Season 3 Of Westworld Is Just As Bold, Imaginative, And Confusing As Previous Seasons But Still An Absolute Treat To Watch

2058 and Aaron Paul still hasn’t shaved. Photo courtesy of SyFy.com

A common complaint of Westworld is how frustrating the storylines and the timelines embedded within them are difficult to mentally maintain while you’re just trying to be entertained, and that’s a fair critique. Even HBO even provides well constructed follow up videos on their website to help fans and critics alike piece together the most important details so they can dive right back into the next episode or even the next season refreshed and informed. Does it work? Absolutely and Season Three is no exception to that quirky mix of storyline inception that is still enjoyable and thrilling to watch.

We will forever be grateful that Evan Rachel Wood said: “yes to this dress.” Photo courtesy of  Harper’s Bazaar

The remaining members of the Delos board are struggling to recover after the park massacre, and it’s not a good look for them. Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), or more accurately, her host, is acting strange and trying desperately to maintain composure while learning (or re-learning?) who Charlotte Hale is and her role in life while maintaining her position as board director of Delos and being a Mom to son Nathan. The new Charlotte host (and a few others) is a creation by none other than Delores, who is now in full seek and destroy mode against Rehoboam and free everyone from the AI’s grasp, both human and artificial life alike. Her plan to recreate herself under a new name and identity, blend in with high dollar crowd at Incite as the girlfriend of Liam Dempsey Jr, son of Rehoboam’s creator, and use the machine’s own weakness to destroy it thanks to an encryption key she posses falls apart when Incite security head Martin Conells (played by Tommy Flanagan) discovers Delores isn’t who she says she is (granted, she does look awfully well preserved for a dead 13-year-old Ukrainian girl) and decides to dispose of the body, properly, down by the river. There is no van involved though. Chris Farley joke anyone? Ehem, moving along.

Caleb (played by Aaron Paul) is a new character that we don’t know much about until around the third episode when two worlds collide (nice guy meets a woman injured and being followed by really bad people) and he finds himself the target of Rico after helping Delores escape bought off cops and Incite henchmen. Delores soon returns the favor, but here is where we find out who Caleb is and why his character is so pivotal in the series so I’ll try my best to not layout spoilers here but there is an undeniable method to all of this madness.

Speaking of madness, Maeve Millay gets a bit of an upgrade to her new role at another Delos park, one that she keeps living like weird  Groundhog’s Day with more guns and fewer rodents. Photo courtesy of dim Engadget.

While all of Delos is combating moles, espionage, and a hostile corporate take over, some of our favorite characters have been rebranded and rewritten into another fantasy world in another part of the park. Maeve Millay is now a spy in Fascist Italy during WWII and part of the resistance against the Nazis. Through the fantasy world she is written into, Maeve figures out how very unreal everything is, and devises a plan to break the system and free herself from Delos technology once and for all, only to be recreated for a completely rational reason by the richest, most secretive businessman on the planet, Serac (Vincent Cassel) who is also behind the hostile take over of Delos and the mole who helped make it happen. That was before she died, in the park massacre, and who is now a host and the shell of Charlotte Hale. Is Charlott still the mole, even though she really isn’t Charlotte? It’s going to be interesting to see what the writers have done with part of the story further down the line but wow.

While all of that is happening, Benard Lowe has been outed at the slaughterhouse thanks to a financially beneficial misunderstanding (and a wanted poster), the aftermath of which prompts him to go back out to Westworld and find out what Delores is trying to accomplish (he was one of the pearls she brought back but we’re all still waiting for the why’s of that) instead of looking for clues stateside. While there he finds his old security guard Ashley in a brutal state, and after fixing the damage Ashley did to himself, the two set out to find more clues to Delores’ plan and hopefully confirm that Bernard is acting under his own will rather or if his system has been corrupted by Delores when she recreated him. It’s all a lot but you will get through it.

To get the full scope of Westworld, you definitely need to watch it from season one and I’d recommend tapping those extra videoes on HBO’s website to get the full experience, but it’s completely worth it. Westworld gives us a different view of what life could be like with too much AI, fantasy, and limited oversight involving corporate activity, not to mention the horrific consequences of unrestrained data collection. This season is much more cohesive and streamlined, but there are still plenty of storyline jumps and untold mysteries tucked away in every character to keep the audience engaged rather than passive about their viewing experience.

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