‘Westworld’ Season 3 Ends With a New World Beginning to Take Shape

There’s probably no better line that’s so prescient in this season of television than one of the closing moments of “Westworld” season three. Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), one of the loneliest of “Hosts” in this android saga, looks over at another character and exclaims that he’s going to find the answer to “what comes after the end of the world.” Because of what’s going on in our actual world this finale takes on a more haunted air. It closes on a note that’s been done quite often lately on TV and film. There are riots in the streets and talk of burning down society. If you haven’t been following the show it will be hard to follow the plot, but the atmosphere is nevertheless powerful.

We’re in full action mode in this chapter as rebel Host Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is missing an arm and is essentially deactivated following a battle with fellow, sword-wielding Host Maeve (Thandie Newton). As you might expect not all is lost and Caleb (Aaron Paul) finds Dolores in a Los Angeles warehouse where he inserts a “pearl” into her which is essentially a backup hard drive. Back in action, Dolores puts on new human skin and off they go to assault the Incite building and initiate a destruction of the social order, in order to then replace everyone with fairer, more just copies of herself. But waiting at Incite is the evil Serac (Vincent Cassel), who wants the data from the “Delos immortality project” whose key is inside Dolores’s “brain.” He’s aided by Maeve. As shootouts ensue Dolores is captured and hooked up to Rehoboam. Meanwhile William (Ed Harris), also known to fans as the Man in Black, intensifies his quest to smash the Devos corporation and its inhuman practices.

This “Westworld” season finale ends with so many winks at other movies that you would think it was a tribute special. Thandie Newton twirls and slices with a samurai sword like “Kill Bill” and the final shot is almost a direct wink at “Fight Club.” Showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy also make sure the episode clocks in at nearly feature length (1 hour and 17 minutes). But for fans who have remained loyal to this complete mindbender it was a worthy finish to another puzzling chapter. There are grandiose deaths and a Marvel-style epilogue after the end credits that offers another big answer to a lingering question. Ever since the first season, which was a total reimagining of a 1973 Michael Crichton thriller of the same name, “Westworld” offered itself as a kind of sci-fi morality play about machines as people and their use as virtual slaves by actual humans. Now in the season finale it all clicks together in an episode that’s all about techno revolution. With a “Blade Runner”-style music score, the action hurtles along as Dolores and Caleb, her chosen leader for the coming uprising, infiltrate Incite and square off with Serac’s guards. This actually is what takes up most of the episode’s time in terms of elaborate action scenes that stretch the hour out. They are stylishly and skillfully pulled off by director Jennifer Getzinger, but we want to get to the meat of the whole story.

Before it all turns into one grand showdown Dolores reveals to Caleb how he was always being observed by her “kind,” even before he was a criminal and trained as a soldier. Hosts were used at live targeting exercises. We see in flashbacks Caleb sitting with fellow soldiers as they look at the host women and wonder about taking a few “spoils of war.” Per Dolores, Caleb is at heart a genuinely good man, which is why, even though he was part of the machine-human experiments carried out by Serac, he would make a good leader for the coming revolution. While the season began with Dolores as the main player, now she’s a conduit, and a tainted one as a digital Hale (Tessa Thompson) keeps distracting her by appearing during crucial moments, condemning her for letting her real self walk into a car bomb trap set by Serac.

For a show that’s either loved or bemoaned for its mind games and time bends, “Westworld” climaxes with a standard finish. It’s excellently produced and exciting to watch, but Nolan and Joy deliver what amounts to just very good, old-fashioned sci-fi. Just as Serac begins to wipe out Dolores’s memory when she refuses to give him the data he seeks, Maeve turns on the villain because he lied to her about allowing her to join her daughter in the “sublime,” the android digital heaven introduced in season two. But Dolores already prepared to sacrifice herself. It turns out she left all the info and data with Caleb, who also now controls the big spinning Rehoboam. For the layman, Caleb now controls the giant computer that can shut down the current order of, well, society. It’s like the ultimate digital virus we saw recently in “Mr. Robot.” In this post-Edward Snowden era, power lies in whoever has the right password.

There are still some beautifully-crafted moments when the show quiets down. As Dolores loses her memories a luminous memory shows her back at the Westworld ranch. Here she links up with Maeve and explains how there are beautiful things in this world, and she chooses to believe in that, not just the darkness. It’s up to Maeve to choose a side, and she does, with the revolution of course. Serac meets a conveniently bloody end next to Dolores’s own shut down body. Maeve and Caleb step outside and watch buildings begin to explode since he has essentially shut down the Rehoboam. The robo revolution is here. How? What happens to all the humans? It’s up to season four to tell us. Nolan reportedly has a deal with HBO to keep this yarn going all the way up to a sixth chapter.

What should generate the most chatter is the post-credits scene, where William marches into an underground lab to exact revenge on the host-creators of Delos and instead is faced with a host Hale and a host man in black who proceeds to kill William. What this amounts to is that there is now just one Ed Harris in “Westworld” world, not two. It’s a great moment with the host Harris having the cold gaze and moves of the original killer robot cowboy played by Yul Brymer in the 1973 movie.

If this does not answer every single question of what happens now in “Westworld,” or even everything that happened in the finale, that is the nature of the show. It began in a theme park where the Old West serviced clients as a parade of attractive hosts, then it turned into a revolutionary parable set in a futuristic Los Angeles. Now the world has come to a halt, and like the actual reality we are inhabiting now, we can only imagine what comes next.

Westworld” season three finale aired May 3 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.