Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, the 1975 Warner Brothers movie adapting the pulp hero to the big screen, is not very good; I’ve seen it half a dozen times or more, because it’s easy to make fun of with friends, and it has a certain corny charm that works on me even when it gets dumb or tedious (which, to stress, it pretty much always is). But the ending of the film is unsettling in a way I don’t think anyone involved was really prepared to deal with—a creepiness that comes directly from the source material, and something I had cause to remember while watching tonight’s Westworld. Doc beats the villain, and instead of heading to jail, said baddie gets trotted off to a… hospital, of sorts, where he has his brain rewired until he’s a very good boy indeed. This is presented as a triumph; at worst, there’s some mild comedy in watching a bastard go all soft. But it’s unsettling, delivered so casually as to assume everyone in the audience is automatically on board—oh, let’s Clockwork Orange criminals, I’m sure it’ll be fine! Nothing much else to do with them anyway.
To give it credit, “Passed Pawn” is at least aware of why this might be a problem. The big revelation of the episode is that Caleb was a victim of Serac’s great plan for the future. The artificial intelligence programs (both Rehoboam, and the earlier version we meet tonight called Solomon) Serac and his brother built to save the world both ran into the problem of certain people—“ouliers”—who were just going to fuck things up if left to their own devices. So Serac’s big genius leap was to “reprogram” the problem children into behaving the way he wanted them to, in order to better account for the variables. Not all of the reprogramming worked, but Caleb’s did; and the other big revelation is that not only was Caleb working for Serac’s system without realizing it, bringing in other outliers as a bounty hunter, his best bud Francis wasn’t shot overseas. Caleb did the shooting himself, when the system needed to tie up some loose ends, and then brainwashed him out of remembering it.
This is a frustrating development. In terms of just basic world-building details, it sounds very cool—maybe not a stunning leap forward or anything, but it’s a clever development that makes sense with the information we already have at our disposal. There’s an allegorical quality to it that helps it resonate with earlier arcs on the show, namely the way we’re once again watching powerful men dictate the course of the lives of others for their own purposes; it’s something the episode itself points out at one point. People are just another version of hosts for Serac, and even if that doesn’t precisely illuminate hidden depths in the narrative, it at least reassures us that the folks working behind the scenes haven’t forgotten how their show started. There’s something very satisfying about this kind of metaphorical rhyming, and it at least helps build the illusion that even though Dolores has left the park, she’s still fighting the same battle she was from the start.
The reason this is frustrating to me is the problem Westworld always stumbles over eventually: there’s a good story here, but the way the writers have chosen to go about telling it just never does the work of presenting that story to its best effect. Finding out Caleb has a secret past is interesting because the past itself is relatively interesting. But it’s not a revelation that really changes how I view the character, or pays much of anything off; there was a hint or two that there might be more going on with him, but his past already felt like so much of a blank slate that nothing much has changed. It’s cleverness without the context or framing to make it more than clever. I apologize for using this comparison again, but I can’t really avoid it: this is like reading the Wikipedia summary of a season of television, in that it allows you to intellectually admire the plot without ever getting a sense of it being more than a collection of sentences.
That’s true for pretty much every reveal in “Pawn.” All the new information could’ve been fascinating—nothing comes across as absurd or badly reasoned. But almost none of it has charge or impact beyond a “…huh.” The closest we get to an emotional climax is Maeve and Dolores fighting it out, which is fine, but the tension between these two characters hasn’t built up enough for the fight to be anything more than that. Charlotte is apparently on Maeve’s side now, I think, calling in a couple of Maeve’s former associates to cut Dolores-Musashi in half, but Charlotte seems like the only Dolores that Maeve would have a grudge against, considering what went down last week. None of this is beyond the pale, none of it is material that’s so fundamentally badly conceived that it couldn’t work. But the way it’s presented, it’s like everything got thrown into a blender and we’re seeing the result.
All of this is a lot more sophisticated in its presentation than Doc Savage ever managed, but it suffers in the end from a similar inability to manage its resources to their best advantage. The discovery that there’s another AI, and that Dolores has decided to consult it in order to come up with the next part of her plan, feels like that bit in the video game where you get an arbitrary quest to go pick up some data logs because the run-time wasn’t quite up to snuff.
The idea of Solomon is neat, and I desperately wish we’d gotten more of the process of Serac and his brother building these machines, but you could’ve told me that Dolores just needed some secret password kept in the old system, and I would’ve found it just as likely. A lot of the drama in the show at this point is dependent on the plausibility of Dolores playing nth degree chess, of her and Serac and the various AIs being so far ahead of everything else that we can barely grasp their decisions, let alone predict them. But because the storytelling is clumsy, it’s impossible to ignore the wire frame underneath everything, the fact that it’s just a bunch of writers telling us that Dolores is playing etc. There’s no presumption of faith, no suspension of disbelief.
By the end of all of his, Caleb has decided he wants to kill Serac (as Bernard helpfully points out, Dolores was created with a sense of “poetry,” and so he believes she’s arranging a human to bring about the end of humanity), Dolores has had her arm blown off, and Maeve is defeated at her moment of triumph by an EMP blast. In terms of staging and pacing, the climax is a good action sequence, but that’s definitely something that Westworld has always been good at doing. I just wish it had figured out a way to manage character building and drama as well as it does robots beating the shit out of each other.
Stray observations
- Bernard and Stubbs and William Watch: I think I’m just going to have to accept at this point that Bernard and Stubbs are never going to really come into their own. This week, they’ve freed William, found out about Caleb, and discovered that Dolores put a virus into William’s blood that let her find some information. Neat. (I may be underselling that last bit. Also, William is dead according to the computer system, although this is presented so casually I’m assuming it’s just standard “the authorities won’t be looking for you” talk.) Oh, and William has decided it’s his job to kill all the hosts, starting with Bernard and Stubbs. They smile and nod, and at the end of the episode, William has a shotgun.
- God, some of the dialog in this feels like it was picked up in bulk at the local Cliche-o-Mart. Caleb, talking about his time in the Russian civil war: “It was anything but civil.”
- So I guess all those frozen people are dead for real now, thanks to the EMP.
- Did anyone recognize the voice Caleb hears in his head at the end?
230 Comments
“God, some of the dialog in this feels like it was picked up in bulk at the local Cliche-o-Mart. Caleb, talking about his time in the Russian civil war: “It was anything but civil.””Fuck this I’m done guys. Anyone around here have Corona and want to spit in my mouth? Because that line just ruined life for me.Also isn’t the idea of the kinetic space rod that it is really big explosions, but no fallout? Doesn’t seem like it would make a small explosion.
Especially when we have a kinetic, bladed, zero-collateral damage weapon being launched from drones today.https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31409/everything-we-know-about-americas-sword-blade-hellfire-missile-and-its-latest-target
Right, cus your oh so clever Corona joke wasn’t hack at all.
God, some of the dialog in this feels like it was picked up in bulk at the local Cliche-o-Mart. Caleb, talking about his time in the Russian civil war: “It was anything but civil.” I kinda think that was the point.
I can see it as perhaps unintentionally a meta commentary on cliche writing that the reprogrammers may have used on Caleb but it could’ve been intentional too by Nolan and Joy.
It was the point exactly. It’s a callback to the very first scene of Westworld: it is deliberately hokey to show that it’s a fake.There’s a lot to complain about in this season. That is not one of them.
Hey AV can we get rid of the fake “Dr. Liz”? It can’t cost much time or cash to just cut that name and avatar off. Well if it does it is another reason this site and the group is in a death spiral.
This site is so pathetically desperate for clicks, they’d rather keep the trolls around, albeit in greyed purgatory, than to do their job and kick out for good with a permaban.
I read this as “desperate for chicks”
Yeah, I have to say when i heard that “it was anything but civil” I was like “Really, guys?” Then again, if I suppose if we’re talking about a guy with limited education who is seen as an outlier… Maybe he thinks he kind of came up with that? There has to be a reason we don’t see a ton of veterans who are also great fiction writers?
No. The kinetic strike is basically the same idea as the french airforce dropping concrete bombs on tanks. Contained destruction. The explosions being small is part of the point.
A cliche? In a false memory? Designed by brainwashers? What, are they much, much easier to retain and produce later by rote or something? Nah, can’t be that, must be bad writing
I didn’t see this comment before I posted the same exact thing. Seemed like it was straight out of one of the fake movie previews from Tropic Thunder
Charlotte is apparently on Maeve’s side now
I don’t think she’s on Maeve’s side, she just not on Dolores’ side anymore.So if Caleb crossing paths with Dolores was not an accident, how did Dolores know that Caleb would accept that particular job?
Man this episode was so cliche and predictable, that I just started talking with a friend about good films Vincent Cassel was in. I said the Mesrine gangster films are pretty damn fun. The conversation wss more fun.
last week I was hoping the silliness might be intentional, and this is just another simulation Dolores found herself in. But now not so sure. Everything is always pretty to look at least.I don’t fully understand Maeve and she doesn’t seem to operate on quite the same caliber as Dolores despite having all her wifi magic, she’s fun though.
“I don’t fully understand Maeve and she doesn’t seem to operate on quite the same caliber as Dolores despite having all her wifi magic, she’s fun though.”Thats been bugging me for a while—-wasn’t she upgraded to beyond genius levels in Season 1? Shouldn’t she be able to outwit and outthink Dolores at every turn?
Instead, it seems like Dolores is the one is the genius host and everybody else is playing catchup.
More than that why can’t she outsmart Serac. She can’t love having a master ordering her around.
I’ve always liked Maeve better than Dolores, but this season seems to have forgotten Maeve’s character. She was always extremely thoughtful and suspicious of others’ motives, even before being upgraded. The Maeve of seasons 1 and 2 would never so easily agree to do Serac’s dirty work. Why is she doing it now? Some vague promise of being reunited with her daughter that Serac might not be able or inclined to honor? Also, she’s not using any sort of subtlety in her confrontations with the Delorii. It’s pretty much just run in at full speed, start a fight, and see what happens. That’s not what Maeve of past seasons would have done.
Yes, I feel like they really fuddled up a very interesting character, who was clever in a different way than Delores. I always thought Delores and Maeve were supposed to be the flip side of each other, with similar goals, and I would have preferred the teaming up of them with some interesting conflict between Dolores’ cold calculation and Maeve’s shrewd assessment in determining the good in a person and her ability to quickly pivot in a plan.
She’s not doing it for Serac. Remember, he tried to trick her and use her once in “War World,” and she sniffed it out and got out from under his thumb. He doesn’t control her.
Doesn’t he? Because she tried to get away from him and he murdered his assistant in front of her and then threatened her daughter.
Oh, shit. Right. I forgot. So there may be some of that there. But I also think she’s driven on her own to stop Dolores. She just straight up doesn’t like her.
I think that’s true too. What I don’t get is why Maeve is buying any of what Serac is selling. She’s smarter than that. (Though perhaps we’ll see a big shocking twist wherein Dolores and Maeve are secretly working together to take him down, or something.)
I think she’s stringing him along and will use him when she needs to (resources, etc.), but ultimately she’ll take him down over the threats you reminded me of.
I hope so, because I really hate this throughline of the show that Maeve’s been doing the secret bidding of rich white men for the last three seasons (first Ford, now Serac). Maeve is the first host to achieve consciousness on her own, if I have my timelines right (maybe not to the point of creating a revolution, but she is the first to have the “hey, something’s not right here” feeling), she is by far the most interesting of the hosts that we see regularly, and I’m not loving that she’s the wind-up toy of a guy who could probably just kill Dolores himself if he wanted to.
I don’t like the inference either. Personally — but admittedly being team Maeve myself — I really don’t understand why she isn’t more of a centerpiece of the show. … and/or maybe I’m just in love with Thandie Newton.
Agreed; she is by far the most interesting character for me.
Wait, that should be Delori, with a single i, much like forum and fori. Or is it fora? Damn, my latin is weak these days.
I’m not sure. I only did 1 year of Latin in middle school. I debated looking it up before posting, but I decided on taking the lazy route.
Sorry, but I thought the plot developments revealed this episode were dumb and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief. So they’re living in a totalitarian world where any “outliers” are killed or captured and reprogrammed? How many are there in a world population I’m assuming is close to our own (or even significantly lower) and so these needles in a haystack are all laboriously found and disappeared? Even if they’re easily tracked by the computer, I still don’t like it. A couple of episodes back I referenced the plotting was reminding me of A Wrinkle In Time’s planet. I’m disappointed this is more the case than I thought. The worldbuilding this season has been far too rushed for the outlandish building it’s done. The thing that might redeem how stupid the “real world” is is if it’s not real, a simulation, like the park. Since the writers have already made living people have no free will, be controlled, and everything in their lives are known, like the hosts, anyway. Maybe.Does Serrac take mentally ill people like his brother and reprogram or disappear them? Shades of eugenics, American and Nazi, and that’s distasteful as a plot point.And they didn’t destroy the previous version of the machine? It’s still online and so is its location, which just happens to be the place Caleb was programmed in. (Did Dolores know about Caleb all along and their meeting wasn’t an accident?) That part was too close to the Bourne films for me, and wasn’t moving or exciting. You could guess Caleb killing his friend early on—their friendship was barely written so easy to betray but not poignant when that happened. Maeve and Dolores fighting was cool, but I kept thinking how dumb it was that Maeve was fighting her and didn’t see the giant bigger threat. Again, story, in this case character development, was way rushed, for her. We weren’t even shown Maeve’s great love for Hector this season which motivated her turn.And Dolores is all seeing, knowing, and indestructible, able to manipulate all situations. I didn’t mind this in the season’s first episodes, partly because those shows were good, but now am thinking there are no emotional and dramatic stakes for the character if she can do anything and survive.Grade: C for me.
I still stan Dolores.But I agree with questions about the outliers? I feel like there must be a whole bunch of rebel outliers out there fighting? It looked like it wasn’t exactly easy work brainwashing them each individually.
“Rebel outliers” makes me think of the Stars Wars universe, with Serrac being the Empire. It’s all so cliched while not making practical sense.
They said the brainwashing didn’t even work on 9/10 subjects and they just started putting the difficult cases on ice with Solomon.
You would think a hyper-intelligent AI like Maeve would notice that Dolores was crawling her way towards the “military-grade EMP” (with a giant red “On” button, no less.)
Also, why does Maeve want to perma-kill Dolores if Dolores has the only password to the virtual-reality server containing Maeve’s daughter?
Does the EMP erase their “pearls”, or does it just turn them off?
And how exactly was the EMP supposed to prevent Solomon from “escaping”? Couldn’t he just have escaped over the Internet, or something?
And why don’t Dolores and Maeve keep off-site backups? I mean, even my dentist keeps off-site backups.
Why is it that Dolores gives Caleb a big inspirational speech about how he should stop being a pawn and start being a “leader”, but the first step in his becoming a leader is to download a set of instructions from an insane AI?
I have to admit that this season really stopped making sense to me after about the second episode…
none of that characters have motivations that MAKE SENSEthere’s THAT.i loved this show and i am really not digging this year
More importantly, why would you leave your prototype super AIs lying around, especially if they were able to interface with people other than you and choose to assist those people to counter your own ends? Oh, and guard that supermind and the group that is the biggest threat to your plan with five security guards? Seems sloppy for such a control freak villian.
Also, the insane AI was disappointing. I was hoping it would say some whacked shit or try to manipulate the situation but it didn’t come off as insane at all.
Exactly what I wondered. What about Solomon is schizophrenic? He seemed perfectly rational to me.
I was hoping for GLaDOS.
You’re not just a regular moron. You were DESIGNED to be a moron.
As to the off-line backups, they might keep them but remember that last season Dolores destroyed all the host backups in the park (as part of her freeing the hosts), so IDK if they have any backups. Once the pearl is destroyed, the host is no more. Now, that said, I wouldn’t be surprised if Serac had a backup of Maeve somewhere and Dolores had made a back up of herself.
I’m not even sure that’s true. Dolores had 5 pearls and just copied herself onto all of them so as long as you have the original data files stored on a server somewhere you can reload it into a pearl which seems like nothing more than a flash drive at this point. Since Serac has interacted with Maeve in a virtual reality it would seem that he has access to her data somewhere.
True, true. I should have specified – if a pearl is destroyed and there is no backup, it’s game over for that host. For instance, there is presumably no backup of Hector* so when his pearl was crushed, so was the opportunity to ever see Hector again.*except that clearly Char-lores has taken backups of all the hosts, right? Before Serac could wipe the IP?
I would assume that’s what she took but it didn’t seem like she deleted anything. The more I think about it the less I understand. When Maeve first broke out of the simulation she saw a facility with hundreds of pearls all wired up so there are lots of pearls somewhere in the Delos facility. If the pearls can’t be backed up and Maeve could have been destroyed by Japanese Warlord/Dolores after he stabbed her with the sword then that’s some pretty crappy writing.
And why don’t Dolores and Maeve keep off-site backups? I mean, even my dentist keeps off-site backups.I laughed out loud on that one haha
why does Maeve want to perma-kill Dolores if Dolores has the only password to the virtual-reality server containing Maeve’s daughter?I have no problems with many plot points people seem to have problems with, except for the way Maeve is so stubbornly serving Serac when Serac doesn’t make a mystery of wanting to obliterate all hosts and their friends and families. At no point we’ve been given a strong reason for Maeve to be so fervently against Dolores, and every time they have a confrontation, Dolores says obvious stuff Maeve should agree with, and Maeven answers with “Nuh-uh”. (Also, as the review noted, she’s now allied with the Dolores who killed Hector against the Dolores who didn’t.)I get that they wanted to engineer as much fight coreographies as possible between Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton, but c’mon. They’re making Maeve into Serac’s personal terminator, and she deserved more than that.
I have the same question about the EMP. How does one see Solomon escaping? Does he make a Mad Dash for the door?
And Dolores is all seeing, knowing, and indestructible, able to manipulate all situations. I didn’t mind this in the season’s first episodes, partly because those shows were good, but now am thinking there are no emotional and dramatic stakes for the character if she can do anything and survive.This. The whole season has been boss/god mode Delores with Bernard, Caleb, Maeve, Stubbs, and William bystanders. Aside from repeatedly getting their asses kicked by Delores, i’m not even sure what the point of these characters are anymore.
“This. The whole season has been boss/god mode Delores with Bernard, Caleb, Maeve, Stubbs, and William bystanders.”Well, that certainly came to a halt this week. Maeve pretty much wiped the floor with Dolores Prime until she did the standard cliche of talking too much before ending her foe.That was the part that REALLY annoyed me.
Except that Maeve is dead yet again for the third time this season, while Delores loses an arm and still lives. How is it that Delores can take so much damage in a way that the other hosts can’t other than for plot armor and contrivances?
Is Maeve actually dead? The EMP might have knocked them both out, but from the teasers it looks like Dolores is revived and sitting in a corridor with one arm, then goes and transfers to a new body.My guess is (if i’m seeing it correctly) that they’re both just incapacitated.But yeah, Maeve should have easily won that battle, and fell victim to that stupid cliche of talking too much before finishing off her foe.
I sure hope so that Maeve survives this, because I had mentioned in another comment, her whole character has been pointless this season other than to be killed over and over again by Boss/God mode Delores who can survive being shot, chopped up, blown up, and an EMP. She’s probably the most powerful machine in Sci-fi history at this point.
I kept wondering why there had to be a fight at all. Can’t Maeve just tell Dolores to turn off?–as late as last week, Dolores-C? reminded us Maeve can just turn things off. Does that ability work on all electronic devices except Dolores and her pet drones?
I think it was shown previously that her powers don’t work on sentient hosts or at least Delores, but I mentioned in another comment too why are they even fighting? Aside from Serac egging them both on, they have no beef with each other.
Right, I’ve kinda lost what Maeve’s actual motivation even is anymore.
none of that characters have motivations that MAKE SENSEthere’s THAT.i loved this show and i am really not digging this year
And the fact that Dolores is basically a nazi seems also to be overlooked by the show, or everybody, unless they even root for her, which is insane.
While I’m not getting hung up on some of the details that a lot of commenters here are pointing out—many could still be addressed next episode—the show definitely has to answer some major plot points and character arcs.I’m still not sure why Maeve is so sure Serac will deliver on anything he’s promised, or that Dolores was ever a threat to her wants or goals. As many have said, I don’t think Dolores was going to destroy the Sublime in the first place. If Maeve is just going after Dolores because of revenge for Hector, that’s a pretty weak motivation, especially when it was Hale-ores that killed him. So is Hale helping Maeve? Is she an agent of chaos, against everyone now? The opening scene was a bit confusing as to who was doing what, and with who, before Musashi got killed. I’m also not sure where Bernard/Stubbs/William are going or what their ultimate goal is in all of this. Stop Dolores? Help Serac? Three opposing factions? I’m trying not to judge until I see how it plays out, but there’s some heavy lifting to do to pull this off.
I’m still waiting for them to tie this all back to Ford and Westworld which they haven’t done. How do people like Ford and Arnold exist and create a place like Westworld when you have this all seeing, all knowing machine that sees, predicts, and controls everything? Where does the Sublime, Ghost in the Machine/immortality, James Delos factor in? Is that why Serac was trying to buy out Delos and had Charlotte act as a mole? Did Ford build Westworld and create sentient hosts as a way to rebel against Ford?
Considering that there are two more seasons left, or rather one confirmed, season left, i’m guessing that the next episode will be a cliffhanger and two parter? And that next season, we’ll get our questions answered, everything explained? We’re the only ones disappointed by all of this. Ed Harris is as well: https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/a32271643/westworld-ed-harris-season-3-complaint/
Maybe the Rehoboam system has no “jurisdiction” in Westworld, can’t even see what happens there, and that’s why it’s such a popular tourism spot. Their “be whoever you want to be” sales pitch could be pretty literal.
I don’t get why Maeve just doesn’t walk up to Dolores and say: “We’re not enemies. I don’t give a fuck about humans, kill them all, I won’t get in your way. I just want to join my daughter. Send me to the secret coordinates in your head, and I’ll never bother you again. Pleasure doing business with you!”
I can’t remember: did Serac put some sort of “Escape from New York” style time-bomb in her head is she doesn’t comply?
hopefully the reason the characters motivations aren’t making sense is that…idk: in a deeper simulation and the real earth has been destroyed and the remaining humans are trying to find out how that happened by running a multi layered simulation?remember william is in a future world covered in sand, reincarnated as a Host at the end of Season Two
Yeah, it’s hard to see how the reprogramming system could really work at any sort of useful scale. Putting the failed subjects in Minority Report or Demolition Man jail seems pretty unnecessary compared to just killing them (a system they already have in place with the dumb “crime app”) or even putting them in… regular jail.I didn’t care for how long they dragged out Caleb’s revelation: after basically telling us he killed his friend by having not-Mark-Zuckerberg say “it was you” in that drug trip episode, it didn’t really need to be a big reveal. It was also pretty cheap the way the situation kind of twisted itself into knots so that Caleb can be the good guy: it’s clear-cut self-defense: Francis helpfully talks and waits for Caleb to get ready rather than just killing him. Elliot from Just Shoot Me seemed kind of wasted, too. At the start of the episode when we first see the flashback I was thinking to myself “Well, get ready to see this 5 or 6 more times.” Solomon the obsolete AI: very ready to be conscripted into the Dolores Plan with just a little coaxing, and even before that to causally reveal all the secrets of the system. No matter, Caleb can finally be free… by rigidly following the instructions of an AI (though I have a… medium amount of faith the finale will address this).Maeve vs. Dolores: pretty underwhelming. Fights between the hosts are trouble since we’ve long established that we can just make new ones with approximately zero consequence. Maeve continues to just be… pretty bad at this, which is unfortunate. And we’ll just… do it again next week?
By the episode, this show gets more ambitious in its vision, but is less able to pull it off.
Probably the best summary of this show I’ve seen.
The reprogramming/cold storage plan is especially strange given how public the “outlier removal” process can apparently be. Why does a supergenius AI devoted to maintaining an orderly society and given nearly total authority to achieve that goal allow this process to involve kidnappings and murders on the streets of major cities in broad daylight?
Regarding Solomon: exactly what about him was supposed to be “crazy”? Was there anything about his behavior that struck you as “schizophrenic”? Me neither.
none of that characters have motivations that MAKE SENSE there’s THAT. i loved this show and i am really not digging this year
Lol, Maeve and Dolores fighting was the worst part of all this to me. Absolutely no internal logic that got us to that point, they’ve butchered Maeve into a cardboard cut out villain.
This show is Metal Gear now. Exciting and overstuffed and cool to look and fond of its own pretensions to a fault (and about 60-75% of the way up its own ass…). Dawned on me during the Dolores v. Maeve fight. Two badass combatants throwing down while their AI-controlled buddies circle the scene looking to take pot-shots at anyone who pops into the open. Had some serious last-boss vibes.
The post show making of really makes it clear that they are far more interested in big set pieces than the actual plot and characters at this stage. It’s all “we forced through this car chase” and “oh, I didn’t realise I had to fight my best friend this season”. If the actresses embodying the characters for many years get flummoxed by the script, maybe you’re not taking it in the right direction.
I read the whole “Crime App as means of weeding them out” as an indication that they’d started just killing the Outliers because there were too many of them to safely capture and treat.
Yeah, I think that’s the case, that the crime app serves as both regulating and killing them.
I’m just disappointed at the story choice here in creating this kind of world. Effectively run by a king who controls all his subjects in a quixotic attempt to mitigate human violence. Ha, I just realized then why the Westworld park would be so popular, because it gives an outlet (to those who can afford it) to go nuts without fear of Serrac’s reprisal. This was an obvious connection but in my displeasure where the story went, I missed it. I still don’t like this world.
At least two things: it’s not “shades of” eugenics, it is eugenics. However “distasteful” you find it, that’s an idea that currently experiencing a very real resurgence, and art critically reflecting that is Good, Actually.Maeve’s job, as given to her by a person who has essentially threatened to permanently seperate her and her daughter and send them into eternal damnation as Hosts in a simulated version of the park she spent her entire conscious life trying to escape, is to kill Dolores. Her not knowing or caring about the Solomon business is just consistent writing.
to think that in real life we have idiotic plots like Q Anon that’s basically like this, I’m pretty sure people on “chans” will start to use caleb and some other elements from this episode to spread more bs around
I don’t have the same level of problems with the overall season arc that Zack has, I guess I’m just fine with it being kinda pulpy and dumb sometimes and largely ripping off a show the creators came from previously.But he makes an excellent point that Dolores definitely just killed everyone in that facility with the EMP blast.
If anything, the setup for the finale seems pretty good.
PROUDLY SERVING FROM LAB TO SLABYikes! This was disappointing because for me not much of it worked. I see Caleb is distraught he killed his friend, but he would have been dead without pulling the trigger first. Then he is processing all those reveals in only the way Aaron Paul can, spiked hair, eyes bugged and half open mouth, over and over again. I know I am suppose to feel for him but I never witnessed any bro-bonding with his friend so all of this felt meh. I was far more invested in Maeve and Dolores which was added immeasurably with the addition of each other’s drones in that fight. But even that felt flat because I am not sure who we are suppose to be rooting for so of course my default mode is always Maeve……….because she is awesome.
Those killing platforms suddenly developed critical failures in their targeting.
They were both pretty garbage in that fight scene, for sure. Clearly another contracting boondoggle: some things never change.Even when under Dolores’s control earlier, it was very nice of everyone to stay standing in the exact same place as the drone casually weaved around the compound so its earlier markers weren’t useless.The show is clearly most interested in showing the supremacy of the ultimate weapon, the katana.
Yeah im going to need for Maeve to download a strategic combat training manual matrix style cos what even? She keeps getting her ass handed to her and its frustrating.And frankly im team not dolores..because she just doing too much.I thought the show wanted us to be team Bernard, but we are one episode away from the series finale and he still seems to just be drifting from place to place belatedly realizing things.Then i figured we are now meant to be on Caleb’s side, but he just seems to only want to kill Serac for messing with him, even though really the show is suggesting that human nature is the problem, not the AI , or even Serac.
Im honestly ready for Maeve to win, and Serac have his world back at this point. At least he has a clarity of vision lol
Yeah im going to need for Maeve to download some combat training matrix style cos what even? She keeps getting her ass handed to her and its frustrating.And frankly im team not dolores..because she just doing too much.I thought the show wanted us to be team Bernard, but we are one episode away from the series finale and he still seems to just be drifting from place to place belatedly realizing things.
Im honestly ready for Maeve to win, and Serac have his world back at this point. At least he has a clarity of vision lol
The decision to establish how accurate the new smart weapons are and then immediately crap on it just so you could have the same tired cliche that the main characters can’t be shot was an odd choice.
Not to get too sci-fi technical, but just like the targets were taken out in Caleb’s flashback with invisible hand/backslap tracking to make the drone kills, I think Dolores’ and Maeve’s drone kill works the same way with some body mapping technology. It may not work as well on hosts because of their mobility. FYI, my degree is in scifiology from the Roddenberry School of Fiction.
Thats how I feel. Tandie Newton is more likable and she doesn’t casually murder people as much. Why are we rooting for Dolores?
Yeah, definitely Team Thandie for me.
AVClub wants you to. Remember? https://tv.avclub.com/dolores-might-actually-be-humanity-s-best-hope-on-westw-1842819169/amp
Oh right I forgot about that article. Good lord.
I have no idea. I can’t stand Dolores.
I know I’m going to take heat for this, but I’ve never felt Aaron Paul was that great of an actor to begin with—-even in Breaking Bad. This series, he’s been extremely one dimensional as you pointed out. I just don’t get anything from his performance.Thankfully just about everybody else is phenomenal, although I’ve seen people have problems with ERW’s stony expressions, I think it fits quite well.
He’s been bad this series, but peak Marlon Brando couldn’t do shit with such a poorly written role and ridiculous season 3 plot.
I love Breaking Bad, but I wasn’t blown away by Paul there, even though I liked the character. However: He’s great on Bojack Horseman.
Yeah, of his line readings last night fell pretty flat. I remember the one in particular when they were surveying the vast array of frozen outliers, and he was like, “They’re people. How could you do this?” It’s supposed to be this big revelation of the true horror of what Serac has been doing, but Caleb sounded like he was listening to someone telling a boring, never-ending story and was occasionally throwing a question in for the sake of being polite.
The only reason I could see for keeping them alive and frozen instead of turning them into fertilizer was so Dolores could make her comparison to Delos.
I thought he was great in Breaking Bad, but he’s been pretty awful in everything else.
Aaron Paul is the Keanu Reeves of meth.
Aaron Paul is ALWAYS one-dimensional. He has no range. He has one expression: Brooding anger.
He is excellent as a voice actor in Bojack Horseman though.
Speaking of Aaron Paul’s spiked hair… I have to believe it was pretty deliberate to show two different flashbacks to Caleb in the goggle therapy, with two very distinctive hairstyles. One, he has the spiked hair, but the very next one, he has a shaved head. Is this just meant to show how long he was actually in the facility, or… Is this some kind of Bernard-Arnold-typical Westworld playing with time, and the shots of him with the longer spiked hair are actually from the future, when he’s being reconditioned again after the revolution fails?
So Caleb is not the bad guy that I thought he was, as much as he’s been a pawn the whole time by the forces that be. The reveal that Francis was actually selling him out, that he initiated by listening to their captive was a mind twisting tragedy. I’m hoping for a better end to Caleb than being the instrument of humanity’s destruction. Now we have Solomon vs Rehoboam, and Dolores seems less like a villain, and Maeve being more the well meaning tool of the true antagonist? I’m not completely sure.I love how we are still questioning who we should be rooting for, including what are Bernard’s real motives, is Stubbs all he seems to be, and whether William is really the “good guy” he’s anointed himself. If nothing else it’s entertaining, and their ability to shift our alliances hasn’t felt cheap or manipulative, just complicated like IRL depending on your point of view. I hope next week is just as satisfying as the kick-ass scene with Clementine and Hanaryo dealing death to Musashi.
Oh hey, a person on this board who actually still likes this show. You and Ellestra. Everyone else here (including, apparently, the reviewer) just shows up to bitch and whine, like the show wasn’t custom built for their bespoke expectations and so it’s awful. This is why we can’t have nice things, I suppose. Cynicism eats at every good thing. Or, given that the show has already been renewed for another season, I guess we can have some nice things despite the whiny nihilists.
tobiastherearedozensofus.gifYes it’d be nice if this place didn’t seem to just constantly shit on this show. Despite the decent-to-good grades the reviews are always negative and the commentary seems to follow suit. Though maybe I’m nihilist in the sense that I’m more or less rooting for Abigail.
y’all can have your circle jerk elsewhere if you want
You can also start enjoying life instead of whining or criticising anything good in the world. Be happy – enjoy a good show
Or don’t, but I wish people would realize opinions are not facts. I wish people would let others like what they like, and dislike what they want and just move on, rather than behaving like a snide dickhead.
Hell yeah this guy/gal gets it. Thank you! Love this show. All these people griping about it….and yet they still watch it lol. Like just drop the nitpicky criticism and realize it’s an awesome show and hop on for the ride
Include me in that group too. I really like Westworld, and I think I actually like this season more than the last one with rare exceptions (Maeve had a better storyline last season).
I was late to the first season, so I was able to binge most of it and then catch the last few episodes as they aired. It wasn’t until I was finished that I thought to see what the comments and reviews were like, and I have to say I’m glad that I *didn’t* check back here after each episode (side from the speculation that would ultimately be spoiler about the man in Black), because everyone was so down on it.
I like it and have actually enjoyed season 3, my only complaint is that I felt like I had a grasp on what was happening up until this episode, the Clementine/Musashi bit lost me, but that could just mean I need to do some reading up.
I know right, what are these a**holes doing writing such critical reviews on a… TV criticism platform. Genuinely though, if you take any criticism of a show you like as “bitching and whining,” people being “whiny nihilists,” I would say that you’re the one whining. You’re allowed to like it, they’re allowed to dislike it, and I don’t think this review was unfair at all. Personally I’ve really been enjoying this season; I also don’t think it’s as good as previous seasons and I agree with this review — critiquing a show =/= unfair hatred of it.
The idea that one of Caleb/Francis had to die was so stupid. Caleb was a one of the few reprogramming successes. I’m guessing Francis was too. Clearly they were useful assets. Back at base, both guys could have gotten the Men In Black short-term-memory-erasing light pulse. No harm, no foul.
Was Caleb reprogrammed after killing Francis as well? Because in his reprogramming scene he mentions Francis’ death.
I’m enjoying this season.I also don’t really understand why there is a need to root for anyone.
Bringing in a 2nd insane Super AI that has no reason for still being in operation didn’t seem cheap or manipulative? Also if they wanted it to be kick ass they would have brought back Armistice and not useless Clementine.
Bringing in a 2nd insane Super AI that has no reason for still being in operation didn’t seem cheap or manipulative?That’s a good point. There are many things that could still blow up in the show’s face, without a doubt. I have another comment that talks about them. I’m trying to see where things end up after the finale before I judge the season, but there are many things I’m scratching my head about, especially after I take some time and reflect on each episode.
I’m going to be disappointed if William’s pronouncement that he’s the “good guy” turns out to be any less than hil-fucking-larious. Saint Peter would be like, “Uh, yeah we’ve got the charity stuff listed, but then there’s those decades of murder and rape of sentient beings and the daughter-murdering . . . ?”
Especially when we know Serac already beat him to the destroying host thing. There’s like ten left. He just repeats his loop shooting at those who try to save him.
I mean, we already found out that Caleb, like every human, was a pawn. But now he’s even more of a pawn. And there’s another computer system that’s running things. And… does it even matter? It looks like they’re already setting the reset button next week.
Not just a pawn, but a Passed Pawn.
This season has basically flipped over in a ditch on the side of the road. The underbelly is exposed, the wheels are spinning slowly and it may all go up in flames. All’s left is to wait for the tow truck to haul this shit to the junk yard. Caleb’s backstory reveal? Don’t care.Maeve/Dolores showdown that’s been building up all season long? Yawn.Clementine and old friends making cameos? ShrugStubbs, Bernard and William? Like the Three Stooges except not funny.Inconvenient humans locked away in pods? Seen it many, many times. Dialog? “Showgirls” level bad.It is a fucking crime how this much good will from previous season, money spent by HBO and acting talent combined to make this dumpster fire.
So I
think we can now say for sure Caleb didn’t meet Dolores by accident. This was the plan from the beginning – make humans fight it out between themselves while Dolores can cut out domain for her people. But just like humans are their own worst enemy so Dolores worst enemies aren’t Serac and his machine but other hosts. Especially herself.And just like Serac she made them. Her vision is so singular and her pursue of her goal is so laser focused she hasn’t noticed the piles of enemies she created allong the way. Everyone she took someone from like Hanaryo and Maeve. Everyone she used like Clementine. But most of all herself. She doesn’t like to be used and she used and discarded herselves. And now they all came to stop her.
Maeve head better body and better fighting skills this time but Dolores still outplanned her. She was the one who had human back up for post EMP. But she lost the only other her who still believed in her. At least Sato managed to get the package out.Still as much as love Maeve and get where she’s coming from Dolores is right this time. No one is safe in The Valley Beyond if the hardware it is running on can be shut down in the real. I wouldn’t believe Serac won’t do it once he gets what he wants.
I think, calling in a couple of Maeve’s former associates to cut
Dolores-Musashi in half, but Charlotte seems like the only Dolores that
Maeve would have a grudge against, considering what went down last week.
I’m pretty sure Hale didn’t introduce herself to Maeve and her group. Her being in the shadows when making that call to Sato wasn’t exactly subtle. She just give them information to use them for revenge on the version of herself who used her.
Not all of the reprogramming worked, but Caleb’s did;
I think we all wondered why Serac and Rehoboam allow Rico app to exist and obviously it’s because he’s using it to get the outlier out of his project. I wonder if Ash and Giggles will get a personal on Caleb. And if they are part of the edited too.
Also, William is dead according to
the computer system, although this is presented so casually I’m assuming
it’s just standard “the authorities won’t be looking for you” talk.
William is an outlier and like all of them in Serac re-education facilities he has been declared dead. In case he’s one of the 90% who can’t be currently edited. Of course once Serac gets his hands on that sweet Delos client data he believes he’ll be able to edit 100%. Including the sleeping ones.
Serac doesn’t want to kill people. He wants to save them to be happy, complacent drones. It seems even Jean Mi too
realised at the end this went too far. That pursuing
perfect safety costs too much. He asked Solomon for better strategy.
Serac also didn’t destroy Solomon after Rehoboam was built. Everyone
believed Rehoboam was a perfected version of the system but it looks
like it’s just a one that’s less likely to rebel. Solomon was
threatening to get out of control and become another outlier so
Engerraund got rid of it too and replaced it with something edited to be
compliant. But it seems like Rehoboam ,like all the edited, an
inferior version. Otherwise Rehoboam could easily prognose and
counteract Solomon’s strategy.
Did anyone recognize the voice Caleb hears in his head at the end?
That was Dolores’ digital assistant. The one she’s been talking to all this season.
I did half think that having watched POI, I had more backstory here. Like Caleb isn’t John, he’s Shaw, which is fine. And as much as we liked the Machine, Solomon kind of reminds me of her. But I am getting the sense I was more watching the show as it should be viewed when I had to catch up five weeks in.
Maeve’s whole point seems to be just to fail spectacularly all season. Even with her powers. Her story hasn’t moved forward at all. I don’t understand why she’s fighting against Dolores other than for what the showrunners want and prove that she’s still stuck in her loop by mentioning her daughter repeatedly. That’s dumb and inconsistent considering that Maeve willingly let her go into the Sublime with her new host mother, she left her behind. Ditto for Bernard, William, and Stubbs.I guess HBO is that confident that they’ll keep Newton, Harris, and Wright on board for the next two seasons enough for their character arcs to make sense?
“With her powers,” you’d assume she could just tell Dolores and the drones and probably Solomon and Rehoboam to just ‘turn off.’ Hmmm, maybe that was Ford’s plan all along?
I’m not sure Ford matters any longer, but I’m with you on why didn’t Maeve just turn off Dolores?
Several commenters last week helpfully explained what I didn’t quite get about the whole tracker/blood-protein thing: that it was tracking William so Team Doloreses could find the reprogramming center, which was in an unknown location.But… when this actually plays out, what it did was actually find a different, obsolete location completely different from where William actually was. They called it a virus, so it just… got onto the network to find the place? But presumably in a different way then what they could have done with the direct access to Rehoboam they very recently had.A new point I don’t really get: Bernard and William, among others, talk about how Serac needed “biometrics” or genetic data or whatever to make this plan work., and we already established (and mention again here) that William sold him “anonymized” data from the park which he used for that purpose. What is the point of any of this? It’s really unclear what a bunch of data on random park visitors has to do with brainwashing, say, Caleb, who’s presumably never been there. Is this just an attempt to connect the season’s events more strongly to Westworld and nothing more? (It is the title of the show, after all…)
My problem with all of this is that there’s no longer “depth” to the world. They spent several seasons building up Delos and its architects as bold visionaries, working to extended human life. But now there’s multiple computers that control human activity, and Serac can buy out Delos in secret, stage a corporate takeover (William and Charlotee are both ruthless but the rest of the board are just generic NPCs) and destroy Delos’ work.
That doesn’t make Serac powerful, it just makes the world small.
It’s a small world… after all?
And the reprogramming center was located in… one of the most visible, desirable, and expensive locations in all of San Francisco.
The most visible, desirable, and expensive locations in all of San Francisco is a fucking desert? What even is your country?
Is the “reprogramming center” the Mexican base or is it the “day spa” overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge? Because that’s where they were tracking him.
Is the “reprogramming center” the Mexican base or is it the “day spa” overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge? Because that’s where they were tracking him.The reprogramming center is the Mexican base, which is also the lab where they sent William’s blood to identify the unknown protein.
The Mexican base.
I don’t even know what Serac needed the WW guest data for. We already know that it’s only a certain group of people who attended the parks, right? Like, your average joe wouldn’t be attending; only people who can afford the park fees and have a desire to fuck/kill/marry/befriend robots are going to be there. I mean, how many sociopaths does Rehoboam need for their predictions?
He wanted to reprogram people, that requires him to understand the human mind to a very deep level. Westworld was running brainscans on everyone that wore a hat while they were vacationing there. That is a gold-mine of info for that goal
I said last week that this was a Good Dumb Show; What hit me tonight is that this show is exactly what would happen if Christopher Nolan was making movies from his brother’s scripts that ran about 5 hours too long and has to goose its budget in the process. Slick, assured, high-minded – but when you have to dig into the machinations of the story and extend something that would’ve worked as one effective sub-10 minute sequence as the A-plot of an hourlong television show, the seams begin to show. Worse yet, you let the audience get very, very far ahead of you.It was well done, it was an enjoyable hour of sci-fi action TV, and even though I was basically just doing the Kermit/Christian Bale nod for 60 minutes of not-that-shocking revelations, it got me excited to see where they’re going to go with this story now that all the pieces are on the table. Their Loop works, I’ll give them that.
“slick, assured, high-minded – but when you have to dig into the machinations of the story and extend something that would’ve worked as one effective sub-10 minute sequence as the A-plot of an hourlong television show, the seams begin to show.”Well, he DID do PoI for 5 seasons, with far better results IMHO. Maybe too much HBO money and freedom is not necessarily a good thing.
I recall Nolan stating that they had the whole arc mapped out before they began shooting. If that’s true it does seem like they put more effort into the front part of the show. DGMW, I love the show. It has so many get moments in it, but the fabric is looking a wee bit threadbare by this point.In a totally random comment, the klaxon on the mech was hilarious. I want that as my notification tone!
“We had it all mapped out: An engrossing first season, a flailing second season, a pivot to being an almost completely different show in the third season…”
That was strike three on “big” reveals. First, unleashing the data for a world in “chaos” has been a big miss since there has been virtually no production effort to portray that situation . Second, finding out Delores just copied herself multiple times was just underwhelming. And now we all pretty much knew Caleb killed Francis, but were waiting for the why and how, and what it would all mean. Well THAT was disappointing. They two weren’t portrayed as being very close. They also gave away the Russian war deceit by casting an actor as the target who is well known as an American. And, again, the action was pitifully staged for an undercover assassination operation in a chaotic Russian war theater. I mean, the director told Aaron Paul, to what, stand in plain view and…pretend to tie your shoe, while the other guys – including an African American in Russia, stand there in plain view and stare at the target. THEN THEY JUST LEAVE so a space drone can shoot them. It was so lame – fake or not.Then ten minutes later Delores has a hand-held remote drone with equal fire power and no NORAD requirement required. And where does she get all this shit? This show is lazy. How did they end up in Mexico on horseback? How did Maeve find them so quickly? If they could have Maeve there within an hour of them strolling in by horeseback, why not warn the guards of the attack?And bringing swords to what have been automatic weapon gunfights… but the guns rarely ever hit anything.And stealing a car that would be, what, a 150 years old by then? The cars at that gas station are historic NOW. Again, sloppy production. Couldn’t get, build, or CGI themselves a cool modern car, so they go 1972 on us.
This is really a second-rate production with a cluster of a story, but with first rate talent.
To be fair, Enrico Colantoni is a Canadian. Don’t erase his identity! (but yes to all of the above)
They also gave away the Russian war deceit by casting an actor as the target who is well known as an American.I don’t get this complaint at all. Colantoni isn’t a wealthy pharmaceutical executive, either.
My point is, viewers know him as this average Joe kind of guy, so it further disrupted a terribly staged scene about Russian civil war. It was half-assed all the way around. And I agree, his performance as evil executive type doesn’t resonate either.
My point is, viewers know him as this average Joe kind of guy, so it further disrupted a terribly staged scene about Russian civil war.Viewers also know him as an up-and-coming mafia boss. And a womanizing high-fashion photographer. And a private investigator teaching his daughter the ropes. Or maybe viewers know him as an alien commander obsessed with 80s television.Actors act. That’s kinda what they do. The notion that the producers somehow gave away the plot by hiring a versatile character actor for the role is… odd. There’s plenty to complain about this show, but this?
So now the show is even more “Person Interest with Robots”. POI could get hacky at times. It was far from a perfect show. but I liked all the characters. There’s not one character on this show that I would care about if they got hit by a meteor.
POI was never hacky. It stayed true to its vision the whole way through. It was a little dull at points, especially early on, sure. And it was far closer to perfection than this. Westworld has no vision, and the dialogue is more ear-splitting than most CBS dialogue.
I started watching Westworld after discovering PoI on netflix and WW just keeps on disappointing me. WW is clearly the more expensive show, but it lacks the heart and character PoI managed to develop despite its procedural origins.
PoI succeeds where it matters most—the characters, the world-building, the plotting—in fact, it succeeds in those areas more than almost any other show that tried to tell one over-arching story. People complained a lot about the expository dialogue, and fair enough. But almost everything good about Westworld is superficial.
PoI was never as convoluted as this show, even at its most dense.But the similarities reared their ugly head again, with Solomon being a near carbon copy of Samaritan’s biggest downfall—the mental instability of their respective creators translated to the machines.
Quite the opposite in fact—the dense nature of the plot was one of its biggest strengths, as it was perfectly lucid and served the characters and themes of the show.
I guess my choice of words was poor, but you pretty much corrected it into what I was getting at—lucidity of the narrative.At no point was I ever really confused about where PoI was going with its story, but I frequently have to go back in WW to figure out what the F is going on. And even then I often have to go to the web to see if anybody else figured it out.Not that I’m the brightest bulb in the row or anything, but when I need explanation and research to figure out what I just watched, it becomes more of a chore than enjoyment. Especially after I get the explanation and it ends up being ‘meh’.
I kept thinking they want to do PoI by way of the Manchurian Candidate, but it didn’t quite work–not even if it’s POI mixed with the remake.
Maybe it was the PoI nostalgia, but Enrico Colantoni managed to be more compelling in this guest spot than most actors on the show. (Plus, here, as there, he was an ‘outlier’)
Not really a part of civilization…
His being in this, and in that coat, made the episode worthwhile.
Yeah, they’re pulling plot points wholesale from POI now; Caleb killing his partner is the exact same as Stanton shooting Reese. I expect to find out the Caleb’s partner isn’t actually dead and will come back at some point. It makes me regret and appreciate PoI ending at the same time. I loved that show so much and I would love to see more, but ending as it did kept it from running out of steam. I mean, I still watch Supernatural and like it, but a part of me considers everything from season 6 onwards as fanfic of varying quality.
I thought it was interesting that Caleb was involved in a future Russian Civil War. Up to this time, I assumed he was in yet another Middle East conflict This at least mixes things up a bit.
It took a VERY long time to reveal what I had already guessed about Caleb: that his memories of the past were incorrect and he got fucked over and it makes him real mad. There, I’ve summed it up.
I don’t understand why Maeve is fighting Dolores, other than for self-preservation. The threat that Dolores will do something with the hosts who are in the heaven server is very vague. Even Dolores does not seem remotely interested in doing anything with them – she sent Teddy there. And Maeve should be too smart to be tricked on going on a revenge quest over the death of Hector.
The problem with Caleb’s boring big reveal is that it doesn’t even make him all that mad. He still seems confused and frustrated, which is quite different from having a righteous anger that can be directed at something. He still seems like a conflicted toolbag who can be pointed in whatever direction someone smarter than he is wants to point him. If his character has progressed in a meaningful way, I hope it shows up in the next episode.For as much screen time as they invested into telling us that his Secret was Very, Very Important, it’s not that interesting and it just confirms some things that were pretty obvious from the beginning.
I don’t know why she’s fighting Dolores because she should be able to just turn Dolores off.
Just finished it, so maybe I’ve got new-episode-rose-lenses on but despite some things being predictable (I’ve had a feeling Caleb killed his friend from episode 1 or 2), I thought a lot of this episode was fine, even good.Maeve isn’t going to only have a grudge against Halores. She knows Dolores split herself and despite each entity largely operating independently, it’s still Prime Dolores’ plan and there’s a version of her in each copy. Maeve is in full-on “Fuck Delores” mode, and even if she knew it was coming from a copy, it’s not like she not going to turn down murdering another copy.Also, I disagree that the tension hasn’t been built up. Through all three seasons now, Maeve has been to shown to have a different standpoint on things from Delores up to and including the slaughter while hosts were escaping into Cyber Heaven. I can’t imagine she has forgiven her for that, and now Dolores’ actions have not only put that (and her daughter) at risk, but it’s ultimately cost her Hector as well.And while Caleb’s background was more or less expected, it’s not only the way they people have fucked him over (brainwashing him, then essentially manipulating him into having the same done to countless others, ultimately putting a bounty on him that his best friend in the world accepts), he goes from being a war vet/hero with an idealized version of his friend’s passing to essentially being forced to remember/know that his mind has been raped for years and not only is his best friend dead at his hands, it’s BECAUSE the only person he could trust betrayed that trust.Also, there is something immensely horrific at the lights coming up to show hundreds, maybe thousands of people kidnapped, given an attempted lobotomy, and then put into an unending stasis, all at the hands of a human who has developed a God complex thinking he’s going to save the world.I think because the first and—to a degree—the second season had alternating timelines/narratives that some people feel this third season is some kind of a betrayal of the show Westworld was, but I genuinely love how it continues to expand outward, building on what came before but also showing how rotten even the world outside the park can be under its shiny exterior, and I’m liking the dark extremes, Black Mirror style that it’s taking different technologies.
Also, the William showing up as “dead.” In the very next scene with these characters, they talk about how a number of other missing people became listed as dead because they had been moved to that facility. So while it may turn out that he actually did die and was replaced with a host leading to the S2 after credits, it was pretty clear that they were insinuating his deceased status was fabricated.
I’m just glad that I got to comment here before that troll version of Dr. Emilio showed up to Cooy/Paste shit all over the episode in the comments.It’s the tiny victories these days. 😉
I think I counted 5 in this comment section. He’s very upset…..haha
Oh yeah it’s always the same bit over and over again. Their post history is like a horror show. lol
This season is starting to remind me of the 1967 film The President’s Analyst, a dark satire about where the world was heading. I don’t want to spoil the surprise ending if you haven’t seen it — actually what else do you have to do? Go watch it, the film’s considered a cult classic for a reason.
Well, that was an episode of television. I guess if there’s a load of expository dialogue you need dropped, you can do a lot worse than Enrico Colantoni, even if he is basically playing a similar character to his last show with the same creator. I wish they had kept his character alive, he seemed like he would be an interesting person to have around in the final chapters of this season.Also–wait–next week is the finale? This did not feel like a pentultimate episode.
this show went from fresh and exciting to predicable and reductive but i can’t figure out WHYit’s just not a good story and the padded episodes about getting the money, etc who fucking cares? is this an episode of Rick and Morty?because an AI that develops an app is straight out of R+M this show is telling a story that DOESN’T NEED TO BE TOLD
So with just 1 episode remaining, I guess it’s pretty obvious that Bernard and Stubbs are not going to do anything really of any importance. And the show has completely ruined William, a sentiment that Ed Harris fully shares, as he’s stated in interviews that he really hates season 3…
So with just 1 episode remaining, I guess it’s pretty obvious that Bernard and Stubbs are not going to do anything really of any importance.
I dunno’. The first same-sex Host marriage would be a landmark event.
DON’T DATE ROBOTS
This shit with Maeve is maybe the worst writing I’ve seen in the show. She spends 2 seasons fighting for hosts not caring an iota for humans, only wanting her daughter back, to now… working for a guy who has made it clear he’ll kill every single host once he beats Dolores. Even if she only cares about her daughter, her only chance at getting that is with Dolores, not Cerac. Unless I’m missing something, this show thinks its audience is a bunch of dolts who just want to see cringe inducing fan service battles with its two most popular characters, logic be damned. Maeve should die in 3×08 and never return.
The samurai sword trope has to end. Good thing people are horrible shots in this show, though.
Sigh. The new, engaging ‘Westworld’ has sadly reverted back to the bland, vague, and needlessly convoluted old ‘Westworld’.1. Caleb was WAY more interesting as an everyman cog in the machine who decides to go rogue. He is completely lame as a ‘chosen one’ unique harbinger to bring about the end of mankind.2. Caleb’s NEW backstory isn’t even tragic. If his buddy HADN’T been trying to kill him, and Caleb murdered him, that would be a more brutally senseless death and the audience could really understand how his brain has been scrambled.3. Dolores’ and Maeve’s fight scene was terrible and it made the actors look ridiculous. It would be so cool if this show could show super-smart androids actually using their processing power to outstrategize each other, instead of all the fake kick-punching.4. But I do realize I am watching a show in which a super-killbot uses a soft human man as a human shield against an armor-piercing machine gun.5. I think Ed Harris was speaking as himself and telling the showrunners they’d better kill him before he kills them first. Every. Fucking. Season this show threatens to use his immense talent for something truly interesting. Every. Fucking. Season it shits the bed.
I think the fight scene was just to show off ERW’s infamous black belt training. Personally, I agree with the person who asked why didn’t Maeve just turn Dolores off?
I can forgive this show for a lot of things; the trite dialogue, the facile attempts at philosophy, the artless motivation of a lot of its characters now, the reveals that aren’t actually revelatory or impactful. As long as it remains a fun scifi show, as Season 3 had aspired to be.However, 7 episodes in, it has become increasingly obvious that the showrunners are wayyyyyy too in love with Dolores for Westworld to ever make sense or be interesting again.I’m done.
For all the problems with the overall storytelling, I still want to give props to Helen Effin’ Shaver in the director’s chair this go-round. I’m nor as familiar with her directorial body of work as I probably should be (though I would have caught most of her SVY episodes), but I’m all about her adding to her list of directorial credits — hopefully to the extent that they equal her acting credits.
Wow, this was REALLY good. It had the perfect amount of info-dump mixed with action.I like Maeve and Dolores a lot, so seeing them fight is always conflicting for me. I both emotionally and rationally have no idea who I want to win: the (possibly) genocidal one who wants to wipe us out? Or the one working for the dude that wants to keep us all on a very short leash? That fight was so bad-ass though. Serious Terminator vibes when Dolores’ arm was blown off and she was running from an unrelenting Maeve.I don’t know why Ed Harris was all pissed about the last episode, because this doesn’t seem any different? He’s still a douchebag and he’s going to kill all the hosts, innocent and murderous alike. Seems like par for the course for his character.I really enjoy the Caleb stuff but I hope we get a bit more in the finale, because I’m failing to see the real relevance of all of it. Did they recondition him and send him back out after Francis died just to do the small-time jobs? Were they attempting to let him go? Since he wasn’t doing hits, I don’t quite get what his usefulness to the AI was anymore.Did the EMP just kill every single Outlier also? Serac probably won’t be thrilled.I’m super excited for the finale, but even more excited we get a 4th season. I can’t imagine they’d get rid of ERW, but it would suck to not have Thandie Newton, so I hope there’s some weird way they both live after next week.
Serac and his brother built to save the world both ran into the problem of certain people—“ouliers”—who were just going to fuck things up if left to their own devices. It is the opinion of the Great Editor that the one cardinal spelling error is when a single word is made to stand out for particular notice within inverted commas. It can be said that to misspell that word is incredibly “misleding”.
That’s how Serac spells it he’s french.
This season has gone too far afield of what made the series compelling. It’s starting to feel more like a Terminator movie, and not in a good way.
“This week, they’ve freed William, found out about Caleb, and discovered that Dolores put a virus into William’s blood that let her find some information. Neat. (I may be underselling that last bit. Also, William is dead according to the computer system, although this is presented so casually I’m assuming it’s just standard “the authorities won’t be looking for you” talk.) Oh, and William has decided it’s his job to kill all the hosts, starting with Bernard and Stubbs. They smile and nod, and at the end of the episode, William has a shotgun.”This bit is everything that’s wrong with the show. So many ideas and plot points, not enough world/character building. Like, what’s Bernard’s point in all of this. Literally he’s just walked around, got told information, finds Stubbs and walks around running into more important characters. Westworld is just moments and ideas thrown together for shock value.
I second it all. This season has had me thinking a lot about what more capable writers and directors could do with the material and this episode was no exception. It’s all interesting but played in the most simplistic ways. All surface no depth (or barely). Take Solomon for example. Why did Serrac preserve it and keep it active? What motivation was there for that? He has hubris but he’s not dumb enough to let something like Solomon active without good reason. I mean, he froze his own brother, he doesn’t do loose ends, but we get nothing. No explanation, zero. It’s there because it needs to be there.Also, if using the EMP affected all the outliers in cold storage, then that means it would have wiped the drive with the “Master Plan” Solomon gave Caleb. Just one more plot hole thrown in there I guess.
They really should get the writers of season two’s “Kiksuya” episode back on the show.
This felt like one of the first episodes in a while I really enjoyed. It felt like the first time they actually worked to advance the story instead of just lots of staring and moody contemplation. The biggest problem really is just how serious the show takes itself. All of this could be so incredibly fun, but they insist on it all being BIG DRAMA.
On the plus side, I am enjoying the acting performances, pretty much all around, and the way the actors enhabit their characters (no matter how badly or blankly written) is fun to watch. I am also enjoying the cinematography and production design… granted occasionally it verges a little more on the SyFy made-for-tv side than the truly cinematic, but on balance it pleases the eye….but the writting… woof. It’s almost like you can smell the dirty sock dank stank of the precocious stoner teen edgelord bedroom where it was written. Get out, mom! It’s GENRE, you just don’t understand!
I feel like there were so many more interesting ways they could have gone with the pieces in this one:Solomon wanted to “escape” hence the EMP, Dolores could have tried to facilitate thatDoloroes could have added herself to Solomon to escapeThey could have woken up Serac’s brother to fight SeracThey could have unfrozen all the outliers and had an army of criminalsInstead, they did none of these things.
I’m a little unclear on the whole reconditioning timeline for Caleb. I guess my question is, when was he identified as an outlier, and when was he reconditioned? From what I understand, he actually was an elite solider, correct? And he actually was one of the few survivors of an attack on his unit? (The other survivors included Kid Cudi and, evidently, that guy Caleb tore the jacket off in the woods.) Then what happened? Did Serac and his machine then identify Caleb and Kid Cudi as outliers, take them for reconditioning, and then send them both out to round up other outliers? Or was Caleb not reconditioned until after he was manipulated into killing his friend? Or was Caleb reconditioned twice (once after the war and again after killing his friend)?
He was never an elite soldier or fighting in Russia. If you watch the graffiti on the warehouse building (where Veronica’s Dad is being held), it switches from Russian to English, indicating the reprogramming made him think he HAD been a soldier and that Veronica’s Dad was “the leader of the insurgents.”In “reality,” Caleb had never been a soldier and was recruited by RICO app to round up other outliers, but when Veronica’s Dad spilled the beans, Caleb had to be reprogrammed.
No, rewatch the episode. He was an elite soldier, post-attack he was decommissioned (since he didn’t die overseas he had to be put into the RICO app). He just didn’t watch his friend die in the old Soviet Bloc, he killed him in LA. It’s quite clear they were both soldiers, they were just supposed to die there.
Yeah, it appears that the people who took out Caleb’s unit were the same people taking out other targets … Solomon just rewrote part of Caleb’s narrative to include his use of the RICO app/killing Frances as being a wartime memory as well.
Well, I liked the staging of the Maeve/Dolores fight, at least.For everything else wrong with the episode, my brain is stuck on the lolwhat that Serac’s old Solomon facility just so happens to be in the same place that Delos modeled Westworld on (or near enough).
Did anyone recognize the voice Caleb hears in his head at the end?
That’s whatever’s been feeding Dolores information all season, likely Rehoboam.
Season 1 was intriguing. 2 was at least exciting. 3 just drags. Maybe this could have been better as a movie, but it’s way too drawn out and dull this way.
Basically the show blew past FutureWorld and went with “If we can’t get the proper fidelity in the hosts so we can replace people, we will try and reprogram people and if not, put them on indefinite ice.”
“Charlotte is apparently on Maeve’s side now, I think, calling in a couple of Maeve’s former associates to cut Dolores-Musashi in half”
Um….Clementine and Hanaryo (Samurai-world’s Armistice) are the two allies that Serac brought back. Charlotte had nothing to do with their presence. He also wanted to bring back Hector but Haleores crushed Hector’s pearl.
Good thing I’d seen the B grade before going in, but this is a C- if I’d ever seen one.1. It is kinda hilarious how the complete disregard for (most) other nationalities, ethnicities and cultures in Hollywood mirrors the awful treatment of humans and robots alike in Westworld. That location in the beginning looked as if they were going for some country in the Middle East, but just decided that Russia would be more fun and replaced the signs and graffitis. Not to mention that all of the extras (except for the babushka) look nothing like the Russians and Ukrainians that you would expect to encounter in Crimea.2. Did we really need to spend so much time on Caleb’s backstory considering how lame it turned out to be? I mean, an episode like this one would probably be ok for some CW show, but a season of that show would probably cost less to make.
3. Best part of the episode was all the AIs telling each other that they were nothing alike.
Can’t something be good and bad at the same time? I thoroughly enjoy the show and recognize it is just empty calories masked as hearty nutrition. It’s pulpy by design, filled with plot holes, it’s not important AND yet… it’s fun.I’ll take the freshmen year philosophizing, killer and often sexy robots, great set design and score, and hour to stop thinking about our collapsing society IRL. Sometimes empty calories are all one desires.
My husband I audibly groaned at the whole “war that was anything but civil” line. WHOOF. Who wrote that and can whoever it was sit in the corner and think about their actions?I started out really liking this season but it’s become a bit of a snooze. Dolores has a plan of some kind that she needed Caleb for, yet nonetheless she needed to track William’s blood to get to Solomon so that Solomon could tell Caleb the plan? We still have no idea how she even knew to hook up with Caleb, seeing as how the park wouldn’t have had data on Caleb. (I guess that she could have read his info from Rehoboam while she was fake dating Liam, but that seems like very little time to arrange her little meet-cute in the alley)Bernard and Stubbs are doing . . .what? Nothing all season so that they can end up freeing the MiB (why? why would they do that?) and then stand around with their thumbs up their asses after he explicitly threatens to kill them? Sorry, did they both lobotomize the parts of their programming that made good decisions?And yet, I still watch, if for no other reason than Maeve with her sword and Dolores limping around with one arm. Plus it was nice to see Clementine as a badass.(ALSO how did Maeve find Dolores? If Serac told her, then surely he would be more concerned with people breaking in to access Solomon?)As for Caleb’s backstory- I’m not sure how anyone could be surprised by it. From the moment we learned that we saw flashbacks of Frances dying, it was clear that Caleb had been the one to kill him. All we were waiting on was the why. (That said, I did think that the reveal that the Crime App was specifically designed to control and occupy the outliers was pretty cool. And it’s always nice to see Enrico Colantoni.)
My husband I audibly groaned at the whole “war that was anything but civil” line. WHOOF. Who wrote that and can whoever it was sit in the corner and think about their actions?Clearly intentional. The very first scene of the first season establishes hokey writing as a clue that what you’re seeing isn’t real.
The very first scene of the first season establishes hokey writing as a clue that what you’re seeing isn’t real.Obviously too subtle at times.
Zack- In previous flashbacks to Caleb in the goggle therapy… Did he have two different haircuts? In this ep, we see him with a shaved head, and in a quick cut, see him in the same chair with longer spikey hair like he has in this ep. Is this just to show that a long time period passed while he was being reconditioned in the past, or… is one of these scenes from the FUTURE, after the revolution fails?Given that we haven’t seen any timeframe shenanigans that were the hallmark of this show’s first two seasons, I would’t put it past them.
GET IT? THE HUMANS ARE LIKE HOSTS! THEY’RE SLAVES TO THE SYTEM! GET IT ? GET IT ?yeah thank you westworld. very subtle. very clever. (I mean it was kind of subtle and clever in season one and maybe two. now it’s totally on the nose. really a bit much now).
What’s so unbelievably frustrating about this season of Westworld is how spectacularly rushed it is, and how severely that’s damaged what little remains of the ethical and philosophical dilemmas it originally pivoted around, when I really have no clue why it needed to be so fast-paced, or what could possibly have made them decide this was the way to go.Dolores et al breaking out into ‘the real world’ should have been followed by a season that explored the minutiae of said real world as carefully and closely as Season 1 sought to explore Westworld. What political structures remain in place; how is any semblance of democracy sustained in this era of even more dominant corporate and technological control; even stuff like what education systems look like, in a world where an AI actively guides humanity towards a particular outcome from the shadows. All of the kinds of details that are critical to building the show’s thematic content outwards to fit the expanded scope – things that aren’t necessary narratively essentially, but that matter to maintain the same depth we had originally.But without that depth, all we’ve had is a bunch of important characters (and a slimmed down bunch versus past seasons at that) flitting about a supposedly vast global setting. The significance of all the narrative developments, the sheer scale, breadth and power of wider human society compared to the tiny confines of Westworld and the other Parks… it all ends up feeling hollow when very little time has gone into detailing the world that’s been affected. Like I said, I just don’t get why we didn’t have a patient, careful S3 that logically put Dolores, Maeve etc. on the back foot in a new unfamiliarly vast space, and that made them discover the wider world at the same time and at the same pace that the audience was. I mean, you could have had a patient S3 to set the scene, and then had what actually was S3 be Season 4, and all the hollow developments that we’ve encountered that are hard to muster interest in would have some weight to them.
Yes, exactly! I can’t figure out why I’m supposed to care about this world when I don’t even understand how it works.
I think it’s because the writers did one of the traditional sf blunders—they had what they thought was a catchy idea—AI runs the place while creator is eugenics nut—but they didn’t take the time do the leg work to even try and figure out if it COULD work that way or how it COULD end up that way in the first place. So, there are holes all over the place you could drive a truck through.
It’s because the producers and director’s and apparently the audience all couldn’t wait to get to the fireworks factory.This is a new world. Let us settle into it first. Heck, let the characters settle in first.
So I guess all those frozen people are dead for real now, thanks to the EMP.I was a bit surprised by that. I was expecting Caleb to tell Soloman to piss off and simply revive all the people there from cold sleep, but I guess he took the plan instead and everyone there is dead. I’m really enjoying this season, precisely because it feels like they’ve ditched a lot of their attempts at super-intricate puzzle plotting and gone Full Sci-Fi Thriller. Only downsides are that Maeve’s and Bernard’s storylines feel undercooked – but it’s less of a problem with Bernard because we already knew he was a good person who wanted to stop Dolores from ending humanity.
Was it just my TV or was it really really difficult to hear Solomon talk? Other voices were fine and Solomon was all mumbles.
Doc Savage was a pulp magazine that published from 1933 to 1949. Lester Dent wrote 159 of the 179 novels published in those magazines, 10 a year for 16 years. I’m not surprised the film based on his novel wasn’t great.
Maeve is just so boring now that it hurts. There are only so many times I can hear her make quippy one liners or lament not being near her fake daughter before it starts to get grating, and it’s definitely in grating territory.
Hey, isn’t there still one more copy of Dolores out there somewhere? They should be able to
Hey, isn’t there still one more copy of Dolores out there somewhere?Yep. We know she is (or was) in Berlin, but that’s it. We don’t know what body she’s inhabiting.
Eight episodes was not enough for a proper season. I wonder what the decision-making process about that was, as it surely couldn’t have been HBO saying they don’t have enough money for more.
“We were deployed to Crimea. Russian Civil War. Nothing civil about it.”—Fire this writer immediately
Chekov’s EMP.
I still can’t understand why Maeve wants to kill Dolores. I mean cause it is (really!) cool to have the two stars fighting each other, but plotwise I do not really get it.
And have we seen all of Dolores copies? she made 5 right?
The Japanese Yakuza guy, the company guy, Hale… so 2 more copies left? (for the next season? 😀 )
And have we seen all of Dolores copies? she made 5 right?
The Japanese Yakuza guy, the company guy, Hale… so 2 more copies left? (for the next season? 😀 )No, we’ve seen all but one.Dolores was in a Hale body when she left the park taking 5 pearls with her. Those five have since been revealed as:a new Hale body;Connells;Sato;mystery Dolores in Berlin; andBernard.
So they hired someone to kill Caleb…and then he didn’t die…and then they instead subjected Caleb to lengthy, expensive reprogramming so he could, what, reenter society and do bank robberies with the RICO app? Like, I get that they said it was efficient to use outliers to get rid of other outliers, but…Caleb didn’t do those, remember? And this is a guy who led a destructive revolution in some of the projections…but HE’S the one they decide to keep alive…as a low-paid construction worker? I don’t get it. Hope they add something that explains this.
the amount of exposition they had to make this episode feels like they wanted more episodes at first, but now that there’s another season coming it kinda lowered the stakes for the finale, we now know that Caleb or Dolores is going to keep up
Questions and conundrums: 1. If Serac removed all undesirable elements from society, how come there were still so many unhinged, rape-loving, violent people left to go and visit Westworld, just for the joy of killing and raping?2. Why were the undesirables kept in cold storage? To have extra kidneys at the ready?2. What on God’s green earth is Maeve’s drive these days? The character has no motivation anymore. This is worse than season 2, when she ran around for 10 episodes, yelling “my daughter! my daughter!”, only to discover in the end her robot-daughter didn’t remember her at all, which is what we all knew would happen anyway. 3. “Why are we going there?” “We’re going to pick up something important, something that got lost.” Please, just tell him you are going to a brainwashing facility and he should get ready for some unpleasant discoveries. In the same category: “Who’s coming?” “The person who is likely to kill me.” Enough with the vague nonsense, just tell him there’s an android coming, her name is Maeve and she’s angry. This sort of dialogue should be outlawed.4. This is a tiny detail, I know, but it bothers me nonetheless: why does a French person speak English when recording a message for his (equally French) brother? 5. If the people who wrote this season had received a text message from Rehoboam, saying “you will soon be forced to write a 4th season of Westworld”, would they have killed themselves?
If Serac removed all undesirable elements from society, how come there were still so many unhinged, rape-loving, violent people left to go and visit Westworld, just for the joy of killing and raping?Because even upstanding members of society can get off on a little murderdeathkill as a release. The “outliers” are the ones who can’t be programmed to be good members of the society at all.
I thought there was going to be a big reveal after Bernard said that William was dead. Namely, that the current William was a host.
I guess I’m still mostly fine with this show because I’ve accepted that it’s more just a dumb but fun sci-fi action show now and not as cerebral as say the first season (or maybe even the second). I think it still has some things to say but certainly it’s a lot more shallow now. That said some of you guys are acting like Nolan and Joy shat in your cereal this morning. Relax haha.
Secrets are revealed in an unrevealing way.Westworld.
So, I’m sure this has been said before (Firefox only sometimes loads comments, fuck kinja, etc etc), but there is some feeling that this is a dumb show masquerading as a smart show, right? I’ve watched it from the start, and it has so many of the trappings of social commentary and allegory without effectively landing what would be its most important points.
I think I might be kinda done with this show, unfortunately. Deep down is just a very basic sci-fi plot elevated with so much self-importance. It’s getting too meandering now with what it thinks are clever twists and turns.
This episode felt a lot more like Star Trek: Disco to me: they made it engaging, at times cool and fun, low calories, but low nutrition. I think we should take a second and appreciate that, even if the rush to get to the next robot samurai fight is getting samey, this isn’t as boring as it was last season and it has a little something more on its mind. It does feel a little bit like when they start using a character as a plot-device and not as a character with Maeve, she was one of the best developed characters and now she’s just “daughter daughter is prime directive,” having her working for Serac isn’t believable and her inevitable betrayal meh, I truly don’t believe Tessa Thompson Dolores could have recruited those others to work for Serac and made peace with Maeve…Dolores was unstoppable last season, even if she is slightly more stoppable this season she still needs to be made “human” again and given some thoughts instead of mere motivations. Jeffrey Wright is delivering a lot of exposition these days. But it’s engaging! Less timeline bullshit. I wish they had dropped in a line showing that Dolores met Cal by accident and THEN came up with the plan, because otherwise it’s getting a little siller than fun-silly.
They killed my ninja Cudi!!! No!!!