Westworld S3.06 — Divergence
It seems like the end of this season is rushing up to meet the writers and they are working really hard to complicate everything as much as they can so people will remember why this show is frustrating.
Tonight’s episode focuses on 2 stories: institutionalized William and Dolores-as-Charlotte vs. Serac (with a side of Maeve). D-a-C and Serac have a complex relationship, since Dolores’ goal is to stop Serac and Charlotte’s goal, when she was a person, was to make a lot of money, which she was doing by helping Serac.
In this episode, Serac successfully takes over the company, but D-a-C has been doing her part for the past few weeks, and especially on the day Serac arrives, to make sure that the important data gets exported to the real Dolores. As far as we can tell, she achieves the mission and even manages to crush the pearl of Hector that Serac was copying for Maeve. Serac then gives the order to burn all of the hosts in storage at the park.
As we know from a few episodes ago, the longer the pearl copies stay away from the original host, the further they diverge. So, Dolores-as-Charlotte is becoming more human than either Dolores or Charlotte. She has a real obsession with her family, but that ends up being her downfall as it tips Serac off that she is not the human Charlotte. Luckily, she escapes with the help of those transformers. Not so luckily, her car explodes and her husband and son die immediately, while Charlotte crawls out of the flames Darth Vader-style (really burnt).
Meanwhile, Maeve is sent back to the Nazi simulation, for reasons that I’m sure the writers think are really smart but in all honesty I don’t buy. I mean, I get it — they want her to reunite with Lee and Hector so that she can get some help, but in the actual world of the story, I think it’s dumb. (Dan says it’s just the waiting room that Serac uses, but that seems silly too).
In any case, she kicks a bunch of Nazi butt and then realizes that her pearl is in the body recopying area. Somehow she can see out through her pearl (the rules don’t exist for Maeve) and so she knows that a Dolores pearl and the Hector pearl are there, too. She gets some time to talk to “Dolores” (the one that was in Connells), but they can’t really agree.
And even if they could agree on the best course of action, Maeve doesn’t really have a choice since she is being held hostage by Serac. As I mentioned above, Charlotte-as-Dolores crushes Hector’s pearl, giving Maeve a chance to fall to her knees and yell, “Noooooo!” She also steals the Connells Dolores pearl.
Finally, we see the world’s worst therapy patient. William is in the outlier institution and it is not going well. He is rude during group and then, while he is having a minor breakthrough in his 1-on-1 therapy, the data that Dolores sent out reaches his doctor and she loses her kids, husband, and life. Talk about a bad session.
Later, William is put into a room for AR (augmented reality) treatment, where he imagines a group session with himself from different ages. We learn that he has been violent since he was a child, which raises the question: was his life always leading down this path or did he do something specific to end up here? Well, that’s the million dollar question of this season and show — are you in control or not? Are the humans just as stuck as the hosts?
He is saved from his hallucination, in which he ruins another group session by violently murdering all of his former selves, when Bernard and Stubbs come to rescue (or recruit) him. I don’t think they realize how crazy he is, so that should be interesting. This, and his therapist’s suicide because of her Incite data, confirm that this story is happening at the same time as the rest of the show, so that’s good!
With only 2 episodes left, I am very unsure how they will wrap this up. Next week looks like we will get Caleb’s backstory, which I think will have a closer connection to everything else than we have thought so far. We’ll see!
Producer who loves TV, looking for my next opportunity to be creative & pet dogs. View all posts by lizziekreitman
Originally published at http://lizziekreitman.wordpress.com on April 20, 2020.