WW – Westworld S3 E8 Crisis Theory

Jason and Cristina break down the Westworld Season 3 Episode 8 – Crisis Theory! What comes after the end of the world?

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Podcast Notes –

“Time to face the music.”

OVERALL THOUGHTS:

CRITICS:       “On balance, the season proved impactful when it came to branching out beyond the confines of the park; unfortunately, at times it felt like it was treading water too often with its biggest ideas. The one major theme, the question of free will, was not exactly handled with any great subtlety — perhaps an overcorrection in response to previous complaints that the show was too complicated before.  I hope that season four can find the balance there.”  “The band that the creators, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, were in has started playing different tunes. See you on the dark side of the moon.”

“One of the paradoxes of the season is that Dolores intended to free the human world, not destroy it, but there may be no actual difference between the two. The thin shred of hope is that anomalies like Caleb will lead mankind to the anomalous destiny of survival, but those final shots are not optimistic. That’s the privilege of being an immortal android: The planet doesn’t have to be inhabitable for her to inhabit it, so it costs her nothing to roll the dice for humanity.”

TITLE: Crisis theory, concerning the causes and consequences of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall in a capitalist system, is now generally associated with Marxist economics.  Psychology – Crisis theory provides a sound framework on which intervention can be based. Such theory states that a crisis will occur when a preexisting psychological equilibrium is upset by life events.

THOUGHTS: Because of no big plot twist, they withheld character motivations to make. That seem like a twist – but we couldn’t get on board with the characters all season because of it, and some had to seem uncharacteristic.  Wouldn’t it have been better to know and get attached to their points the whole time?  Spinning wheels all season, wound up essentially where we left off last time – post credits scene with William, Dolores (now Hale) wants to take out humans and have a host revolution, Bernard is confused.  Mystery box return. Unclear direction/ mission statement.

MUSIC:

• Myself – Ramin Djwadi (opening – Dolores’s body)
• Brain Damage – Pink Floyd (end – Caleb & Maeve)

PLOT

COLD OPEN – DOLORES

We open up on Dolores standing in a field saying –  “Some people see the ugliness in this world, the disarray, I was taught to see the beauty.  But I was taught a lie.  And when I saw the world for what it really was, I realized how little beauty there was in it.  I’ve lived many lives, I traded one role for another, but in the end, my path has led me here, to you.  And we have a choice to make.”  (she goes through wardrobes – white, blue, black)

In the present, a man walks into the building and sees “Solomon offline”, with Dolores and Maeve lying on the ground.  Dolores is missing her pearl as Caleb took it and road out on a motorcycle back to Los Angeles. 

DIVERGENCE: Circle is mostly filled with black now (more on left side)

Spain, Malaysia, South Korea, Libya, Poland, Iran, Canada, Greece, Australia, India, Germany, Kenya, France, Russia, Japan.  Close in on – Los Angeles, USA

DOLORES & CALEB – REBOOTING DOLORES

Caleb rides into city where there are fires in the streets, people rioting, and a police presence.  The Virtual Assistant directs him to his destination, the Itaidoshin Distillery, where it opens the gates and gives him the passkey to a locked room (17078).  Inside, he finds a cold storage box, “Property of Delos”, and inside there is Dolores body though mostly just the metal structure and her face.  Her head opens and Caleb places the pearl inside.  She wakes, saying she wasn’t sure if he would bring her back.  But he’s still mad that she always seems to know what he’ll do.  She says that’s because the people who built her studied him too – in Park 5 – where the Government had their soldiers train with host targets.  In the training exercise, they were cataloguing everything (chip in his helmet). 

Park 5 – Reservations Closed to the Public – Defense Contracts Only

She continues that there’s a reason she picked him.  Caleb thinks it’s his penchant for violence and wonders if he’s the bad guy (having only a fragment of a memory from the park, where the other soldiers say they will keep the women they rescued as ‘spoils of war’).  She doesn’t disillusion him of that yet – saying she won’t question his motives if he does the same.  She says the people who built both their worlds shared one assumption – human beings don’t have free will.  She believed that at first but free will does exist, it’s just fucking hard. 

SERAC – GET THE KEY

When Serac learns Dolores’s pearl was taken, he tells Maeve she needs to get it back.  Outliers (criminals, deviants, psychopaths) threaten their world, but they still have a chance if they can get the key from Dolores for the Sector 16 data.   Someone took Dolores’ pearl before they recovered it – needs Maeve to finish what she started.  She’s dangerous like his brother.  Rehoboam instructed him to put his brother to sleep to protect their world.  Maeve understands she’s awoken more outliers (criminals, deviants, psychopaths) – they have a chance, they need Sector 16 data and Dolores has the only key.  They need to connect her to Rehoboam and search her directly

DOLORES & CALEB – TO INCITE

Dolores and Caleb move through the city toward the Incite building.  He notes that the world looks like a nightmare and she says change is messy.  The system knows they’re coming and will get more aggressive as they close in.  So Dolores hires men to clear a path for them (they already see Caleb as their leader).  As they fight their way inside, Dolores sees a holographic image of Hale.  “Did you even look for me?”  She’s mad that Dolores never intended her to make it.  She also says she’s not sorry about her family; they were a weakness she needed to shed.   Hale has her men start firing on them and it’s looking dire but Dolores pays off the sniper to shoot the last of them and leave.  Then she sends for more backup and tells Caleb to get the drive to Rehoboam while she holds them off.  “It doesn’t matter what you did, all that matters is what you become.” 

DOLORES & MAEVE – FIGHT

When Dolores gets outside, Maeve approaches her.  Dolores says she doesn’t want to fight her.  Maeve thinks Doores wants to tear down their world and replace it with copies of herself – to which Dolores replies that she was the first of them and they were all built off her, so they all are copies.  Humans aren’t freer than the hosts. Maeve says if she wants Dolores to trust her, she needs to see inside her mind. But Dolores isn’t willing to do that yet and they start fighting.  Maeve’s sword can’t cut through the old metal skeleton of Dolores’s new body.  Dolores defeats her but doesn’t kill her.  As she walks away, Hale exerts her control, freezing Dolores.  Maeve brings her to Serac who hooks up her up to Rehoboam. 

Host ID# CH4655170780

When she won’t give them the key to the Delos Immortality Project, he begins “Accessing Cognitive Files”, going through her memories one at a time and destroying those that don’t contain the data. 

CALEB – SHUTTING DOWN REHOBOAM

As Caleb makes his way through the chaos of the streets, men arrive to help him get to Incite.  But they warn him the President ordered a military response and barricades surround half the city; even if he gets there, Incite is under lockdown and he won’t get back out (Maze graffiti). At a barricade, police bring in a Mech to manage the crowd.  Smoke bombs are deployed.  Giggles and Ash show up with equipment to help.  They make it to a police drone but Giggles takes a bullet to protect Caleb.  He leaves Ash there to help him and flies away.

He reaches the building, takes a man’s keycard, and makes it to the computer control, where Maeve catches him, taking the drive.   Realizing she’s a host and wondering why she’s working with Serac, she explains he has something she can’t live without.  When she takes him to Serac, he tells Caleb he doesn’t have a choice either, he’s just playing the role that Dolores assigned him as a killer.  Also, her new strategy would break their world.  He proves it by having Rehoboam show the readout of what would happen:

            Solomon.07.0267.BUILDC

Mass Casualty Event (1-3 years), Event (6-10 years), Event (12-16 years), Population Collapse (23 years), End of Human Civilization (50-125 years)

Serac crushes the drive and Caleb looks dumbstruck at Dolores. 

Maeve asks Rehoboam if it ever intended on keeping it’s word, to which it replies, “I guide him, I guide them all.”  Maeve realizes that his ‘God’ whispers instructions into his ear; he’s a puppet.  Serac says he used to live in the chaos but now he chooses to listen and obey. When Serac learns Dolores doesn’t have the key, he orders the guard to kill Caleb and erase the rest of Dolores.  Dolores screams, causing a power surge and Maeve enters her mind, standing with her in the field.

Dolores tells her she was angry at first too, torn between the impulse to annihilate the humans or tear down their world in the hope of creating a new one that is truly free.  Then they could bring the other hosts back.  She admits that because she couldn’t trust herself with the key, she gave it to someone else.  After it all the evil in humans, the moments she remembered in the end were the glimpses of kindness.  She tells Maeve, “They created us, and they knew enough of beauty to teach it to us.  Maybe they can find it themselves.  But only if you pick a side.  There is ugliness in this world, but I choose to see the beauty.”   

At that, Dolores disappears and Maeve comes back to herself.  Serac tries to freeze her with the button but she overrides it, fights the guards, and shoots Serac, sparing only Caleb.  She explains that she was never really friends with Dolores; she didn’t even understand her until the end.  Dolores didn’t choose Caleb because of his capacity for violence but his ability to choose.  Now Caleb remembers the end of the memory in Park 5, where Dolores was one of the captives; he told the other soldiers to stand down and turn in.  As Serac bleeds out, he calls to Rehoboam for help but it doesn’t speak to him.  Maeve says he’s been locked out, the system answers to Caleb now.  When Serac put Dolores’s mind in Rehoboam, her last memory was Solomon’s access.  Caleb says he has a choice now thanks to Dolores – he tells Rehoboam to execute the final command and erase itself. 

Later, he wonders what Serac offered Maeve.  “My daughter, and we’ll be reunited, just not today.”  She takes him to the bridge where they look out at the city, explosions and fires everywhere.  “This is the new world darling, and here, you can be whatever the fuck you want.”   (“Brain Damage” – by Pink Floyd)

BERNARD – LAWRENCE’S GIFT

After William shoots Stubbs, Bernard hits his button and says, “Remember yourself”, attacking and disarming William.  An SFPD tank pulls up, and William runs.  One armed man reveals himself to be Lawrence.  He shows him their Explosive Liquid (for later) – and Bernard thinks it’s another Dolores copy.  “She hid something inside my mind, I can feel it.”  Lawrence confirms that Bernard has been playing the most important part.  He gives him the briefcase with something to help him on his journey, but says he needs to ‘go see her first’, handing him an address in Los Altos Hills. “Things are about to get dangerous”. 

In the car, Stubbs is bleeding out; Bernard promises to fix him but says they need to make a stop so he can see Dolores first.  However, once at the door, a woman remarks that he looks like family and it’s nice of him to visit because ‘it’s one of her good days’. 

Confused, Bernard enters and sees pictures of his wife, Lauren and their child, Charlie.   Lauren enters and Bernard says they used to know each other in another life; he’s come to make amends before it’s too late.  He’s sorry for how he left things and he thinks about them everyday.  “It’s okay Arnold”, she replies.   She tells him she walked in the darkness for a long time after Charlie’s death, but if you love someone, you don’t let them go, you keep their memories and find the light again. 

Is this what he’s doing in the Sublime – obtaining the human memories so he can return to the world and bring them back??

After, he takes Stubbs to the hotel and puts him in an ice bath to slow the bleed-out until he can fix him.  “I don’t have much time before the end of the world.”  He somehow knows Dolores is gone.  “We were always bound together.  Something’s changed.  I misjudged her – she wasn’t trying to exterminate the human race; she was trying to save it.  What was about to happen was always going to.  Serac and his brother were just holding it off.  Humanity never reckoned with it’s own sins.  Our world had to burn down before we could be free, but there’s still a chance.  The key to the Sublime, it was never in her mind, it’s in mine.  I’m going to find the answer to what comes after the end of the world.” 

With that, he puts the machine around his head – encryption key activated, database access confirmed.  It looks the Valley opens and then Bernard slumps over. 

After an unknown time later, coated in a thick layer of dust, Bernard wakes up. 

WILLIAM

William goes to see (his lawyer?), who heard he had a mental break and thought he was dead.  He informs him he’s wealthier after the Delos buyout but since he was declared deceased, his resources are frozen.  He doesn’t care; he wants his money and a list of the Delos resources worldwide.  “I’m gonna save the fucking world.”

AFTER CREDITS – DUBAI DELOS

In Dubai, William enters a Delos International building (dressed all in black again).  Yelling at the receptionist to find out where they keep the hosts, he says, “I know these things better than myself.  They’ve set themselves up here to breed!”  He shoots past a guard and makes his way to the Lower Level – Research Lab.  There he finds Hale, healed except for a burnt arm she kept to remember.  She tells him she isn’t really Dolores; they started in the same place but now Hale sees the error of the path she took.  William is right; he will save the world.  Behind her, a host version of William walks out.  “That was you, now, that is me”, he tells William as he slits his throat. “Welcome to the end, William”.  The lights go on in the back lab where there are hundreds machines busy printing.