<em>Westworld</em> Never Fixed Its Villain Problem

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That flaw had been nagging at me for each of the season’s eight episodes, which dispensed gory action with practiced efficiency but felt hollow nonetheless. The show’s villain problem was crystallized in the season finale, “Crisis Theory,” in which the vengeful robots Dolores (played by Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandie Newton) faced off against the trillionaire mogul Engerraund Serac (Cassel) and Rehoboam, the colossal AI that he used to impose order on human affairs. Rehoboam, a glowing red sphere that pulsated with energy and spoke in philosophical riddles, was impressive; its demise, which involved flicking a few switches to turn it off, was less so. For the most part, the threat of big data was amorphous and faceless.

The storytelling impulses that led Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy down this narrative path are understandable. Despite its sci-fi trappings (futuristic robots et al.), Westworld has been fundamentally concerned with human behavior from its first episode, analyzing the depravity of Westworld’s attendees alongside the developing consciousness of the “hosts” (the robots built to populate the park). Designed only to mimic reality, the hosts ended up shattering it, rising up against Westworld’s visitors and owners to assert their newly developed independence. The first season turned out to be a curious and arresting parable of how violence is a universal language.

Ever since that robot revolution, Westworld has been stuck trying to find newer angles on the same question: What happens when you combine advanced machine learning with humanity acting on its worst instincts? The second season responded to that prompt by advancing the show’s world-building. It revealed that Delos, the park’s corporate owner, was gathering information on visitors and perhaps looking to make robotic clones out of them, thus inventing a form of artificial immortality. But the plotting was molasses-slow, charting the further disintegration of the theme park over the course of just a few days, and only teasing any exploration of the outside world at the very end.

So Season 3 went full speed ahead with its narrative, starting with Dolores finally being set loose on society and wreaking havoc, and ending with the world descending into an apocalypse, with cities engulfed in rioting and chaos. Westworld the park was largely forgotten. Rehoboam exploded the creepy implications of Delos’s surveillance a thousandfold by functioning as a global oracle of sorts. Because the machine was plugged into everyone’s public and private lives, Serac could use algorithms to literally shape the future, partly by murdering any humans who might rebel. Caleb (Paul) was one such human, enlisted by Dolores to serve as an ally in her quest to topple Rehoboam.