Full spoilers follow for Episode 4 of Westworld Season 3, “The Mother of Exiles.”
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Part of IGN’s Westworld Season 3 guide
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A lot of story elements finally came together in the latest episode of Westworld (read our review!), including an answer to one big question: Who is really inside Charlotte Hale’s body now? Despite speculation among fans that it might be Teddy or Clementine or some other missing Host, the reveal comes as quite a surprise: It’s actually another copy of Dolores! And not just that, but we’ve also learned now that most if not all of the Host control units Dolores smuggled out of the park are just copies of herself, copies which she has now implanted in a Host version of Martin the bodyguard, Musashi from Shogunworld, and of course the Hale imposter.
Showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy explained their thinking behind this big Westworld twist in a recent chat with IGN, which they said basically boils down to Dolores thinking “if you want something done right, you got to do it yourself.” Read on for what they had to say about the “Dolorii” and more!
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Explaining Dolores’ Plan
Most fans assumed that Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) had smuggled her closest allies out of the park at the end of last season — as well as Bernard, who she apparently keeps around to keep her on her toes — so why did she choose this particular strategy of making multiple copies of herself? We asked the producers.
“There are a couple of ways of looking at it,” says Joy. “One is O.K., if you perceive of her as villainous, then she killed a lot of people, and got a lot of people killed in her quest to escape the park, promising them salvation — and then brought out a bunch of herselfs. Then again, she was the first host, so maybe there’s something to that. But on the other hand, you can also say she killed a lot of the people and got a lot of people killed in her escape from the park. You start from the same premise, and in seeing that suffering, she wouldn’t want to inflict it upon others again, taking that pain upon herself in this next movement.”
The producers think that this question about why Dolores did what she did ties back to one of the bigger themes of the show, which they’ve explored each season: What is the nature of good and evil?
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“Why does the phrase — the nature of good and evil — even exist?” says Joy. “Because it’s so binary and it presupposes an objective observer meting out a title of good or evil for every action or the sum of each action. How does that work? How does determination work? It’s a tricky quandary, and narratively though is a wonderful sandbox to play in.”
Who Is Charlotte Hale?
We’ve known all season that Tessa Thompson’s Charlotte Hale was actually a Host, but the question has been which Host. With her self-destructive tendencies, it seemed as though the real Charlotte herself might even be trapped somehow in the replica of her, subsumed by the Host’s consciousness (which, who knows, may yet turn out to be true — stay tuned!). As of Episode 4, it remains unclear why Charlotte is struggling so much, even if we do now know that she’s actually another version of Dolores.
“If one of the big questions in the show is nature versus nurture, if Dolores duplicates herself, from that point forward, do those copies remain the same person, do they start to begin to subtly change, and does the Dolores who’s pretending to be Hale start getting this sort of internal version of Stockholm syndrome because she starts taking on some of the characteristics of the person she’s pretending to be?” ponders Nolan. “Does she kind of hybridize her own personality with the personality of Hale? Does she become sort of an improved version of who that person was? Potentially a better mother, a better partner? Does who Hale was start to infect who Dolores is and vice versa?”
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One has to wonder if the other Dolorii will begin to exhibit similar changes to their personalities as time passes, although it sounds as though the major focus in this area this season will be on Dolores Prime and Charlotte-ores (or Dolorotte?).
“Even beyond whether or not you think that Hale’s personality is beginning to kind of soak into Dolores’, different things are happening to these two different characters as the season progresses,” says Nolan. “One of the things we’re interested in is you take two people to get to the same person. The show’s about identity and agency and free will. You take two versions of the same person and essentially bifurcate them down two paths of experience. Is there a point at which they diverge, is there a point at which they potentially even come into conflict with each other? So it’s something we’re excited about.”
Westworld’s Behind-the-Scenes Dark Knight Connection
Nolan of course co-wrote The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises with his brother Christopher, and he says in a funny way there’s a connection to that experience and his work on Westworld. The original 1973 movie Westworld spawned a lesser-known sequel in 1976 called Futureworld, and that film actually shares some plot elements with Westworld Season 3 — namely, the notion of replacing powerful world figures with Host duplicates.
Nolan laughs about the similarities and says that he and Joy never looked at Futureworld when prepping the season, though he did know the original film from his youth when he and his brothers would watch it on London weekend television and then a “scratchy VHS copy.” (In fact, he says that when they were brought the concept to turn it into an HBO series, he couldn’t quite get his head around it — “My mind immediately went to like a sort of a Love Boat kind of show where every week Dolores and Maeve would conspire to help a troubled young married couple right their wrongs!” he laughs. It was Joy who cracked the scenario they landed on eventually.)
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But as for that Futureworld connection, as Nolan says, “there’s nothing new under the sun.”
“We had headed in a pretty similar direction, which I love,” he says. “It’s analogous to when we were working on The Dark Knight. Paul Levitz, who was the publisher of DC at the time, and a lovely, lovely person, on every movie he would send us a big box of comic books, talking about the characters that Chris wanted to explore for that film. And he sends a big box of Joker comic books and I read some of them when we wrote the movie, but I realized only after the fact that somehow I had missed the first appearance of the Joker! Chris was in production on the film, and I went back and I read it and I was like, ‘Oh my God, it literally has a scene where he dresses up as a police officer, and all the other criminals decide that they’re going to kill the Joker.’ There’s actually a lovely feeling there of standing on the shoulders of folks like [Westworld creator] Michael Crichton and, in the case of Batman, Bob Kane and Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson and kind of trying to think in the same space they do. And finding yourself walking in their footsteps is great fun.”
Westworld Season 3 is currently airing on Sunday nights on HBO.
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Talk to Executive Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
