Westworld S3.07 — Strategy

It’s the penultimate episode of Westworld and they are working hard to bring the audience up to speed. In my opinion, it’s not quite working.

Caleb & Dolores ride on horseback (even though it’s the future and they have so many different types of vehicles) through Mexico (where Westworld was based off) to find the center where Solomon, the supercomputer before Rehoboam, is being kept. Solomon was created and shares qualities with Serac’s schizophrenic brother, the first outlier that he had committed. Solomon is kept with the rest of the outliers who did not succeed in being re-educated.

But, we learn through many flashbacks that Caleb’s re-education was a success and the memories we were seeing throughout the season were false. Turns out that he and Francis (Kid Cudi) made it out of the war alive and started doing jobs on Rico (which was created by Serac to streamline crime). When they picked up a pharmaceutical exec, they accidentally got him talking and the system offered both Caleb and Francis money to kill each other. Caleb ends up shooting faster and he kills Francis.

Ok, that’s a fine story, if not a somewhat lame twist. But, they made us watch 15(ish) flashbacks of the made up story while he was recalling being in the re-education center in order to get to that point. Also, it’s a little weird that there are 2 identical re-education centers for outliers — is the one Caleb was in only for military?

Dolores tells Caleb to get the strategy for the new human race from Solomon while she goes out to fight Maeve. As far as I can tell, I’m not sure he did that because he yelled “show me how to kill your creator” rather than just getting exactly what Dolores told him. That being said, I’m sure there’s a version where they win the war and also kill Serac, so I guess that’s the version they are going to do.

Dolores & Maeve fight and argue while fighting, even though they are both basically saying the same things. It’s a little frustrating because their characters are not different enough, in my opinion. Dolores gets her arm blown off, but she “locks” the computer, which shuts her, Solomon, and Maeve down. But it’s confusing because at the very end, Caleb hears a voice in his earpiece. Who is speaking?

They also briefly show Yakuza-Dolores being killed and beheaded by Clementine and the girl with the dragon tattoo from Eastworld, so it looks like Maeve got the help she wanted. William is rescued by Stubbs and Bernard, but William says they should kill him or he will kill them. At the end of the episode, he has a gun and it’s not looking good for the buddy cop comedy of Stubbs and Bernard.

Next week is the finale and it seems like they have a lot of loose ends to tie up. They were renewed for another season, though, so I’m sure they’ll leave us with a heavy cliffhanger.

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 27, 2020.