Ford controlled everything we saw - including the humans. It was a reach that he was able to plan a 30 year long con that just so happened to culminate the night that he was being pushed out.
Just look at all that happened in the last episode alone. What if MiB didn't stab Dolores? They can explain it by saying he knows the guests so well, but it's still a variable he can't control. Maybe he had backup plans, maybe he could push the story along no matter what MiB did or didn't do. Who knows.
Overall, I think the show did a poor job of character building. I wish Season 1 would have been more in-park stuff - like a year before this all happened. We could have learned about characters and got to know them. They didn't give us anyone to really like - and when there were some glimpses of that, they dropped the character or told us something that changed everything we thought. They gave us no cornerstone.
There wasn't one character that I would have been sad to see go - certain actors, yes, but the character they played, no.
I don't personally think that the conclusion weakened the character exposition or anything else which had been previously built in the show. To take the point about MiB stabbing Dolores, I did read someone elsewhere suggesting that parts of Teddy's dialogue in that scene sounded as if it was meant to be a love scene rather than a death scene, and it just had to happen that way because Dolores was dying -- with the implication being that the original 'planned' version of that scene wouldn't have ended that way. I can't comment either way without watching it again (...) with the idea in mind, but it's a possibility. Especially considering the stage between memory and consciousness being improvisation, it wouldn't be a stretch for hosts to get 'back on track' in a situation they weren't wholly scripted for.
I think the characters overall were well-rounded in the context of the theme, and I would suggest that surely the cornerstone of the show -- of the show's entire view of human nature and the question of consciousness -- hinges on the difficulty we face in trying to understand our true natures and the subjectivity inherent in deciding what makes the self the self, and the other the other. In that sense surely depicting concrete, wholly-delineated figures would be a rejection of the show's core premise. I would see the model of character which exists here as the fullest extension of the Aristotelean view of narrative: what could be or would be likely to be, not what definitively is or has been. The pictures of the characters we have are simply multiple 'could be's.
To take two of your examples, Bernard's indeterminacy -- to me -- simply reflects a view of human nature as malleable and reflects the question asked more overtly by William's storyline: which is the real 'him', and how much of what we consider to be the 'self' is constructed by others' subjectivity? His actions being dictated by Ford's needs does not necessarily equate to him having no character of his own (in fact I'd say the opposite, considering he clearly has opinions regarding his actions as directed by Ford as he asks "You've never made me hurt anyone like this before, have you?") Similarly, watching as Dolores "confusingly jumped between times and spun around the drain" might equally be termed an exercise in trying to decide how formative experiences can be on what becomes our prevailing nature. It's surely little wonder that as different experiences and memories come back to the foreground with different weights, the character traits dependent on those experiences and memories will shift and alter.
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