Well shit…Maeve was right
Hello my fellow guests/hosts, since I’ve been traveling and got behind, I’ve had the benefit of watching the first 5 episodes, so I’ll contain my thoughts to what happened in each episode in case you want to read these as you catch up.
After last week’s bomb shell reveal, we’re now catching up to how Halores has run the human world as a park of sorts for the hosts. Meanwhile, we learn more about Christina, the storyteller and what that means for her in this world.
Am I Just Fooling Myself?
It’s intro and conversations like the opening to this episode that make this series worth it. Because it allows a veteran actor like Ed Harris to chew scenery and bounce an idea about privilege back and forth with an unsuspecting human. This could be insightful about racially-driven privilege in our own world and just as impactful about the host-human conflict unfolding before our very eyes.
This scene is also the first time we’ve really seen the difference in Host-William and our original. At the dinner, he’s much more subdued than our original William, but can still deliver a punch when he critiques the human in front of him about how confident that they are in themselves, not realizing how much control Host-William has over the situation. While it’s an opportunity to showcase the new world Halores has made, this meaty scene also shows cracks in this curated world: in the middle of this dinner, Host-William has to leave to handle a host who has massacred an entire house of humans, chiding them for their carelessness about the unwritten rules of their world (another difference in the two Williams).
The Outliers
So yeah, humanity is living hell on Earth, all puppets under Halores and the other hosts, who have free reign to kill and do as they please with humans. We see this painfully demonstrated in a scene that Tessa Thompson absolutely devours as she has a pianist play until his hands are bleeding, makes the entire crowd dance a waltz, and later has a few more give their bodies to create a quick throne for her highness. It takes the brutality we saw in the park to a new level; this was more than just gratuitous pain, it was gleeful revelry in misery.
However this new world isn’t as good as it initially seems. Halores is upset that the hosts haven’t taken up her offer of transcendence after 23 years of control over humanity. Presumably this transcendence is into the Sublime, but all we see are their pearls removed into fancy, more elaborate drone bodies so not sure if that’s what Halores meant.
Even worse, some hosts lose their minds if they interact with an outlier. That mess that Host-William had to clean up was a host who went on a spree killing humans after interacting with a human outlier, or someone who breaks free of the tower’s tonal control.
Halores is distressed that hosts are killing themselves rather than take her up on the offer of transcendence, even pointing out that Host-William has failed to do anything about it. Something that his predecessor wouldn’t have failed at.
This episode feels eerily like a number of body snatcher movies or even Matrix-level of control and that agents (hosts playing the game) can come and swoop you up as soon as you get unplugged.
The Extraction
Bernard and Frankie split off with other rebels to take care of Maeve while Stubbs, Odina (Frankie’s girlfriend), and the group leader Jay head off to the Halores’ city to save an outlier – the same one tasked to Host-William to dispatch. The group encounters him, other activated humans and hosts, eventually getting split up. Here, Host-William encounters the outlier first and doesn’t do what Halores told him to do and allows her to speak, which starts to cast doubt in his mind about what he’s doing, causing him to hesitate and allow the outlier to escape with Jay and Stubbs.
While this goes well for the rebels, what was that weird moment where Jay is looking up the staircase? Did he see the Man in Black and he didn’t shoot him? That doesn’t jive with how the rest of the episode played out even if he was tripping over his experiences. I’m sure this will play out some way in the next episode, but this is framed as an obvious setup, either of Host-William’s eventually betrayal and/or Jay being compromised
Man in Black is Gonna Man in Black
With that in mind, the conversation with Host-William and original William shows us that the host version is having doubts about who he is, and when pressed, he really doesn’t understand his purpose which prompts OG William to utter the classic Westworld phrase with a twist…
“You need to question the nature of your reality.”
Geez, we don’t need the two of them getting aligned, but I’m honestly not surprised it happened. Halores leaving him alive was always going to cause a problem, either for herself, for humanity, or some combination of the two. And now that the OG has the new Host-William’s ear, that’s not going to lead to anything positive. The interesting question in comparison to how Dolores’ consciousness was split across different hosts is how closely does this version of Host-William compare to the original. Halores even chides this one for not being as committed or decisive as the original William, which could mean that even his original nihilistic tendencies may not play out the same way. And we also saw how he reacted to the woman outlier that the rebels rescued and their moment together, he’s clearly struggling with his role but what does a new version of his role look like?
Neo = Christina
While her date went super well, Christina becomes suspicious of Teddy after figuring out that he’s the same man who saved her from a stalker. But she listens to Teddy long enough to hear him out. He implores her to try her work skills (creating stories) on people in the real-world. It takes a few moments, but eventually she gets better at using her skill, even saving herself from a tight situation with her boss, learning that she can control him too with her words. This helps her finally see what Teddy has been imploring her about, which is the control tower that Halores has been using to control the human population. Though she’s still confused, she presses Teddy for an answer about why she’s here / who put her here and he responds that “you did”, meaning that Dolores/Christina did this to herself.
More likely though, Teddy is referring to another version of Dolores, Halores. Because we get a great tense scene with the two of them this episode, as Christina is starting to put the pieces together, but she can’t give away to Halores that she knows something is wrong. Thompson and Wood play this scene really well and if you don’t pay attention, it’s easy to miss how Christina created a distraction to get herself out of that situation.
Final Thoughts
While I was rightfully concerned about the potential time jumps this season (given how damaging that was to season two’s impact), creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan have successfully navigated a strong course with this season’s storylines. And while you may not know or understand how every element is going to play out yet, there’s enough tied up here from the previous flashback timelines and the last remaining loose timeline thread, that we won’t have to worry about a crazily rushed ending. This sets a really firm stage for the final three episodes to show us whatever calamity Bernard has been warning everyone about and how to potentially avert it.
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Next Episode: Fidelity