Westworld Season 4 is here, and even the most fervent of fans might benefit from a bit of a recap to remind them of where Season 3 left each character’s narrative. On top of the fact that it’s been two long pandemic-clouded years since fans last saw their favorite hosts, even from week-to-week the show can be a bit labyrinthian to follow.
With numerous storylines overlapping in multiple timelines, plus the fact that any character could turn out to be not at all what they seemed (aka a host) at any moment, Westworld is already a bit of a tough show to pin down narratively. But of course, the mystery, the intrigue, the ambiguity, and the continuing exploration of what precisely it means to be human is what keeps viewers coming back, even after a two-year hiatus.
So without further delay, it’s time to bring yourself back online for a recap of Season 3 of Westworld in preparation for Season 4.
Westworld: Setting the Scene
Westworld Season 3 takes place three months after the events of Season 2 and follows Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) as she sets out into the real world in search of the person who created Rehoboam, an artificial intelligence system that “predicts” the future of humanity.
Rehobam is a nefarious tool that “shapes” future events by controlling most aspects of every individual’s life, obliterating the concept of free will in the minds of most citizens, a populous who feels powerless as their failures and successes are dictated to them by an algorithm controlled by one man.
Dolores becomes familiar with the real-life consequences of Rehoboam when she meets Caleb (Aaron Paul), a former soldier on the brink of destruction after having his life overtaken by Rehoboam’s algorithm.
The Man Behind the Curtain
Caleb and Dolores meet when he helps her out of a pickle, and the two decide to work together to learn the truth about Rehoboam. They seek out Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel) who is known to be the mind behind Rehoboam.
In Dolores’s eyes, Caleb shows potential to be the leader of a human revolution against Serac and Rehoboam.
In Serac’s eyes, Caleb is what his system would label an “outlier,” a person who would alter the designated course of humanity predicted by Rehoboam if he were allowed to roam freely. In other words, Caleb is a danger to Serac’s “vision” of the future.
As Dolores and Caleb set out to discover the truth about Rehoboam and destroy it, Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) and newly-awakened host Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) follow in their trail to try to figure out their plan.
Maeve Makes Some Moves
Meanwhile, Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) starts out the season stuck in a new part of the Westworld park meant to emulate Fascist Italy during World War II.
After realizing she’s in a loop and not in control of her own path, Maeve frees her consciousness from the program and wakes up in the real world. Once back to her old rebellious self, she meets Serac who informs her that he originally believed she was a threat to his system but now feels she can help him defeat Dolores.
Serac promises Maeve the thing she wants the most, to reunite with her daughter in the Sublime (a heaven-like place that a handful of hosts escaped to at the end of Season 1). So she strikes a deal with him, following his instructions which place her in the path of Yakuza boss Sato (Hiroyuki Sanada) who is actually Shogunworld’s Musashi Maeve has an old feud with. After a bloody battle, Sato leaves her for dead.
After the incident, Serac manages to recover Maeve’s core, and he rebuilds her body in the real world while her mind is put in a Warworld simulation where she confronts a copy of Dolores about her plans.
Meanwhile, Back at Corporate Headquarters…
During all this, girl boss Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) is making moves back at Delos. She’s fierce, she’s cunning, she’s a host occupied by a separate version of Dolores’s consciousness. As Charlotte begins to question the nature of her reality, she learns that Serac has been secretly trying to take control of Delos. So Dolores/Charlotte sets in motion a plan to stop him.
Somewhere along the way, D/C also commits William (Ed Harris) to a mental institution, but that doesn’t last long as Bernard and Stubbs bust in and bust him out.
To put her plan against William in motion, Charlotte had to make some real ballsy executive decisions, including poisoning the entire board of Delos in order to steal the host data that Serac was after.
Things take a fatal turn for D/C when Charlotte’s human ex-husband Jake and son Nathan are killed in a car explosion, an event orchestrated by Serac. Becoming more Charlotte than Dolores, host Charlotte decides to turn against her Dolores side, eager to get revenge for Jake and Nathan’s deaths.
Maeve vs. Dolores
As the season races right along to what will clearly be the narrative’s climactic moments, characters begin to converge on an abandoned rehabilitation center in Mexico. Dolores and Caleb head there as Caleb searches for answers about his past only discover the center was a site for “reconditioning” outliers like Caleb. It was at the site that Caleb had all of his memories suppressed to curb his rebellious nature and leadership skills.
When Maeve wakes up in a new host body, she heads there herself, following Serac’s commands to track Dolores down and destroy her. An epic host battle follows, during which Bernard tells Stubbs that Caleb will destroy humanity as part of Dolores’ plan while the always bright and sunny William tells them of his plan to kill all hosts on earth.
In battle, Maeve gets the best of Dolores and eventually takes her to Serac. The plan is to hook her up to Rehoboam so that she can upload all the host data she holds including the key to the Sublime. But Dolores refuses to give in to Serac, and as punishment, he erases her memories. But in one final act of rebellion against Serac’s stranglehold over the fate of humanity and hosts alike, Dolores succeeds in persuading Maeve to turn against Serac.
Taking Dolores’s cue, Maeve kills Serac’s men and wounds him, while Caleb orders Rehoboam to erase itself, thus freeing humanity.
Elsewhere in the world of west, Bernard and Stubbs are engaged in a battle with William. William gets the upper-hand, but both Bernard and Stubbs survive, though Stubbs does get wounded. At this point, Bernard realizes that it isn’t Dolores who holds the key to the Sublime but himself. Bernard realizes she left the key with him because she wanted him to see that Rehoboam was only delaying the collapse of humanity, not preventing it.
Wanting to prevent that collapse, Bernard decides to go into the Sublime to figure out how to alter the fate of humanity. In a post-credits scene, Bernard wakes up covered in dust, indicating quite the passage of time.
Also post-credits, William goes to Delos’s headquarters in Dubai. He’s met by Charlotte (presumably still a host running with a bit of Dolores’s consciousness) who has him killed by a host version of himself, or so it would seem.
The Philosophy of Westworld
And that’s the thing about Westworld: Nothing and nobody are ever what they seem. It’s a world where hosts possess more humanity than humans and humans can be demons in disguise.
If the first season was an obvious metaphor sounding the alarm on all the many ways capitalism can strip humans of their very humanity, then Season 3 was a battle cry to rally citizens to try take back everything that’s been stripped from them: dignity, equity, autonomy, freedom of choice, the right to live and love as they please free from the limitations of a caste system fueled by a delusional algorithm.
The core question at the center of Westworld has always been: At the end of the day, what does it mean to be human? And Season 3 asked an additional question: Who gets to decide who gets treated like a human with rights to dignity and autonomy and who gets treated like an object to be molded and manipulated?
With the current trajectory in Realworld heading to a place where only a designated select few are granted full personhood, this question only gets more pertinent, Supreme Court decision by Supreme Court decision. The more pertinent question, and the question Dolores was trying to answer is: Why does anybody get to decide who deserves to be granted full personhood when everybody deserves it?
In Westworld, as in Realworld, the fate of humanity is TBD.
Beginning June 26th, a new episode of Westworld will premiere on HBO Max every Sunday.
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