“She won’t destroy the world, but he will”

Penultimate episodes can tread a fine line. Writers will often want to keep their biggest set pieces, revelations and truths until the season finale and that can often lead to a penultimate episode which simply serves to jam it’s characters into their finale starting positions.

Predictably, Westworld avoids this trope but at the same time, I’m sure the season finale will be the spectacle that the season has forecasted.

Caleb’s Revolution Revelation

Aaron Paul has been a great addition to Westworld’s impressive ensemble cast and despite Dolores and Maeve having their first head to head and William being as quotable as usual, it was Caleb Nichols who stole the show.

It turns out that Caleb is a reprogrammed outlier – clearly one in the one in 10 that can be successfully altered to fit into the Rehoboam constructed society. Post-reprogramming and alongside his best friend Francis, it was Caleb’s job to round up other outliers within the system and bring them in for reconditioning. If this fails to work, then they are made Category-U and placed in frozen stasis governed by Rehoboam’s schizophrenic sorta-older brother known as Solomon.

This particular manhunt enterprise is all controlled by a familiar application – the RICO app that’s been popping up ever since episode one is what propels the outlier hunters to find the anomalous individuals that don’t fit into Rehoboam’s matrix of humanity.

Ah, Westworld’s doing it again – making me want to go back and re-watch an entire series just to spot all the times that I thought I knew the context and didn’t.

When a job goes south after Caleb hears a few too many truths from an outlier client that they’ve captured, he suddenly becomes an anomaly himself. Francis gets a notification from the RICO app to kill Caleb, and Caleb is told to kill Francis, leading to a standoff where Caleb Solo shoots first.

Yep, CALEB KILLED HIS BEST FRIEND, all as a result of Solomon and Rehoboam’s influence before the AR conditioning once again made him forget the truth.

Dolores wasn’t wrong at the start of the episode when she told Caleb that there was something he needed to see. Now he’s got a suped-up USB drive containing a strategy of revolution to effectively tear down the AI controlled society and he truly is Dolores’ plan. That’s a power-play.

The Man in White

Sure, Ed Harris might not have enjoyed “The Man in White” plot-line but it’s been neat to see how the trigger-happy villain has changed now that his character is planted back in reality. Time for William to save the world– one quip at a time.

“Don’t lecture me you fucking can-opener” might be the best host put-down ever unleashed, as William puts Stubbs firmly in his place. AR therapy has done nothing to inhibit Will’s wit.

Given that the episode ends with William holding Bernard and Ashley at gunpoint, after declaring his intention to kill all the hosts that he feels responsible for creating, it’s likely that the can-opener is about to be canned. He is programmed to be Bernard’s bodyguard after all, so taking a bullet for his master is on the cards.

Dolores v Maeve: Part 1

I feel like this particular Dolores v Maeve tussle was a teaser. Sure, Dolores lost an arm in a fight which ended with both hosts being shut down by a Solomon shutdown, but the real battle is to come in the finale.

We’ve already seen in series’ trailers that Dolores and Maeve meet in a different location and we know that there is one more copy of Dolores that we are yet to meet, supposedly located in Berlin.

Just one of the many plot threads that will undoubtedly be tied up in what promises to be a packed finale.