SPOILERS Updated June 20, 2022 – Season 3 doesn’t have the radical time jumps that previous seasons of Westworld had. Most everything takes place in the year 2058, starting soon after Season 2’s finale. Even without the confusing time jumps, Season 3 has plenty of complex elements. See below for help in clarifying things. But first recall…
Dolores – inside a print of Charlotte Hale’s body – leaves the island with five host control units, aka mind “pearls.” Including the pearl inside her, that means a total of six pearls leave the island. One pearl is revealed to be Bernard, which leaves four as-yet-unidentified pearls going into Season 3.
Charlotte-Dolores makes it to the real world, to Arnold’s home (in Singapore), which has a host printer. Though we don’t see it happen, the Charlotte-Dolores pearl is put back into a Dolores body. Dolores interviews a naked Bernard, whose body probably just got printed. Knowing they’re now in the real world, Bernard vows to oppose Dolores, because he assumes she wants to kill humanity. Dolores is okay with Bernard’s opposition, and says both of them will be needed for their kind to survive. An unidentified host in the Charlotte Hale body enters, and she and Dolores leave. Then Bernard gets dressed and goes out into the real world.
Meanwhile, back on the island, many of our favorite hosts are dead: Maeve, Hector, Clementine, and others. Stubbs turned out to be a host, and helped Charlotte-Dolores escape. Teddy went to the Valley Beyond. And William, the Man in Black, is wounded and being treated on the beach.
In the real world, Dolores discovers that humans are being treated similar to the hosts at the theme park. A massive AI supercomputer, called Rehoboam, has been cataloging, predicting, and controlling human behavior. Why? Rehoboam has been programmed to insure the survival of the human race, and has calculated the best plan for achieving this.
When something or someone threatens Rehoboam’s plan, it’s called “Divergence,” “Anomaly Detected,” or “Elevated Scrutiny.”
With the survival of the human race always in mind, Rehoboam looks for anyone that disturbs or might disturb societal peace and safety. These perceived troublemakers are called “outliers.” To keep them quelled, Rehoboam makes sure they’re giving low-level positions in society, and are sent off to war or other dangerous situations where their lives might end quickly. Outliers are also reconditioned to become less of a threat to society. If they fail reconditioning, they’re put into stasis (frozen). This is the world that Dolores has entered.
There is a war going on in the real world, now that Dolores has arrived to upset everything. An easy way to understand Season 3 is to identify the different groups involved in the war. Each group is fighting for something.
For what Dolores has planned, she doesn’t trust anyone other than herself. So four of the pearls (that she took from the island) are copies of herself. Dolores wants the survival of her kind: hosts. And she’s hell-bent on stopping Rehoboam and its owner, Engerraund Serac. In the finale, we learn that Dolores chooses to look at the positive side of humanity, and wants to give mankind a chance. She wants to free them from the control of Rehoboam.
After being awakened, this new Charlotte-Dolores is slow to adjust to impersonating Charlotte Hale. Initially she’s in league with Dolores. But then she develops real feelings for Hale’s family. When they are killed and she barely survives, she turns against Dolores, thinking Dolores doesn’t care if she dies. Going into Season 4, she will be against Team Dolores.
Early in the season, Charlotte orchestrates things in order to replace Martin Connells with a copy of herself. Connells is a fixer for Liam Dempsey, Jr. and the company Incite.
Sato-Dolores is a Yakuza leader, and supplier of the white goo used to make hosts. He bests Maeve in battle. Then, after Charlotte-Dolores turns, she tries to recruit him, but he declines. She retaliates by leaking his location to Serac. Then Maeve’s new recruits (Clementine and Hanaryo) show up and remove his head.
Lawrence-Dolores is seen briefly in the finale episode, showing up in an SFPD vehicle and uniform. He gives a special address and briefcase to Bernard, and tells him to be careful.
Caleb is a veteran, a construction worker, and a small-time crook. Because of his kindness toward her kind long ago, Dolores wants him to be the leader among humans – if her plan succeeds of defeating Serac and Rehoboam.
Dolores also recruits the help of Solomon. Solomon is the AI supercomputer that preceded Rehoboam. She convinces Solomon to help her take down Serac and Rehoboam.
Engerraund Serac is the owner of Incite and co-creator of Rehoboam. He believes humanity’s biggest problem is humanity itself. His overall goal is the survival of humanity at any cost, and looks to AI for the best solution. It’s revealed that he is the buyer for whom Charlotte was trying to smuggle data off the island in previous seasons.
Rehoboam is the most recent iteration of AI supercomputing created by brothers Jean Mi and Engerraund Serac. Their goal was to control humanity in order to save it from itself.
Serac recruits Maeve to help him take down Dolores, and get the Forge’s decryption key from Dolores. Since Maeve’s ultimate goal is to be with her daughter in the Valley Beyond – which can be accessed by the Forge’s decryption key – she agrees to Serac’s offer.
Maeve tells Serac she needs help to go against Dolores. So Serac removes some hosts from the island, and then destroys the rest of the hosts. Hector is one of the saved hosts, but his time with Maeve doesn’t last very long. Charlotte-Dolores crushes his pearl in her hand.
Recruited by Maeve. She and Hanaryo take down Sato.
Recruited by Maeve. She and Clementine take down Sato.
Bernard is in opposition to Dolores, and is on the run with fellow host Stubbs. Bernard assumes Dolores wants to end humanity. He’s wrong about this, and is making moves according to Dolores’s plan. He’s really on Team Dolores and doesn’t know it. In the finale, Dolores reveals she gave the Forge’s decryption key to Bernard alone, because he is the best of the hosts.
Stubbs turns out to be a host (Season 2 finale). Bernard goes back to the island, plugs Stubbs back in, and gives him a new directive to protect Bernard.
William’s surname has yet to be revealed in the show. Not sure why. In any case, William bumbles around this season mostly as a crazy man. But in the finale, we learn that he wants to wipe out all hosts. In the finale’s after-credits scene, William is killed by Charlotte-Dolores. But was it really William that was killed? Or a host of William? Did the real William die in a previous season?
• Since Season 3 takes place almost solely in the real world, people wondered where the writers would go with the story. The writers took inspiration from what’s happening currently in our real world. Funded by Incite, Rehoboam stores all human behavior just like search engines, websites, and social media platforms do today. And just as Delos sold theme-park guest data to Incite, social media platforms and other companies (banks, healthcare providers) sell information about you to interested buyers. Personal data is a top commodity. But to what end?
• I watched this season three times, and it’s better with each subsequent viewing, as is usually the case with complex shows.
• Accounting for the five Dolores pearls – DOLORES: The way the finale ended, it’s unclear what happened with the main Dolores pearl.
CHARLOTTE-DOLORES: Still in play. CONNELLS-DOLORES: Damaged but possibly still in play. In the lab, Charlotte-Dolores grabs it, but then what happens to it? Charlotte-Dolores comes out of the lab, but doesn’t seem to have it. (See photo.)
SATO-DOLORES: Sato-Dolores’s head was cut off. What happened to the Dolores pearl inside it? We don’t know. Possibly still in play.
LAWRENCE-DOLORES: Still in play as far as we know.
• Season 3 had only eight episodes, not the usual ten. The season did feel more rushed than past seasons. We could have seen how Dolores met Liam Dempsey, Jr. We could have seen more of Charlotte-Dolores’s daily routine. The reveal of Maeve being in a simulation didn’t need to come so quickly. Etc.
• It made sense that Dolores would put copies of herself in people from the real world, such as Charlotte Hale and Connells.
However, what made far less sense was having her pearls inside the bodies of Sato (Musashi) and Lawrence. It was cool seeing them, of course, but in the end it seemed like a weak nostalgic ploy that didn’t serve the story.
It would have been stronger to have only one pearl in a host body (the Dolores body), and the other four Dolores pearls in non-host bodies: Charlotte Hale, Connells, and two more people from the real world who already had established lives/positions in the real world.
• Some people have wondered if Lawrence was a Dolores copy or rather a host taken from the island. Maeve chose the hosts that were salvaged from the island, to help her out. It’s doubtful Maeve would have chosen Lawrence to be part of her squad. But Hector, Clementine, and Hanaryo do make sense. Also, Lawrence gave the briefcase to Bernard, which had the mind-wrap thingy in it. In Season 2, Dolores and Bernard used the mind-wrap thingy together in the Forge.
• One of the strengths of the show is that many of the characters live in a gray area.
Even Dolores’s recruit, Caleb, is a gray character: not all good or all bad. For viewers, this is a good thing.
It means that the thoughts and actions of the characters are unpredictable.
In much of Season 3, we’re not
sure what’s going on in the minds of Dolores, Bernard, Charlotte-Dolores, Maeve, etc. When the show stays in the grays like this, it’s strong.
• Even if Hector’s pearl was destroyed, is that really the end of Hector? Maeve did restore his memories. Maybe Maeve or someone else has a backup of Hector that can be put into a pearl – if new pearls can be made.
• Don’t ever play chess with Dolores. Throughout the season, Dolores is several moves ahead of everyone else. And, in spite of how the season ended, she probably still is.
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Bibliography:
How Westworld Season 2 Ended
Westworld Wiki
Westworld Season 3 Wikipedia
In Westworld season 3, what is a divergence?
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