Writer’s Note: Every Westworld episode review this season will involve spoilers of some kind so you have been warned.
!! Spoilers Start Now !!
Quick Synopsis
- Serac (Vincent Cassel) recounts his life after the nuclear attack on Paris and how he and his brother, Jean (Paul Cooper), created Rehoboam to avoid humanity’s destruction. A young Serac and Jean bring in Liam Dempsey Sr. (Jefferson Mays), father of current day Liam, for his money and are only able to persuade him / keep him around with accurate market predictions which they can choose.
- Rehoboam starts identifying outliers that will affect the planned future, including Serac’s brother Jean, which leads him to eventually isolating and reforming the worst offenders from harming society. Serac kills Liam Sr. when his greed gets the better of him by faking a plane crash.
- Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Caleb (Aaron Paul) take the kidnapped Liam Dempsey (John Gallagher Jr.) through the tunnels to avoid capture by Serac. He attempts to escape and hits Caleb with the Genre drug before being recaptured by Dolores. As the trio makes their escape, Caleb begins hallucinating, seeing different colors than the rest of the group and experienced different thematic scores as they escape.
- During a firefight with Serac’s men, Dolores convinces Liam to give over his private key, which host-Connells (Tommy Flanagan) uses at Incite’s headquarters to feed Serac’s background info to Dolores (which ends up being the flashbacks we’ve seen this episode from Serac).
- Dolores, Caleb, and Liam are cornered by Serac’s men but are saved by additional help ordered by Dolores (Ash and Giggles from the first episode, played by Lena Waithe and Marshawn Lynch respectively) who accompany them, and learn more about their projected futures under Rehoboam.
- Host-Connells, accompanied by Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), begins to release all of Incite’s past, present, and future info on the world. Ashley (Luke Hemsworth) catches up to them, releasing Bernard, and leaves Connells behind at his suggestion (since Serac’s men have shown up to question Connells). Host-Connells is interrogated by Serac’s men, led by Martel (Pom Klementieff), and accompanied by a hologram Serac. He uses the opportunity to blow up the guards with a hidden explosive.
- With Connells dead, Liam is no longer needed and they discuss what to do with. Ash, angered by the information she’s received from Liam and Incite, fatally shoots Liam, who dies mumbling incoherent, differing details about Caleb’s life. Caleb starts flashing back to new moments in the death of his teammate that differ from what we’ve already seen.
Caleb’s Trip
Arthouse, Action, Romance, Horror, Noir, you name it and this episode had it all. Caleb’s experience with the “Genre” drug lasts the entire episode and gave the filmmakers an opportunity to play with different movie backdrops in a non-jarring way. Given we’re outside the park (where we would come to expect a shift like this), it’s an impressive and entertaining audio/visual ride with numerous decades of film history.
Some were easy to pick up, like the noir, action, and romance sequences. Noir featured a score reminiscent of old school thrillers (Nolan specifically referenced Vertigo and Out of the Past) with an added silver-screen effect to the black and white color change. The car chase featured Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”, made film famous in Apocalypse Now‘s helicopter attack scene. Lastly, we get a classic love theme from no other than 1970’s Love Story, cued up when Caleb becomes absolutely useless and shoots puppy love eyes to Dolores.
The last two happen out-of-sequence and can definitely be harder to peg down for the casual cinephile. The first one occurs as Caleb and crew head into the subway, with Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing” playing, a reference to the heroin-fueled movie Trainspotting. I found this one the most confusing reference, but it could be a on-the-nose reference to the movie title (since they were boarding a subway car) or to the drug usage in the film. If it’s the later, it would have made more sense at the onset of Caleb’s trip.
The second one is even more confusing as we receive a short pause to experience the real world, with David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” playing (another fantastic Ramin Djawadi piano cover). While not explicitly called out, the chaos shown in this moment feels like a classic societal breakdown moment in Dawn of the Dead or The Mist. Unfortunately, here’s where I started to question whether Giggle’s warning, “Watch out for the last act”, would actually play out. However, we get that at the end when Caleb is trying to save Liam as he dies. We get a callback to The Shining‘s classic score as Caleb is struck in horror of what has transpired.
Caleb flashbacks during the horror sequence included more moments with his teammate Francis (Kid Cudi), but the newcomers to his visions, Dr. Green (Bahia Haifi) and Whitman (Enrico Colantoni) (which aren’t named during the episode) seem related to rehabilitation center that Serac runs and placed his brother into. Could it be the AI set him and his teammate up on purpose to direct Caleb’s course?
My only real criticism during the 5 phases was during the firefight. It was hard to believe they had any success with Caleb essentially being dead weight the whole time. Dolores made quick corrections and adjustments to save her plan, but the genre-bending definitely hurt the big action set-piece for me.
All of places, Jonathan Nolan said motivation for the drugs’ different phases came from a scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where Willy Wonka’s infamous 3-course meal left Violet as large, swollen blueberry. Wouldn’t have expected this at all, but I was pleasantly surprised my favorite film created this inspiration.
Serac’s Backstory
We finally get more details of Serac’s backstory interwoven into the episode and it addressed concerns or ideas I was toying with the last two weeks, like does Serac know and/or care about the outliers. Turns out, he’s known about these issues since the inception and has spent his life weeding them out, especially any high-risk ones like his brother and now Dolores.
It still doesn’t answer my questions on how much he knows or cares about the effect this is having on people’s quality of life, but it does speak deeply to the how much he believes in his cause, what sacrifices he’s made for it, and how much he’s already done to ensure this vision continues. There’s a critical line he delivers that directly relates to Caleb’s military service. To be clear, he doesn’t say it to him directly, but the inference that Rehoboam would assign people to military service to get rid of them (through being killed in action) sheds light on Caleb’s backstory and the quick glimpses we saw that appeared to be in Serac’s rehabilitation lab at some point in the past.
The New World
Dolores’ plan is starting to take shape with her first major blow to Serac. The carefully manicured world we’ve seen the past 4 episodes has quickly started to come crashing down around us. Now, we’ve only seen how individual people have reacted to their new future’s revealed in small doses around our characters. It will be curious to see how this affects businesses, governments, and more in the next episode and how this plays into Dolores’ overall goal.
Additionally, has any of her interactions with Caleb changed her mind on how to interact with humanity? Does she have more compassion seeing that we’ve all been under Incite/Rehoboam’s control for decades? Is her path of destruction narrowed to a select few or will she not be satisfied until all of humanity has paid?
Overall Thoughts
It’s not uncommon for a good shake up as a Westworld season nears it’s finale and “Genre” definitely lived up to those expectations. Dolores executing this massive of a shift with only 3 episodes left means there’s at least a few counter moves that Serac may have in his sleeve. Not to mention, we’ve still barely know what Maeve and Bernard will or should do to counter or possibly even assist Dolores’ goals. I will be immensely curious to see what they do as the real world starts to crumble around humanity and who they choose to help or not.
I also really hate the Dolores clone decision in hindsight. I thought it would be more interesting after we learned it last episode, but Connells’ death was lackluster or I felt no stakes in it when he died as it was simply a Dolores clone. Now, it could have more to do with that particular version, as we’ve spent more one-on-one time with the Dolores-Hale host. Whatever happens to her will likely sting us more as audience members but may ultimately suffer the same problems. As always, we shall see next week…
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