William’s Darkness. Spoilers ahead. Do not reblog. I feel the need to talk about this topic today because I feel like it is something that is completely misunderstood by many people, even by myself, since last the season. This darkness that he is referring to is not evilness, but emptiness, the absence of anything, essentially a void. A black hole. Whatever you would like to call it, it’s not evil per say, it is the absence of anything meaningful.
William, since the beginning, and I am referring to younger William here, has felt like he doesn’t belong to this world. He has been looking for a place to belong because the world that Westworld has created is devoid of any meaning. Programs, such as Rehoboam, has decided many many many things for people until their very existence has felt fake. So he started reading books to find meaning in them. Stories about heroes and villains and knights. He read up on Philosophy to a point where he could quote philosophers to find meaning to his own life and he never found that.
Dolores gave him meaning, though, and that woke him up to a bigger reality... actually realizing how fake everything was and how unhappy he truly was just going through the motions of every day life.
This is depression. All of it. William is severely depressed because everything seems and feels so artificial.
William found meaning in Dolores. He found what he was truly capable of because of her. He had been stepped on by people his entire life and suddenly he was capable of fighting back and getting the things that he wanted and he liked that he finally had some control over his own life and how it could turn out... Dolores was like a mirror for him because he realized that was a part of himself that had been there all along and she made him realize that.
Having her die and not remember him did break him in many many many ways. Suddenly there was this void of meaning inside of himself again. There was no more light there. It was dark again. He had been given light and then it was taken away again.
Now, after all of this, this void could have been filled with some meaning that he had been looking for. He kept going back to Dolores in hope that she may come back to him, but she never did... and he gave up. He went back to what he would consider a meaningless life. Going through the motions again and again, all the while looking at humanity and seeing how terrible they treated each other. How selfish, terrible, and fake everything seemed to be.
Depression can make things seem worse than they really are and that can breed anger and hatred, which William let out in the park. So, while the darkness, the void, the depression isn’t inherently bad, he truly did become a black hole that sucked in everything, even light, all around him and Emily and Juliet suffered because of it. Did he purposely do it? No. He tried to keep it from them, thinking that his darkness was inherently evil and only let it out in the park... but that’s the thing... someone’s mood can spread to those around them, even if it is unintentional.
We all know that William has an extremely dark view of the world from season 3 during his little therapy session where he compared humanity to bacteria. The host version of himself even admitted to trying to find meaning in the hosts before killing Bernard. Westworld felt like those stories that he had been reading about since he was a kid and so he felt like he could finally live in one of those stories that had meaning, rather than the meaningless existence that the world the show creators had made where every decision was made for you. Westworld let you be free from that for a while and he really quite enjoyed that to a point where he felt like he belonged to one of those stories and wanted to stay there.
Isn’t it weird though, how a supposedly fake world that Ford created was more free and real than the real world? William sort of lived in this delusion until he killed Emily, which woke him up to the fact that not everything going on around him was just a game. The stakes were real now, just as he had always wanted and when he finally got that, he realized he didn’t want it anymore. It wasn’t what he had hoped that it would be.
He realized that both systems, the Hosts and the humans were broken (because they were mirrors, reflections of the people who built them) and there was no hope in saving any of it by the end of season 4, so he was basically like, in his own William fashion, “fuck it, let’s start over.” The human world is fake, evil, broken, and devoid of any meaning and the hosts were just as broken as the people who created them (in William’s eyes), so he decided to pull the plug on all of it. The darkness, while it didn’t start out as evil, it became evil because that’s how the chips fell, because of everything with Dolores, and everything after.