Spoiler alert: this blog is published after Westworld airs on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK on Sunday night/Monday morning. Do not read unless you have watched season three, episode three.
Hands up who was banging on last week about how only Maeve could save humanity from the evil Dolores and how the linen-suited Serac seemed like a lovely man who had only our best interests at heart, and really, what a guy, who wouldn’t love to lunch with him in his tropical garden. No? Not you?
Hmm, I swear there was someone. But onward, and a new reality: only Dolores can save humanity from the evil corporations that have become so sophisticated at modelling human behaviour through all the data we leave lying around that they can predict our futures. By knowing whether you are likely to enter your twilight years with a burden of debt and a sceptical view of technology platforms they know whether to deny you access to such things as money and work. Get rid of such challenging individuals now, these corporations surmise, and there will be fewer to worry about in the future.
At least, that is how Dolores is selling the situation to Caleb as they stand on a pier looking at the Pacific, considering a revolution against Serac and his omniscient AI known as the Roehampton. Sorry, the Rambutan. No, the Rehoboam.
Rehoboam was the son of King Solomon, in the Bible. He abandoned his father’s passion for justice but stuck to his passion for excess in a 17-year reign that descended into civil war. It’s not the name I would alight on if I were attempting to convince the human population to trust in the wisdom of artificial intelligence; I’d probably plump for something more clubbable, such as Archie. But I’m not a plutocrat at war with fugitive robots, and perhaps they have a different perspective.
Foremost fugitive robot, Dolores, has bonded with downtrodden meat puppet Caleb after he refused to divulge what he knew about her to a pair of Rico thugs. (To be fair, he knew pretty much nothing, but it’s the principle of the thing.) During his interrogation by the creeps, Caleb is suspended from a building in classic style and given an injection into his palate. This is painful at the best of times, but the roof of Caleb’s mouth turns out to be electrified, a consequence of the government’s attempt to control his soldier’s PTSD (I think). The goons turn up the juice in Caleb’s gob and it all looks awful, before Dolores arrives to save the day and explain the broader picture to our new human protagonist.
Dolores is also on hand to comfort a fellow host, that being whichever control unit is inhabiting the manufactured body of Charlotte Hale. Dolores left Westworld with control units containing the data of three hosts. Oh, and Bernard, but we don’t talk about him. As yet, the identity of the host chosen to inhabit Hale has not been made clear, at least not to me. I guessed at Clementine, the troubled sex worker of the Mariposa, but then I remembered that the Man in Black, or William, had gouged his own flesh at one point, which is a trait the Hale occupant has. So maybe it’s him.
Either way, someone is pretending to be Hale so that Dolores can use them to control Delos, the company that owns Westworld. The bad news for everyone concerned is that Serac has stealthily acquired enough of a stake in Delos to make him majority shareholder de facto. This is explained to Hale using the overwrought analogy of first a snail, then a black hole. His presence is negative, and that’s how you know he’s there (except he was also identifiable by name, so go figure).
At the end of the episode, Hale has to deal with Serac personally. He wants to get all the data Delos compiled on its ne’er-do-well guests, which he will then feed to Rehoboam as a pre-dinner snack. The complicating factor for Hale is that she was the one who promised them to him in her previous life, a complication of which she has only just been made aware.
Elsewhere, Hale is also having to learn how to be a parent to her estranged son, Nathan, who is being groomed by paedophiles after school. This is a dilemma far more easily resolved. In a punchy scene we see Hale get in touch with her maternal instincts by throttling the groomer to death in a secluded bower. Talk about having it all.
Both these little passages combine to show something interesting going on inside Hale, as the host mind and the apparently latent memories of the human that existed beforehand (also articulated in a video left by human Hale during the Westworld massacre), start to make the character question her values and what she should be doing. At this stage, it seems that “human” values might win out over the “corporate”. We shall see.
We are also invited to consider what it means for two hosts to care for each other, when Dolores takes the self-harming Hale to a hotel suite to calm and heal her. The couple lie together on a big double bed but, perhaps in a first for HBO drama, there is no hot hanky-panky. Instead, there is something that looks like consolation.
Divergence and anomalies
Can someone explain how Dolores obtained a precise transcript of what happened to a six-year-old Caleb in a nondescript diner some decades previously?
Farewell Caleb’s robot pal, we barely knew ye. Though here’s hoping he pulls himself up off the concrete to ride again before the end of the season.
There are no elephants in the future. Not even in a zoo. We humans must really have gone for them hard.
Is it just me, or did those cop cars look a bit clunky?
