Let me just say that this third season of Westworld is so different from the first two that it seems more like a new sequel series than the third season of a single series. The tableau certainly isn't the same. Even the recurring characters, especially the multiple Dolores, are different. But this new series is provocative and altogether excellent. But you already knew that.
Tonight's episode 3.5 featured some great music and some notable, even crucial reveals. Let's start with the reveals.
Serac's erstwhile bodyguard - his body now inhabited and animated by a Dolores - tells Bernard, "You're the only one we can't replace". That's an extraordinarily important point. Why is that? Bernard's a host, so why can't he be replaced? Because there's no master file of his mind or soul or whatever you want to call it? I'm trying to recall if we've ever seen Bernard replaced in earlier seasons? Were a bank of Bernards wiped out at the end of season two? I'm not sure - perhaps the machines that control the world wiped out that part of my memory.
Then there's what that dying guy says to Caleb: "You did it". Did what? Of all the new characters this season, we still know the least about Caleb. Was his running into Dolores the accident that it seemed to be? Caleb apparently is an innocent, but also seems to have a reflexive understanding of the world around him. The answer to who Caleb is will likely also explain why Dolores trusts him.
Third and last reveal I'll mention now: Serac saying that, although the super-AI machine his brother created and Serac now controls has immense and detailed power over people's lives, we humans still have a "bubble of agency" to do on occasion what we want to do. When those bubbles present themselves is of course not clear. But they mean that anyone and everyone still have modicums (or modica?) of unpredictable free will.
Just like every time you sit down or stand up to play or sing a song. Which brings me to the music in this episode. It was especially good, via the "genre" Caleb was experiencing. But I especially liked the violin instrumental rendition of David Bowie's "Space Oddity". Can't get much better than that in depicting a world veering out of control.
See also: Westworld 3.1: The Great Outside ... Westworld 3.2: Dolores' Enemies ... Westworld 3.3: Cyberpunk World ... Westworld 3.4: The Man in White and Multiple Doloreses
And see also Westworld 2.1: Maeve's Daughter ... Westworld 2.2: "Narcissus Narcosis" ... Westworld 2.3: The Raj and Guns of the South ... Westworld 2.4: Questions Pertaining to Immortality ... Westworld 2.5: Telepathic Control ... Westworld 2.6: The Dangling Conversation ... Westworld 2.7: Maeve vs. Dolores ... Westworld 2.8: The Wrong World ... Westworld 2.9: Fathers ... Westworld 2.10: The Realist World
And see also Westworld 1.1: Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick Served Up by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and J. J. Abrams ... Westworld 1.2: Who Is the Man in Black? ... Westworld 1.3: Julian Jaynes and Arnold ... Westworld 1.4: Vacation, Connie Francis, and Kurt Vonnegut ... Westworld 1.5: The Voice Inside Dolores ... Westworld 1.6: Programmed Unprogramming ... Westworld 1.7: The Story of the Story ... Westworld 1.8: Memories ... Westworld 1.9: Half-Truths and Old Friends ... Westworld Season 1 Finale: Answers and Questions
They're coming out into the open, for the first time in centuries ....
Chronological Order, the 2010 feature-length movie I just saw on Amazon Prime, certainly deserves an award, which would be for the most unlikely time-travel device I've ever come across on page or screen. That would be a door that our protagonist, a guy by the name of Guy, finds floating in the ocean. He and we soon learn that when he stands it up and walks through it, he walks a little or longer into the past.
