'Westworld' Season 2 finale: What happened in that post-credits scene?

Beware of spoilers below if you haven't watched Sunday's season finale of HBO's "Westworld." And if you turned it off when the credits started, go back and watch the ending!

We made it to the end of the "Westworld" Season 2 finale and exhaled as the credits rolled, thinking we had all the clues and could start sorting out the HBO sci-fi drama's many puzzles.

And then – Holy Marvel Cinematic Universe copycat! – we got a post-credit sequence with the Man in Black/William and his daughter, Emily, that raised even more questions.

With the season now finally, completely, there's-nothing-else over, USA TODAY breaks down that mysterious, season-ending encounter.

Kelly Lawler: I watched this scene twice and I still have a few questions because it was so purposefully confusing. But my basic read of it is that William is a human in a host body. The Emily we see in the scene might be one, or the dead Emily out in the park might be one. Is that the gist you got?

Bill Keveney: I agree that it appears William's consciousness is in a host body. The scene echoes the frequent meetings between William and a hybrid James Delos, suggesting this William is an advancement on that glitch-prone model. I'm torn regarding which Emily is human: The one in the park had William's program card, but the post-credits version would have an interest in immortality. What do you make of the apparent passage of time between when William got on the elevator and when he got off it?

Lawler: Yes, I'm not 100% sure when, exactly, the post-credits scene takes place, because Willam's body was found by Stubbs and the security forces on the beach near the end of the episode. So either he made a pit stop there and then returned to the surface and somehow fell unconscious or the post-credit scene was in a different timeline, a simulation inside the "system" or something else.  What I can't stop wondering about the whole immortality project is how, exactly, making a copy of yourself makes you immortal. Wouldn't your consciousness inside your human body die? Wouldn't the host/humans be more like clones?

Keveney: You're right about Stubbs finding William. I think my inferior human consciousness shuts down at a certain point, sorting out all the timelines. Presuming you could copy a consciousness onto some kind of hard drive, I think it would still be the person. But consciousness – in terms of what defines an individual and whether it is separate from the body – is one of the big philosophical and even spiritual questions of "Westworld." The producers also frequently raise the concept of free will, as when Emily asks William what he hoped to find: "That no system could tell me who I am. That I have a … choice." What do you think of that, and what does "system" mean to you?

Lawler: I wondered if that exchange had to do with William's sadism. When Dolores and Bernard are in the Forge system earlier in the episode, we see various copies of James Delos that turned out wrong, one of which was extremely violent. Is William a sadist, murderer and rapist because he's a human in a host body? If so, I think that's a kind of cheap way to redeem someone so horrid.

Keveney: That's an intriguing point. The copies of James Delos suggest that the experimental merging process can corrupt the human consciousness. If that's the case, it would help to know when William became a hybrid in order to judge his responsibility for his bad behavior. And indirectly related to that, when William got off the elevator, the Forge had been destroyed but the adjoining apartment was in magazine-cover shape. Does that suggest this was a simulation, even though Emily says it wasn't?

Lawler: I don't think we can trust Emily one bit. She was too clean and too smug. And there's too much bad blood in the Delos family for me to trust Emily to take care of her father's consciousness. After all, William wasn't too kind to James Delos.

Keveney: Emily does have dual loyalties. She's James Delos' granddaughter as well as William's daughter. I love the inside-out nature of the scene: William, who at one point was a human, is trapped in the Westworld park, even if it's a virtual version or just in his mind, while android hosts Bernard, Dolores and Charlotte's-body-with-Dolores's-mind (Are there two Doloreses now?) are free in the "real" world.

Lawler: With hosts and humans intermingled in the park and the real world, next season is definitely going to be just as confusing. Yay!

WPXI