Beep boop hello, fellow humans who are definitely not robots who just think you’re humans, and welcome to our review of HBO’s science fiction series, Westworld. The season three premiere is a stylistic reboot of sorts, letting go of the cowboy aesthetic and entering a new world of self-driving mopeds and cars with doors that open differently. So take poetic revenge, and do it with panache, here are five thoughts on Westworld season three, episode one: “Parce Domine.”
1. Revenge: Know Thine Enemy
Dolores’ first destination in her new-old body is the home of a Delos shareholder who had brutalized her as a guest in Westworld for his bachelor party. Then he murdered his first wife, though the official story is that she “slipped and fell” in the pool. Armed with the knowledge of the simple algorithm that defines him, Dolores knows exactly how to orchestrate the perfect revenge. She hacks into his smart house to trap him, and hacks into his smart glasses to make him see his dead ex-wife. After she forces him to give her all his money and access to a mysterious other company he used to work for, Incite, she walks away. With her back turned, the evil tech bro comes after her with a golf club, but surprise! That Dolores was a hologram! So he trips through her into his pool, where he hits his head and dies. Perfect poetic vengeance!
Dolores never intended to let him live. She perfectly engineered a scenario where his hubris would bring about his own downfall. By hacking into his house, she exploited his reliance on technology. By taunting him with his own misdeeds, she goaded him into killing himself in the same way he killed his first wife. Dolores needed his fingerprint on a tablet to get his money and his access to Incite, but she also needed to perform this act of poetic vengeance, for her own emotional satisfaction. She also did it with style because she’s the most stylish robot in fiction! I mean, can we talk about that dress?!
2. That Dress
Infiltrating a fancy party with the CEO of Incite, Dolores walks in wearing an understated yet totally elegant little black dress, with a subtle gold trim at the neckline. As she walks, she pulls at that gold trim and her dress transforms into a stunning glittering gold floor-length evening gown, earning her an appropriately enormous level of appreciation from the surrounding fancy party guests. This is another one of those quintessential Westworld single-striking-images-that-mean-a-great-deal. Like her dress, Dolores is a chameleon. She’s at this party undercover as Lara, a high-powered businesswoman here to schmooze with her fellow one-percent-ers, while truly she is here to usurp their power and probably destroy humanity.
We are also reminded of whoever is walking around in Charlotte Hale’s body, because the one person we’re certain it’s not is Charlotte Hale. This is the body Dolores escaped Westworld in, in the season two finale, but she was then able to create a duplicate of her original Evan-Rachel-Wood-shaped body that she now inhabits. There’s also some interesting meta-commentary on the art of acting. Dolores is a computer program that can live in any number of robot bodies. Evan Rachel Wood is an actor who can inhabit any number of characters. In the dress transformation scene, we the real life human viewers are watching Evan Rachel Wood pretend to be Dolores pretending to be Lara. Deep!
3. Meritocracy
We meet Caleb, a veteran, and an underpaid construction worker who moonlights as a criminal on an Uber-like app for crime. He begrudgingly accepts that “the system” is one of meritocracy. Only “the system” is an actual system, called Rehoboam. It’s an AI, developed by Incite, that chooses a path for everyone. With the same technology that wrote an algorithm to describe every human who visited Westworld, Rehoboam uses collective data on every human being in the world to predict the best choices they can make. Rehoboam doesn’t tell anyone what they can’t do; Caleb still applies to higher paid jobs, but he doesn’t get them, and we the real life human viewers are begged to wonder if Caleb’s algorithm is actually telling potential employers that he’s not worth hiring. It’s a good thing this is just a sci-fi dystopia and not how real life works, right? … Right?
Continued belowCapitalism in the United States derives legitimacy from the myth of meritocracy. People who work hard earn more money, and people who don’t work hard earn less money. We real life humans know it’s not that simple. There isn’t one big Rehoboam telling everyone what kinds of jobs we’re allowed to have, but we all have various data points we didn’t choose that intersect to give us unfair advantages and disadvantages, such as race, gender, generational wealth or lack thereof, etc. Rehoboam is a simplified fictionalization of a very real class system that makes it easier for people with power and wealth to stay powerful and wealthy. As Caleb’s old friend Francis put it, “They built the world to be a game, and then they rigged it so they always won.”
4. Incite
The company behind Rehoboam is Incite, a word that doesn’t officially have violent connotations, but we’re most used to hearing that word in the context of inciting violence, one of the limitations placed on the freedom of speech in the United States Constitution. It sounds like “Insight.” Incite has a detailed personality profile of every human on Earth, and that might give them an unprecedented insight into the human condition. Perhaps Incite wants to believe it has profound insight but really all it does is incite people like Dolores. (There aren’t people like Dolores).
Liam, the CEO, says of Incite, “We’re just a technology company.” He denies the obscene amount of influence his company and he personally have on everyone’s lives. By denying his influence, he’s able to shirk responsibility for it, just like the dystopian tech monopolies in real life. Another way Liam avoids accountability is his insistence that he is only a figurehead. His father created Rehoboam, but his father’s partner Serac is controlling it. Liam might not have the final say, or any say, in what Incite does as a company, but even a figurehead role has a limited amount of power, and his denial of that power is only an excuse to keep it.
5. Circles, Spheres, Loops
This episode opens with the image of a circle. The line of the circle varies in thickness at different points, and at the sharpest thickest point is the word, “divergence.” This is how Rehoboam measures divergences from the way its algorithm predicted life would unfold. When Liam shows Dolores the actual physical Rehoboam, we see that it is a sphere. We are reminded that the robots of Westworld were subjected to “loops” and that real life humans are pretty much “wired” to their (I mean our) own loops, imposed by societal expectations, and by our own weaknesses. We suspect Rehoboam is preventing Caleb from upward mobility, keeping him in a loop of poverty and crime. It’s keeping an entire socio-economic system in a loop of greed and exploitation.
The season three premiere was so packed with interesting images and themes, I didn’t even mention Jeffrey Wright’s heartbreaking portrayal of Bernard’s hard-earned paranoia as he interrogates himself in a synthetic meat factory, or Maeve’s post-credit appearance in Naziworld, or the possibility raised that this “real” world might be yet another simulation. Okay, that last one was probably just a joke, but it’s funny because it is a simulation… it’s a television show! It’s called Westworld! But maybe we should start calling it World. Until next time, beep boop goodbye.
