We have all seen prestige TV shows that once showed promise but have slowly degraded to sub-par quality. The last time we saw it was with Game of Thrones, which collapsed in on itself after the showrunners ran out of original material to adapt the story from. It seems like Westworld is following a similar path. While the show hasn’t had a fall from grace as dramatic as Game of Thrones did, it has gone through an unmistakable degradation in quality over the last two seasons. While season two tried too hard to be smart and ended up delivering a plodding narrative with confusing characterizations, season three chose to go for a more linear plot, relying more on production value and set pieces instead of thematic resonance and meaningful characterization.
After escaping the park, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) has been busy in the real world, trying to take down an advanced AI called Rehoboam. Initially, it’s unclear how that ties back to her quest to create a safe refuge for the hosts. She recruits Caleb Nichols (Aaron Paul), a down-on-his-luck ex soldier to help her. Meanwhile, Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel), the man behind Rehoboam, sets Maeve to hunt Dolores in order to find the key that opens the virtual world, Sublime, where the other hosts escaped to in the previous season. There’s also Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) who is now a host (and a double agent for Dolores) and Bernard, who’s trying to piece together why he’s in the real world and what Dolores is up to.
The best thing about this season is the production value of all the sets and futuristic designs.
The carriage-like cars and helicopters, and the massive riot robots all feel distinct and unique. Charlotte Hale also had a compelling character arc for 3/4ths of the season. She has to deal with both Dolores and Serac’s plans for Delos, and also take care of her fragmented family. The lines between who she is and who she pretends to be become blurred, and that culminates in an episode-long fight scene where she has to escape Delos and save her family. Once that doesn’t work out, however, her motivation in the next few episodes becomes cryptic, and by the end of the season, she has emerged as a new antagonist. Then there’s William (Ed Harris), who gets committed to a psych ward and has to go through a gruesome form of therapy where he ends up literally killing past versions of himself in order to find his new purpose. The post-credits scene, however, does him dirty, making his entire character arc in the season mostly pointless.
Maeve (Thandie Newton) and Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) receive the worst treatments this season. Although she had come to terms with her daughter going to Sublime in the last season, she’s roped into helping Serac in the hopes that she can join her daughter in Sublime. While it’s abundantly clear from the beginning that Serac doesn’t intend to honor his agreement, Maeve chooses to believe in him until he inevitably betrays her. This is weak characterization who, in the last two seasons, was often using her wits and ingenuity to stay a few steps ahead of her enemies. In this season, she’s mostly a foil to Dolores, resulting in few close combat sequences where Maeve fights with a katana sword. While they are initially impressive, they get repetitive by the final episode. We finally get to learn why Bernard had been brought back by Dolores, but by that time, he has contributed almost nothing to this season’s main narrative.
By the end of the season, Dolores expresses that she sees a beauty in mankind, and that she was working to free them, not destroy them. But the end results aren’t that different: shutting down Rehoboam apparently seals humanity’s fate, which is self-destruction in a few decades. “What’s going to happen was always going to happen,” Bernard says, and Rehoboam was only delaying the inevitable. The riots which happen following Dolores’ leak of Rehoboam’s activities seem both plausible and exaggerated. While there would definitely be many people who would be enraged at being controlled by an AI, many others would, perhaps, try to approach the dilemma in a more rational way than to start rioting in the streets.
When Westworld began its journey, it started as an exploration of human cruelty, love and determinism, with layered narratives that complemented each other. Season three has stripped most of that complexity away.
Some of the scenes, such as Maeve waking up in a simulation of the WW2 inspired Warworld, seem contrived, added to increase the episode count. Although Dolores finds herself in a dire predicament by the end of the season, for the most part her plot armor is so thick that it feels like she could almost slip into a Marvel superhero movie unnoticed and fit right in with the rest of the cast.
While Westworld season three is still enjoyable for the most part, it has lost most of its charm. The characters rarely question their agency or morality, and things happen because they are ‘supposed to happen’, not because there was a believable flow of cause and effect. A fourth season has already been green-lighted. Although it won’t arrive until 2022, the anticipation for more Westworld has thawed down considerably since the series first began. Can it get back in the audience’s good graces? Possibly, but given its track record, maybe it’s better not to get our hopes up.