Every week, Chris Plante swings for the fences with one massive theory about the future of Westworld. But he’s out with food poisoning — we’re going to try to take that as proof that he isn’t secretly a bot — and we only have one episode left in season 1, so it’s time to air all our final wild theories for the year. Are we wrong? Are we right? We’ll find out when the finale airs, and then it’ll be time to start theorizing about season 2.

Ford’s grand, final narrative has been engineering the entire plot of the first season

Adi: The overwhelming impression we’ve got of Ford is that he’s a kind of writerly control freak. He’s more interested in creating stories that play out entirely between hosts than ones that seem to involve guests, and as we saw in episode 8, he doesn’t seem to be interested in giving hosts true control over their own lives, even as he brings them closer and closer to consciousness.

Throughout the season, we’ve seen hints of a grand “final narrative” that will see Ford upending the park as we know it. But that narrative has always seemed a bit boring — a slightly fancier version of the normal cowboy gunfights. As much as I’ve enjoyed Teddy’s journey from hero to potential in-game villain, his story doesn’t have the stakes of the Man in Black playing a secret meta-game that will unveil the secrets of the park, or Elsie stumbling on a corporate-espionage plot that seemingly results in Delos board members being replaced by hosts. But what if all these plots — and implicitly, the entire show we’ve been watching — are the actual narrative?

Earlier in the series, it seemed like sparking true consciousness was Ford’s real goal. But it’s feeling more and more like he wants everything to be as predictable, and as controllable, as his bots. Characters in Westworld already move more like pawns than people, following clues and coincidences in a world we know Ford micromanages. His endgame isn’t to tell a story inside the park, it’s to turn everything around the park into a melodrama for his own amusement. And he’s spent 30 years bringing it to fruition. In other words, Ford’s final narrative for Westworld is… Westworld.

Elsie and Bernard are both alive and gunning for the park

Tasha: This isn’t nearly as sweeping and significant as Adi’s theory, and it seems so obvious to me that I barely want to mention it. But I’ve seen this exact brand of offscreen-death fake-out work countless times with both book-readers and show-viewers on Game of Thrones, so it seems like we need to throw it out there. The show has been playing things incredibly coy with Elsie since her disappearance: no corpse has surfaced. We’ve gotten flashes of Bernard strangling her, but not snapping her neck as he did with Theresa. Her tracker turned up on Ashley’s monitors, but when he went to find it, there was still no corpse. And now we have a group of Ghost Nation bots with their deactivate protocols turned off, hanging out in the spot Ashley was lured to. Given Bernard’s murder-capabilities, there are two likely possibilities: either he deliberately let Elsie go, or she found a way to shut him down long enough to get away from him. And now she’s in the park, behavior-modding bots as her private army, and figuring out her next move against the powers that be. If she doesn’t know about Theresa’s death yet, or she just recently found out, that’s more than enough reason to want to keep herself hidden and build herself a protective security force. But luring Ashley in and grabbing him seems like the first step toward reentering the world as an active and vengeful player.