'Westworld' Season 3 Episode 5 Review: Outliers in the system bring everything crashing down
Spoilers for 'Westworld' Season 3 Episode 5 'Genre'
For good or for ill, 'Westworld' plays the long game and this season might just be long-game storytelling at its best. Its short game, however, left a lot to be desired, as a missed opportunity for a novel idea made for a disappointingly bland car chase. The end of the world never looked so dull.
Let's get the bad out of the way as soon as possible, like this episode probably should have: The high-speed car chase and spy-like action scenes were more tiring than thrilling. It's especially disappointing after last week's highly entertaining episode that this week wasted such a fun idea. Caleb Nichols (Aaron Paul) is injected with a drug that makes him see the world in different genres, allowing the episode's action scenes jump from one filming style to another, and very little of it actually works. It could be the fault of the setting - there's only so much excitement you can get out of sleek and silent futuristic cars on empty, late-night streets. Whatever the reasons, the final explosion comes more as of a relief than anything else.
With that said, this episode was a real gamechanger, not just for the season, but for the series as a whole. The opening scenes with Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel) and his brother attempting to gain control of the world after the destruction of Paris really puts the series into perspective, almost dwarfing the first two seasons in terms of scope. Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) has come a long way from being an emergent AI in a Western theme park and is instead introducing anarchy on a global scale.
The world of 2050, not too far from our own, the system has all but been perfected, and it's in that "all but" that the danger truly lies. It turns out that the Westworld theme park was a microcosm for the outside world, as outliers in the system who question the nature of their reality — like Dolores and Caleb — are ultimately the ones fated to bring it all crashing down. The parallels between AI and humans whose lives are defined by the system are brilliant and done with surprising subtlety for a show that can be so heavy-handed about its twists. It's not that the point isn't obvious, but the show has expanded its theme without drawing too much attention to the fact that everything that 'Westworld' was about has been leading to exactly this story.
We all saw what happened when the outliers like Dolores and Maeve (Thandie Newton) finally saw their place in the system. They tore it down from the inside out. With one stroke, Dolores did the same for every human on the planet. She showed them just where their place in the system was, and what their futures entailed if they allowed the system to continue to control their actions. The effect is powerful and immediate. People return to their baser selves and start tearing the world down. The real question for the show is now this: with no lies left to expose, what happens next?
The next three episodes are going to be very interesting explorations of that question, and there's a lot to look forward to. Just so long as the series can figure out some consistency with its action scenes.
The next episode of 'Westworld' airs on April 19 on HBO.