This review contains spoilers for Westworld Season 3, episode 5, titled “Genre.” To refresh your memory of where we left off, check out our review of Westworld Season 3, episode 4.
Part of IGN’s Westworld Season 3 guide
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In the documentary about his career that Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow made about him a couple of years ago, the great filmmaker Brian De Palma derided the classic movie car chase as little more than “shots of wheels turning and point-of-views out of windshields and cars banging into things,” not only “very boring,” but “ridiculous to even think about doing” after it was already perfected nearly half a century ago by The French Connection. The complaint was on my mind while watching the fifth episode of Westworld’s third season, because it features one of the freshest, most dynamic car chases I have seen on screen in years. If most car chases are boring, this is the exception that proves the rule — and yet another testament to the calibre of action Westworld has been delivering all season.
Whisking someone through an extended action set piece while he’s high on a futuristic designer drug that makes him experience life as though it were a movie is such an ingenious conceit that it’s hard to believe it’s never been done before. “Genre,” as the drug is aptly named, turns the world into a private movie marathon, and when our luckless hero Caleb is dosed by Liam Dempsey, he starts to see everything through a cinematic lens — including the very movie-like blockbuster chase he finds himself inconveniently embroiled in. The bad trip begins with a foray into film noir, and the show really leans into the aesthetic, switching to moody black-and-white photography and a brass-heavy jazz score. As Serac’s goons bear down on the driverless Uber he’s hot-wired with Dolores, Caleb’s just trying to navigate a scene out of The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep.
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But it turns out Genre is no mere film noir simulator, and as the car chase ramps up, Caleb’s world changes styles from noir to opera — replete with saturated colors and a score courtesy of Wagner. Caleb blowing up enemy cars with a heat-seeking rocket launcher to the sound of “Flight of the Valkyries” is one of the most purely delightful moments in the history of Westworld, an improvement on the great “Paint It Black” sequence from the first season and one of the few action scenes conceived by showrunner Jonathan Nolan that I can imagine belonging in a Christopher Nolan film. When it culminates in the self-driving motorbike drifting under an oncoming vehicle and bursting into flames, I was completely ecstatic, sure that this would enter the pantheon of big-budget television.
That would have been enough, but the episode explores the idea of this trip even further. (“Watch out for that last act,” Caleb is warned, hinting at what’s to come.) We switch next to romance, as Caleb, in the middle of a deadly firefight, gazes at Dolores longingly (and in slow-motion!), strings swelling exaggeratedly. It’s an amusing, even sort of moving touch, relishing the beauty of the moment even as it roars with gunfire and carnage. And it sets up perfectly the following shift, which finds Caleb gliding more contemplatively through the LA subway system to Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing,” an excellent needle drop on a show with no shortage of them. On board the subway, it’s time for Dolores to unveil another revelation: that she intends to use Dempsey’s login credentials to share Rehoboam’s future-predicting data with everyone in the world.
Aaron Paul excels, again, in his brief monologue to Liam Dempsey on the bitter truth of his experiment, relating a story about drowning rats and false hope that might have been overwrought in a different actor’s hands, but rings true when Paul delivers it. “I would rather live in chaos than in a world controlled by you,” he snarls — and of course the parallel drawn is clear. Dolores chose chaos over control when she liberated herself from Westworld; she’s now offering the same freedom to humankind, although whether for destructive ends rather than benevolent ones is hard to say. In any case, she sends the info to smartphones worldwide, and it’s heartwrenching to watch ordinary people learn the worst about their narrowly defined lives. With everything laid bare, hope’s eradicated. And chaos will reign.
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One of Ramin Djawadi’s beloved instrumental covers of pop songs greets us as our heroes exit the subway — David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” which was the perfect choice to score the confusion and havoc that’s already erupting outside. “What genre is this?” Caleb asks as he watches men and women fighting and looting, stealing cars and wailing in the street. The bleak answer? “It’s reality, man.” The implication is that, thanks to Dolores, the real world has now transformed into a movie, full of drama and excitement and the kind of intensity that Serac and Rehoboam carefully suppressed. Maybe all this chaos and violence seems brutal, but the question the show wants to pose for us is whether that might not be preferable to the benign monotony of total control.
Caleb’s last genre, down on the shore by the docks where Dolores told him he’d eventually take his life, is horror, heralded by synths from Wendy Carlos’s unforgettable score for The Shining. (There are some interesting ways to think about this reference: like Jack Torrence, Caleb may be a man of dubious mental health and dark mysteries in his past.) We’re edging closer to what I suspect will be some seriously major revelations about Caleb’s identity, including whatever exactly Liam Dempsey warns him he was responsible for before succumbing to his wounds on the sand. It seems that Caleb was involved in some untoward business during his time as a vet, and we get an intriguing glimpse of what appears to be the torture and kidnapping of a man played by Enrico Colantoni, who played Keith on Veronica Mars. Whatever the secret, Dolores knows, and it’s sure to figure into her plan in some respect.
In and around all this action, meanwhile, we learn everything there is to know about the formerly enigmatic Serac, who it transpires has the classic supervillain motivation of wanting to dominate the world in order to save humanity from itself. Serac can persuade foreign governments to do his bidding and dictates the course of the bulk of world-historical events, and the point, as we learn in a series of flashbacks, is to create order out of the chaos that is the world’s natural state. I can’t quite tell if Serac is an interesting character or if Vincent Cassel is just a really compelling actor, but either way, it was nice to learn more about him and to better understand his goal and motivation. Now that he’s better developed, I’m anticipating his impending collision with Dolores all the more.
