Dolores is the most likely character to be in Charlotte’s body. In Season 1, we saw that Robert Ford took the sweet, naive version of Dolores and merged her with a character named Wyatt, the leader of a dark cult. The result was Dolores having two personalities that shaped who she was.
If those personalities can be merged, it makes sense that they could be pulled apart. When Dolores left the Westworld park in Charlotte Hale’s body, she likely took Wyatt out of her head and put his consciousness into Dolores’s body while leaving the sweet, rancher’s daughter version of Dolores in Charlotte’s body.
With this possibility in mind, everything Dolores and Charlotte say to each other makes more sense. In their first scene together in Sunday’s episode, Dolores stares at Charlotte and tells her to “bring yourself back online.” Charlotte begins to freak out, and Dolores grabs her hand and tells her to “remember who you are.” She remembers. What character would remember who they are by staring at Dolores other than … Dolores? We’ve already seen Dolores awakened with this exact scenario
at the end of Season 1, when Dolores sat in a chair across from herself.
In the first scene of Sunday’s episode, Dolores says that Charlotte is a creature of beauty and power and that she trusts her, words that would make a lot more sense in reference to herself than to any other person. And later in the episode, Dolores soothes Charlotte by saying, “You’re not alone. You have me. No one knows you like I do. No one knows me like you.” As Dolores says that, cinematographer Zoe White uses a mirroring effect to multiply the personalities in the room.
The symbolism continues. “If I ever lost you, I don’t know what I’d do,” Charlotte responds. The two then lie down and spoon together, a sort of intimacy that Dolores has never shown with anyone else. Two parts of the same mind coming together.
This theory is not as out there as it sounds. Westworld co-showrunner Jonathan Nolan has done this kind of thing before. [Spoiler alert for a movie that came out in 2006.] In The Prestige, written by Jonathan and directed by his brother Christopher, Christian Bale plays a magician who pulls off an elaborate trick in which he teleports from one side of the stage to the other. But at the end of the movie, we learn Bale’s stagehand had actually been his twin brother in disguise the whole time. The two brothers were so committed to the act that they took shifts living one life. Now, I’m not saying David Bowie as Nikola Tesla is going to show up in Season 3 of Westworld, but history might be repeating itself a bit.
Where does that leave us for the rest of this season? The broad outlines seem to have been laid out by Dolores in the first scene of this episode. Dolores, as Wyatt, is the power. She’s the gun-toting, motorcycle-driving, neck-slashing brute who sees the ugliness in the world. Charlotte is the sweet Dolores who sees the beauty in this world. But her softer touch is hardening, as shown when Charlotte chokes out that pedophile on the bench. “The harder I squeeze, the more I remember,” Charlotte says. “I remember what it’s like to be me.” If sweet Dolores is yearning to be whole again, we could get a role reversal where Charlotte gets more violent and Dolores gets less violent.
Convinced me.
