3x04 The Mother of Exiles

[7.8/10] I’ve come to terms with the fact that Westworld is more style than substance. But what style. Look, there may not be nearly as much going on under the hood as this show pretends, but if all it wants to be is high class, gorgeous pulp, well then hey, count me in.

Maybe this is all the show should aim for. After a lot of ponderous set up, this episode features almost all of the series’s major characters in action. It has most of them dressed to the nines in exotic and luxurious locales. And when that’s not enough, it has them kicking ass and going toe-to-toe with one another.

Does it make any grand statement? Not really. Does it advance the story of the season? A bit. Do the characters feel meaningfully changed by the events? I guess so. But more than anything, it is just a damn entertaining hour of television, which is more than you can say for Westworld’s first three installments this year.

This is Westworld though, so we can’t get away from the big twist. The big dangling mystery at the end of season 2 was just which “pearls” (had we heard that term before) did Dolores take with her from the park? It turns out that she didn’t take anybody. She just used those little programming balls to replicate herself, so every host we meet outside of the park is just Dolores in a different getup.

It’s an entertaining reveal, I’ll give the show that much. There’s something to the Poirot-esque notion that it turns out that all the culprits were Dolores! But thematically, it also speaks to the notions of identity that seem to be at the core of this batch of episodes. Mostly, it feels like a “Did we make you say whoa? Huh? Huh? Did we?” type of reveal, but I’ve grown to appreciate that on this show.

It also spends a good amount of time giving everyone some genuine motivation, and letting those motivations clash with one another, which is the right kind of basic storytelling a series as expansive (and often up its own ass) as this one is needs.

We learn that Serac is a...humanity supremacist? He himself has been trying to map the human mind, only to realize that Davos already did it better than he could and poses an existential threat to humanity. His tragic backstory doesn't do much for me (though the worldbuilding of a disaster-struck Paris is an intriguing detail), but giving him a simple M.O. and purpose helps make him more than a random, mustache-twirling villain.

By the same token, he can also offer Maeve something he wants and which he claims Dolores has -- a key to Heaven, where she can find her daughter. That provides good reason for her to do his bidding and show off her general badassery.

It’s some damn good badassery! There’s nothing especially profound about the way she takes out various mooks, or uses her technology manipulating powers to break into places and misdirect firearms, or get into a martial arts battle with Musashi (the Shogunworld equivalent of Hector). And yet, it’s pretty damn fun to see her go half-Neo, half-John Wick on all these randos, en route to the beautiful but macabre image of her blood mixed with the white liquid from which hosts are born. (Incidentally, it looks like Dolores is planning to build an army, or at least a lot more of her kind.)

We also get what feels like it’s supposed to be closure for William. He spends much of the episode wondering whether what he’s experiencing is real, and by extension, whether he’s real. His arc has become so convoluted that it’s hard to care too too much about his plight or the answer to those questions, but “The Mother of Exiles” still makes the most of it.

For one, it works in sheer plot terms as the whole “the board needs you to root out a mole” routine is a ploy by Dolores (or Serac, maybe? Or both?) to give Hale a controlling interest in Delos. It works as a twist on the same terms when we’re led to mistake the same as a sincere effort to stave off a hostile takeover. But it’s also a great outing for Ed Harris, who’s deranged ramblings and palpable guilt over killing his daughter and whether he had a choice to do it works as a gripping standalone cold open even if his broader arc is a hash. There’s an irony to the fact that he finds himself trapped, questioning whether he’s real, as Dolores’s ultimate revenge. If this is the end for him, which I doubt, it’s a fitting one.

But we also get a confrontation between Dolores and Caleb on the one hand, Bernard and Stubbs on the other, with Liam stuck as a pawn in the middle. Again, the setting of a high class charity auction for prostitutes is just weird and Kubrickian enough to hold your interest, feel very on brand for HBO, while also nodding toward the class conscious themes that have also been a thematic undercurrent this season.

At the same time though, “The Mother of Exiles” does better than most outings at drawing the tension out from all of this. The scene where Caleb needs to use his purloined biometric password to get into Liam’s account, lest Dolores do things the old fashioned way of “just killing everybody” is dripping with suspense. The conflicting plans of Bernard to stop the “kill and replace” millionaire (or so he thinks) while Dolores wants to taunt him over stealing all his money add stakes to the ostentatious event. And seeing Dolores and Stubbs go mano-a-mano, despite the fact that it’s “not personal”, is a surprising thrill.

Give me this brand of Westworld every week, and I will be a happy camper. Sure, its pretensions to profundity still make me roll my eyes a bit now and then, but include enough action, enough fun, enough aesthetic joy to make its four-color storytelling this much fun? Then hey, you can include as much freshman year philosophy as you want, and I’ll still tune in.