Westworld: Season 3, Episode 3 Review

In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the Pinocchio-esque quest of a child robot to become a real boy hinges on one thing: the love he feels for his mother. For Spielberg (and for Stanley Kubrick, who had been developing the project before he died), the incredible bond shared between parents and their children was fundamentally a human characteristic, and it was so deep, so profound, that if a being with artificial intelligence could experience it, they could basically be said to have achieved consciousness.

Westworld has proposed a similar idea before — particularly in the character of Maeve, whose abiding affection for her daughter was the reverie that both awakened her to the reality of the park and prevented her from escaping it. In the third episode of Season 3, Westworld is ready to explore that notion all over again.

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It starts with Charlotte Hale — or rather an exact Charlotte replica, indistinguishable from the real, late Charlotte, who was of course murdered by Dolores at the end of last season. As we discover at the outset of the episode, Dolores has implanted host-Charlotte with one of the pearls she managed to smuggle out of the park, and she’s been instructing this phony to continue leading Delos and negotiate with the company’s shareholders on her behalf.

There’s a lot going on at Delos these days, including a surreptitious takeover bid, some drama involving the fallout from the board killings, and the suspicion that there may be a mole at the top of the circus reporting things to the nefarious trillionaire Serac. But the episode manages to outline the intersecting problems with minimal confusion, and we now have a clearer idea of what Serac’s after and how Dolores, Charlotte, and even Maeve figure in to his scheme.

We know that the real Charlotte was the mole. She promised Serac that she would retrieve for him the park’s vast stores of visitor data, which he presumably wants to add to Incite’s gargantuan servers. Of course, host-Charlotte works for Dolores, Serac’s current target and budding arch-nemesis, and that’s going to make it considerably more difficult for them to maintain the illusion that Charlotte is alive and well and going about her business as usual. In any case, Serac continues to prove an intriguing, vaguely sinister villain, thanks to a fine turn by Vincent Cassel. The showdown between Dolores and Serac that the season is plainly leading toward is shaping up to be one hell of a battle, even if for the time being it’s strictly one of wits.

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But while Dolores wants her Charlotte facsimile to gather intel and ward off the prospective Delos takeover, all is not going so smoothly with the ruse. It’s an issue of personality: the “real” Charlotte seems somehow lodged inside the host body somewhere, lurking beneath the programming and fighting to get out, or else parts of Charlotte’s identity are so strong that they’re screwing things up.

Host-Charlotte can’t stop cutting herself, as if psychologically tortured, and this is clearly going to get worse before it gets better — as evidenced by the relationship between her and the real Charlotte’s son, who immediately senses something is wrong with this so-called mommy. Her son’s suspicion, as well as her conflicted affection, is the crux of the episode, and it’s maybe the most emotionally complex that Westworld has ever been. The hosts are becoming more and more human, yes, but here we have a case where a human seems to be becoming more host — where a human’s feelings refuse to die with their body, and where an identity is too strong to be programmed away. Of everything going on so far in the season, I’m most intrigued to see where this goes.

Charlotte’s son recognizes that the woman in front of him isn’t his real mother. Caleb’s mother, meanwhile, can’t recognize the man in front of her as her real son — “where’s Cal?” she pleads with him as he visits her in hospital, in a very clever parallel the show is smart enough not to underline. Caleb has made the possibly fatal mistake of lending Dolores a hand, and now the crime-share app with which he’s been making an illegal living has deemed him a lucrative target to track down and kill. You can’t help but feel for Caleb, whose life is endlessly disappointing and who can’t catch a break. On the other hand, getting involved with Dolores may help give his life meaning: as he tells her, unaware of the irony, she’s the most real thing that’s happened to him in a long time.

The season’s action sequences continue to impress — both Caleb’s attempt to defend an injured Dolores from a couple of goons and an equally dangerous exchange with a different set of goons who want to torture and kill him are thrilling. (I also loved the touch of Caleb’s faithful robot construction worker buddy trying and failing to come to his rescue, which was strangely poignant.) And the design of future Los Angeles continues to dazzle, from the look of the Delos headquarters down to the style of the cop cars and ambulances.

If last week’s return to Westworld and the parks seemed visually dull, that’s only because the outside world Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have created is so engaging. Even a two-second establishing shot of the hotel where Dolores meets Charlotte for a drink, covered in trees and vines, blew me away. (It doesn’t hurt that Westworld is shot on 35mm and looks downright sumptuous at times.)

Dolores elects to reward Caleb’s kindness with some revelations we will also find interesting: Rehoboam, Incite’s all-powerful computer, has actually computed so much data that it can predict exactly how and when someone will die. Caleb is destined to take his own life in about a decade’s time. The scene in which Dolores shocks Caleb with a verbatim transcript of the day he was abandoned by his mom certainly resonates in a world already dominated by Big Data — it’s another of the show’s sci-fi predictions that seems eerily plausible. What elevates it to the next level, though, is Aaron Paul’s outstanding performance, which makes it seem extremely intense and real. One of the obvious highlights of Breaking Bad, Paul’s already brought so much to this season of Westworld. Now that he’s teamed up with Dolores, I can’t wait to see what’s to come.