'Westworld' Season 3 Episode 3: Tessa Thompson's portrayal of Charlotte Hale's discomfort is a visceral watch
Spoilers for ‘Westworld’ Season 3 Episode 3
Episode 3 of season 3 of ‘Westworld’ had a quality to it reminiscent of some of the more meaningful episodes of the first two seasons. ‘The Absence of Field’ in many ways was a Charlotte Hale episode. Or the Host version of Charlotte hale, to be more clear. It was less about self-discovery and more about the conundrum that comes with (to quote the philosophical science fiction series on multiple occasions) “understanding the nature of one’s reality”.
Tessa Thompson has, since season 1, played this cocky high-level Delos executive to perfection. Charlotte was confident and smug and carried with her a secret. She was the one trying to smuggle all data collected by the park to the real world. Why she would do it in a clandestine manner, given that the data already belonged to Delos, remained a mystery till the very end of this episode. But that’s not what made the episode what it was.
It was Thompson’s performance as the exact opposite of what Hale used to be in the previous seasons; the real Hale. When Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) escaped the park, she did so by murdering the Delos executive, cloning her as Host, and implanting her own pearl in her body. But when Dolores woke up as the present Hale, she was a wholly different person.
Speculations suggest the new Hale is either Teddy Flood (James Marsden) or Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum), but in the case of either, the confusion in this new Hale is almost painful to witness. It is as if Hale is experiencing a continuous existential crisis, one that would have automatically led to a Host short-circuiting back in the day. But with higher “bulk apperception” -- the Hosts’ ability to understand the nature of their reality -- and a higher tolerance for pain, she did not malfunction.
But that malfunction is only in the strictest sense of parameters employed by those running the park. Here, Hale was malfunctioning in every other possible way. For one, she kept indulging in self-harm -- cutting herself as if she were uncomfortable in the very skin she existed.
Her discomfort was perhaps an ongoing battle of identities: the one she really was and the one she was programmed to play. Imagine being forced to live in deceit. But imagine that deceit being your only visible identity. How long does it take for the deception to overpower the reality?
Imagine the titular character from ‘Donny Brasco’, played by Johnny Depp. As an undercover agent inside the mob, he began to lose a sense of right and wrong. And while Donnie still had reality on his side, the same cannot be said for Hale. Waking up from one fever dream into another, it is easy to understand why Hale was not doing well; she barely had any time to adjust.
And within the confines of the real Hale’s character, she found overprotectiveness for her son Nathan. So much so that she killed a man she suspected was a child molester. But the most unsettling part of the whole episode was to watch Hale as a weak-willed, depressed, ennui-ridden entity. She was as far away from the real Hale as possible (although only when either alone or with Dolores).
We still don’t know who Hale really is. But with what looks like an impending breakdown coming her way, does it matter? Will she, like Peter Abernathy in season 2, when loaded with the malignant data and encryption key, just cease to function in any perceivably normal way? There are seven more episodes to go, but if this keeps up, you have to wonder if the span of this season and the lifespan of Hale are in any way the same.
The next episode of 'Westworld' airs April 5, on HBO.
