Last week, “Westworld” gave us its first “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” reference. “Alice” is an easy touchstone, but an apt one for this show — a story about an innocent girl wandering through a strange and frightening unreality. There was no live reading from “Alice” this week, but it certainly feels after watching “Dissonance Theory” that we are about to head down the rabbit hole, or about to go through the looking glass, or whatever. Regardless of your favored metaphor, “Westworld” appears to be winding down its world-building stage and gearing up for the business of storytelling.
We open, as always, with Dolores and Bernard. (Eventually the show will stop doing this, but apparently not yet.) Dolores is describing to Bernard the death of her parents, whom she saw murdered again at the end of last week’s episode. When Bernard asks Dolores if she’d like him to take the pain of the experience away, she declines. “The pain, their loss, is all I have left of them.” The statement echoes Bernard’s comments in episode two about the death of his son. When Bernard asks if her response was scripted, she answers that it was, partially. Bernard then offers her another option — the Maze. If Dolores can find the center of it, he tells her, “then maybe you can be free.”
“I think I want to be free,” she answers.
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Cut to Dolores waking up in a field, gun in hand, next to William. There is a lot of good scene work this week between Evan Rachel Wood and Jimmi Simpson, whom the television gods were kind to bring together for us. But we need to stop here for a moment to talk about time, and how it may or may not work in this show.
It has been clear from the start that “Westworld” would play freely with time and perception. (Was Dolores flashing back last week to finding the gun in the drawer or hallucinating?) But the assumption here thus far has been that the show is, aside from such moments, progressing in a linear fashion. It’s time to draw in a fan theory gaining steam online: That “Westworld” is taking place on multiple timelines separated by many years. I won’t get into detail here — there are plenty of Reddit threads for that if you feel like losing an hour of your life. But given the Jonathan Nolan-J.J. Abrams pedigree of the show, the puzzle-box marketing behind it, and the promises that cast and creators have made about mind-bending revelations to come, we should remind ourselves that “Westworld” probably isn’t going to be straight with us all the time. Question everything.
Now back to the show. William wants to abandon the bounty-hunt storyline and take Dolores back to town, but Logan, who gave up a lot of prostitute time to go on this adventure, nixes that idea. Instead, with Dolores in tow, they raid the house where their bounty is holed up, extract him via gunplay and start back to town. Then Logan, being Logan, kills the marshal and implores William to “go black hat” with him. Logan and robot gangster guy then ride off to meet robot gangster guy’s boss, whom Logan is convinced is a BFD.
In non-Dolores-and-William news, Ford almost makes Theresa seem interesting by having a big, creepy face off with her over his new storyline. Ford again works his magic, freezing all the hosts around him to illustrate the power he wields inside the park. Scenes like this are what you pay Anthony Hopkins for. But all the effort feels a little wasted on Theresa, who has yet to establish herself as an interesting character, much less a formidable opponent for the likes of Ford. (That the latter would know about the former’s affair with Bernard should be surprising to no one after last week’s scene with Bernard in Ford’s office.)
You know who is finally getting interesting? Ed Harris’ Man in Black. Fans seem to like the character, but I’ve found him too stock so far. This week the needle moved at last. The mission to free Hector in exchange for info that would lead MiB one step closer to the Maze felt video game-esque — which is perfectly fine for a show that is one big video gaming analogy. And there were plenty of simple pleasures along the way — a developing Mutt and Jeff comradery between MiB and Lawrence, a creatively shot action sequence at the prison fort, and some excellent one liners. (MiB to Hector: “You always seemed like a market-tested type of thing.” Hector to MiB: “You sound like a man who’s grown tired of wearing his guts on the inside.”) MiB has until now felt like a fun bad guy minus the fun. Now the fun has arrived.
We also got some big hints about the character’s past. MiB, it turns out, also knows the secret origin story of Arnold the co-founder, and his pursuit of the maze is tied to Arnold’s death. But more interesting was the glimpse we got of MiB’s life outside the park when a fellow guest approached him, attempting to thank him for the work that his foundation does, which saved the guest’s sister’s life.
“One more word and I’ll cut your throat, you understand?” MiB says. “This is my fucking vacation.”
The exchange is menacing cool, but also reveals something we already suspected about MiB — that he is a big macher in the real world, apparently big enough to have a foundation that saves people’s lives.
Finally, Maeve. Early in the episode we see her fritzing out again — complete with short-circuiting wire sound effect — flashing back to hazmat-suited surgeons removing, or rather not removing, a bullet from her body. Her sexy, bloody moment with Hector in the episode’s finale is deftly executed, but the important stuff comes earlier. Have the hazmat-suit images been planted in the local Native American tribe’s religion as a clue for the hosts to find there way to the maze and the enlightenment promised at its center? Time will tell.
Some other thoughts:
• Elsie is gunning for that “show’s most boring character” title like a boss. Any scene with her in it is a cue to go to the refrigerator or bathroom. You could press pause first, but why bother?
• Elsie’s primary non-Theresa competition? Her pal Stubbs. Do something already.
• Dolores’ scenes in the Mexican village reminded us that Lawrence’s daughter is apparently the horror-movie-child gatekeeper to the Maze. But the best part was Dolores run-in with the random marshal. The stare-down between the two was one of the most intense moments this show has produced — implying that the characters’ host personas had temporarily vanished, revealing two elements of the park in opposition, one trying to restore order by imposing itself on the other. Also, how many random marshals are running around?
• Nothing quite on the MiB level, but we got some interesting tidbits about William: 1. Logan’s family, which William is marrying into, owns a stake in the park. 2. William really does not like being called Billy.
• I’m starting to understand the relentless amount of crap that the park heaps onto Teddy and the pleasure that MiB appears to take from it. If you were a normal-looking dude visiting Westworld and you saw a guy who looked like James Marsden, wouldn’t you want to watch him get knocked down a peg or two?
• If you decide to go down the Reddit rabbit hole, keep in mind the similarity mentioned earlier between Bernard’s dialogue about his son and Dolores’ about her parents. I’m just saying.
Correction: An earlier version of the recap stated that Dolores and William rode away with Logan and his captive toward the episode’s end. They were not shown riding together.
