Fumble to Finish

The pitch was good, the hit was even better – home run potential. Amazing performances from Tessa Thompson and Evan Rachel Wood followed while series newcomer Aaron Paul had also seamlessly slotted into the Westworld fold. We rounded the third base with a penultimate episode that teed up a thunderstorm finale.

Then right as Westworld was about to clock the home run it tripped up with it’s final few steps in season three.

Hmmm…

The season finale wasn’t a disaster – but Westworld did deliver the weakest episode of the season, by quite some margin, just when it looked to finish with a flourish.

As good as the penultimate episode was it did act as the stimulus of the issues to come. We simply had too much ground and too many characters to cover in the season finale and my biggest issue is that we didn’t have a satisfying conclusion of the season three narratives for Hale, William, or even Serac.

Hale made two ‘physical’ appearances in the episode. Once in a mysterious hologram form and then in the post-credit scene, where it appears that she is building an army of hosts.

But that’s it.

Her hologram cameo isn’t really explained, nor is it needed for the main narrative of the finale and it simply opens up more questions rather than closing any loose season three loops.

After the dramatic car explosion at the end of episode six, I would have preferred to have not seen Hale at all until what was the post-credit scene. Seeing that she had returned to work in the ‘engine room’ at Delos Dubai would have explained why Dolores mysteriously shut down during her confrontation with Maeve, as well as giving us a more weighty revelation to close the series on.

However, this moment shouldn’t be buried in a post-credit scene which some viewers might not even stumble upon. Make this an epilogue within the confines of the episode itself. The fact that it’s revealed that there is a host copy of William who goes on to kill the real William – or at least what we presume to be the real William – is a huge moment in the context of the series. One of the biggest twists. The moment that effectively answers the questions sourcing back to the post-credit tease at the end of season two, when William’s daughter Emily is testing for fidelity in a clone copy of her father.

I pity anyone who didn’t watch until the end of the credits – you’ve missed one of the most important moments in the entire season.

Twist; Dolores wasn’t really trying the end humanity, she was trying to create it.

Long story short, Dolores spent an entire season effectively baiting Serac into plugging her into Rehoboam in the belief that he could extract and upload the Sector 16 data to the system. But Dolores didn’t have the data – that was instead stored in Bernard.

A masterful game is misdirection.

Oh, and Dolores wasn’t using Caleb to destroy the world. Caleb was an outlier whom she trusted to make the right decisions, after it emerged that they met before during a military training exercise carried out in Park 5 at Westworld. Plugging Dolores into Rehoboam allowed her to interface with the system – a trick she picked up from Solomon in the previous episode – transferring control of the system to Caleb, who proceeded to force Rehoboam to destroy itself.

In doing so, Caleb has liberated humanity from oversight. Citizens are no longer controlled like hosts in a park. Now, destiny is what they make it. In Serac’s, (or should I say Rehoboam’s) eyes, that condemns the world to chaos and knowing Westworld, he’s probably right. I guess we’ll find out in season four.

Serac the Puppet

Did I expect Serac to hologram out of the picture when events started to go sideways – you bet. In fact, for a character who has been impervious to danger this entire series, he had one heck of an off-day in this finale.

Our perspective has been forever altered now that we know that Serac was effectively a puppet of Rehoboam this whole time, with the system telling mouthpiece-Serac exactly what to say and do. In principle, it’s not a bad twist, but Rehoboam wasn’t menacing enough in this episode to really give that plot point the required gravitas.

Anyway, I’ve been too negative in this roundup already. After all, it’s meant to be highlights…

And now for the biggest question of all;

When’s the soundtrack coming out?

Seriously, I’ve worn out the Wicked Games replay button on Spotify – I need the full soundtrack in my life…