'Westworld' Season 3 Episode 3 Preview: Dolores tells Caleb that she plans to usher in a revolution
What can one expect from Episode 3 of ‘Westworld’ Season 3?
For starters, it will definitely explore the relationship between Dolores and Caleb, a construction worker and a part-time criminal. Caleb’s existence, despite being a human, is very similar to that of Dolores. He lives in loops, questions the nature of his reality, and definitely does not have a lot of kindness in his heart for the people around him, people, who have no doubt been selected by Rehoboam’s deterministic abilities to lead a better life.
For all intents and purposes for the successful people in the world, Caleb may as well be a Host, they can use and discard.
Episode 2 of ‘Westworld’ Season 3 revealed a lot and left even more questions to be answered. While the episode saw none of Caleb’s (Aaron Pual) or Dolores’ (Evan Rachel Wood) storylines, it did reveal more about Maeve (Thandie Newton) and the new character, and possibly this season’s villain Serac (Vincent Cassel).
The episode saw Cassel, the mysterious partner at Incite who controls the deterministic artificial intelligence device Rehoboam, tell Maeve that his prediction algorithm failed to see the divergence, that is Dolores, coming. He said that Dolores would destroy the harmony in the human world that he had long strived to create. And he “asked” Maeve to help him defeat Dolores.
Back at the eponymous theme park, Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) discovered that Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), the head of security at the park, was a Host all along. He then reprogrammed Stubbs to aid him in his quest to find Maeve, for he believed that Dolores had only brought him back so that he could act as a check for her, in case she went out of control; and he figured that the only person who could help stop her was Maeve.
So, the general consensus is that Maeve is the only true match for Dolores and her unchecked fury against the human race. In fact, the official trailer for the series also sees them facing each other, almost as if ready to fight to the death — eerily reminiscent of the final battle between Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) in ‘The Matrix Revolution’. But where is Dolores?
Last we saw, in Episode one, Dolores was gravely injured. And Caleb came to her aid. Before the firefight where she got hurt, Dolores was attempting to get inside Rehoboam through Liam Dempsey Jr. (John Gallagher Jr.), the co-owner of Incite. We saw her create a Host replica of the head of Incite security. In season one, she brought back five “pearls” along with her. One of them was Bernard. Two others are now in active use, the aforementioned head of security and the other in the form of Charlotte Hale, a high-ranking member of the Delos board, the company that owned all the parks and the Hosts.
The promo video for Episode 3 titled ‘The Absence of Field’ also reveals that the episode will focus on Charlotte. We see in the video Dolores telling the Host Charlotte, “Remember who you are. Now let me show you, who you need to pretend to be.”
The Host Charlotte asks Dolores, “Why must I be her?” to which the latter responds, “Because I trust you.”
But her trust may not be everything. It is evident in the video that the Host consciousness is struggling to align with the idea of being Charlotte. She says, “I feel like I’m changing.” Which makes one wonder, who exactly is this Host consciousness? One of the more popular guesses on the internet has been that it’s James Marsden’s Teddy Flood, Dolores’ former lover who she killed to put him out of his misery.
Another possibility is that it’s the former Mariposa prostitute Clementine (Angela Sarafyan). The highly unlikely one is that it is her father Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum).
The promo video also sees Dolores tell Caleb, “The way they built their world, it won’t take much to bring it all crashing down.” When Caleb asks her what she was planning to do, Dolores’ answer is a predictable one: “Start a revolution.”
A good guess for what Dolores meant by “The way they built their world…” is that it’s a reference to Rehoboam. The artificial intelligence system, which functions on the principle of determinism, likely strategizes what humans to be put to what function.
The present world (the real world in the show) functions in near-perfect harmony because of such a system. Should something happen to Rehoboam, however, all might be lost. It would definitely fit the idea of a “revolution” Dolores wants to usher in.
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy love to explore philosophical themes through the medium of science fiction in this show. Perhaps, we shall find out the full extent of these philosophical ideas in the episodes to come.
The next episode of 'Westworld' airs on March 29 on HBO.