Violent Delights is a recap podcast where hosts Andrew Sorcini, Dwayne DeFreitas, and Tosin Onafowokan discuss HBO’s Westworld, and the larger questions this ambitious show hopes to tackle.

On this week’s podcast, Andrew, Tosin, and Dwayne deconstruct the final episode of Westworld‘s third season, “Crisis Theory”, as they ask: What astonished Bernard in the Sublime, and how long has he been gone? Have we really seen the end of the ‘real’ William & Dolores Prime? Will Char-lores wipe out humanity? And will we really need to wait until 2022 for the next season?!!

Links:

• ‘Westworld’ Renewed for Season 4 at HBO
• Fight Club (1999)

• Coco (2017) Lauren’s philosophy of preserving someone’s memory to ‘keep them alive’ mirrors this film’s theme.
• Original Star Wars Trilogy
• Hackers (1995)

Behind the Scenes of Westworld’s Finale:

Social Links

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Follow us on Twitter: @HBOWestWorldPod or just hash-tag #ViolentDelights

And our Facebook page is : @WestworldPodcast

Recap

• We begin with Dolores recounting how she was taught to see the beauty in her world— but that she was taught a lie. The world has only a little beauty, and her path, through having played many roles, has led her to… someone that we are not shown. The camera shows us Dolores’s body, wrecked from her fight with Maeve. Her Head Control Unit has been removed. Maeve’s body lay lifeless from the EMP, nearby. 
• We see Caleb getting away — riding a motorcycle on a mountain triad at high speed.
• William, the man in black was left holding a shotgun on Bernard and Stubbs. He starts firing, shooting Stubbs in the heart. Bernard uses his remote to change “modes,” turning off his personality and then subduing William in an emotionless, robot-first state. 
• An SF-PD SWAT van pulls up and William runs away. The driver is Lawrence Gonzales, or El Lazo from the first season. Bernard recognises him as the fourth Dolores copy. Lawrence tells Bernard he has been playing the most important role in Dolores’s plan and hands him the case that Musashi, just before he was killed by Clementine and Hanaryo,  told an errand boy to deliver. Lawrence also gives Bernard an address to contact rendezvous w/ Dolores. 
• Rehoboam’s divergence infographic is displayed and it’s wildly chaotic with divergences from Vancouver all across the world to New York, St. Petersburg, and Malaysia. But it singles out the LA divergence. 
• The camera moves to Caleb who gets off of his bike at the instruction of Dolores’s digital assistant and navigates to a local distillery where he  finds a package containing Dolores’s original mechanical body and installs their HCU. When she awakens, she answers his questions. It turns out that Caleb was catalogued by Delos for a military training project. Delos modelled his mind, which is why Dolores knows so much about him. She says she wants Caleb to help her give the people of the world free will. Dolores suits up and the two head into LA. As they do, Rehoboam commissions more and more resistance in the form of henchmen against them. Dolores tasks her assistant to re-target the riots in order to give her and Caleb an easier route to Incite HQ, which is their destination. It turns out that Dolores is paying the protestors. As the group moves toward its objective, Dolores is confronted by a vision of Hale, who tells her that she has become her own person, but that she still knows everything Dolores knows. Hale tells Dolores that the death of Hale’s family was a blessing in disguise because it was a weakness. She believes Dolores is also a weakness and wants her dead. 
• Dolores and Caleb split up and Dolores is confronted by Maeve. Dolores tells Maeve that she needs to trust her and Maeve, who is accompanied by a small army, gives Dolores a choice—  either fight, or let Maeve into Dolores’s mind so she can see what Dolores is planning and, then Maeve can trust her. Dolores chooses to fight, going after the armed men with Maeve while Caleb was assigned a new escort. 
• Dolores’s original body gives her an advantage during her mano-a-mano fight with Maeve. During the fight Dolores reveals that all the hosts are copies of her in one way or another. Dolores leaves Maeve alive but as she goes, she is confronted by Hale, presenting herself again as a digital construct. Hale is able to constrict Dolores’ movements through software, disabling her.
• Maeve recoveres, and takes Dolores back to Serac, at Incite. Serac hooks Dolores’s body up to an interface to probe her mind in order to find the data on the Delos immortality project. 
• Caleb finds his way to incite with the help of his armed escort. 
• Bernard drives over to Arnold’s widow’s home. They have a touching moment while Stubbs waits in the back of the car, bleeding profusely.
• Caleb finally arrives at Incite only to be captured by Maeve. Caleb finds out from Serac and Rehoboam that the strategy the Solomon computer gave Caleb, if uploaded, would have resulted in the end of humanity within a quarter of a century. 
• Maeve finds out that while Serac is a human, he is willingly being manipulated by Rehoboam, who whispers nearly every word he says, in his ear. 
• This realisation makes Maeve lose confidence in Serac. Maeve reconsiders Dolores and uses the mesh network to communicate with Dolores virtually. Dolores convinces Maeve to help her create a world based on free will for humans and hosts alike.
• Maeve then kills Serac’s men, and reveals that before her mind was wiped clean, Dolores sent a command she gained from the Solomon computer to the Rehoboam computer which transferred administrative power of Rehoboam to Caleb, and took that power away from Serac. Caleb then commands Rehoboam to erase itself.
• Over in a roadside motel room, Bernard packs a wounded Stubbs in ice and lets him know that the encryption key to the Sublime was hidden in his head by Dolores before she was destroyed. He’s going to use the headset interface Musashi dolors sent to him to access the sublime in order to seek an answer— the question being: what happens after the end of the world?
• Bernard sits on the motel bed and puts on the headset that Musashi sent him. He seems to lose consciousness.
• With Rehoboam disabled and Serac rendered powerless, Caleb and Maeve walk out of Incite headquarters and look at the new world, where Caleb can be whomever he wants to be.
• The screen goes black but after the credits, we see William walk into a Delos facility and shoot his way down to R&D where he meets Hale, who has recovered from her car accident. She’s chosen to leave one arm burned to remind her of what humanity is capable of. Hale tells William that, as a copy, she and Dolores started in the same place. Hale has decided to take a different path from Dolores, and is going to create hundreds or thousands of Hosts to replace and take down humanity. She was expecting William and has a host copy of him ready to replace him. The robotic copy of William slits his throat as the camera shows us dozens of host-creation robots, working on building new robots.

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