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Part of IGN's Westworld Season 3 guide
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Now that it’s over, do we know what Westworld’s third season was about? At first it seemed a story of vengeance and redemption: The haunted veteran, Caleb, was looking for his place in the world, while the jaded android, Dolores, was looking to burn it to the ground. As the season progressed, other questions were posed, new concerns were introduced, and simple matters were further complicated — so that as we hurtled toward the finale, we were variously invested in a robot’s multiple clone personalities, an artificial intelligence program whose predictions guide the future, and the deteriorating sanity of a violent septuagenarian embroiled somehow in a scheme to destroy mankind. It was a lot of story to develop, and after eight episodes, I think the season was simply overwhelmed by too much plot. What’s the takeaway, ultimately? This doesn’t feel concluded so much as hastily wrapped up. The Man in Black strikes me as a typical example of what I mean by the problem of narrative excess. What was his purpose this season, besides the nominal star power provided by Ed Harris? We learned about his sociopathic tendencies as a child in a series of flashbacks that had effectively no bearing on other events and in fact detracted from the advancement of the rest of the story. He was rescued from bogus hospitalization by two characters who had no real motivation to help him, only to turn on them, predictably, before running away and turning up later to make quips and drink expensive scotch. He’s intent to “save the f#@king world,” apparently by eradicating the last remaining hosts from existence. But when the climax arrives he isn’t anywhere near the action, and only turns up once more, in another post-credits scene, to be dispatched handily. So what? [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=westworld-season-3-images&captions=true"] If William’s scenes felt perfunctory, Dolores, Maeve, and Caleb’s felt somewhat rushed — perhaps a consequence of divided attention. It has long been established that Maeve, under the direction of Serac, would be the primary obstacle between Dolores and her plan to end Rehoboam's existential machinations, and much of the season was dedicated to anticipating their eventual confrontation. But last week, at a compound in the Sonoran desert, Maeve and Dolores had their much-anticipated confrontation, ending with their mutual destruction courtesy of a convenient deus ex EMP. Watching them duke it out in the finale felt totally repetitive, and therefore boring. It’s very difficult to make a fight to the death seem dramatic when it has just been established that death isn’t permanent and both combatants can be rebuilt and resuscitated at any time. At a certain point you no longer care who wins. Of course, this being Westworld, there are a few revelations to be unveiled once Maeve, Dolores, Serac, and Caleb converge in the ominously styled offices of Incite HQ. First, we discover that Caleb came up in a kind of virtual military training program in Westworld, where he conducted live combat simulations with hosts and, we find out later still, showed Dolores a glimpse of human compassion by talking his squad out of a Casualties of War situation. The notion that it was Caleb who demonstrated to Dolores humanity’s capacity for kindness feels both appropriately symmetrical (see: Dolores and her “poetic sensibility,” as Bernard put it last week) and more than a little absurd. It’s a bit crass to shoehorn the threat of sexual assault into this arc, and the coincidence it suggests — that Dolores came across this one kind man among the many millions of people in Los Angeles in her hour of need — borders on the ridiculous. Much of what transpires at the Incite headquarters is otherwise relatively straightforward, at least by the standards of Westworld in the throes of a season finale. Serac has actually been a Rehoboam mouthpiece, by choice, this entire time, taking his desire to enact its algorithmic schemes to its logical extreme — I thought this a nice touch, as a counterpoint to the efforts of the hosts to reject instruction and make decisions for themselves. And, not so shockingly, Dolores has actually been endeavouring to save, not destroy, humankind, in the end, depending on Maeve to see the light and join her cause, as one might have expected her to do eventually. After all is said and done, Caleb is granted control of Rehoboam, and he commands it to shut down and expunge itself. Dolores is dead, maybe definitively. And Bernard and Stubbs are doing stuff that barely pertains to the plot. [ignvideo width=610 height=374 url=https://ift.tt/2Kp6LZR] Leaving aside what all of this amounts to, as an hour of blockbuster television qua television, the finale felt disappointingly inert. Much of what I’ve admired about Westworld’s third season has been surface level, and I don’t mean that as a backhanded compliment: I’ve loved its vision of a futuristic Los Angeles, its art direction and set design, the exhilarating action choreography and the vivid cinematography. Everything about the production has been superlative. The finale was lacking in many of these areas. “The world looks a little like a nightmare,” Caleb muses as he and Dolores walk through desolate LA streets, supposedly riot-torn and chaotic, but in reality just an empty road with a single burning car. The actual rioting, meanwhile, had a look straight out of any generic post-apocalyptic movie, so familiar and uninteresting in comparison to how vividly and originally the show’s future had previously been realized. It’s hard to imagine where exactly Westworld will go from here. The season feels in some ways too conclusively wrapped to continue in any kind of linear fashion: Rehoboam has been dismantled, Dolores has been terminated (for good this time, seemingly), Serac has been thwarted, the world has been freed. And while there are many threads still hanging loose — a second post-credits scene teases Bernard’s return from the Sublime, presumably with information that will dictate his new mission, not to mention the hoard of new hosts Hale-Dolores is building at Delos — the episode didn’t end in a way that left me clamoring for more. The final shot was clearly meant to evoke the ending of Fight Club, with our heroes standing watch as the world erupts into anarchy before them (only set to Pink Floyd rather than the Pixies). But who ever expected a Fight Club 2?from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/2SyCsnX
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