Westworld recap: season 3, episode 4 – five of a kind

  • 4/7/2020
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Spoiler alert: this blog is published after Westworld airs on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK on Sunday night/Monday morning. Do not read unless you have watched season three, episode four. Poor old William. Well, maybe just the old bit. The nastiest man in Westworld has fallen apart. Wracked by guilt, he is unable to distinguish hallucination from luxe furnishings and, most troubling of all, he has been outwitted by a host. Dolores has got the better of her long-time tormentor, by persuading him to take his company, Delos, off the stock market and turn it private. That means it can’t be bought by nasty man Serac, but it also means that it is now in the control of a nasty robot who tends to see humanity (not without reason) as a blight that would be better off in the evolutionary bin. Dolores, while looking like Charlotte Hale, achieves this by declaring William insane and deposing him from the top of Delos. William is aghast, but it turns out that wandering around shouting: “I know who the fuck I am!” is not a particularly persuasive counterpoint. For regular readers, an apology follows. Last week you may have been given the impression that Dolores was a lovely robot woman who recognised good people for good people and was our only hope in the battle against the billionaire misanthrope Serac. I am happy to correct that observation, now being very much of the mind that Dolores is an imminent and absolute danger and, what’s more, there are five of her. Yes, after all that speculation (what, a red herring in Westworld?!), it turns out that Dolores did not smuggle a series of hosts out of the park when she left Westworld at the end of the last season. Instead, she smuggled out four clones of herself, because if you want to do the job of conquering the world properly, you are better off doing it yourself. So, no Teddy, no Clementine, no leering dude with mutton chops (he is called Rebus, but he will always be Mutton Chops to me), no Ford. Just Dolores and a Bernard for cosmic balance. That is fine with me. This week’s episode, while a bit glitchy when showing us around William’s mind, was as straightforward as Westworld has been for a while – and that is a good thing. We now know the parameters of the conflict: Serac versus Dolores, with Bernard and Maeve (and surely Caleb, soon enough) in the middle. At stake: the future of humanity and a question over whether anyone can ever be free. Caleb is currently in Camp Dolores, having helped her to capture Liam at a 1% orgy. This orgy is basically Eyes Wide Shut with added “digital psychopharma”, which is basically drugs via a dongle. Liam is in attendance with some of his disgusting pals, but he has lost his appetite for delinquency. Why so? Because he has been confronted by his security chief, Malcolm Tucker – sorry, Martin – and mocked for his proclivities. Anyway, no matter, Liam can’t partake in the orgy anyway, because he has had all his money stolen by Dolores. Which as a result leaves me confused as to why she wants to kidnap him, too. Maybe it is something to do with the Rehohohoboam. Anyway, it is all moot as Bernard, sexy orgy mask and all, turns up with Stubbs to pinch Liam first. Bernard wants Liam because he believes he is Dolores’s plant and a secret host. He is not, however, as Bernard finds out when he tries to switch him off with a button. But with Malcolm/Martin having spotted Bernard from his eagle-eye view, Dolores is soon bearing down on our furrow-browed hero and Stubbs is forced to step in to fight her. I swear Stubbs wasn’t nearly as spiky and sarky and, well, interesting in previous series, but as Dolores descends he has time to compliment her little black dress before the pair go at it. Yet despite his weight advantage, Bernard’s minder is no match for Dolores; after exchanging a few quick blows, she throws him off a balcony. Bernard has escaped with Liam, but is soon tracked down by Malcolm/Martin, who also turns out to be Dolores. Get it? Got it? Good. Over in Singapore, Maeve is having a similar experience. Having been recruited to Team Serac two weeks ago, we see her enjoy a ginormous glass of sherry with the billionaire Frenchman at the beginning of this episode. He is explaining his hopes for humanity, which involve getting them to do what he thinks is right, but he then also offers an intriguing insight into what has been going on in the world at large while we have been watching Delos’s “murder simulation theme parks” (copyright Stubbs). When Serac was a boy growing up in Paris, he was witness to a massive bio-terror event that destroyed the city. Fortunately for Serac, he was gambolling in a field overlooking the city at the time (you know, that field), but millions of other people perished. Yes, it was a bit eerie to watch, wasn’t it? So, anyway, a lot of the world is now uninhabitable, we are led to assume. And Serac wants to control the rest of it. You get the impression that Maeve loses her affection for the guy after he blows out the brains of an informer who had helped Dolores after her escape from Westworld. This guy’s dying confession sets up a trail first to “The Mortician”, then an underworld kingpin called Sato, who looks just like Hector’s Shogun World double, Musashi. But the truth is that he is none other than – you got there before me, didn’t you? – Dolores. Following this revelation, there is another fight, this time with swords. We learn that Sato’s distillery isn’t making whisky, but host milk. We see that Maeve is able to control electronics with her mind, which allows her to mess up a few goons with machine guns. Just as with Stubbs before, however, the Dolores double is too good. Sato deals Maeve a big sword to the tum and soon her red blood is pouring out over the white milk in a symbolic mixture of materials that makes you wonder, once more, why she doesn’t bleed white in the first place. Divergence and anomalies Can anyone name the song being played by the string section during the orgy? I thought it was Hot Chip’s Over and Over for a minute, but I suspect that dates me; it is probably some contemporary R&B. “All sex is commerce. If you don’t know that, then you’re being billed indirectly,” says Liam’s mate during the orgy. Charming. I enjoyed the fight scenes this week, which were well choreographed and exciting. And the bit where Maeve shot the doorman in the groin was good, too. Watching Caleb convince the 1% banker to give up all Liam’s money while Dolores watched on was just like watching Jesse Pinkman fib to Tuco Salamanca in front of Walter White. Aaron Paul does give good “more sophisticated than you think actually”, doesn’t he.

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