Season 3 of Westworld has kicked off and we’re heading down yet another rabbit hole with Episode 2 titled The Winter Line. Last Sunday, we got our first real look at Warworld thanks to Episode 2, another park from Delos that is set during World War II in a small Italian village that is overrun with Nazis.
Maeve (played by Thandie Newton) and Hector (played by Rodrigo Santoro) reunite, however, it seems that Hector isn’t the same as he used to be.
After the pair escape the village, Maeve quickly realizes that she has been repurposed at another park and finds her way back to Lee Sizemore (played by Simon Quarterman), who acted as an ally for her during Season 2.
This version of Lee Sizemore is revealed to be a construct after giving himself away as an imperfect copy and Maeve figures out she is in the second level of Delso fiction, a digital space meant to poke Maeve into revealing what she knows about what has happened or what will happen.
Once the curtain is pulled, Maeve in the construct reprograms a droid in the real world to steal her digital conscience and this ends badly, only for Maeve to meet the puppet master Serac (played by Vincent Cassel), who says they had originally thought she had been the threat to humanity when it was later discovered that this was, in fact, Delores the entire time.
Delores is seemingly found-out to be an imposter and Martin Connells (played by Tommy Flanagan) takes her away after knocking her out the flying her off to dispose of her quietly.
After replacing Charlotte Hale (played by Tessa Thompson) we see Dolores has replicated Incite Inc.’s “fixer” Martin Connells (played by Tommy Flanagan) and that host version taking over for the real Mitchell and seemingly inserting him as her inside man at Incite.
This episode has a little more gusto to it and we see a decent action sequence between Mitchell’s men and Dolores, this leads to a wounded Delores meeting up with Caleb Nichols (played by Aaron Paul), who had randomly taken a job to deliver Martin a clean vehicle and drugs to use to kill Dolores, making her death look like an overdose.
This points out that drug addiction is still very rampart in this world.
Caleb and Delores are seemingly going to be entangled for the next episode.
Meanwhile, Barnard Lowe (played by Jeffrey Wright) has made his way back to Westworld and discovers that Ashley Stubbs (played by Luke Hemsworth) has attempted to shoot himself only to be still alive, yet another host that is set to protect Bernad. It is revealed that Bernard was actually there to find Maeve to help him stop Dolores from killing humanity.
During this time there is a huge Game of Thrones nod with showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff playing technicians in Medievalworld about to cut-up a robotic dragon (seems to be Drogon) with a saw.
The pair eventually get out of the facility and leave on a small boat heading back to the real world.
Along with the action scenes, we get to see where the alliances reside in the characters moving forward with Dolores replacing Charlotte and Martin to gain direct access to Delos and Incite, to what end this hasn’t been revealed but it likely won’t be good for the humans. With Maeve, Bernard, Ashely, and Serac seemingly are more or less on the side of humanity.
It was certainly a better episode than the first one and only gives us more questions, which is normally what Westworld does best and hasn’t really meandered in the philosophical angles that have bogged it down in the past.
The biggest reveal is that other people than Ford are able to construct digital realities and this was shown in the previous episode where Dolores kills Gerald using a false reality leading to his death.
This is only a theory but I’m starting to get the impression that the real human world is even more terrible than what we’re being shown and that Caleb’s world might be just another level of the fantasy, possibly Futureworld.
I’m curious if Futureworld is more like The Matrix or Black Mirror’s San Junipero than simple visual trickery or another park and that guests are possibly in commas (like Caleb which is sort of hinted to) or this is not a real place given the Grand Theft Auto feel to the entire place.
We know from the trailer that Maeve and Dolores will eventually go head-to-head against each other.
If you haven’t checked out our review and re-cap of Episode 1 click here.
