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 five.
Let’s take a moment to reflect on the passing of Liam Dempsey. OK, that’ll do.
The heir to the money man behind Incite bleeds out on a Californian beach after being shot by Caleb’s pal, Ash. She did it to prove her own agency, her free will … and also just to shut the dude up. He couldn’t help whinging about how all the human scum deserved to have their futures written by the Rohohoboam and how he’d had all his money taken and blah blah blah so, anyway … he gets a bullet in the stomach and falls into the sea. Eventually he dies in Caleb’s arms, his last words enigmatic and just a little bit mean: “You did it! You did it!”.
Liam became expendable because Dolores now has all the information from Incite that she needs. Namely the Rohoho file on Serac which predicts the future of the billionaire tech mogul, émigré Frenchman and wannabe God.
Dolores is of the mind that predicting people’s future with a degree of accuracy that allows someone to control their lives, to keep them on a loop as Bernard puts it, is not fair. She is not for determinism, and having lived umpteen lives as a host in Westworld where not only are events preordained but unremittingly brutal, you can understand why.
On the other hand, you do get the sense that were Dolores to exist in our current reality, she might have some struggles remaining GDPR compliant. In jacking Serac’s data, she also steals the files of an unspecified number of other human beings. And during a leisurely wander through futuristic LA on plane, train and automobile, she decides that the best thing to do with all this data would be to send it directly to people’s phones, causing them to learn they will have early onset dementia on the subway home.
It does appear, by the looks of the mass freak out, that everybody gets bad news. There’s nobody looking at their phone, skipping to the conclusion and finding “lives to 95 and enjoys a lovely garden”. It’s all either cancer or suicide. You can see why Liam got so moody. There is something to be said that Westworld’s abiding philosophy is misanthropy and that it would be a better show were that not the case. That said, you don’t create panic on the streets of Los Angeles by sharing good news.
Meanwhile, Caleb is enduring the most am-dram acid trip in history. Stabbed by Liam with the “digital psychopharma” the Dempsey was too sulky to take at last week’s orgy, Caleb is plunged into a five act experience called “Genre”. Basically, it means that his experiences are given the stylings of a different type of cinema, from noir to romance and war movie. As ideas go, it’s interesting. As special effect sequences go it’s highly underwhelming, as all that changes is soundtrack and the image filter. I don’t know, perhaps the psychedelics in 1990s Norfolk were particularly powerful and I’m biased, but if I were Caleb I’d be asking for a refund. Maybe that’s what he was doing when cradling Liam on the beach.
At least the Genre experience gives Aaron Paul a chance to use the gurning, eye rolling shtick that we used to see in Breaking Bad and he also gets to be, like, totally blown away by the chance to fire a gun with the world’s biggest bullet in it. Due to his incapacitation, Caleb shoots his massive gun all wrong, but fortunately the bullet has its own internal piloting system and pulls a 180 in the air before crashing itself into a car full of Serac’s goons.
Given that we also see Malcolm Tucker/Martin detonate himself and blow up the top floors of Serac’s HQ, where does our plutocratic bad guy stand at the end of episode five? Well, he certainly looks disconsolate as he sits on his glass-walled private jet traversing the globe. But given that we now know, through the telling of his backstory, that Serac has learned how to edit humans, and that he has some of the world’s most idiosyncratic individuals (including his own brother) stashed out in the desert, it would appear he’s not over yet. Oh, I almost forgot, he has all the money in the world, too. So as Dolores and Caleb board their own plane – destination unknown – it would appear that the real battle is yet to be joined.
Divergence and anomalies
I hope we see Caleb’s lowlife mates again. Ash for generally being a spiky badass and Giggles – AKA American football superstar Marshawn Lynch – for wearing a T-shirt that utterly puzzles me. The first time he wore it, it appeared to have some kind of LED component. The second time it does not. Google it – Amused and Scared and Bored and Anxious – and it exists in real life. But it turns out to be a garment that is ubiquitous and utterly generic. I’m unable to find where it originally came from, and I wonder whether the costume department invented it and seeded it, or picked it up when looking for the most random thing they could find. Spotter’s prize for anyone who knows more.
What was it with the president of Brazil and that fly?
I think daddy Dempsey went down too easy. Three bangs of the head on a jet’s wing shouldn’t be terminal, in my opinion.
Great to hear some electroclash again after all these years. The episode plays out on Fischerspooner’s Emerge, one of the (possibly the only) classics of the genre. I also got this weekend’s string section number, but it was pretty easy: David Bowie’s Space Oddity.
