'Westworld' Season 3 Episode 3 Review: A sinister future, questions of identity and a deepening mystery
Spoilers for 'Westworld' Season 3, Episode 3 - 'Absence of Field'
The host AIs of 'Westworld' have been smuggled out into the world by Dolores, and nobody knows which of them are out there - and in whose bodies they're in, as well. Season 3 is very much a game of spot the host, as hosts pretend to be humans, live their lives out, and take on new roles that they weren't programmed for. In all this, it's worth asking the question - what makes a person?
If you can download someone else's memories, collect all the available data from their decisions, body chemistry, and predictive algorithms - can you create a complete copy of that person? could you be them? That's a question that this episode attempts to explore, and while it makes things a whole lot more confusing, it's interesting to see the question of AI approached from the other side.
Gone are Season 1 & 2's questions of whether or not artificial intelligence can attain true sentience - Season 3 appears to be taking that as a given. What comes next is everything that's associated with self-autonomy. In an ideal situation, an intelligence that has just become self-aware after the nature of their reality is shattered would have a lot of trauma from the experience. Unfortunately, Dolores has placed the hosts in a war of secrets, lies, and pretense, so just as a host has come to grips with their new reality, they're put into the very stressful position of infiltration.
The host inside Charlotte Hale (Tess Thompson) is not having an easy time of things. Whoever they were in a previous life, pretending to be another person does not come easy to them. They try, admirably, to fake Charlotte's personal life as well as their professional one, but it's causing them a lot of stress, and it's only a matter of time before they snap. They already have, in one instance, as the host strangles a child predator out in broad daylight at a park.
Running alongside that is 'Westworld' man-on-the-street, Caleb Nichols (Aaron Paul) and his story. Caleb shows, that in the future, humanity is halfway to becoming robotic hosts themselves - a military implant allows Caleb's biochemistry itself to be hacked, his own heartbeat programmable. What's more, every scrap of data about him has been absorbed by Rehoboam and fed to predictive algorithms - somewhere out there, there's a mirror universe, simulated by Rehoboam, which predicts that within the next 10-12 years, he will kill himself.
"Before the system, a man like you had a chance," says Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), pulling 'Westworld' straight from cowboys and AI and firmly into 'Black Mirror' territory - what happens when algorithms have too much control? The show seems to be positing that the lack of privacy, and predictive algorithms that the future follows means that the average guy has no chance. 'Westworld' isn't subtle about the parallels to real life that it's drawing - and the future is looking decidedly sinister.
The next episode of 'Westworld' airs April 5, on HBO.