The challenges facing the 21st-century career woman, those that existed before recent events at least, have been documented in newspapers and magazines, books, TV and film. On the one hand there’s the inward-looking fulfilment to be found through work (this is not my opinion, by the way, I’m just summarising the literature). On the other hand there’s the outward-looking, selfless fulfilment of raising a child (what the men were doing, no one knows).
It’s a tough balance to strike, everyone acknowledged, almost impossible in fact. So add into the mix the fact of being an android, and having to engage in mortal combat with a legion of mercenaries and you can understand why Charlotte Hale is literally steaming come the end of this episode of WestWorld.
Yes, the Delos boss has had it tough this week. Not to say that it was easy before. As well as running a company dedicated to bringing out the worst in humankind, she was also working as a corporate mole for the dastardly plutocrat Serac. Then she died, but that was hardly the end of it. Reanimated as a robot, she became a mole on behalf of Dolores against Serac, only for the Frenchman to rumble her and send his trusty goons a rat-a-tat-ing her way.
But, hang on, there’s even more. Despite being a host powered by a copy of Dolores’s own control unit, Hale increasingly felt more sympatico with the human she’s supposed to be pretending to be. Goodness knows how it works; there’s a snatch of convo between Dolores and Hale suggesting some kind of accidentally uploaded emotions, and we’ll have to go with that. But suffice to say, when it comes to the crunch, in the choice between fighting Serac for the sake of Delos’s corporate values, or dashing off home to save her husband and kid, she plumped for the latter. Talk about having it all.
Sadly for Hale all that went to waste. No sooner has she returned home and uttered the words: “Mummy’s not going to let anything happen to you”, than her squat little future car explodes into a ball of flames taking hubby and progeny with it. It’s an act of murderous arson that has Serac written all over it. Despite the horrible intensity of it all, however, the explosion is not nearly enough to take out Hale herself. She crawls from the wreckage looking like a tanning salon disaster, but alive; her eyes spelling out ‘‘revenge”.
As Hale crouches by the roadside, hot enough to fry an egg, Maeve is in Serac’s laboratory waiting to print something out. Because this is Westworld, the print job is not a 32-page guide to performing essential maintenance on the Rohohohoboam, but an actual host, about to emerge from the mystical milk and help Maeve in her fight against Dolores.
Maeve, you will recall, is on Team Serac, though the bond is hardly an unbreakable one given that the dastardly trillionaire has promised to deny her access to her daughter for eternity should she not do what she’s told. Maeve spends much of this hour trying to get the gang back together for the big battle ahead. She returns to Warworld with some zingers about the necessity of foreplay and a lust for robot Nazi blood, before rallying poor deluded Hector and limping Lee Sizemore to her cause.
Serac serves up one other character for Maeve to interact with and that’s Dolores. In a reworking of all those interrogations Bernard used to make of big D in season one, Maeve quizzes a version of Dolores as to what she would do – just hypothetically speaking you understand – if she was determined to wage war on all humanity. The fake Dolores reveals that her first move would be to stop Maeve reassembling the aforementioned gang.
Soon enough Hector has his control unit crushed by a rampaging Hale. And Sizemore is just a simulation, so he’s useless. But judging by the smile on Maeve’s mush, whatever’s coming out of that host bath promises some useful help; whether it’s a Teddy or a Clementine or maybe that Rebus dude whose muttonchops will stay with me till the grave.
Speaking of the grave, William’s still dodging it. Committed to an asylum the last time we saw him, we now find the erstwhile Man in Black being exposed to all kinds of Clockwork Orange/Marathon Man style brutality. Dressed in an all-white jumpsuit he endures some improvised dentistry (getting the same mind-bending braces fitted as Caleb) before being introduced to Dr Albert (how do they come up with these names?) who signs William up for a spot of aversion therapy.
The problem with William’s aversion, is that it’s for himself. He absolutely loathes William, does William. Dr Albert’s recommended course of treatment, therefore, is that he should sit in a room with several different versions of himself (and good old Daddy Delos to boot) and collectively thrash out their problems. Of course, William being William, the thrashings are literal and after a debate over nature versus nurture – did William’s alcoholic Dad make William bad or did Bad William make his dad alcoholic? – William beats all his variant selves to death with his bare hands. No damage done though. The therapy turns out to have been all in the mind and Bernard, displaying once again his uncanny ability to turn up in the precise place where the plot needs him, detaches William from his nightmare.
So with two episodes left in the season, Bernard is in the saddle with the Man in Black, Maeve is down the robot dairy and Hale is best served with a tomato relish. Serac meanwhile is beaming holographic versions of himself into any number of boardrooms as he looks to reassert control over the future of us all and put an end to these pesky hosts. Caleb, well, we all hope he has come down off his Genre by now and as for Dolores it’s all up in the air, quite literally guys. See you next week!
Divergence and anomalies
• No popular chart music played on a violin this week, what’s up with that?
• Last week I read that driverless plastic tubs were delivering fast food in Milton Keynes. A week later and futuristic gardeners are using them to get rid of dead bodies. I have to say, this trajectory does have an air of plausibility to it.
• When precisely did Hale find the time in her busy schedule to secrete poison gas in the Delos boardroom?
• Good to see one of those riot robots get an outing. All that money spend and it would have been a shame not to see them go smash something up Transformers-style.
