality we were really seeing BOTH human and host versions of William simultaneously. But the end point is that the events we saw transpire were the events that transpired to the REAL William, though the version we saw may or may not have been the real William.
