These past few weeks, on my long, confusing, existential journey writing about Westworld, I’ve often wondered about my own ones and zeroes, what’s in my code that compels me to follow a show that doesn’t twist and turn, so much as it sends you hurdling off a cliff like the car at the end of Thelma and Louise.
I’m sure, at some point, I subconsciously asked myself what Emily asked her father, The Man in Black, at the beginning of this week’s episode: “Are you free and evil, or blameless and helplessly enslaved?”
I think I’m just an idiot.
Season Three, Episode Four of Westworld, “The Absence of Field,” not only soared off the cliff—it drove straight off the face of this planet. The episode criss-crosses between three plots: The Man in Black waking up in the real world from his Westworld journey and meeting Robo-Hale, Maeve going on that long-anticipated, Serac-mandated Dolores hunt, and more of Caleb and Dolores’s buddy action-comedy, where they drain Liam’s bank account and go to a rich-people sex party. At the end, we get a supercut of characters from all three plots, who are all saying similar things… almost like Westworld is trying to tell us something.
In Maeve’s showdown with Musashi (who’s fresh out of Shogun World and working in a real-world mob, apparently), she says to him, “No, that’s not you. Dolores stole five pearls. Who did she put inside you?” Shortly after that, Martin Connells tells Bernard, “After all the time we spent together, you don’t recognize your only friend?” Meanwhile, Hale says some very Dolores-y things to The Man in Black, and Maeve does us the solid of putting it all together: “The other pearls, I assumed you brought someone else. You’ve just made copies of yourself.”
So, after three episodes of fuss about exactly whose brain orbs Dolores smuggled out of Westworld—and an entire episode teasing out Charlotte Hale’s identity—it turns out that everyone is Dolores! She just copy-pasted her own brain orb four times. Why the hell not? Dolores is Dolores, Dolores is Hale, Dolores is Martin Connells, and Dolores is Musashi. (The fifth and final brain orb was Bernard.)
In other words the five orbs (which they call pearls) break down as follows:
1) Charlotte Hale = Dolores Orb
2) Martin Connells = Dolores Orb
3) Dolores = Dolores Orb
4) Musashi = Dolores Orb
5) Bernard = Bernard Orb
Sure, the Dolores identity twist just negated nearly three hours of Westworld buildup over who was in those robot lottery balls, but it did us a favor: Episode Four drafted the show’s characters into two clear, warring teams, playground sports style. On one side, you have the aforementioned Doloreses, with each Dolores having a role—i.e. Hale Dolores (Charlores?) trying to take over Delos from the inside, Dolores Dolores taking INCITE down, Musashi Dolores doing god knows what yet. Against them: Serac, Maeve (who definitely left that fight with her brain orb intact), Bernard and Stubbs, who really aren’t into the idea of squad Dolores taking over humanity.
One exception, though: The Man in Black. Episode Four sets him up as Season Three’s X-factor. After Hale Dolores committed Big Will to a psychiatric hospital, it’s still not clear whether or not he’s a host. His visions of Emily and Dolores feel like the work of some kind of intentionally-buggy code, but it’s hard to imagine what purpose a robot William would serve, the way Season Three’s story is playing out. Instead, it’s more likely that, sensing an opportunity to get some kind of hold in Delos, Serac breaks The Man in Black out of the ward, and enlists him in the fight against Dolores.
Hell, maybe William just tripping on one of those poppable Genre drugs, and Episode Four was just a bad trip. Let’s go with that.
