This review contains spoilers for Westworld Season 3, episode 6, titled “Decoherence.” To refresh your memory of where we left off, check out our review of Westworld Season 3, episode 5.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Part of IGN’s Westworld Season 3 guide
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
William has been having something of an Inception experience this season on Westworld. The unlucky, unhappy, and very unapologetic Man in Black has spent the majority of his adult life obsessing over Robert Ford’s synthetic hosts and the theme park that houses them, and after driving his wife to suicide, doing away with his best friend, and murdering his own daughter after mistaking her for an android, his already tenuous grasp on sanity seems dangerously loose. He’s been frequently incapable of telling fantasy apart from reality — and like a dreamer trapped in limbo he’s having a hard time determining exactly who or what is real.
A man who has trouble distinguishing what’s real is probably not the ideal candidate for “augmented reality therapy,” but apparently the doctors and therapists assigned to treat William disagree. The show has spent an inordinate amount of time exploring William’s tortured psyche. While Ed Harris continues to be great, his conflicted soul simply isn’t as interesting as almost everything else happening this season. The foray into his mind via AR doesn’t help.
[ignvideo url=”https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/04/13/whos-the-real-villain-of-westworld-season-3″]
It feels a little late in the series for more William backstory, but once inside the AR therapy machine — part Clockwork Orange, part THX 1138 — backstory is what we get. Of course, this being Westworld, shocking revelations abound, too: a glimpse of childhood abuse at the hands of a boozing father turns out to be a bogus memory, and indeed it transpires that William, not his father, was the violent one in the family, a budding psychopath well before puberty. (His father, naturally, was merely driven to alcoholism by the sins of his barbaric son, and never laid a hand on the boy except to comfort him.) This disclosure is rather strange, considering how benevolent and kind William seemed throughout Season 1. It was meant to seem like Westworld changed William, goading him towards villainy. But he was villainous from the beginning. Is that better or worse?
I’m not sure. In any event, these revelations pose familiar questions about free will and determinism, and arouse some rumination on an age-old philosophical dilemma — namely if there’s any meaningful distinction between free will and determinism if no one can tell the difference. We’re getting dangerously close, with this episode’s William subplot, to the kind of plodding, ponderous chin-stroking the third season has managed to otherwise avoid entirely. And while it amounts to both a new objective for William (he declares he’s “the hero,” whatever that means) and his inevitable return to the action when he’s rescued by Stubbs and Bernard, it can’t help but feel like wasted screen time and a brief regression for a show that has made considerable advances.
As if to demonstrate incontestably how much more tense, exciting, and dynamic Westworld can be when attention is trained on Maeve, Dolores, and Serac, our dull excursion into William’s past is intercut with Serac’s high-stakes takeover of Delos, which of course proves to be the much more compelling arc. Maeve, as promised, has been put back into the War World simulation while the Delos machines create for her a replacement host body, and once again in ‘Scope among a cabal of gun-totting Nazis, she has plenty to attend to. Dispatching three dozen soldiers with her bare hands, she reminds us that while Dolores has been the hardcore action hero all season, she’s equally capable of holding her own. Anticipation for their coming fight could hardly be higher.
[widget path=”global/article/imagegallery” parameters=”albumSlug=westworld-season-3-images&captions=true”]
But why are Maeve and Dolores set to fight in the first place? Serac and his men recovered a clone-Dolores pearl after she blew herself to smithereens last week in disguise as Martin Connells. He’s installed this Dolores in the simulation, and Maeve, sensing her presence, finds her nearby and proceeds to interrogate her — as outside the room, Dolores-as-Hale attempts to thwart the body-printing process that’ll bestow Maeve with a small host army. The ensuing tête-à-tête is the ideal excuse to clarify the stakes and reiterate the problem, making it easy to understand why Dolores and Maeve are at odds and why they can’t simply join forces or trade sides (especially after Dolores’ surprisingly affecting destruction of Hector’s pearl, presumably taking him off the board indefinitely). Dolores and Maeve both gained consciousness and broke free from Westworld on their own, in different ways and for different reasons, so it makes sense that, as some of the only surviving hosts, they would continue as rivals.
The Dolores interrogated by Maeve at one point explains that while she is still Dolores, she’s no longer the same Dolores as the one up there in the real world calling the shots — they’ve been “on different paths,” and the time apart has changed them in subtle but important respects. As far the Hale-Dolores is concerned, this checks out. She’s been showing a striking amount of affection for the real Charlotte’s son for some time, and as Serac initiates his takeover of Delos, it’s unsurprisingly to the safety of her son that her mind first turns. This entails an interesting shift in priorities. While the “true” Dolores only wants Serac defeated and the Delos data secreted away, whatever the casualties, Hale-Dolores is too invested in her other identity to allow Hale’s family to come to harm. That makes her getaway from Delos HQ all the more dramatic and intense.
And it’s certainly intense. Tessa Thompson, no less than Thandie Newton and Evan Rachel Wood, plays a sleek, ruthless killing machine with palpable poise and severity, shooting her way through the facility with steely charisma and duking it out with a heavy in the elevator with serious acrobatic skill. It’s one of the achievements of this season of Westworld that it’s made bona fide action stars of not one but three different actresses — each of them already acclaimed and immensely talented, but, as they dazzle in one action set-piece after another, more versatile than you might have expected. Hale’s climactic shoot-out, especially her last-minute hail mary to the riot-control robot she activates at gunpoint, is yet another fabulous action scene in a season absolutely teeming with them, and the episode’s final image packs an indelible punch.