http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/review-in-the-stray-westworld-asks-how-much-the-robots-really-remember


FAN THEORY CORNER

Finally, I'm going to try something that worked pretty well with Mr. Robot this season, which is to put a separate section here at the bottom for dealing with a particular fan theory until it's either confirmed or disproven by the show, as a way to allow some discussion of it while also shielding anyone who hasn't thought of it and would rather be surprised if it turns out to be the case. (This stuff is fair game in the comments, though, so read at your own peril.)

So, the theory: William and Logan's scenes take place 30 years before everything else we're watching, and William will eventually age into being the Man in Black.

There is some evidence to support this, including the train station looking a bit spiffier when he and Logan arrive than when we saw Teddy and the guests pull into town in the pilot; ditto the slight changes to the Sweetwater script and cast of characters when each group arrives. And when William gets shot at early in this episode, it's with a non-lethal bit of ammunition with enough force to knock him down, whereas the Man in Black isn't hurt at all when Teddy shoots at him in the pilot.

But this episode seems to blow a huge hole through the middle of that theory, as William's path appears to cross that of Dolores while she's in the midst of a story that we know to be part of the action that's contemporaneous with the Man in Black. He runs into her right after she has escaped the latest assault on the family farm, which should be set in the show's present because she uses the gun she found buried in the dirt outside the house to defend herself against Rebus during this particular attack, and she has multiple memories of the Man in Black while handling the gun at different points in the episode. The inherent Groundhog Day of the show's plot — and the fact that we see Dolores go through several iterations of Rebus's assault — means we can't take anything 100% for granted, but there's a line between clever misdirection and outright screwing with your audience to conceal a twist, and if William is meant to be the young Man, the show is already getting really close to that line.

UPDATE: As several pointed out (and as was difficult to make out on HBO's screener), the gun Dolores uses on Rebus isn't the one she found buried in the dirt, but the one she took off of his holster. But the fact that she has another Man in Black memory in the midst of the encounter means the larger point still stands.