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Originally Posted by photon
So you mean the stuff with the MiB is all from the future?
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The stuff with William is all in the past.
In that theory, the William storyline would be showing us what led up to the major malfunction that happened 30 years ago (as mentioned in the first episode). If you watch the William scenes, there do seem to be some differences within the park from the rest of the stuff we see.
- The Westworld logo on the wall when William arrives at the modern train station is different from the one that's seen everywhere else.
- When they get off the train in town, Teddy wasn't also a passenger (he is a passenger every other time we see the train arrive). In fact, we never see Teddy in any of the scenes with William.
- Instead of the Sheriff recruiting a posse to chase the outlaws, we see a soldier recruiting for the Union Army. We also don't see the old man with the treasure hunt in the scenes without William. This could indicate that storylines have changed over the years.
- The only "common" hosts that we see in the William scenes are Dolores and Clementine (the prostitute). We know that Dolores is the oldest host in the park, and there's a suggestion that Clementine is older too (when Maeve starts to malfunction and they reassign her role as the head of the brothel to Clementine, Stubbs says that she has done the role before).
Everything seemed to be playing into this theory right until the final scene of the last episode where Dolores runs into William's camp and collapses. If Dolores escaping the attack on the ranch is a sign of her slipping her programming in the "present", she couldn't run across William in the "past".
I actually wouldn't be surprised if we're seeing things happening within a few different time periods. If you look at previous shows from Abrams and Nolan (Alias, Lost, Fringe, Person of Interest), having storylines from different time frames/realities play out concurrently is something that's been pretty common in those shows.
The nature of Westworld (a park that's set in the past within a show set in the future) makes it difficult to pinpoint when things are actually happening. The fact that the storylines and events within the park play out in a limited number of ways and repeat themselves frequently also adds to the confusion.