'Westworld' Season 3 Episode 1: Fans wonder if the real world is not as real as it seems
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s magnum opus, the third season of ‘Westworld’, has raised more questions than answers.
Even though this is standard ‘Westworld’ thoroughfare, it is a little unnerving to see the show bereft of the Western setting, and wholeheartedly embrace a cyberpunk aesthetic, more worthy of Phillip K Dick than Michael Crichton, whose novel inspired the show.
Of course, the interwebz was abuzz with speculations and theories about what is happening in the show.
There’s a lot to take in.
Take, for instance, Aaron Paul’s character Caleb. There are obvious similarities between him and Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores Abernathy. They both seem stuck in a loop, waking up to a repetitive existence every day. We know from the trailer that Caleb and Dolores team-up. Even so, the scene where Caleb finds an injured Dolores, which is eerily similar to how a young William (Jimmi Simpson) finds the distraught then-farm-girl in Season 1, makes one shiver with anticipation.
There is also Rehoboam, the Artificial Intelligence system with deterministic abilities, named after the first king of Judah, that seems to control the world outside the theme parks.
So, what does the Internet have to say about all of this?
On the official subreddit for ‘Westworld’, one user found the intro credits sequence (that changes every season) foretelling one of the show’s most important characters. Reddit user TheCyphyr, pointing at the winged creature that looks like an eagle and burns away as it flies towards a circular source of light in the intro credits, posed the question: “Is this a reference to the story of Icarus? Will this season show Dolores's downfall as she flies too close to the sun?”
That wasn’t apparently the only reference to Greek mythology in the intro.
Talking about a humanoid creature looking its own reflection in liquid, another Reddit user pointed out, “Narcissus is also referenced in the intro. Which complements the idea of humanity gazed in its own reflection represented by the hosts.”
But the speculation that intrigues most comes from a Reddit user called PeteCampbellisaG. The user suggests that the “Real World” is some kind of augmented reality. The user writes, “Based on what we've seen in S03E01 I think we can all agree something is definitely not right with the real world.”
The user continues with the hypothesis that the world we're seeing outside the theme parks is some kind of “augmented reality overlay”. “My suspicion after the newest episode is that the real world has been devastated to some degree (at least certain cities) and is more akin to the wasteland we saw at the end of the Season 2 finale. But augmented reality has been used to make everything look nice and glossy.”
The user further hypothesizes that brief glimpses of the real world cities can actually be seen through Caleb's flashbacks. The user writes, “Do people know they live in an augmented city? I believe so, but I think they've (somewhat) accepted it. If you live in squalor at least putting a shiny augmented reality overlay on the whole thing makes it easier to deal with. The wealthy still enjoy their privilege so it's easier for them to adjust. It also makes things like Westworld much more attractive – if you can go to a place that you know is definitely fake it helps you feel like your sorta-fake world is more real.”
This theory definitely takes one back to one of the notable icons of cyberpunk science fiction: ‘The Matrix’.
The Wachowskis’, in their trilogy, took a lot from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s treatise ‘Simulacra and Simulation’. The Simulation, as argued by the Reddit user, can be seen in the examples of chatbots that talk to people, Caleb's dying mother is in a hospice room with a giant screen overhead, the technology that helps control quote-unquote smart houses.
The Simulacra — copies that depict things that either had no originals — may just be the kind of blockchain tech that Caleb uses to find criminal missions. It almost feels like a ‘Grand Theft Auto’ version of real life.
Let’s not forget that the drunken man at the Incite party suggests that this whole world is some kind of fake simulation. There are also chips that people seem to consume on the show. That may be how this augmented reality is implemented. One mustn't also forget the kind of fidelity tests being run on the Delos patriarch in Season 2. Even if failure then, given the show’s warped non-linear storytelling, it can be assumed that at some point, the tests produced positive results.
On a more positive note, user M_XoX postulates that Bernard is heading back to Westworld for Maeve. We see at the end of the episode that Bernard, presumably in a farm in the Philippines, is heading towards an island off the coast of China, supposedly where Westworld and the other theme parks are actually located. It’d be interesting to see how the Host (who for the longest time was convinced he was a human) fares in this world with newfound knowledge and more self-control.
‘Westworld’ speculations are endless. One can only hope the show, through its complex storytelling, manages to satiate our queries to the best of its ability.
The next episode of 'Westworld' airs March 22, on HBO.