Can we talk about how lame William is in “Westworld”?

Everybody is buzzing about finally having confirmation that William is the Man in Black, but we haaaave to talk about how he became the Man in Black. This is something people have been speculating about since the very beginning — in fact, this theory was so prevalent that it probably would’ve been more surprising if William hadn’t turned out to be the Man in Black. In the finale, the Man in Black starts explaining what happened to William after Dolores, confused about where she is in time, says he’s coming from her. He basically tells his whole life story pretty explicitly — but we’re still confused and have a lot of questions.

The gist seems to be that, after losing Dolores, William went a little mad looking for her. In doing so, he realized he had a taste for the violence and mayhem Westworld allowed him to wreak. The dark side of him takes over (basically like how it did Darth Vader), when he finally finds Dolores and she has been reset. He watches as she has the same meet cute with another guest that he’d shared with her, and suddenly he realizes everything he knew was a LIE.

So like, based on a bad dating experience with a robot, William decides that he has no faith in human beings any more? Even if Dolores weren’t a robot who was forcibly stricken of her memories and so had zero agency in falling for William OR forgetting him afterward, this would be incredibly creepy douchebag behavior on William’s part. For all intents and purposes, he gets rejected, and decides to be evil.

And given the dramatic moment of William, who so pointedly chose a white hat, finally donning the black one, it seems like Westworld wants us to see this as a significant moment for William, as something serious we should understand. But this is the sort of moment that EVERYBODY has ON A REGULAR BASIS. We all get our hearts broken! Come on!

Batman sees his parents die and becomes a positive force in his community. Buffy has the most miserable life of anybody ever, and she still shows up to fight evil, even when it means killing her dreamboat boyfriend. River Song is stolen from her parents, imprisoned for much of her life, and raised to be an assassin by an insane religious cult, and still grows up to be a superhero.  Magneto is a freakin’ Holocaust survivor.

William just gets dumped.

Either there’s more to his downward spiral than we’re told, or Westworld just gave us one of the most bizarrely motivated villains of all time.