I don't buy the suggestion that Bernard is a robot as many fan theories suggest. It was pretty clear in one episode that part of his background was that he did experience the loss of a child. My feeling was that one way of his dealing with that grief and loss was throwing himself into understanding what shapes the thoughts and development of a host like Dolores. It's not entirely clear to me what, if anything Bernard has to do with her thinking differently. For now it feels like he's dealing with the effects of a change that Ford made to their programming which allows access to previous memories and the connection of those memories to a new set of gestures - a feature referred to as "the reverie" in the pilot episode.
Bernard seems as though he's on to the fact that this change is resulting in the out of loop behavior that they're now witnessing in hosts, but he seems to be struggling with how to deal with it properly without pissing off his mentor. He's also genuinely interested in this behavior as a scientist, and seems to really want to understand where it's come from and how it might evolve.
The black hat character played by Ed Harris is another mystery in itself. It seems almost as if he's on to what Ford has been talking about with regard to the details and introducing subtleties that lead to clues that bring guests to deeper meaning and potentially deeper levels in the game that Westworld clearly is. The amazingly compelling thing about the series is that it's becoming something of its own game - trying to assign meaning to the myriad of clues that are dropped each week and fit them into the bigger puzzle.
What is becoming clear to me though is that Ford knows that allowing the reverie into the equation has introduced a level of chaos into the system that he almost seems quietly aware would happen. It might be tied to what he's been trying to attain all along; playing god and trying to create truly sentient beings that are indistinguishable from people. What's not clear to me though is the deeper end game for him, because there is something considerably deeper and probably more sinister to him. It wouldn't surprise me at all if all of his years of work have simply driven him mad. His sinister overtones to Theresa in episode 4 of "don't get in my way" could also could be a ruse. He could end up being the only sane one on property and it will later be revealed to us that he knew exactly what he was doing all along. Not sure which it is, but it's one of the many elements that have me glued to the TV each week...