The episode has a tragic arc to it, taking full measure of William's all-consuming obsession and the destruction it has caused in his life. The show has often flashed back to the image of the overflowing bathtub where his wife committed suicide, but now the full story can be told, with the killing of his own daughter added as a stinger. It's both a feature and a bug that Ed Harris, an actor known for his explosive displays of emotion in films like "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "Pollock," has been so inaccessible throughout the show's run. His craggy face has been a window into William's desiccated soul, but the character has been wandering the park like Judge Holden in "Blood Meridian," an implacable source of violence against anyone who stands in his path.
At times, the Man in Black has appeared to be a force for good, relentless in exposing the park for what it really is. But now, the true corruption ("the stain," as he calls it) is within him, and continuing to play Dr. Ford's "game" has just forced him to confront it. His paranoia leads him to the shocking mistake of believing his daughter is one of Ford's tricks, a host sent to knock him off the path. Whatever flicker of humanity he had left has been snuffed out.
"Vanishing Point" keenly ties William/the Man in Black's downward trajectory to that of Dolores, whose own bloody, relentless quest for vengeance has taken a moral toll. For hosts like Dolores, freedom and the power of self-awareness also means taking responsibility for your choices, and her desire to get to "the weapon" and use it against her former captors has obliterated her conscience. Changing Teddy from an earnest simpleton to a coldhearted gunslinger was only the capper to a violent campaign in which she — and she alone — has determined who is fit to reach the Valley Beyond.
Dolores's similarities to the Man in Black have helped enforce the show's theme about the park itself as a corrupting landscape, but it has also been disappointing to experience to the same kind of disconnect with her character. After all, Dolores is someone who once greeted the "splendor" of each new day with optimism and a romantic spirit, and ended it in the looped horrors of rape and murder. The righteousness of her mission, as well as her basic "humanity," has been forgotten.
The deaths of Teddy and Emily toward the end of "Vanishing Point" have a terrible finality to them for Dolores and William, who are now permanently condemned figures in whatever world they attempt to conquer. (Although technology has put an asterisk on all deaths in "Westworld.") That leaves Bernard, who is now in some nebulous place between human and host, questioning his allegiance to Dr. Ford and to Elsie, whom he has vowed not to hurt again. He's a closet full of Bernards on the inside, too, and the future of "Westworld" will likely depend on which Bernard he decides to be.
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