'Westworld' Season 3 Episode 5 raises questions on Caleb's past including being 'edited' and killing Francis
Spoilers for 'Westworld' Season 3 Episode 5 'Genre'
The amount of fan speculation that ‘Westworld’ attracts probably surpasses even ‘Game of Thrones’ at the height of its popularity. The attention to detail on the show has always been what has drawn fans to the show. And season 3 episode 5 of ‘Westworld’ has tonnes of details that fans went gaga over. And once the shock from the initial impact wore off, they were back to asking questions and trying to delve inside the minds of showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy.
And while fans seemed to agree that Caleb’s (Aaron Paul) drug trip in the episode was poorly executed (fans have called it hamfisted and cheesy), it didn’t stop them from analyzing what happened there.
One of the more interesting aspects of the episode was the backstory of this season’s antagonist, Serac (Vincent Cassel). It tells the story of how Serac and his brother created Rehoboam and how eventually, Serac realized his own brother was one of the divergences, the outliers that would ruin his plans of stopping humankind’s plummet into chaos.
Instead of killing him, Serac locked his brother up in a facility, attempting to “edit” him. The facility included many more like him. A Reddit user posed the question, “So, the facility where Serac's brother (and presumably Caleb and William too) was being held is some kind of lobotomizing place? They were trying to change the nature of the outliers so they could become predictable / more complacent or did I miss something?”
Another user observed, “When Caleb is walking with Kid Cudi and the hostage, they look like they are in the same warehouse yard that Liam Sr. was walking through when he found the facility that Serac's brother was in. I think Caleb and Kid Cudi were both in that facility and were fed lies about going to war and while he was there Caleb killed Kid Cudi (Francis).”
This is an interesting hypothesis and one that explains Caleb’s mysterious military past further. As another user pointed out, “Rehoboam was sending outliers to war and places where they could be human meat and not ruin the plan. Serac found a way to ‘edit’ people so that they wouldn’t have to die,” implying that Caleb’s psychology may have been quote-unquote edited by Serac and his team, in order to maintain status quo in the world.
Another user noted, “I think they wiped Caleb and gave him a completely new history, that of some dead soldier. So Caleb was never in the war, he didn't have a friend that died and that's not his mother. Caleb is a reprogrammed outlier and that person died in the war.”
The editing of outlier human beings, many fans pointed out, bore a striking resemblance with how techs at Delos fine-tuned the Hosts. In fact, the scene with Serac and his brother at the facility eerily paralleled Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) working on Dolores in season 1.
“I'm certain that we're going to discover the parallels between the ways Ford ran the park for hosts and Serac controls humans are even more literal than we thought. Including how hosts are commonly reformatted with a new role. I think they make adjustments to personalities and backstories, but if someone isn't working out they will completely brainwash them and give them a new role,” a fan noted.
Then added, “I'm thinking that when Caleb's mom said he's not her son, she meant it literally. She was so sick and on so many drugs that she remembered that he's not really her son but can't really explain it. Either she never had one or more likely they subbed in Caleb after her real son died or something. Considering the army buddy was an AI, it's possible that everything we know about Caleb isn't true.”
The next episode of 'Westworld' airs on April 19 on HBO.