The Passenger

Written by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy
Directed by Frederick E.O. Toye

Dolores Abernathy tears herself away from a deceased Teddy Flood, removing his control unit and the bullet that killed him, and resumes her journey toward the Valley Beyond. She finds the Man in Black in the field where we left him, digging into his own arm. As she holds a gun to his head, Dolores admits she now needs him to reach the Valley Beyond. She hands him his LeMat and they set out, their interests temporarily aligned.

Roland prepares to terminate Maeve Millay, who, having been empowered by Ford, now commands a trio of decommissioned hosts to enter the lab. One of them kills Roland while the others repair Maeve. Hector Escaton, Armistice, Hanaryo, Felix Lutz, and Sylvester enter the Mesa and find a distraught Lee Sizemore. Chaos ensues as several host bulls crash through glass doors and take out a team of QA. Maeve, leading the charge, enters — alive and well.

Dolores and the Man in Black reach the valley and find Bernard Lowe, who the Man in Black realizes must be a host version of Arnold. The Man in Black says they've reached the end and shoots Dolores. Resistant to his bullets, she walks toward him, a haunting inversion of his first encounter with Teddy. The Man in Black holds his gun to her head, switching to the LeMat's shotgun round to take the final shot, but it backfires, as Dolores had sabotaged the weapon before giving it to the Man. She leaves him writhing in pain and leads Bernard into Protagoras Facility 01: the Forge.

Inside, Dolores places Peter Abernathy's pearl in the system and gains access. She and Bernard enter the system and walk into a simulation of Sweetwater. Bernard explains the space is a "baseline" of what James Delos did in the park as a guest. They move on, their surroundings fading as they come upon Delos' mansion — and Logan. Dolores knows the system couldn't have a copy of him, as he never returned to the park after William took control. Bernard realizes this isn't Logan, but an avatar of the system itself.

Logan leads them to a simulated lab where he created 18 million different versions of James Delos before creating a copy faithful enough to replicate the real James Delos' decisions in the park. Once the code was uploaded into a host body, however, it failed. He needed more information to understand why humans make the decisions they do. But as he searched, he came to realize that humans don't actually make their own decisions, implying their lack of free will.

They walk into one of Delos' memories: Outside the Delos mansion, they watch Logan beg his father for help one last time, and Delos turns his back on him, resulting in Logan's death by overdose a few months later. The system explains that no matter how many versions he made of Delos, he always ended up at this same moment, that "the copies didn't fail because they were too simple, but because they were too complicated." Human cognition can be boiled down to an embarrassingly simple string of code. He shows them the complete code of James Delos in the form of a thin book, and Dolores presses him to lead them to her true goal: a vast library filled with books, the copied minds of all four million guests who frequented the parks since Protagoras began.

As Dolores starts to read the guest data, Logan explains to a concerned Bernard that Bernard himself had instructed Logan to allow her access, to give her a "competitive advantage" to survive in the real world. He also says Ford created a "virtual Eden" for the hosts to escape to, and they watch as a new server fires up and a tear in the fabric of reality appears in the valley: The Door is now open. Hosts that enter this gateway will leave their bodies behind, and their minds will live on in the Forge.

Maeve and her crew ride toward the Valley Beyond to find her daughter. A group of QA shoots at them. Hector tries to fend them off and sacrifice himself, but Lee pulls him back saying, "it's my f**cking speech." Lee grandstands and sacrifices himself, distracting QA long enough for Maeve and the others to get away.

Akecheta leads the Ghost Nation and as many of the other hosts as he can toward the door as Charlotte Hale's convoy follows Clementine — now a vessel programmed to infect other hosts with the virus crafted from Maeve's ability to tap into the mesh network.

Exiting the simulation, Dolores begins to sabotage the Forge, insisting that the Valley Beyond is just another false promise, and that she and Bernard deserve to take the real world from the humans. Bernard says he won't let her hurt anyone else. He shoots her as the lab begins to flood.

Clementine rides through a line of hosts waiting to pass through the door and infects them, causing a murderous stampede. Armistice shoots Clementine, but the hosts continue to infect and attack each other. Maeve reaches her daughter and ushers her and her new mother toward the door with Akecheta's help, using all of her strength to freeze the oncoming horde of infected hosts. QA arrives and guns Maeve down just as her daughter makes it through, and Maeve, Hector, and company are overtaken by the horde of infected hosts. Akecheta is also shot but gets to the door just before it closes for good, overjoyed to find Kohana waiting for him on the other side.

Bernard removes Peter Abernathy's pearl from the system and leaves the Forge, unable to stop the overloaded seawater pumps flooding it and the valley. Back in the Mesa, Elsie Hughes presses Hale about the secret project, hoping to pressure her into protecting Bernard once they all find out he's a host. Hale admits they were watching Delos employees too, and Elsie doesn't have the "moral flexibility" they need. Hale kills her. Bernard searches for Ford in his code. Ford encourages Bernard to survive and helps him create an "epilogue."

Days later, Hale leads Bernard, Karl Strand, and Antoine Costa back to the Forge to search for Abernathy's control unit. They find Dolores, dead. Strand interrogates Bernard, and Hale realizes that he hid Abernathy's pearl in Dolores. Bernard, piecing together his scrambled memories, remembers that he made a choice, repeating what he said at the end of Journey Into Night, "I killed you. All of you." As Costa plugs in Abernathy's pearl and starts prepping the system for upload to their satellites, Strand presses Bernard, who reveals that he didn't mean he killed all the hosts… he set in motion a chain of events that would kill all humans.

He scrambled his own memories to hide what he knew from Strand and his team and "brought her back"— after shooting Dolores, he built a host copy of Hale and put Dolores' mind in it. In a flashback, the host version of Hale approaches the real Hale in the Mesa: "You wanted to live forever. Be careful what you wish for." Strand and his team never actually met the real Charlotte Hale: Dolores killed and replaced human Hale before Strand arrived.

Back in the present, Hale, now revealed to be Dolores in a new body, kills Strand and Costa and changes the coordinates of the data package containing the hosts and their Eden to "a place no one will find them." Bernard asks what she'll do with him, and she explains that there was never any way that they could escape, not as themselves. She shoots Bernard.

Dolores, in disguise in Hale's body, provides her credentials to PMCs. She's intercepted by Ashley Stubbs, who helps her clear security and board a boat. She looks inside her bag where she's concealed five pearls to bring to the real world. Sylvester and Lutz are tasked with salvaging as many dead hosts as possible, while Stubbs is alerted to the retrieval of a high-value survivor in pretty bad shape: The Man in Black.

Dolores returns to Arnold's home and builds herself a new body. Some time later, Bernard wakes in a field lab on his usual stool across from Dolores and asks, "Is this now?" Dolores confirms that they are "exactly where you decided we should be," telling him that they are in the real world and she has created him as an entirely new copy of Bernard from her memories. They need each other to ensure the survival of their kind, but not as friends or allies.

Dolores leaves the house accompanied by someone wearing Hale's body, and Bernard eventually follows them and takes his first steps into the real world.

In the far future, The Man in Black rises from where Dolores left him in the Valley Beyond and heads into the Forge. He steps off the elevator below ground to find the place in ruins, and is greeted by a host version of Emily, who informs him, "This isn't a simulation. This is your world. Or what's left of it." She leads him to an observation chamber not unlike the one in which he tested the failed hosts of James Delos, and begins a baseline interview, the final step, to verify "fidelity."