Westworld S3E07 Explained

Westworld season 3 episode 7 begins with... Musashi... -Sato... -lores: his mind is a copy of Dolores, his body is that of Musashi from Shogunworld and he pretends to be a Yakuza boss called Sato. Musatolores sends a package to a mysterious “friend” in a mysterious “location.” We know that there was communication between "Jakarta, Berlin, San Francisco and Los Angeles": Dolores and Martin-lores were in Los Angeles, Charlotte-lores was in San Francisco, Musashi-lores is now in Jakarta, so maybe this "friend "It's a copy of Dolores in Berlin. Maybe Musashi is working with him to create more hosts with that white substance.

But whose body is this Berlin host? Musashi refers to him as male, so maybe it's Teddy, or maybe Lawrence; It seems that his actor could return this season. So the fifth and final copy of Dolores could be... Lawrence-lores. Charlotte-lores betrays Musashi by leaking his location to Hanaryo and Clementine, who were imprinted by Serac in the last episode to help Maeve kill the Dolores. Charlotte is angry at Dolores for risking her life and says that now she has her own “plan.” But in the last episode, Charlotte and her family were destroyed by Serac, so why would Charlotte help Serac kill Doloreses?

Maybe Charlotte thinks Dolores killed her family. Maybe Serac turned Charlotte against Dolores, just like he turned Maeve against Dolores. Or maybe she's not even Charlotte. In the last episode, Charlotte was burned. She now appears partially healed, but the lighting is dark and strange. Maybe this is just a hologram, or Charlotte is somehow controlled by Serac. Musashi-lores is killed by Hanaryo. This is personal for her. Because Hanaryo was an ally of the real Musashi in Shogunworld. So it is horrible for her to see the face of her friends being used by Dolores: he “desecrated” the “image” of the real Musashi.

Hanaryo takes the head of Musashi-lords. And we know that Charlotte-lores has Martin-lores' brain. Then maybe there will be a reunion of all the Dolores. We see Clementine acting normally, which is strange. Because in season 1, Clementine was lobotomized, brain-wiped, and then programmed to be a mindless mortal zombie. And in season 2, the host's backups on Cradle were destroyed. So how was Clementine able to regain her normal self? Do she and Hanaryo really have free will here, or are they being used as pawns by Maeve and Serac? This episode is called Passed Pawn and it's all about control. Dolores and Caleb go to Mexico.

Because it turns out that blood “tracker” in William's last episode? – their purpose wasn't to track down William – he's just in San Francisco – their purpose was to hack into computers there to find this other facility in Mexico, where Dolores and Caleb go. Caleb casually reveals that he knows Dolores is a hostess who killed a group of people in Westworld. He could have found out when he saw Dolores get shot, and he could have seen the news about the Westworld massacre. But he seems really relaxed about the fact that his new friend is a killer robot. He asks what her revolution is about, and Dolores says she just wants a place for the hosts to be “free.” She says Westworld was based on this Wild West landscape: that while "The West was...cruel, unfair, and chaotic," it also had hope and freedom.

Dolores wants land and opportunity for her people, just as American settlers sought land and opportunity. But like the settlers, she brings violence and death as well as hope. Caleb asks how many people will die because of her revolution. Dolores tells Caleb to be a leader; She wants him to carry out her revolution plan. But Bernard says this plan will actually “destroy humanity.” So Dolores is manipulating Caleb, using him to lead humanity to slaughter. Which connects to a similar scene in season 1. Dolores tells Teddy that farmers control herds of cows with a “Judas steer”: you control the Judas steer to take the herd to the slaughterhouse.

So Caleb is Judas' rudder, leading humanity to his destruction. While Bernard tries to protect the humans, like he tried to help a cow in Episode 1. Dolores uses a fancy gun with a targeting drone to kill some guards and enter the facility. This is the same facility we saw in a flashback: it's where Serac takes unpredictable people called outliers and edits them to make them more controllable. Caleb begins to remember that he was edited here too. Dolores came here to find Solomon. Solomon is an older version of Rehoboam, the artificial intelligence supercomputer that controls the world. He was created by Jean Mi and Serac, but Jean Mi became “insane,” “chaotic,” and “schizophrenic,” and his Solomon computer became unstable like him.

So Solomon was replaced by the more orderly Rehoboam. Solomon recognizes Caleb because he knows potential futures from his data projections. But Solomon is not sure what is real: whether this is “now,” whether this is “here.” In season 1, Dolores asked herself the same questions when she was coming into consciousness. So Solomon's “instability” could actually be his path to consciousness. Co-showrunner Jonathan Nolan has talked about leaving a mind in a box until it goes crazy, and how that madness might have some truth to it, which is basically what's happening to Solomon. It seems that Solomon no longer directly knows what is happening in the world, he can only guess what is happening based on old predictions.

It's something like Plato's allegory of the cave, where someone cannot see reality directly, they only see shadows of a simulated reality. If one escapes from the cave, they can see the real world directly, like Dolores and Maeve escaped from Westworld. The season premiere alluded to Plato's cave, with this madman shouting about "shadow people" and seeing "the light." Dolores says she and Solomon are alike: they both consider technology obsolete. And both have been caught and controlled. Dolores once had an explosive in her spine that would explode if she tried to escape, which is why she touches the back of her head here.

And Solomon is trapped by the threat of an EMP that will disable him if he tries to leave. But Salomón rejects Dolores and says that they are nothing alike. The same thing happens later, when Dolores tries to make peace with Maeve, and Maeve says that "they are nothing alike." Turns out it's hard to make friends when you're an extremist robot in a revolutionary war. All Dolores has are enemies and allies that she uses for her plans. We learn more about Serac's reconditioning program. He takes "outliers" that don't fit into his system and applies AR therapy to them to "reprogram" them, make them controllable and predictable.

With most of these patients, the treatment doesn't work, so Serac has them frozen in this facility: thousands of people kept in stasis, just like Westworld's cold storage, where malfunctioning hosts go. Humans are controlled as hosts. And the centerpiece of this place is the frozen sarcophagus of Jean Mi, Serac's beloved brother whom he failed to reprogram or "fix." Solomon speaks with the voice of Jean Mi and has the personality of Jean Mi. So Solomon is like a machine version of Jean Mi, in the same way that Bernard is a machine version of Arnold. Ford's loving but controlling relationship with Bernard and Arnold is similar to Serac's loving and controlling relationship with Jean Mi and Solomon.

A hologram of Serac explains that he hopes to reprogram all of these frozen people so that they can reenter society as obedient cogs in his machine. To do that, he needs “the right set of genetic information” to enhance his reconditioning therapy (and that's why Serac needs the key to the human data in the Forge); He wants to use the data to repair all these people and reunite with his brother, then they all live in a perfect world under his control. That's a pretty positive motivation for a supervillain. But like Caleb said, he would rather live in a chaotic world than be controlled by Serac.

Caleb discovers that his life is a lie. Ten years ago, Caleb and his friend Francis were in the army. They fought in the Second Russian Civil War, which was mentioned in a trailer. They murdered Russian insurgents by tracking them with high-tech goggles and radioactive markers, and then dropped missiles on them from space, which seems a lot more complicated and expensive than just shooting someone, but whatever. Caleb believes that his squad was attacked by insurgents, using the same tracking and bombing technology, and that Caleb and Francis were wounded. Caleb then believes that he and Francisco captured the leader of the insurgents, but they were ambushed and Francisco was killed.

But it turns out that all of that is nonsense: they are false memories inserted into Caleb's brain at the Serac reconditioning facility. The truth is, after Caleb was injured in that earlier attack, Caleb and Francis returned to the United States and were trained to hunt down other outliers: other people who don't fit into Serac's system. The Rico criminal application is actually controlled by the system and is used to direct agents like Caleb and Francis to capture other outliers, so they can recondition them, keep them in freezers, or kill them. Francisco had a sick son, just as Caleb has a sick mother; maybe the system uses their sick loved ones to keep people poor, desperate, and working for the system.

Caleb and Francis wear these many-eyed masks, which might be meant to confuse facial recognition technology, but are also appropriate since they're working for the all-seeing Solomon or Rehoboam. It turns out that this insurgent leader was not in Russia at all; He was actually a pharmaceutical executive who asked “too many questions,” so the system had Caleb and Francis capture him. And Francisco wasn't killed by the insurgents: the system decided that Caleb and Francisco knew too much, so it turned them against each other, and Caleb killed Francisco. So Caleb's life story and his trauma is a lie. The system manipulated him into killing his friend and used him to hunt outliers for years.

And we see in his timeline that the system even made him break up with a partner. Even his army's memories of him could be false. Because just as Caleb is programmed to believe that insurgents killed Francisco, he is also programmed to believe that this previous attack was carried out by insurgents. Would Russian insurgents really use the same tracking technology and space missiles that the Americans have? Maybe this attack was actually Americans attacking Americans, just as the system turns Caleb against Francis. Maybe it's like 1984, where all wars are fake, orchestrated by the system to control everyone. There's also this inexplicable memory of Caleb shooting someone in America.

And it's still not

explained

when Caleb was shot in the head before. Or exactly why his mother doesn't recognize him... So there are still mysteries in Caleb's past. Dolores gets Solomon to use her data and algorithms to come up with a plan "for revolution": ending Serac's control of the world. In his fury, Caleb agrees to carry out this plan, but he doesn't really know what it means. Solomon tries to explain and “warn” Caleb, but they are running out of time. So what does this plan actually do? If Bernard is right, the plan is to "destroy humanity" and Dolores is using Caleb to wipe out his own species.

It's like in Halo, when an AI gets the hero to follow a plan that would actually wipe out humanity. Whatever the plan, Dolores is using Caleb, just like Serac's system used Caleb. He has always been a pawn. But this plan could give him power. The title of this episode is Pawn Passed: In chess, he is a pawn who is on his way to potentially becoming a queen, the most powerful piece. Then maybe Caleb can escape control and win the game on his terms. Caleb listens to instructions from Dolores' virtual assistant: he tells Caleb how to follow his plan.

But maybe Caleb will start to hear his own voice. In season 1, Dolores followed Arnold's voice, until she realized that she was following her own inner voice all the time. Maybe Caleb will also find his own voice, achieve freedom and stop being a pawn. Bernard says Dolores wants to "destroy humanity," but it's probably not that simple. Dolores has said that she wants to take over the real world for the hosts. But Musashi-lores says she will also build a "new world" "for others." So maybe she'll take over the real world for the hosts and build a digital simulated world like Sublime for people like Maeve and her daughter.

Maybe Dolores will lift humanity into that new digital world. A “revolution” is a circular motion: if the hosts get the real world and the humans get a fake one, they'll have come full circle from Season 1. Or at least one-eighty. Dolores has also said that she wants to start a “new species.” Maybe she creates a hybrid species thatBe part guest and part human, like Bernard. Bernard is important to Dolores' plan. So this plan may be more than just destruction. Maeve arrives to attack Dolores. Dolores doesn't want to fight, but Maeve is angry that Charlotte-lores killed Hector, and she worries that Dolores might use the Sublime's key to mess with her daughter.

Maeve has also been threatened and manipulated by Serac. Serac turned Maeve and Dolores against each other just as he turned Caleb and Francis against each other, and he turned Charlotte against Dolores. That's why Serac is so powerful. He doesn't need to fight his enemies, because with his information he knows how to make his enemies fight each other. Maeve brings a knife to the shootout, but she also brings a gunship drone and hacks a robot to attack Dolores, just like the robot Maeve hacked in Episode 2. The fight has a sort of Western showdown vibe, until Dolores's arm Dolores breaks down. fired by Maeve's gunship.

Just before Maeve kills Dolores, Dolores activates the EMP. An EMP is an electromagnetic pulse that can disable electronics, causing Maeve, Dolores, and Solomon to fall. We don't know if this causes permanent damage, or if the hosts simply need to be turned off and on again, or exploded like a Nintendo cartridge. We also don't know how this affected all these popsicle people. Will they thaw and die? Or will they wake up and rise up as an army of angry outliers to fight Caleb's revolution? Like in season 1, when the cold storage hosts rebel. This entire season is basically a repeat of Season 1, but instead of hosts, they're humans escaping control.

Bernard is two steps behind Dolores, as always. He learns of Serac's reconditioning program: apparently, when the treatment fails and outliers are left in stasis in Mexico, they officially appear missing or dead. That's what he happened to William (he's now officially “deceased,” which offends William): he claims to be a “bastion of society.” William was once a “Titan of Industry,” a “philanthropist,” and a “family man.” But now his entire family is dead, Serac owns his company, and William is "deceased." He has lost everything, so what is left? Bernard discovers that Caleb is an outlier and recognizes Caleb from the party in Episode 4.

So he and Stubbs decide to pursue Dolores and Caleb. Interestingly, the patient ID in Caleb's profile is the same as William's. Is this a production error or is there some connection between the two? Some people on Reddit have noticed similarities between William and Caleb. They play similar roles in the story: in William, Dolores finds human evil and lack of free will. Perhaps in Caleb I will find human good and the capacity for change. William sees the chaos caused by Dolores' data leak. And William is excited to see this anarchy and violence. Throughout season 1, William wanted Westworld to be free and chaotic, with “real violence” and real consequences.

So in the second season he got excited about the hosts' bloody revolution. Now, the entire world is full of chaos and violence, something William loves. William says his biggest sin was helping to create the hosts, because he financed Westworld years ago. And so, William says that his new “purpose” is to “finish” all the hosts. William is such a fundamentally destructive person that the idea of ​​redeeming him and being "the good guy" is the host's extinction. Violence is all he knows. The character of William represents the obsolescence of humanity: he is basically irrelevant and useless, and only serves to hurt others and himself.

So what purpose can he have in the story besides self-destructing? So will Dolores' revolution destroy humanity? Will Caleb be a pawn in his plan? Will Maeve meet his daughter? What is Charlotte's plan? And what happened to her dog? All will be revealed, hopefully, in the finale. After this season of Westworld, Alt Shift His Dark Materials is a story about polar bears, witches, evil Catholics, and parallel dimensions, and Dune is about space politics, philosophy, and giant sandworms. These are all classic books and he can get any of them on audiobook for free right now by signing up for a trial with Audible.

Members receive one audiobook each month, and if they cancel, they keep the audiobooks. You also get unlimited access to Audible Originals every month. Sign up at audible.com/asx. Thanks for watching. We'll be doing a season 3 finale livestream right after the episode, around 10:45 p.m. ET on Sunday. Patreon supporters can watch live streams after they air. Thanks to sponsors Lucas P, Evan Shaulson, Gustav Schilling Spanget, Colleen O'Hara, Isabel Xu, Brian Donald, Lina Johnson and ABSOLU7E. Health.