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Part of IGN’s Westworld Season 3 guide
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One of the clearest advancements Westworld’s third season has made over previous seasons is its speed. This is not only a brisker, more exhilarating show than ever, with an emphasis on lively action set pieces and propulsive high-stakes drama, but also a more direct and conventional work of narrative storytelling — one that no longer wastes time meandering or withholding information to trite effect. Of course, this is still a staunchly complicated series, and there are no doubt many theory-upending twists to come. But puzzles that would have remained unsolved for weeks in prior seasons are now being answered almost as soon as they’re introduced, and the result feels smoother, sharper, and more focused. Four episodes in, this strikes me as the principal reason Westworld Season 3 is so good.
Last week was all about Charlotte Hale, the nominal head of Delos who was murdered at the end of the second season and has since been replaced by a host. The question of which host occupied that human simulacrum was the subject of fervid speculation: Dolores escaped the park with five host pearls, and it seemed plausible that the one living as Charlotte could be Teddy, Clementine, or perhaps even her father, Peter Abernathy. (Some galaxy-brained Redditors developed an intriguing left-field fan theory that it was Caleb, once again proving that Westworld is a magnet for conspiracies.) In any case, the question seemed unlikely to be answered anytime soon, and the true identity of host-Charlotte was positioned to become the definite ongoing mystery of the season.
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Charlotte is Dolores. So is Tommy Flanagan’s steely Martin, and so is Musashi, who has been whisked out of Shogun World and serves as the head of the Yakuza in Singapore. As it turns out, Dolores escaped Westworld not with several host allies in her possession, but with copies of herself, and she has been installing them in host bodies to orchestrate her elaborate master plan. As a matter of strategy, this makes sense — she already tried to recruit Teddy to her cause once, but even after some canny reprogramming, he couldn’t rally behind her. No other host in Westworld is as capable, ruthless, or as resourceful as Dolores, except maybe Maeve and Bernard, her chief adversaries. So who better for Dolores to enlist than more Doloreses? (Dolori?)
This information is revealed in three ways simultaneously. Bernard learns it from Martin, with whom he tussles at a glamorous sex party attended by their mutual target Liam. (Shades of Eyes Wide Shut: I loved Dolores’s quip, entering the party, that the human world was more like Westworld than she expected.) Maeve learns it when she barges in on the Yakuza, finding Musashi in charge. And William — half-deranged and perpetually drunk, never sure if what he’s seeing is real or fake, like Marion Cotillard in Inception — learns it when he chats with Charlotte, who summarily blows his mind before having him committed. It’s this last one that’s the most shocking, for us and for the character in question. Deemed unfit to run Delos, his duties will now fall to the second in command — Charlotte, which is to say, Dolores. This relationship keeps getting more complex.
These revelations are stunning, not least because the timing was so unexpected. The long-term implications are even more fascinating: Bernard wrongly assumed that Liam had been replaced with a host, but he’s right to suspect that any human could be one. If Dolores is able to replicate herself indefinitely, how can we trust that anyone in the real world is in fact real? Of course, whether a character’s a host or a human is a question Westworld has posed repeatedly since the beginning of the series. But out of the park, as Dolores roams future Los Angeles on a mission, the possibilities are endless. It’s a terrific twist on an old gimmick, and I suspect it will be used to great effect as this season continues. (Share your theories about who could be another Dolores in the comments.)
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Now that the action has converged in the real world, our heroes are finally ready to contend with one another — beginning with Bernard and Stubbs, who descend on the sex party to kidnap Liam and save him from being replaced by a host. It was inevitable that Stubbs, the season’s bodyguard and major heavy, would eventually duke it out with Dolores, but their brawl in the club is even more impressive than anticipated. Westworld’s fight scenes have never been better. Their superhuman fisticuffs are well-shot and well-choreographed, while Evan Rachel Wood, dressed to the nines and drained of affect, is so amazing as the host-turned-Terminator that she seems born to be an action hero. I’m eager for every future opportunity for Dolores to kick ass, and I’m certain there’s much more of this to come.
Dolores isn’t the only latent superhero: over in Singapore, there’s the indomitable Maeve, whose powers include the ability to control any device powered by a computer. As she tears her way through the urban underworld, she glides through gunfights unscathed, turning uzis on the baddies wielding them and unlocking top secret doors with her mind. She gets a big, thrillingly choreographed fight scene of her own, too, and one in a different style — we switch from an American influence to an Asian one, as Maeve and Musashi go at it with katanas. This battle is just as superb as the other, culminating with an exquisite shot of Maeve lying defeated on the floor, swirls of blood and white matter pooling around her body. It’s a dazzling shot that demonstrates the show’s knack for indelible cinematic images.
