I don’t think I’m smart enough/invested enough time into Westworld theories to be an authority figure here, but as a normal person watching this show, I think it’s safe to say this show is off the rails. Even though Dolores significantly altered the Westworld universe in “Genre”, the fifth episode of season 3, I won’t excuse it for being by far the most boring episode of the season so far. She finally released humanity of the routines Rehoboam had planned for them, thus allowing them to control their own fates for the first time in their lives. As was expected, people started to lose their shit when they found out their lives had been controlled by a system all along.
We also learned a little more about Serac’s origin, aside from the fact that Paris was nuked during his childhood. I’m not going to lie to you, I didn’t understand a single thing about the building of Rehoboam except for the fact that Serac and his brother built it to save humanity from itself. Enter Dempsey: owner of Incite, which has access to a ton of the world’s data. Dempsey backs the brothers and they build a supercomputer that can effectively predict the world’s events and plan the future. However, the most distracting part of the Serac/Dempsey storyline was the sudden jump in time where Serac aged 30 years and Dempsey aged five.
Another significant part of the episode was that Caleb knows Dolores is a host. She took those bullets like a champ, which obviously means that she is not human. But, that didn’t alter Caleb’s loyalty to her at all. If anything, it strengthened his loyalty because she effectively saved his life even though he was tripping on genre (a psychedelic drug) much of the episode.
This episode also continued the tradition of Westworld episodes incorporating orchestral renditions of pop songs. This week’s rendition was of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, an all-time favorite song of mine; although “Wicked Games” takes the cake for my favorite rendition this season.
We also didn’t get any Maeve action this episode which tells me that we can expect to learn a lot more about her next week. My guess is that the robotic tag team duo of Bernard and Stubbs somehow link up with Maeve and take down Dolores. I think it’s too obvious that Maeve would team up with Dolores because she has as much reason as anyone to hate humanity. However, once she sees how reckless Dolores has been, she’ll team up with Bernard and Stubbs – especially after how Liam Jr. was just killed.
Through the first four episodes, this was my favorite season of Westworld so far, but episode five was a huge step back in terms of confusing storylines. The confusion aspect, in addition to my lack of empathy with the hosts in the first two seasons were my biggest concerns with the show before this season. All I know is that I need more Beast Mode in his #mood shirt.
