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 seven. It’s the fight you’ve all been waiting for! It’s the Mexican sendoff! The slapdown in Sonoma! The judgment in the vicinity of Solomon! It’s Maeeeeve versus Doloooooores! In the red corner, carrying a katana and a helicopter shaped like a shoebox , it’s the mistress of the Mariposa, Maeve Millay! In the blue corner, wearing Terminator black leather and using a sniper’s rifle that’s also a drone (though maybe it’s the other way around), it’s Dolores Abernathy! Remember, no biting, no holding and no punching below the belt. But momentarily taking control of a security droid through telepathy has been deemed legal by the Robot Fighting Board of Control. So seconds out, round one, ring-a-ding-dong! It’s the penultimate episode and, as befits grand HBO drama tradition, we get the big denouement in the Mexican brush. Maeve tracks Dolores down to a secret complex where Serac and his genius brother have been plotting the future of humanity and storing anyone who got in their way in suspended animation. As the Rohohohoboam’s big brother Solomon pulses away in a hangar, Maeve stomps out of her chopper and mind messages Dolores. “We’re overdue a little chat,” she says. But she doesn’t mean chat, she means fight. Dolores being Dolores, she can’t resist a bit of sweet talk and after decapitating a hypnotised droid, she finds Maeve in the best location for any duel to the death – the canteen. Dolores shoots Maeve, Maeve lightly sautes Dolores in peanut oil. Dolores grabs a steak knife and jabs it in Maeve’s gut several times in full view of the camera, just in case anyone missed any of the gory detail. Maeve makes a tapenade from Dolores’ leather jacket. The action then spills outside and Maeve’s faithful helicopter shoots Dolores’s arm off. It would appear to be a decisive blow, but as Maeve chases her prey into the hangar where Solomon has been pondering eternity for the past few years, it turns out Dolores has a trick up her sleeve. Yes, the host who has taken it upon herself to be the messiah for her kind turns out to know a few things when it comes to robots, like the whereabouts of the on-off switch. She presses a button (it’s a big one, so definitely powerful) and not only does Solomon stop throbbing, but both Maeve and Dolores plop to the ground like a pair of abandoned marionettes. This was not quite the explosion of hellfire many of us expected when the reckoning between humans and robots finally came to pass. Which kind of makes you suspect that it might not have. Indeed, there are still several threads to be knitted together, not least what will happen to Caleb “just a construction worker” Nichols, who has been anointed both saviour and destroyer of humanity, depending on who you listen to. Thanks to the power of flashback, we learn that Caleb has been living a drug-fuelled lie so deep and convoluted that you probably needed to be on drugs to make any sense of it. Caleb was a special forces agent, operating in the Russian civil war of the future. But some of the jobs he thought he had carried out in the Crimea had actually been carried out years later in LA when he thought he had been just a construction worker with a sideline in app-based petty crime. Not only had Caleb got the time and place wrong, it turned out he had got the details wrong too. Rather than capturing an insurgent leader, he had kidnapped a pharmacologist, and rather than seeing the guy die in an ambush, he had killed him for being, like, “I told you so.” Caleb also killed his best mate, Francis, who he thought had been killed by insurgents. When all of this is revealed, not to mention the news that his memory was subsequently erased at the hands of Serac’s multitalented goons, Caleb is understandably irate. “Solomon you asshole!” he screams at the throbbing orb. The intensity of his revelation and the deranged leer on Caleb’s face at the end of the episode leave the viewer uncertain as to what might happen next. Bernard seems to know, however. The Good Bot has been marching around with William and Stubbs on the set of The Walking Dead, trying to decipher Dolores’s plans. Well, Bernard and Stubbs have; William has been concentrating on delivering the most bloodthirsty barbs known to man. Here’s a sample, after learning Dolores (/Hale) had injected a tracking device into his veins: “I’m going do to something to her blood. Mop the fucking floor with it.” Anyway, Bernard has been trying to decode the significance of Caleb to the whole scheme, but only as the episode comes to its denouement does Stubbs provide him the opportunity to share. What is the significance of Caleb to the whole scheme, Stubbs asks, or words to that effect. “If we can find Caleb we might be able to stop her,” Bernard explains. “Dolores was made with a poetic sensibility; she won’t destroy humanity, he will.” Now I thought a poetic sensibility meant being able to look at a cloud and see the fleeting nature of existence. But if Bernard says it means tricking a human into blowing up humanity then I’ll go with it. We humans are stupid, after all. And that includes William, who comes back from an alleged “piss” with a pump-action shotgun pointed at Bernard and Stubbs, and a murderous glint in his eye. Er, you do know these guys can take a bullet to the face and keep on trucking don’t you? I mean, you did own a park full of them. Divergences and anomalies So Maeve was using the 3D milk printer to bring Clementine and Hanaryo (Armistice’s doppelganger from Shogun World) back to life. The pair begin this week’s episode by taking out Musashi clone Saito in yet another fancy-ass bar, this time in Jakarta. It’s 2030-something and still the security deployment at a top secret facility is not looking out for massive drones flying over the perimeter fencing. If they weren’t already sniped dead, I would have sacked them. “Every human relationship can be adjusted with the right amount of money,” says Solomon. Bitter words born of experience? RIP Kid Cudi, big rap name who – like Marshawn Lynch – doesn’t get much opportunity to show his acting chops as Francis. Limbics, good for lockdown?